Prof. Dominik Wujastyk
For a century, scholars have been puzzled by Vedic descriptions of a group of outsiders called Vrātyas. In later Brahmana thought the term "vrātya" came to be used simply for someone who had missed their initiation (upanayana), and it is in this sense that the term was used in Dharmaśāstra, even up to early modern writers like Nageśa Bhaṭṭa, who composed two treatises on the subject But it's history goes back to the earliest Vedic literature, including especially the Atharvaveda, where the term has a somewhat different meaning. Given the clarification that the Greater Magadha theory brings to our thinking about first millennium north India, I shall revisit the idea first proposed in the early twentieth century that the Vrātyas were people of Magadha as seen from the point of view of Vedic Brāhmaṇas.