By Ritambhara
The Rigveda madhu vata verse, Rigveda 1.90.6, says the winds blow honey and the rivers stream honey for the one who keeps ṛta, and asks that the plants be sweet. In December 2022 a study in Environmental Health Perspectives found that too few pollinators already cut world fruit, vegetable and nut output by 3 to 5 per cent.
The verse sits in hymn 90 of the first book of the Rigveda, composed by the seer Gotama Rāhūgaṇa for the Viśvedevas, the All-Gods.
madhu vātā ṛtāyate madhu kṣaranti sindhavaḥ
mādhvīr naḥ santv oṣadhīḥ
Honey the winds blow for the one who keeps ṛta; honey the rivers stream. Let the plants be honeyed for us.
What the Rigveda madhu vata verse claims
Madhu means honey and any sweetness. Ṛta is the Vedic word for the right order of things. Ṛtāyate is the dative of a participle formed from ṛta, so the gift goes to a person who acts by that order. Kṣaranti comes from the root kṣar, to flow. The verse makes the sweetness of wind and water conditional on conduct.
Sayana’s fourteenth-century commentary reads ṛtāyate as the sacrificer who seeks ṛta, which he identifies with yajña, the rite of offering. He glosses sindhavaḥ as flowing rivers or seas, which pour out their own rasa, or juice.
Sayana on plants that ripen
Sayana defines oṣadhīḥ as plants whose life ends in the ripening of their fruit. He derives the word from oṣa, ripening, and dhā, to place: ripening is placed in them. The prayer for sweet plants in Rigveda 1.90.6 is therefore a prayer for fruit that ripens. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad later built its honey doctrine on the same word.
The madhu vata verse and lost pollination
Fruit sets only after flowers are pollinated. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reported in 2016 that more than three-quarters of the world’s food crops rely at least partly on animal pollination.
The 2022 study, led by Matthew Smith of Harvard, linked the pollination shortfall to about 427,000 excess deaths a year from lost fruit, vegetables and nuts. South Asia accounts for 67,000 of those deaths, about 16 per cent of the total by The Fourth Plate’s calculation from the paper’s Table 2.
The Rigveda madhu vata verse ties honey from wind, river and plant to the keeping of ṛta. Read with Sayana’s gloss, the text requires its reader to keep the order in which plants flower and ripen, and it counts sweet food as the return on that order.
