The otherness of rival speakers: rsis and mayins in the contest

Othering defines boundaries and produces social demarcation. More specifically, within religious and political discourses, othering involves the process of locating alterity. This is a powerful strategy that creates a semantic field of authority that, in turn, effectively displaces unauthorized speakers. In this paper, I will treat Ṛgvedic poetry as a form of authoritative field. I will analyze its discourse of alterity through its use of māyā, extraordinary power, artifice, cunning, tricks or wiles. I will suggest that ‘others,’ from the viewpoint of Vedic poets, were those who could not make use of authorized speech, i.e. the sūktá. I will illustrate how the poetical activity constituted a semantic field within which the ṛṣis distinguished themselves from malicious, tricking speakers and charlatans, i.e. the māyíns and other untrustworthy speakers assigned to the art of manipulating words.