- Lived:
- nothing demonstrable — the story is set among the Ikṣvāku kings of the Gangetic plain and written down in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa, a ritual manual usually placed between about 800 and 600 BCE; hymns 1.24–30 of the Rigveda are ascribed to him
- Field:
- Rigvedic seer-poet — by tradition the boy who composed his way off a sacrificial altar, and the most human story in the whole Vedic prose literature
- The Big Idea:
- A starving father sold his son for a hundred cows to die in a king's sacrifice — then took two hundred more to bind him and kill him. Bound to the stake, the boy talked to the gods in verse until the ropes fell off; and the tradition kept his rescue-hymns as scripture and made his story required listening at every coronation.
- In their words:
- "Loosen the bonds, O Varuṇa, that hold me, loosen the bonds above, between, and under." (Rigveda 1.24.15, translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith)
- If you remember one thing:
- The oldest full-length story in Indian prose is a child's claim against his own father, his king, and the ritual order itself — and the ritual order wrote it down, set it to music, and made its kings sit and listen.