Paul-Émile Dumont (1879-1968) in memoriam: his contribution to the study of Vedic ritual texts

Vielle, Christophe [UCL]

A Vedic workshop held in karmabhūmi (Kerala as the “land of ritual [activity]” par excellence) and remembering Frits Staal, offers a good opportunity to evoke another late great Vedic scholar, viz. Paul-Émile Dumont (1879-1968). Despite his major contribution to the correct understanding of the indigenous descriptions of the Vedic sacrifice, especially the horse sacrifice and the daily fire worship that he respectively presented in full in his two main books (1927, 1939), P.-É. Dumont did not receive any real tribute from his contemporaries (only one short obituary in the VIJ). In course of writing a bio-bibliography of P.-É. Dumont, I would in this paper share the results of my historiographical researches, partly based on unpublished archives. Born in Brussels, Belgium, Dumont specialized in Indology at the University of Kiel in Germany, with Paul Deussen and Hermann Oldenberg as masters, before the First World War (during which he was for a while with Arthur A. Macdonell in Oxford). Thereafter, supported by Louis de La Vallée Poussin in his first essays on Vedic ritual, he went for six months in Utrecht with Willem Caland, and a few years later, after the death of Maurice Bloomfield, with the additional support of Sylvain Lévi he became professor of Sanskrit and Indology at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he remained active until his death. His Indological work was mainly (but not only) devoted to Vedic studies, and, within this peculiar field, especially to ritual literature. Beside his annotated translation in French of the passages from the brāhmaṇas and śrauta-sūtras related to the aśvamedha and the agnihotra, he also translated in English and commented extensive portions from the Taittirīya-brāhmaṇa (1948-1969). He focused on the agnicayana-rite several times: in the course of his description of the aśvamedha; according to the Taittirīya-brāhmaṇa (on special methods of building the fire-altar, 1951); on the meaning of the immured tortoise (1957); and already in 1923 on the mathematical problems of the successive enlargments of the agnikṣetra and the mahāvedi, a rather technical essay listed by Louis Renou in his Vedic Bibliography but neglected by Staal in his study of the agnicayana.