South Asian riddles

Riddles have at times been an important literary or folk-literary form in South Asia. Indeed, it is thought that the world's earliest surviving poetic riddles are those found in the Sanskrit Rigveda.

Terminology

According to Richard Salomon, "the Sanskrit term that most closely corresponds to the English 'riddle', and which is usually translated thereby, is prahelikā—a term that is not only of uncertain etymology but is also subject to widely differing interpretations and classifications."

In Tamil, riddles are called Vidukathai. They circulate in both folk and literary forms.

Sanskrit

According to Ludwik Sternbach,

Sanskrit riddles had to be composed in verse, preferably in four pāda-s but no more than eight pāda-s. Their solution had to be based on clear language and no obscene meaning could ever be suggested in treatises of poetics and other classical sources... They were usually difficult to solve and therefore required commentaries: they were real intelligence tests and they required from the receiver of the riddle not only wit and cleverness, but also thorough knowledge of mythology, grammar, rhetorics (including knowledge of, at least, the basic alakāra-literature), phonetics, metrics, mathematics, languages and, in particular, a vast knowledge of Sanskrit vocabulary.

Hymn 164 of the first book of the Rigveda can be understood to comprise a series of riddles or enigmas which are now obscure but may have been an enigmatic exposition of the pravargya ritual. These riddles overlap in significant part with a collection of forty-seven in the Atharvaveda; riddles also appear elsewhere in Vedic texts. According to Archer Taylor,

The highly sophisticated quality of many Sanskrit riddles can perhaps be adequately illustrated by one rather simple example ...