Jarrod Whitaker's Strong Arms and Drinking Strength: Masculinity, Violence, and the Body in Ancient India is an in-depth examination of ideas about manhood, masculinity, and martial potency in the representation of the Ṛgvedic person (both divine and human). Whitaker's work here is closely circumscribed, limited to the evidence of the Ṛgveda Saṃhitā (the earliest text we possess from ancient India), and focused on the expression of notions of manhood found in the Ṛgvedic poets' lexicon. These limits notwithstanding, Whitaker brings great acumen to his study, employing throughout careful and extensive textual analysis, with references to or direct translations of more than a thousand Ṛgvedic verses (the whole of the Ṛgveda Saṃhitā exceeds ten thousand verses).

The Ṛgveda Saṃhitā (ca. 1500–1200 BCE, a date that is not entirely certain) is a collection of celebratory verses largely directed to the Vedic gods. It is ancient India's best known and most celebrated text; yet, in terms of its actual contents, it is also among the least known, for the text is veiled by its antique language and its numerous references to matters now lost to us (from cultic practices, to mythological episodes, to the representation of everyday objects). (It is worth noting here that an accurate, full English translation of the Ṛgveda Saṃhitā is still wanting.) In Strong Arms and Drinking Strength, Jarrod Whitaker hardly pauses over the text's difficulties, diving directly into the Ṛgveda Saṃhitā, and deftly presenting a significant fraction of it in clear, comprehensible English (indeed, Whitaker's monograph should be lauded on this basis alone). While Whitaker's approach does have the benefit of exposing us to the Ṛgvedic milieu “as it is”—that is, opening this world to us on its own grounds, without the distraction of scholarly breast-beating over matters that may never be fully understood—it is also the case that it leaves the reader somewhat in the dark regarding the problematic nature of the Ṛgveda Saṃhitā (notably, the difficulty of understanding the text's larger historical and cultural context).

Whitaker sets out his argument in four concise, closely related chapters. Following an introduction that briefly touches on general theoretical issues (notably, the notion of manhood as a cultural construct and the nature of ritualization as a hegemonic enterprise), Whitaker devotes single chapters to: 1) the nature of manhood and masculinity in the Ṛgveda Saṃhitā as expressed through the Ṛgvedic authors' acclaim of the gods' “manly” deeds; 2) the centrality of martial activity and of violence as a means of economic survival, elevated in the Ṛgvedic world through certain deeply embedded andocentric ritual activities; 3) the employment of sheer physical power in ordering the cosmos (on the divine level) and the lived-in world (on the human level) as a means of establishing and maintaining sovereignty as well as freedom; and, 4) the location of physical strength in a man's arms (divine and human) and the gaining of strength through the ingestion of soma in what stands as the central ritual event of the Ṛgvedic world (again, realized on both the divine and human planes). Underlying much of this exploration is Whitaker's conceptualization of a deep connection between ritual performance and the formation and affirmation of Ṛgvedic man's sense of himself: “masculinity and strength in ancient India derive from in part from ritual participation, rather than being a natural consequence of gender. . .” (p. 16). Here, Whitaker exposes the tension inherent in the notion that the celebrated qualities of masculinity are to some degree innate, but at the same time, they must also be won through ritual performances (see, e.g., pp. 56, 105, and 144).

Throughout, Whitaker supports his arguments by marshalling an astonishing array of Ṛgvedic textual evidence (seen both in the book's main text and in the substantial endnotes). In comparison, Whitaker's rather limited discussion of what constitutes masculinity in general (which Whitaker does note is a gendered “construction” [p. 15], but tells us little else), and his seeming lack of concern with the overall context of Ṛgvedic culture and history (see, e.g., p. 163), is slightly disarming. And, though it is a small point, I found Whitaker's work marred by a discussion (or, more precisely, a dismissal) of Jan Heesterman's well-known work on Vedic ritual; for, not only does the discussion seem misplaced (as Whitaker even notes, Heesterman's work is drawn from post-Ṛgvedic materials [p. 164]), but Heesterman's central thesis about an “inner conflict of tradition” seems to me to support rather than detract from many of Whitaker's arguments. These issues are but minor distractions from the overall contribution Whitaker's Strong Arms and Drinking Strength makes to our knowledge and understanding (for both specialist and non-specialist) of Ṛgvedic thought.