Who Aranyani is
Aranyani is the forest. Her name is made from aranya, the old word for the wild land that begins where the village fields end, and the Rigveda gives her exactly one hymn. It is hymn 146 of the tenth book, six verses long. No other hymn in the collection is addressed to her.
She is not a goddess of the forest in the way a queen is queen of a country. She is the forest itself, spoken to as a person. The poet does not describe a face, a dress, a weapon or an animal she rides. What he describes is what it is like to stand near the trees at evening: the insects, a shape that might be a house, a noise that might be a cart, a cry that might be nothing at all.
He begins by asking her a question. She never goes to the village to ask for anything. Is she not afraid, out there alone? The question is never answered, and the hymn gives the feeling that the man who asks it is the one who is afraid.
Now I have praised the Lady of the Forest, sweet with balm, mother of the wild creatures, who never ploughs and is never short of food.
That last verse holds nearly everything the Rigveda knows about her. She smells sweet. The wild animals are her children. She has food in plenty, fruit that anyone may eat, although nobody has ever tilled her ground. And she is gentle: the verse before it says that she kills no one, unless some murderous enemy comes close.
Most Vedic hymns ask for something: cattle, sons, rain, victory, a long life. This one asks for nothing. The poet wants no gift from the forest. He listens to her, tells her what he hears, praises her and stops.
The scholar A. A. Macdonell, writing in 1897, remarked that the gods of plants, trees and forests play a very small part in the Veda. Aranyani is the proof of it and also the exception. She has six verses in more than a thousand hymns, and those six are among the most closely observed in the book.