Sri Suktam

The Śrī Sūkta is a khila — an appended hymn, attached to the fifth maṇḍala of the Rig Veda rather than counted inside it. Its language is Vedic Sanskrit and it is old enough that almost nothing else sung on Diwali night is within a thousand years of it. Reading it means putting down, for the length of sixteen verses, nearly everything the later tradition supplies about Lakṣmī.