Shreekant Sambrani: Lingua Indica

It is not common knowledge that Sanskrit had a West Asian link, in the now volatile region at the junction of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran

All through my Marathi-medium schooling, I was told that there was a shuddha (pure) way of writing and speaking the language: the way our texts were written and the way the Puneri Brahmins spoke it (as did my family). But most of my classmates spoke it distinctly differently and flubbed shuddhalekhan (dictation) exercises. Some years later, in college, well before the first stirrings of Dalit poetry of the recently deceased Namdev Dhasal, I began realising that my learning was not quite correct.

But I still enjoyed hugely the 1965 movie version of My Fair Lady (based on Shaw's play Pygmalion). The curmudgeonly Professor Henry Higgins accepts a dare to teach a Covent Garden cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle the right English speech. I particularly relished, as did the Professor, the delicious moment when Zoltan Karpathy, a Hungarian authority on languages, pronounces Eliza to be a Hungarian, because her speech is too perfect to be that of a native Englishwoman!

Enlightenment came my way shortly thereafter when I heard Noam Chomsky on the subject. He demolished the belief that there is a "right" way to speak or write a language. His belief has now become standard: languages evolve as living entities, and norms are time- and location-specific. Bhadriraju Krishnamurthi, the noted authority on Telugu, told me that beliefs similar to mine about Marathi existed in Telugu as well, as I am sure they did in all languages.

I recall this for two reasons. First, Wendy Doniger remarks at the beginning of her now-pulped The Hindus that "the natural language, Prakrit, and the vernaculars came first, while Sanskrit, the refined, secondary revision, the artificial language, came later. But South Asianists often seem to assume that it is the other way around, that the dialects are 'derived from Sanskrit,' because Sanskrit won the race to the archives and was the first to be written down and preserved, and we only encounter vernaculars much later." Remember, Professor Doniger proudly claims to be a philologist by training and profession, not a historian.

Second, I recently came across a monograph Haunting Echoes in the Fog of History: Evolution of Sanskrit and its Derivatives by Sudhir Savkar (Snehavardhan Publishing, Pune, 2009). This slim volume is obviously a labour of much love, because Dr Savkar is a mechanical engineer who spent his entire working career with the GE Global Research Centre at Schenectady, NY (a place that fascinated me at the time of the aforesaid schooling, because it appeared on the dial of our proud possession, the GE 3-band radio). He went to the US when he was eight, but was driven sufficiently by his quest for his roots to take up a thorough study of Sanskrit on his own. The book is the result of his research, reviewed by well-known academics.

The popular belief that written Sanskrit originated with the Vedas is not quite valid, as both the scholars point out. The Vedas, especially the Rig Veda, existed for many centuries in oral tradition and assumed a written form in classical Sanskrit around the 11th and 12th century BCE. Common languages of the people, apabhramsa and some prakrits existed even earlier and continued to evolve. Depending on the region, prakrits took distinct shapes: Maharashtri in the west, which evolved into Marathi, Sauraceni in the heartland becoming Brajbhasha and Gujarati, and Magadhi in the east, emerging as Bhojpuri, Bengali and Odiya.

Sanskrit literature predates that in other languages, but that is because it was the court language and patrons encouraged poets and litterateurs to write in it. The dramas, even those of the great Kalidasa, reflected the prevailing class system: only the Brahmins and Kshatriya heroes spoke in Sanskrit, the women and the mid-level characters adopted the prevailing prakrit, and the common folk the 'vulgar' apabhramsa. Vidushaka, the court jester, a pivotal role in many plays, who was almost always a Brahmin and the king's friend, moved fluently across the language barriers as needed.

When Jainism and Buddhism emerged as religious reforms against orthodoxy of the sanatana dharma, languages of their texts, the prakrits Pali and Ardhamagadhi, were a conscious reflection of the mood of the movements, which wanted religious thought to be accessible to the aam aadmi of the time (are you reading this, Arvind Kejriwal?) Emperor Ashoka sent his children to Sri Lanka to propagate his new faith of Buddhism, along with the prakrits, the forebears of the modern Sinhala.

Connections of Sanskrit to Latin and Greek are well-known. Not so common is the knowledge that the language also had a West Asian link, in the presently volatile region at the junction of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. Dr Savkar tries to establish a connection between the Mitanni, Indo-Aryan residents of the region, and the first faint stirrings of the Vedas. Sanskrit means pure or refined, but that very definition also tells of its origin as the language of power, as Professor Doniger succinctly calls it, and possibly elitism.