Empires Of The Word Part 13

Sanskrit supplanted.

Muslim invasions had started from Ghazni in Afghanistan in the late tenth century. It took three hundred years for the Muslims' 'Delhi Sultanate' to take control of the whole plain from Indus to Ganges, and another century to grasp most of the rest of the subcontinent. Their unity was not sustained, but their presence in India continued to count, especially after 1505, when Babur, leading yet another army down from Afghanistan, founded the Mughal empire.

The incomers were known to the Indians as Turuka ('Turks'). They brought in a new self-confident civilisation that conversed in a form of eastern Turkic (Chagatay), prayed in Arabic, but was literate above all in Persian.

Their cultural self-confidence, their totally alien concepts of decorous behaviour and the point of life, and above all their developed systems of administration conducted in Persian, meant that they had far, far more linguistic effect than the previous, non-doctrinal, incursions from the same direction of the aka, Kushana and Hua. Now for the first time Sanskrit was supplanted as the elite language of India.

Ironically, the Muslims' success in invading the continent was largely a result of their skill with cavalry, and the fine Afghan-bred horses that they brought with them. The distant descendants of the Aryan horse-borne invaders of the second millennium BC had at last been beaten at what had once been their own game.

At about the same time, some of the civilisations of South-East Asia that had been Sanskrit-speaking were taking up the same new religion, but apparently for quite different motives.

There was no military conquest here, nor social revolution in favour of lower castes. Nevertheless, some ports in northern Sumatra became Muslim in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and Melaka (Malacca), the most important trading centre, situated on the Malay peninsula, embraced Islam some time in the early fifteenth.* The religion spread widely among its trading partners, notably to Java, south Sulawesi, the Moluccas and Mindanao. It is presumed that the influence came from Muslim traders out of India, perhaps in a kind of commercial domino effect, with kingdom after kingdom reckoning that they stood to maintain their Indian links only if they took up the faith-or perhaps responding to a desperate Islamic rush to proselytise before the arrival of the Portuguese.45 Whatever the linkage, the new religion created a new social climate, and put an end to Sanskrit's reign as the representative language of culture here.

The charm of Sanskrit.

The roots of Sanskrit's charm.

keyura na vibhuayanti puruam hara na candrojjvala na snana na vilepana na kusuma nalakta murdhana bhaaika samalakaroti puruam ya saskta dharyate kiyante khalu bhuaani satata vagbhuaa bhuaam Bracelets do not embellish man, nor necklaces bright as the moon; bathing, cosmetics, garland, head-dress, none can add a whit. Man's one true embellishment is language kept perfected: finery must perish, but eternal the refinement of fine language.

Bharthari, ii. 17-20.

A language that began as an Indo-European offshoot settled in a decidedly quiet corner of the world, the foothills of the Hindu Kush, spread as a vernacular all over the Indo-Gangetic plain, and as an elite language, borne by Hindu religion, to the rest of the Indian subcontinent. From there it spread eastward across the sea through trade, and became for a thousand years the cultural inspiration to a whole new subcontinent and archipelago. This was the autonomous growth of Sanskrit.

But one of the religions that had started in Sanskrit's first millennium continued to grow through its second and third: Buddhism spread first with Sanskrit and the Prakrits across India and Indo-China. Then the religion showed that it could transcend its native state, its home in Indian culture. Moving northward and finally eastward, it won converts and flourished in Chinese, Korean, j.a.panese, Tibetan and Mongolian societies. Although the religion metamorphosed as it progressed across the world, Sanskrit and Pali travelled with it without significant change, as adjuncts to Buddhist higher learning wherever it took them. This was Sanskrit's free ride, its vehicle Buddhism in all its many forms.

It is now time to consider what it was about Sanskrit which made it grow, and whether Buddhism itself may have owed something to this consummately charming form of human expression.

Sanskrit had many advantages. It was the language of a self-conscious elite, the Brahmans and Kshatriyas, who considered themselves ent.i.tled to dominate other peoples with whom they came into contact, and had the technical means to do so. Furthermore, their language was at the very centre of their own picture of their culture, since grammar was the queen of their sciences. Facility in Sanskrit was seen as the hallmark of civilised existence, of one's place in the world as an arya, but it was also something that was teachable, and was taught.

Beliefs about the true value of this knowledge gradually changed over the centuries, from the need to guarantee the cult of the G.o.ds, to maintenance of the social order, and then to enhancement of the patina of cultural appreciation.

Although some social forces promoted less elite forms of the language, both at a secular level (for example, in the practice of kings such as Asoka) and in the spiritual world (for example, in the att.i.tudes of the Buddha), they gradually lost out to the cultivated, self-conscious charm of the self-styled Perfected Language, saskta bhaa: because of its elaborated descriptions and a.n.a.lyses of itself, it could always demonstrate what was best and why it was best. It thereby made itself irresistibly attractive to upwardly mobile inst.i.tutions: Hindu kingdoms (such as that of Rudradaman) seeking wider recognition in India, Indo-Chinese dynasties (such as the ailendra of Bnam) seeking to demonstrate their legitimacy, Buddhist schools wanting to endow their devotional texts with prestige.

The natural conservatism of inst.i.tutions meant that their symbols would tend to ossify-witness the fate of the Pali language among the Buddhists, starting as an attempt at an unstuffy people's lingua franca but ending up as just another cla.s.sical language. India, with its caste system, was nothing if not a home of conservative inst.i.tutions. Such conservatism always played into the hands of Sanskrit: it was defended through its own sutras as the unchanging linguistic standard, from which any change would mean decline and degradation.

Being concretely defined in the grammar books, Sanskrit was eminently learnable: indeed, it could be held that since the standard was so explicit, if complex and abstruse, it encouraged explicit displays of lawyer-like intelligence, though always in a strangely impractical realm divorced from the usual imperatives of penalties, property and military force. There were no wars based on the results of its debates, hotly disputed though they often were (and are). Vyakaraa, grammatical a.n.a.lysis, provided a natural forum for intellectual exercise and argument, simply concerned with the establishment of what was right in the world of language, or how it should best be formalised. As the saying had it: ardhamatralaghavena putrotsavam iva manyante vaiyakaraa.

The grammarians rejoice at the saving of half a measure as at the birth of a son.

One result was that Brahmanical skills could never decline into mere rote learning and stipulation, since they were based in a rigorously articulated intellectual structure.

As in linguistics, so in the gamut of Indian sciences. In its continual appeal to abstract principle, rather than its own specific cultural tradition, Sanskrit-based civilisation is different from those of Greece and Rome to its west. Indian culture does not revolve around its epics and its literary cla.s.sics, treasured though these are. Nor does its philosophy emphasise socially useful theories, such as politics, ethics or the art of persuasion. Rather it theorises about states of being and modes of perception. There is a certain sense in which Sanskrit theory fails to connect with the practical world. As Basham points out: ... the geographical knowledge of the learned was of the vaguest description. Even within India distances and directions, as given in texts, are usually very vague and inaccurate. The conquerors who led their armies thousands of miles on their campaigns, the merchants who carried their wares from one end of India to the other, and the pilgrims who visited sacred places from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin must have had a sound practical knowledge of Indian geography, while that of the seamen who sailed the ocean from Socotra to Canton must have been even wider; but there are few echoes of this knowledge in the literature of the time.46 Ethereal in its interests, above local loyalties and personal detail, Sanskrit achieved, and still enjoys, a status within Indian civilisation as a quasi-universal language, even if there are now persistent voices in parts of India who would disown it, and emphasise its origins as a local language of the north. Pali, its younger sister, has enjoyed something of the same status, though only among Buddhists, and mostly outside India itself. One sign of these two languages' pan-Indian, almost pan-Asian, status is the fact that, unlike all the other languages of India and Indo-China, they are written indifferently in all the different scripts that have descended from Brahmi: they are thus 'globally local' in the Indic context, at home as a holy language whatever the vernacular.

But for cla.s.sical languages, they have always been strangely indifferent to a written existence, in whatever script. We have noted the characteristic distrust of writing in Indian culture. This in fact applies not just to these Aryan languages, but more generally: in fact, the first sacred written text anywhere in India is the Sikhs' Guru Granth Sahib, produced in the seventeenth century. (And Sikhism explicitly takes Islam, with its adoration of the written text of the Koran, as a major inspiration.) This greater esteem for texts preserved and transmitted orally has probably kept Sanskrit accessible to a wide public, a language of prayers and devotion, as well as a language of ancient works of literature. To pick one example, a popular local hymn, vande utkala janani, 'I salute, O mother Orissa', is in fact expressed in Sanskrit, although those who sing it hardly notice.

Meanwhile the fact that it was preserved by two media, straightforwardly written down in a ma.n.u.script tradition, as well as distinctively through the oral tradition of the Sanskrit grammarians, may have prevented the p.r.o.nunciation of Sanskrit from changing markedly over the three thousand and more years of its liturgical life.*

One side of this story is like the survival of Hebrew: a holy tradition, built on recitation of texts in a language that no one spoke any longer, has preserved the language more or less intact. But the other side is like nothing else on earth: it is as if the Hebrew tradition of gematria, which a.s.signed numerical values to letters and by so adding them gave mystically significant numbers to phrases, had defined, in a set of equations, an alternative means of representing the whole Hebrew language, so preserving its grammar and p.r.o.nunciation quite independently of what was written in the Torah and Talmud.

For all this, the attractiveness to outsiders of Sanskrit and the Indian culture it expressed remains elusive. I have questioned Indian friends about it, pointing out the apparently unreasonable readiness of Mon, Munda or Mongolian to accept Aryan culture, language and religion when presented to them without coercion. They point out how little was asked of converts, either to take up as new observance or to cast aside from their old ways. Offerings are made to deities, but explicit duties as an adherent of Hinduism or Buddhism are few. Hinduism can apparently find a place within it for all other faiths: old allegiances can simply be incorporated, as in the foundation myth of Funan. Mahayana Buddhism was as accommodating as Hinduism, with an eternity of universes and G.o.ds in its purview. Other forms of Buddhism were oriented in a completely different direction, giving guidance on ethics and personal enlightenment, but leaving old beliefs and allegiances undisturbed.

But this is purely the absence of an obstacle: it does not explain why in so many different contexts people have chosen to follow the Indian example rather than stick with their old ways. The decision to adopt the new culture transmitted in Sanskrit was no doubt often made by members of an elite, then enforced or induced in a wider population. The decision to adopt Buddhism may more often have been for individuals to make. But at whatever level the decision was made, the decision-makers must have felt they were taking a step towards a wider, more open world-opening links to the surmised wealth of India and the Western world, and to its ancient and elaborate wisdom.

The decision will not have been taken once and for all, nor with any prescience of the fundamental changes in Indo-China, China and the East that it would bring about. But by and large the decision, wherever taken, stuck. And the absence of any military inducement, either at the outset, or in the later years or centuries when both Indians and the converts were well aware each of the other, argues that the cultural a.s.similation was recognised somehow as good value, and well worth pursuing and developing.

Limiting weaknesses.

And yet the human world of Sanskrit was not, and is not, without its disadvantages.

Militarily, it never created a strong defensible centre, tending to rely rather on natural barriers, which were periodically breached by invaders from the north-west. Socially, it remained conservative and stratified, preferring to theorise about why it was best for society to be closed and rigid, rather than to use its talents to innovate, militarily, politically or economically. In religion, Hinduism and Buddhism tended to create an other-worldly system of values, so undercutting practical concerns for loyalty and social cohesion, and compounding the fundamental weaknesses in defence and flexibility.

All these problems were implicit in the Sanskrit community. The creeper spread charmingly, but in time it tended to harden into an extremely intricate, and fairly unyielding, tangle of branches. In time, it would be pruned by unsympathetic hands.

We begin with the domains of war, diplomacy and government.

We have seen (from the record of inscriptions) that Sanskrit, at first a sacred language, established itself as the outward language for political statements only in the middle of the second century AD, 650 years after the grammarian Panini had established its canon. Previously, it appears that the language of government was the common speech of the ruling city, notably the Magadhi Prakrit of Pataliputra: 250 years after Panini, when Asoka had set monuments all over north and central India, they were written in this Magadhi Prakrit. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that Sanskrit had already penetrated to the highest levels in the state: the great handbook of Indian statecraft, the Arthasastra of Kautilya, is written in Sanskrit, not Magadhi. This is traditionally attributed to the chief minister of Candragupta ('Moonsecret') Maurya, Asoka's grandfather, who had established his northern Indian empire shortly after Alexander's brief foray along the Indus, but it could have been written at any time in the five centuries to AD 150. By then, certainly, the primacy of Sanskrit in political records was a.s.sured.47 Regardless of the cultural unity signalled by Sanskrit, India was not nearly as successful as Rome and Persia to the west, or China to the east, in establis.h.i.+ng a large-scale political unit that could defend its borders and secure orderly succession beyond a half-dozen generations at most. From the fifth century BC to the fifth century AD, indigenous dynasties such as the Nandas, Mauryas, Shungas, Satavahanas and Guptas rose and fell with a persistent rhythm, their capital often at Pataliputra, but with no sense of direct succession: usually these larger empires collapsed into a couple of generations of decentralised feudal melee, before the next would-be cakravartin, 'wheel-turner', i.e. universal monarch, emerged. Sometimes major incursions from the north-west would get as far as Pataliputra, for example when the Yavana kings (such as Menander-Buddhism's Milinda) swooped down from Swat, or when Kanishka, a Bactrian-speaking Iranian, founded the Kushana empire, in the first to second centuries AD. But they never lasted any longer.*

All the invaders in this period-they also included Scythians (aka) speaking Iranian, and Xiongnu (Hua) speaking Turkic-conformed to the pattern of Mongols in China or Germanic tribes in western Europe. They did not establish their own cultures, but after a first period of rapine simply adopted the existing culture and settled down as the new aristocracy, with no lasting linguistic effects. Sanskrit, and the Prakrits, were thus transmitted to new generations and new peoples. The tradition was not politically unified, though the Arthasastra shows that it was highly organised and self-conscious, legally and economically.

There was no apparent technical or military innovation in this period, and communications must have remained difficult, two reasons which explain why the various cities and regions retained so much independence, with the centralised power of the cakravartin largely an unrealised dream.

The Arthasastra has an elaborate theory of foreign policy, implying a large number of smallish states. Most of the states were monarchies, but there were in fact also republics, ruled by councils of men of substance. The Licchavi, living in Vaisali north of the Ganges, are said to have had 7,707 rajas or 'kings', all in the tribal a.s.sembly. The Buddha himself had grown up in one such community, not far away among the akya of the Himalayan foothills. This tradition is said to have inspired the noticeably democratic practice of the sangha, the full community of Buddhist monks.

As for the social limitations of Indian society, it must be seen as overwhelmingly stratified, with one's caste, and hence status, determined by birth. Sanskrit-speaking theorists, usually referring back to the Vedas, had no difficulty in justifying and rationalising flagrant inequalities-even if, from time to time, natural leaders who happened to be low-caste made themselves into kings without too much scruple over Hinduism's taboos. The status of women was also not a matter for discussion, with the Sanskrit word sati, originally just the feminine of the adjective meaning 'true, correct, good', coming to be understood as best applied to a wife willingly burnt on her husband's funeral pyre.

The real contribution of indigenous thought to subverting the rigidities of the caste system was Buddhism. This was true in both the variants that developed in this period. The earlier Hinayana tradition encouraged anyone to seek their own enlightenment, though they would have to give up the world as monks or nuns in order to do it. Early on, it also gave women equal, or at least comparable, status in pursuing a contemplative life. The later Mahayana was less austere, more a religion for everyday life. It allowed believers to develop a personal relations.h.i.+p with the holy figures of bodhisattvas, and its much stronger social ethic, of general compa.s.sion and altruism, was also attractive.

There does not seem to have been much religious intolerance or violence as between the different faiths. Where people felt aversion, it seems to have been more fastidious or superst.i.tious than based on piety. In the Sanskrit dramas and romances being written at the time, a chance meeting with a monk may be viewed as a sign of bad luck to come. In this same period, the Buddhists were building up a formidable reputation for intellectual rigour as well as high-mindedness.

The Great Monastery of Nalanda (Nalanda Mahavihara), a couple of days' walk south of Pataliputra, was the supreme monument to Buddhist learning. Asoka founded the core monastery on the site of a favourite haunt of the Buddha in the third century BC, and all the major dynasties that flourished during its lifespan re-endowed and rebuilt it as a seat of learning: the Guptas in the fifth century, King Harsha in the seventh, the Palas in the ninth. Besides the scriptures of the Mahayana, and the eighteen sects of the Hinayana, subjects taught included sabdavidya (Sanskrit grammar), hetuvidya (logic and metaphysics), cikitsavidya (medicine), silpasthanavidya (literally 'technology', including mechanics, yin and yang, and the calendar), apparently also the Vedas, and 'miscellaneous studies', generally understood as secular literature. Xuan-Zang, who was enrolled as a student and later a teacher there in the seventh century, describes the inst.i.tution in terms very reminiscent of a modern elite university: The priests to the number of several thousands are men of the highest ability and talent. Their distinction is very great at the present time, and there are many hundreds whose fame has rapidly spread through distant regions...

From morning till night they engage in discussion; the old and the young mutually help one another. Those who cannot discuss questions out of the Tripiaka are little esteemed, and are obliged to hide themselves for shame. Learned men from different cities, on this account, who desire to acquire quickly a renown in discussion, come here in mult.i.tudes to settle their doubts, and then the streams of their wisdom spread far and wide. For this reason some persons usurp the name of Nalanda students, and in going to and fro receive honour in consequence. If men of other quarters desire to enter and take part in the discussions, the keeper of the gate proposes some hard questions; many are unable to answer and retire. One must have studied deeply both old and new books before getting admission. Those students, therefore, who come here as strangers, have to show their ability by hard discussion; those who fail compared with those who succeed are as 7 or 8 to 10.48 Although there was continuous production of new works, or at least commentaries on old ones, such large-scale concentrations of intellectual fire-power (like their contemporaries in Europe and the Islamic world) were profoundly conservative: they aimed at sustaining the religious and philosophical status quo, although they might defend it with new arguments.*

The mahaviharas did not in the end sustain Buddhism in India. Buddhism was already losing adherents in the time of Xuan-Zang. From the tenth century it was gradually absorbed by Hinduism, as if it were just another sect, the Buddha having been imaginatively recast as an earthly manifestation of Vishnu, on a par with Hindu heroes Rama and Krishna. This closed the loophole in the caste system, and left the lower castes and untouchables con demned again to inferiority. Many of them would have provided eager listeners when Muslims began to invade, bringing news of a world where all were equal before G.o.d.

The mahaviharas were not spared when these invaders finally overran northern India and sacked its treasures at the end of the twelfth century. Sanskrit retained its charms, but like many with this virtue it was unable to defend itself bodily against those unable to appreciate them.

agrahya murdhajev eta striyo guasamanvita na latah pallavacchedam arhanty upavanodbhuva Ladies like these, who are accomplished, should not be seized by the hair; for creepers growing in orchards deserve not to have their foliage lopped off.

udraka, The Little Clay Cart, 8.21.

Sanskrit no longer alone.

After the Muslim invasions, India became a very different place.

It is hard now to conceive what opposite and harshly conflicting extremes, both of daily life and of values deeply held, had to be reconciled to create the India now familiar to us.

Indians had perceived themselves as being firmly at the centre of their world, their G.o.ds running it, their social order complex but immutable, because ordained at the highest level. Even as austere an a.n.a.lyst as the Buddha had called the highest path the Arya way. Intellectually, they knew that they were not alone in the world, but the only role in which they had seen foreigners was as outsiders whose best hope was to partake in the blessings that India could provide, whether by trade or by adoption. They dressed scantily, as was comfortable in their climate, but adorned themselves as gaudily as their incomes and caste allowed. Their relations with their G.o.ds were largely a matter of personal devotion, except at festival time. They built their monuments with loving attention to intricate detail, and lavish ill.u.s.tration and decoration. Their religions were frank in acceptance of all aspects of life and nature, with destruction on a par with creation, and s.e.xuality openly acknowledged as central to all.

Their rulers were now foreigners with an alien, and uncompromising, vision. They were firm believers that there was but one G.o.d, of universal dominion, and that idol-wors.h.i.+ppers were fit only for conversion or death. They believed that all men were spiritually equal before G.o.d, and that they should wors.h.i.+p him, publicly and en ma.s.se. Their style of dress was to cover the body fully, and they believed that modesty required this. Their buildings were austere, and they believed that any graphic or sculptural ill.u.s.tration was tantamount to blasphemy. Their idea of the workings of the world was austere and abstract: s.e.x had no part in creation, and females (and the delights a.s.sociated with them) should be kept decently out of sight in purdah.

Somehow, around the middle of the second millennium, a compromise, or at least a modus vivendi, was reached between these polar opposites.

Linguistically, the effects of this are visible in the largest and most widespread single language now spoken in India, especially in its northern regions. It goes under two names, Hindi and Urdu, because it is felt to be two different languages. Hindi is written in Devanagari, the characteristic 'was.h.i.+ng on the line' script derived from the Brahmi tradition, and likes to borrow words from Sanskrit. Urdu is written in Persian (by origin Arabic) script, and draws on Persian and Arabic. Urdu is the official language of the state of Pakistan, while both Hindi and Urdu are dignified as official languages in the Indian const.i.tution.

But neither can really run true to its cultural ideal in sourcing its vocabulary, and when they are spoken Hindi and Urdu are in practice one language.*This maintenance of a distinction without a difference speaks eloquently for Indian civilisation after the Muslim invasions, each side believing it maintains its own standard, but in fact conforming to a common, wider, norm, which unites them in a common society.

Despite their determined maintenance of Islamic ideals-along with educated use of Persian, which lasted until the British imperialists had fully taken over from the Mughals, well into the nineteenth century-the invading Turuka have ultimately fallen into the old pattern of invading conquerors adopting the speech of the conquered. For if the names Hindi and Urdu come from the Persian side of the language's heritage, its substance turns out to be pretty much pure Aryan, with the basic vocabulary, and the endings on verbs, adjectives and nouns, all traceable to something like Sanskrit, though radically simplified. Historically, it is evidently the continuation of the Prakrit spoken round Delhi, known successively as auraseni ('language of ura-sena', the region to the south of the city), Apabhramsa ('falling off) and Khai Bol i ('standing speech').

In a quite different and unexpected way, the fall of Sanskrit into a world where it was no longer seen as the sole standard of linguistic excellence came to enrich the whole world's understanding of language. The new Muslim masters, despite their independent knowledge of Arabic, Persian and Turkish, did not distinguish themselves for their linguistic scholars.h.i.+p. But when the British succeeded in the eighteenth century, a new and equally confident alien civilisation became acquainted with Indian culture, and through it with Sanskrit. They approached it from the new perspective of knowledge of the cla.s.sical languages of Europe, Greek and Latin, and were soon struck by its remarkable similarity to both of them. Sir William Jones, Chief Justice in India, ventured in 1786 the wild surmise that they were all three 'sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists'.

This was the origin of historical comparative linguistics. Applying it to languages all over the world was one of the great intellectual adventures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and as a direct result we now know much of the flow of human languages, and so of human history, well before the start of the written doc.u.ments. To give just three examples, this is how we know that the Hungarians came from northern Siberia, that Madagascar was colonised from Borneo, and that the European Gypsies originated as far away as India.

For all the self-generated excellence of Sanskrit's own tradition in linguistics, it could never have gone off in this new direction on its own: what was needed was confrontation with other languages, far beyond the Indian ken, but also the ability to view these languages as somehow on a par with Sanskrit, something else that the tradition would have found simply inconceivable.

Sanskrit's subsequent history is one of survival, rather than new triumphs. In India it is still the language of a traditional elite, but now it is denied its ancient and medieval role as the princ.i.p.al vehicle of intellectual discourse in India. That is conducted either in the princ.i.p.al vernacular languages, or much more in English. Sanskrit's culture was always based on a disarming view of its own importance, which held India to be the only significant part of the world; it has not adapted to a world where even in India itself this view is dismissed. The world touched by Indians, the whole of East and South Asia, once took India at its own valuation, but not any more.

Perhaps it could still have achieved the revolution in viewpoint needed to incorporate Western learning. Until the early nineteenth century the English East India Company, like the Mughals before them, had patronised Indian learning as they found it, both Arabic/Persian and Sanskrit. When a Committee of Public Instruction was formed in 1823 to spend an annual sum of 100,000 rupees on 'the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of the Natives of India and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British Territories in India' they were split for a decade on whether this should go towards the traditional learning or on modern studies conducted in English. The decision ultimately came down in favour of English, a cultural clean break: and no serious attempt was made afterwards to bridge the gap between India's tradition and the swiftly developing sciences, ideologies and technologies that created the modern world in the Victorian age. Sanskrit became more and more a symbol of certain religions, certain cultures, certain philosophies-of interest to humanists, but somehow offering no contest in the world of the scientists.*

It continues to enjoy an enviable status for a language that was codified 2500 years ago, and has admitted no significant change except new words since. In 1947, it was adopted as one of India's official languages, and 200,000 people still claimed to speak it in the Indian census of 1971-though out of a then population of 400 million.

In a final irony, it a.s.sumed a new symbolic value in the last decade of the twentieth century, adopted by the Bharatiya Janata, 'Indian Community' Party (BJP), which was often in government, as a totem of Hindu ident.i.ty. So, for example, 1999 was declared a Sanskrit Year in India, and a government-funded 'World Sanskrit Conference' held in New Delhi. There is something decidedly bizarre in this. Outside its use for prayers and mantras in the temple, as we have seen, the study of Sanskrit has always been an elite pursuit; and Hinduism's strict hierarchies, denying status to lower castes, have long encouraged them to desert it for the totally egalitarian Islam. Now this badge of Brahman intellectuals is paraded as the banner for a popular ma.s.s movement that demolishes mosques as a cra.s.s and simple a.s.sertion of Hindu power.

Sanskrit's career is not over, although the exclusively Indian world-view that has underlain its distinctive character over the past 3500 years probably is. Nonetheless, it coexists in India with a large family of modern daughter languages, and carries on in its own right as the sacred language of two world religions, Hinduism and Buddhism.

It is a language of paradox. Perhaps it is technically extinct, since there can be few if any infants who pick it up as their first language. Yet it continues to be transmitted to the next generation by an artificial system of rote learning and grammatical a.n.a.lysis that has somehow proved as robust as the natural way-and far less liable to introduce change.

Sanskrit has always been very much a garden variety of language, but in the tropical climate where it has flourished the gardeners have always chosen to encourage its luxuriant side.

adhara kisalayaraga komalaviapanukariau bahu kusumam iva lobhaniya yauvanam angeu sanaddham Truly her lower lip glows like a tender leaf, her arms resemble flexible stalks.

And youth, bewitching like a blossom, s.h.i.+nes in all her lineaments.

Kalidasa, akuntala Recognized, i.21 * This is not a metaphor, or anachronistic interpetation of Sanskrit grammar, but a straightforward description of the working of the sutras in Panini's system. Consider the application of a single sutra: iko ya aci The three words that const.i.tute the sutra are not words of Sanskrit itself, but of an artificial metalanguage that refers tersely to other sutras of the grammar. Nevertheless, they are treated as if they are consonant-stem nouns, with the regular ending for genitive (-as), nominative (a bare ending) and locative (-i). (There is a slight complication, in that both a voiced segment, a final -as, is realised phonetically as -o. This is a regular principle of liaison in Sanskrit, itself a highly complicated part of the grammar.) The sutra could therefore be a.n.a.lysed functionally as In the context of a sutra, these cases have special interpretation, referring respectively to the input, the output and the right-hand context of a phonological rule. The sutra is therefore to be understood as: But what is the reference of the strange words themselves? They are to be understood as applications of another set of sutras (known as the iva-sutras), which plays the role of a system for defining natural cla.s.ses of sounds in Sanskrit. This begins: There is no distinction between upper or lower case in Sanskrit, nor any semicolons. But the use of this Roman typographical convenience is simply to show explicitly what a student of Paninian grammar learns by example, namely that the letters here written in upper case are functioning as control characters. Any term consisting of one of the lower-case letters a followed by one of the control characters b denotes the sequence of phones starling with a and ending just before b. So, for example, 'aC' denotes the set of vowels, 'haT' the set of semi-vowels excluding 1. It can be seen then that the sutra being a.n.a.lysed is nothing less than a concise statement of the rule: Terse, indeed, but it should be remembered that this level of concision is possible only because a number of controlling principles can be taken for granted-e.g. the interpretation implicit in the brackets: the first four phones map respectively on to the second four phones, but this occurs before any of the nine phones in the environment. Part of the task of the tradition of commentary which followed on from Panini was to make explicit the precise nature of the paribhaa (auxiliary principles) on which the correct interpretation of the sutras rests.

* Compare the 215,000 or so entries in the latest Chambers English Dictionary, and over 500,000 in the latest Oxford English Dictionary.

* This is the precise Sanskrit equivalent of the Greek barbaros, defined as someone who did not speak Sanskrit.

* Bizarrely this only happened after Muslim incursions, which had brought in the completely alien Persian as the new elite language.

* Indeed, there is a famous story of the embarra.s.sment caused when a king called Satavahana turned out to know less Sanskrit than a lady: in a water fight, one of his queens begged him to stop pelting her with water (modakai, from ma udakai, 'not with-waters'), but he responded by showering her with sweets (modakai, 'with sweets'). He was so mortified when she pointed out his mistake that he took to his bed, and then embarked on a crash course in grammar (Somadeva, Katha-sarit-sagaram, l.vi.108-22).

* One gets some idea of how much, and how little, Pali differs from Sanskrit by comparing the Sanskrit equivalent for this phrase: sarvasata mulabhaa.

* He called it Fan, probably a Chinese reduction of the word Brahmana.

* The most widely used alphabet in this area of India is still known as deva-nagari, 'the G.o.ds' urban [script]'.

* These two terms came to mean 'slave' and 'demon, robber, bandit' respectively. Compare the development of the English word slave from Slav, and the apparently opposite route taken by Serb from Latin servus. The feminine of dasa, dasi, came to mean 'wh.o.r.e' (devadasi, 'a G.o.d's slave-girl', was a temple prost.i.tute), and one of the most routine Sanskrit insults is dasya putra, equivalent to 'wh.o.r.eson' or 'son of a b.i.t.c.h'.

* The purpose was to rescue Rama's kidnapped wife Sita-rather similar to Homer's motivation for the Trojan War, where a Greek fleet set out to rescue Menelaus's wife Helen.

* In a total reversal, Hinduism was later to renounce even the possibility of foreign voyages. It was held to bring una.s.suageable impurity upon higher castes, e.g. in the late-thirteenth-century law digest by Hemadri (iii.2: 667).

* Devanagari, Gujarati, Panjabi, Bengali, Oriya in the north; Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and Sinhalese in the south. There is another related alphabet, used farther north for Tibetan.

Burmese, Lao, Thai, Khmer (Cambodian) on the mainland; in the islands, Javanese, Balinese, Tagalog (in the Philippines), Batak (in Sumatra) and Bugis (in Sulawesi) . * The same word is now p.r.o.nounced Phnom, as in Phnom Penh.

Java, Sumatra and Malaya are derived from Yava-dvipa, 'barley island'; samudra, 'sea', and Malaya, actually from a Dravidian word, malai, 'a hill', in south India near Malabar. Cambodia (Kamboja) evokes Kambuja, a kingdom in the Khyber pa.s.s area; but had a competing etymology as Kambu-ja, i.e. born of Kambu Svayambhuva, a hermit who united with the celestial nymph Mera to found the race of Khmers (Coedes 1968: 66). Champa shares its name with the kingdom of the lower Ganges, but is probably the local ethnonym Cham in Sanskrit form. The River Irrawaddy in Burma is named for the Iravati, 'having drinking water', the old name of the Ravi river in Panjab.

* To an extent, this still continues: so Megawati Sukarnoputri, at the time of writing president of Indonesia, has a name that translates as 'Cloudy, Beneficent's Daughter'.

* A variant called Siddha-matka, 'settled alphabet', or simply Siddha, is the version of the script most generally used in the East Asian (i.e. Mahayana) Buddhist traditions.

The motivation for this is purely historic. It ultimately goes back to an equally arbitrary 'aleph beth gimel daleth...' specified by the Phoenicians.

* The items in parentheses do not exist separately, in the spelling or the language, for phonetic reasons.

* Nevertheless, the script had been modified deftly to represent more effectively features of Tibetan which are alien to the Aryan languages for which Brahmi and all its successors had been designed. Notably, it can distinguish initial vowels that have glottal stops in front of them and those that do not. (In Sanskrit, as in English, a glottal jerk is inserted automatically when a vowel begins an utterance.) The script was later (in the thirteenth century) borrowed by the Chinese at the court of Kublai Khan, to create the 'Phagspa script for Mongolian, this even being declared the official script of the empire in 1269. It was also used to write Chinese. (See Chapter 4, 'Holding fast to a system of writing', p. 156.) * Malacca's role as an entrepot firmly established Malay, Bahasa Melayu, as the lingua franca of the region, and this has lasted up to the present day. (See Chapter 11, 'Dutch interlopers', p. 400.) Malacca was itself a colony of sri Vijaya (Palembang) on Sumatra, also a major trade centre, and that is where the earliest (seventh century) inscriptions in Malay have been found, one of them upriver from the city of Jambi, previously known as Malayu (Hall 1981: 47-8). Ironically enough, 'Bahasa' is none other than the Sanskrit word bhaa, 'language'.

* Although we know that some features, e.g. the tonal accent, and the p.r.o.nunciation of over-long (pluti) vowels, have been lost along the way.

Most famously NRWN KSR ('Nero Emperor') added up to 666, the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation.

* Ironically, the most lasting contribution of Kanishka's rule was 'Shaka' era, a dating system still in use in India. It runs from AD 78, and is even used in many of the Sanskrit inscriptions of South-East Asia.