Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  We begin with an outline of how Sanskrit was spread across Asia.

  A dialect of Indo-Iranian, it is first heard of in the North-West Frontier area of Swat and the northern Panjab (now in Pakistan), spoken by peoples who have evidently come from farther north or west, and who like to call themselves ārya (later a common word for ‘gentleman’, and always the Buddhists’ favourite word for sheer nobility of spirit). Somehow their descendants, and even more their language, spread down over the vast Indo-Gangetic plain, as well as up into the southern reaches of the Himālaya (’snow-abode’) mountains, so that by the beginning of the fifth century BC the language was spoken in an area extending as far east as Bihar, and as far south, perhaps, as the Narmada. Sanskrit literature from the period, principally the epic poems Mahābhārata (’Great Bharata’) and Rāmāyaa (’The Coming of Rama’), is full of military exploits and conquests.

  The result was the present-day situation, a northern Indian heartland, stretching from sea to sea, of languages more or less closely related to Sanskrit. This centre is always known in India as Āryāvarta (’abode of the Aryas’). It also gained one offshoot in $SArī Lankā to the far south, creating the Sihala (’lion-y’) community there: according to tradition, this group had come from Gujarat, on the north-western coast, in the fifth century BC. The advance of Aryan is continuing to this day in the northern regions of Assam and Nepal, where the official languages (Assamese, and Nepali or Gurkhali) are both Aryan, but have not yet become the vernaculars of large majorities of their populations.

  Not all the spread of Sanskrit was through full take-up of the language as a vernacular. Even when pre-existing languages, such as Telugu, Kannada and Tamil, held their own, they were usually permeated with terminology from Sanskrit. It is quite possible for these borrowed words (called tat-sama, ‘that-same’) to be overwhelmingly numerous in a language whose grammar is non-Aryan. Conversely, in Urdu, or even Hindi, majority languages of northern India, Aryan roots may be almost invisible under the heavy influence of later borrowings from Persian and Arabic. (This widespread culturally induced borrowing has been the bane of Indian historical linguistics: nowhere has it been harder to sift the inherited part of languages from foreign borrowings, and so piece together their history.)

  The process of Sanskritisation did not stop at the boundaries of the subcontinent. Over the course of the first millennium AD, Indian seafaring traders or missionaries made landfall, not only in Śri Lanka, but also in many places along the coasts of South-East Asia. Here, the language spread above all as a language of elite civilisation and religion (whether Hindu or Buddhist), but the influence, and evidently the study made of Sanskrit as a vehicle of high culture, was profound. The region is known as Indo-China, quite rightly, for it became a crucible for the competing cultural influences of India and China.

  But when Sanskrit took its path northward, round the Himalayas to Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, it was above all the attractions of the Buddha’s teachings which caused the spread of the language. The Buddha had lived in the fifth century BC, in the lower valley of the Ganges, speaking a Prakrit known as Magadhi. In the next two hundred years the faith he founded spread all over India and Śri Lanka, as well as into Burma, its scriptures largely written in a closely related Prakrit, Pali, but also, more and more over time, in classical Sanskrit. Besides the spread to South-East Asia, the most influential path that Buddhism took was to Kashmir, and back to the homeland of Sanskrit itself in Panjab and Swat.

  Hence in the first century AD Buddhism, with its attendant scriptures, spread northward, perhaps here again trekking back up the historic route that Sanskrit speakers had used to enter India over a millennium before. But past Bactria, instead of turning left into the central Asian steppes, it turned right and, picking up the Silk Road, headed into China. Received by the rising Tang dynasty, and ultimately propagated by them, Buddhism became coextensive with Chinese culture. Thence it was ultimately transmitted, along with its Sanskrit and Pali scriptures, to Korea and Japan, its most easterly homes, arriving at the end of the sixth century.

  Other, closer, areas took much longer to receive the doctrine, borne as ever by its vehicles Pali and Sanskrit. Nepal had been part of the early Indian spread of Buddhism under Aśoka, in the third century BC; but the first Indian monk invited into Tibet, Śāntarak⋅ita, came in the second half of the eighth century AD, a full 1200 years after the Buddha had lived just two hundred miles to the south (admittedly, over the Himalayas) in Magadha; and the religion was firmly established in Tibet only in the eleventh century.

  The last area to be exposed to Buddhism (and hence sacred Sanskrit) on a large scale was Mongolia, its northernmost home. For many centuries there were strong links between the Tibetans and the Mongols, who from 1280 to 1368 achieved ascendancy over China. Kublai Khan, for example, the Mongol emperor of China well known in the West as the host of Marco Polo, was keen to spread Buddhism to the Mongol homeland in the early fourteenth century. But this aim was only achieved permanently by Chinese preachers rather later: in 1578 the Altan Khan of Mongolia accepted a version of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, on behalf of his whole realm.

  Sanskrit, then, has a far-flung history, and has been in contact with cultures conducted in other languages all over southern, eastern and central Asia. And an interesting generalisation emerges. Nowhere has this linguistic contact led to loss or replacement of other linguistic traditions, even though Sanskrit has always been central to new cultural developments wherever it has reached. This record makes a striking contrast with the impact, too often devastating, of languages of large-scale campaigning civilisations, such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, French and English.

  But in another way this widespread embrace of Indian culture is highly reminiscent of the enthusiasm for Americana that captured the whole world, and certainly the South-East Asian region, in the second half of the twentieth century. In that advance too the primary motives were the growth of profits through trade, and a sense that the globally connected and laissez-faire culture that came with the foreigners was going to raise the standard of life of all who adopted it. As with the ancient advance of Indianisation, there has been little or no use of the military to reinforce the advance of Microsoft, Michael Jackson or Mickey Mouse. There has been little sense that the advance is planned or coordinated by political powers in the centre of innovation, whether in India then, or in the USA today. And the linguistic effects are similar too: English, like Sanskrit, has advanced as a lingua franca for trade, international business and cultural promotion.

  A major dissimilarity is the absence of any religious element in the American movement. There is nothing in it to set against the cult of Hindu deities, or the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path. This may be significant for the future of English, since we shall see that it was ultimately only religion, whether Hindu or Buddhist, which was to preserve any role for Sanskrit outside India. But with this one caveat, it seems more helpful than misleading to compare these two rising tides—of Indian culture in the early first millennium AD, and of American culture at the end of the second.

  The rest of this chapter looks a little more deeply at what kind of language Sanskrit was, and how it came to be received so enthusiastically across southern and eastern Asia.

  The character of Sanskrit

  dūrīktā khalu guāir udyānalatā vanalatābhi

  Left far behind indeed in virtues are the garden-creepers by the forest-creepers.

  Kālidāsa, Śākuntalā Recognised, i. 17

  Intrinsic qualities

  Indian culture is unique in the world for its rigorous analysis of its own language, which it furthermore made the central discipline of its own culture. The Sanskrit word for grammar, vyākaraa, instead of being based, like the Greek grammatikē, on some word for word or writing, just means analysis: so language is the subject for analysis par excellence.

  Patanjali, a noted grammarian of the second century BC, wrote at the beginning of his
work the Mahābhā⋅ya (’great commentary’) that there were five reasons for studying grammar: to preserve the Vedas, to be able to modify formulae from the Vedas to fit a new situation, to fulfil a religious commitment, to learn the language as easily as possible, and to resolve doubts in textual interpretation.3 So it is clear that even at this stage, a good millennium after the composition of the Vedas, when the language had already changed quite considerably, enhancing the use of language for religious purposes was still felt to be the central point of grammar.

  And religious uses have always loomed large in the figure that Sanskrit cuts in the world. Hindu liturgies have been intoned in the language over a continuous period of 3500 years, which is probably the age of the oldest hymns in the Rig Veda. The gods chosen to be the focus of worship have changed over the millennia, from Agni (’Fire’), Savitri (’Sun’), Varuna and Rudra in the Vedas, to Śiva, Krishna, Ganesha and Kali (and many others) today, but some gods are still with us (notably Vishnu), and the language has changed very little. In fact, in the Rig Veda there is one hymn that is an invocation of Vāc, speech itself. Here are two of its verses:

  The last words show a blending of sexual and mystical imagery, often found in Sanskrit; but they also show that the skills of the linguist were early recognised. This is particularly interesting in that the discipline of grammar as it had been developed was an analysis not primarily of the religious language of the Vedas, but of a different, slightly simpler, and therefore presumably later, dialect. Pāini, the original fifth-century BC doyen of Sanskrit grammar, has to give extra rules to generate the forms used in the Vedas (called chandas) from a base in ordinary Sanskrit (designated as bhāā—’speech’). (Panini probably lived in the academic community of Takaśilā, known to the Greeks as Taxila, near modern Rawalpindi in the extreme north-east of the subcontinent, now part of Pakistan.)

  Furthermore, the grammar that the tradition had defined was a vast system of abstract rules, made up of a set of pithy maxims (called sūtras, literally ‘threads’) written in an artificial jargon. These sutras are like nothing so much as the rules in a computational grammar of a modern language, such as might be used in a machine translation system: without any mystical or ritual element, they apply according to abstract formal principles.*

  Formulation in sutras became the key feature of Sanskrit academic texts, but using maxims in regular Sanskrit and not this complex meta-language. Whereas Western didactic texts until the modern era were formulated in some Greek tradition as a set of axioms and theorems (after Euclid), or more often as didactic verse (after Hesiod), the preferred approach in the Sanskrit tradition has been to encapsulate treatises as a series of memorable aphorisms, usually phrased as verse couplets. So much so that there is even a sutra to define the qualities of a good sutra:

  svalpākaram asandigdha sāravad viśvatomukham

  astobham anavadya ca sūtra sūtravido vidu

  brief, unambiguous, pithy, universal,

  non-superfluous and faultless the sutra known to the sutra-sages.

  This approach was very much a part of another distinctive feature of Sanskrit linguistic culture, namely a strong ambivalence about the value of writing. Reliance on language in its written form was seen as crippling, and not giving true control over linguistic content. Hence this proverb:

  pustakasthā tu yā vidyā parahastagatam dhanam

  Knowledge in a book—money in another’s hand.4

  In this ancient India was like many cultures as widely divided as the Druids of Gaul in the first century BC5 and modern Guatemala (where Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to have to remember them).6 Even Socrates recalled a story that when the the god Thoth first offered the craft of writing to the king of Egypt, the king was not impressed: ‘it will set forgetfulness in the minds of learners for lack of practice in memory’.7 The doyens of Indian learning took this undeniable side effect of book learning very much to heart.

  Even though the language had undergone a full phonological analysis by the fifth century BC, which was even incorporated into the official order of letters in the alphabet, reliance on written texts for important (especially spiritually important) documents was decried. Hence another saying:

  vedavikrayiaçcāiva vedānācāiva dūaka

  vedānā lekhakaścāiva tevāi nirayagāmina

  The sellers of the Vedas, the misreaders of the Vedas,

  the writers of the Vedas, all go on the path to hell.8

  By contrast the ideal was the rote learning of all the principal texts, through judicious use of mnemonic techniques. This learning then made possible true engagement with all aspects of them, including the composition of new texts and commentaries, which might indeed benefit from being written down.

  The character of the language that received this attention has already been exhibited in the quotations. It was a typical ancient Indo-European language, with nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs all highly inflected in a system that, although susceptible to elegant analysis (as Panini and the grammatical tradition demonstrated), was rife with special exceptions. Words tended to be polysyllabic, and their length was often increased by the propensity of the language to tolerate compounds of almost unlimited length, a feature of Sanskrit that became more extreme (in all genres of literature) as the centuries and millennia wore on.

  The vocabulary is vast: there are over ten thousand nominal (i.e. nonverbal) roots in the traditional thesaurus for poets (Amarakoa, ‘the Immortal Treasury’, organised of course into sutras for memorisation) and, when verbs and compounds are allowed in, Monier Williams’ 1899 dictionary runs to 180,000 entries.* This means that there are vast resources in near-synonyms: at an extreme, John Brough claims there are fifty synonyms for ‘lotus’, a favourite concept of Sanskrit poetry in both literal and metaphorical senses.9 Words tend to have multiple senses anyway: the most straightforward word for lotus, padma has eleven extra senses in the neuter gender (lotus-like ornament, form of a lotus, root of a lotus, coloured marks on the face and trunk of an elephant, an army formation, a trillion (10), lead, a tantric chakra, a mole on the body, a spot, part of a column) and eight more in the masculine (temple, quarter-elephant, species of serpent, Rama, a treasure of Kubera, a mode of sexual enjoyment, a posture in meditation, a treasure connected with magic). These lexical resources are exploited to the full in Sanskrit poetry, which is gratuitously allusive and periphrastic, and addicted to ślea or punning.

  But we have already noted that a special characteristic of Sanskrit is a complicated system of word liaison. This is known as sandhi (’putting together’). It means that word boundaries are often effaced, and a single stream of syllables, as pronounced or even written, becomes susceptible to multiple interpretations. The combined result of these two properties of Sanskrit is an opportunity for punning on an almost inconceivable scale. This opportunity was amply taken up in literary composition. The ultimate in this was achieved by the poet Kavirāja (’poet-king’), who in his Rāghavapāavīya (twelfth century AD), set himself the task of retelling simultaneously the stories of both the great epics of India, the Rāmāyaa and Mahābhārata, in ambiguous (and highly ornate) verses. In a way, this can be seen as a release of meaning from its expression in words, for it is difficult to conceive how the work could have been understood, in either of its senses, without active and detailed pre-knowledge by the audience of the tales being told. Author and audience share the stories, but are focused exclusively on the verbal details of their expression. This in practice forces not only the use of ambiguous terms, but an analogy to be set up between the narrative flow of the two epics. So, to quote one couplet (vi.8):

  paracakra parikrāmann aśokagahana gata:

  kanād iva ktārtho ‘bhūn maheyīdarśanena sa.

  Going round the enemy’s kingdom/forces, he came to a thicket of Aśoka trees/the reverse of grief:

  in an instant as it were, his task was accomplished, by his sight of the daug
hter of the earth/the cows.

  Here the first of the variant translations (in bold) of phrases applies to Hanuman seeking Sita, and the second (italicised) to Arjuna on a cattle-rustling expedition behind enemy lines. But to maintain a coherent narrative, most of the phrases still have an unambiguous translation.

  In every sense of the word, then, Sanskrit is a luxuriant language. Sir William Jones, Chief Justice of India and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, memorably described it in 1786: ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.’

  Sanskrit in Indian life

  SOCIAL

  The question of who or what provided the model for the best Sanskrit has been answered in various ways over its long life. It was far more fraught than the question of the standard for Greek or Latin, since those languages did not carry the heavy theological overtones that have remained with Sanskrit throughout.

  Originally, as we have seen, the focus was purely religious, and the promoted aim was to pronounce and articulate the Vedas properly. What would now be seen as a matter of social and pious propriety was represented otherwise in ancient India. Intoning the Vedas, after all, was held to give supernatural power, and Patanjali gave an example of the potentially life-threatening nature of bad grammar: the demon Vritra performed a sacrifice to obtain a son who would be indra-śatru, a killer of Indra, his sworn enemy among the gods. Unfortunately he accented it wrong, on the first rather than the last syllable, and so conjured up a son whom Indra would kill.10