Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  Coming from Patanjali, this is an anecdote of the second century BC, showing that some features at least of the language defined by Panini’s grammar had already ceased to be routine. Panini had lived in the fifth century in the extreme north-west of the Sanskrit- or Prakrit-speaking area. By Patanjali’s time, this region had fallen under the control of mleccha* peoples, non-Hindu (and non-Sanskrit-speaking) foreigners, the Yavana (Greeks) and Śaka (Scythians speaking an Iranian language, comparable to Pashto) from the west and north.

  The religious motives emphasised by Patanjali for ensuring one’s Sanskrit was correct developed naturally, in India’s hierarchical and theocratic society, into social markers, and indeed status symbols. Patanjali worries that there may be a circularity (itara-itara-āśraya) in his natural wish to identify the best educated (śia) usage with what grammar prescribes: after all, how does the grammarian know what to prescribe? So he appeals to the usage of the Āryāvarta, defined geographically: this turns out to be northern India, bounded by the Himalayas in the north and the Vindhya mountains in the south, and the Panjab in the west and Allahabad in the east.11 This was to remain the received view of the Aryan centre, although there are refinements to be found in the Manu Law Code, written perhaps seven hundred years later, about AD 500: Madhyadeśa (’Mid Land’) is identified with this definition— effectively modern Haryana and Uttar Pradesh—while the Āryāvarta has expanded to encompass the whole of the north of the subcontinent; meanwhile, a small region round Delhi (’between the divine rivers Sarasvatī and Dadvatī’), identified as the Brahmāvarta, has the supreme accolade: ‘All men in the world should learn their proper behaviour from a Brahman born in that country.’12

  POLITICAL

  Patanjali conveniently places the limits of Āryāvarta more or less at the borders of the Śunga empire of which he was a citizen.13 This would not have been so convenient a century earlier, when the political world revolved around the vastly larger, but less centrally located, empire of the Mauryas. Its centre was Pāaliputra (modern Patna), which is in eastern India beyond the confines of the then Āryāvarta. Furthermore, it extended as far to the east as the Brahmaputra, as far to the north and west as the southern part of Afghanistan, and to the south it reached modern Mysore and the Nilgiri hills. These bounds are marked by monumental inscriptions, set up on pillars or carved into the living rock, placed by the greatest Maurya emperor Aśoka (’grief-less’—or, as he preferred to called himself, Piyadasi, Sanskrit Priyadarśin, ‘of friendly aspect’.)

  The role of politics in the early spread of Sanskrit across India remains obscure. Very likely, the process of military conquest and dynastic subordination in the third century BC spread not Sanskrit as such but the Magadhi Prakrit, which was the language of the Maurya court; Sanskrit would have taken up its position thereafter, establishing itself here, and no doubt elsewhere, as the common language for educated discourse of all those who spoke some Indian Prakrit in day-to-day life. This has been its position in India ever since, although in the last millennium other languages, notably Persian (under the Mughals) and English (under the British), have entered the subcontinent and competed for this status as the prime language of education.

  In fact, the kind of linguistic advance achieved by military conquest seems to have been particularly impermanent. There is a cluster of Aśoka’s edicts round Raichur, on the borders of modem Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh; but this is now the very heart of the area where Kannada and Telugu are spoken—both Dravidian languages unrelated to Magadhi, or indeed to Sanskrit. Later, a series of Aryan-speaking empires based on the lower Ganges (such as Aśoka’s) rose and fell: this happened in the second century BC, and the second and fifth centuries AD; after each fall Bihar, the area centred on the lower Ganges, relapsed into the (likewise unrelated) Munda language. It seems that the east and centre of India succumbed to the Aryan tendency only gradually, and fitfully: Bengal in the fourth century AD, Orissa in the seventh. Farther to the west, even in the fourteenth century, the official inscriptions of Mahārāra (’great kingdom’) were still in Kannada; but it then became another totally Aryan-speaking area, with a language known as Marathi.* It appears that the social strata must have been speaking different languages for some time, with (in this case, at least) Aryan favoured much more by the lower orders.

  Aśoka’s inscriptions, the earliest in a decipherably Aryan language to survive, are not in Sanskrit but Magadhi Prakrit; and this absence of Sanskrit from inscriptions, or rather its presence only for literary decoration while the guts of the message are given in Prakrit, continues for several centuries. It is not until two hundred years later that the first inscriptions in Sanskrit are found, farther west, in Ayodhya and Mathura (south of Delhi). There is a clear division of function between Sanskrit and Prakrit visible in these inscriptions, which contain both: Sanskrit is used for the verse, Prakrit for the prose dedications. Ultimately, Sanskrit did come to predominate, and indeed to be the exclusive language of inscriptions. But this tradition did not get fully established for another 250 years, starting in AD 150 with the rock inscriptions of a fairly minor king, Rudradāman, at Junāgah (’Greek fort’) on the western coast, in Gujarat.

  Something of the same division of function between Sanskrit for high and Prakrit for everyday use is also shown by the language conventions of Sanskrit drama. Every play was multilingual, or multi-dialectal. From the sixth century AD, noble males speak in Sanskrit; ladies speak in Śaurasenī (the Mathura Prakrit), but sing in Mahārārī; meanwhile, low characters are scripted in Magadhi (ironically, the descendant of the dialect that had had royal overtones, nine hundred years before). We can only suppose that intervening political reversals (e.g. the rise of the Sātavāhana kings in the Maharashtra area over the first centuries BC and AD) had a more or less permanent effect on the perceived status of the dialects.*

  Rājaśekhara, making recommendations C.AD 900 for the ideal poet, says that he should have servants fluent in Apabhraśa (’falling off, the quite generally used, but unflattering, term for later forms of Śauraseni Prakrit, on its way to becoming modern Hindi), maids in Magadhi and the like; but his wives should speak Sanskrit, or else ‘Prakrit’, which for him means Maharashtri, and his friends all languages.14 The social imperative for Sanskrit had become inescapable, despite the poet’s own personal enthusiasm for his local Prakrit. But to a large extent, the status of the dialects seemed to have become fully detached from awareness of their local origins, or their history.

  RELIGIOUS

  Interestingly, Magadhi had probably also been the dialect of Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, though about one millennium earlier. (His contemporary, Mahāvīra, the founder of Jainism, lived in the area too.) Magadha was also the area of the earliest Buddhist councils, which established the outlines of this faith for later generations. And Buddhism’s most famous, and influential, early convert was King Aśoka himself, another resident of Magadha, in its chief city, Pāaliputra (modern Patna in the state of Bihar on the Ganges).

  This geographical coincidence might have been expected to lead Buddhism to favour Magadhi. The Buddha had advised his monks to teach in their own language (sakayā niruttiyā). His view here seems to have involved not only a respect for the vernacular, but also a positive belief that his caste, the warrior Katriya, was actually superior to the priestly Brāhmaa with its Sanskrit associations. This was part of his persuasive redefinition of the whole caste system and of what it was to be truly ariya (Aryan)—though this word is usually translated in Buddhist English as ‘noble’—based on personal merit rather than birth.

  But the monks did not in turn privilege the common speech of the Buddha himself and his region. Rather, they declared themselves in favour of any form of vernacular language. There are stories that this caused some unease among Brahman monks, who feared that the resulting slack grammar and pronunciation would corrupt the sayings of the Buddha. However, in time a particular Prakrit did come to predominate: it was called Pāli (’canonical’) and w
as a mixed Prakrit. Despite the claims of the Buddhist tradition (which also claimed that this language had been spoken by the Buddha and was, for good measure, the original language of all beings, sabbasattāna mūlabhāsa),* Pali was not predominantly Magadhi, but included many distinctively Western elements, reminiscent of Śauraseni: it must have arisen as a kind of Buddhist Aryan creole, by a process of compromise among monks speaking various Prakrits.

  Later on, as the faith developed, and became more heavily institutionalised, it increasingly adopted a grander style of language, in form closer to classical Sanskrit, which is known as Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. This typically involves taking the grammatical structures of Prakrit, which are much simpler and more analytic than those of Sanskrit, and reclothing the words in case markings and verb endings that are reminiscent of classical Sanskrit, but quite often misapplied from the viewpoint of classical grammar.

  Overall, throughout Indian linguistic history, Sanskrit’s status has tended to rise, both in secular and sacred use; the Maurya kings’, and the Buddhists’ and Jains’, early preference for the vernacular all ultimately yielded to the respect in which Sanskrit was held. It has been recognised throughout as an artificial (saskta) language; but if anything this has increased its status, and its use has come to be seen as a linguistic touchstone for the quality of a text.

  Outsiders’ views

  It is interesting to compare briefly some external perceptions of Sanskrit, and of its role in society. There are two outsiders’ traditions which have left records of their encounters: for the last three centuries BC, we have reports from the Greeks; and for the middle of the first millennium AD, from the Chinese to the north-east.

  A glance at the map shows that, in an age of overland travel on foot, emissaries of both civilisations must have had to distinguish themselves in terms of determination even before they could reach the centres of Indian culture: Greece was over 5000 miles away (though Greek had been established as a lingua franca for most of that distance), while China, though closer as the crow flies, was in practice cut off not only by the Taklamakan desert but also by the mountains stretching from the Pamirs to the far Himalayas.

  THE GREEKS

  The Greeks knew little about India until Alexander’s campaigns brought them to its borders in 327 BC. Thereafter there were diplomatic exchanges between some of the great Indian rulers of the north and the Greek dynasts who controlled the east of what had been the Persian empire, the Seleucids. From 302 to 288 Megasthenes served as Seleucid ambassador to King Chandragupta Maurya in Pataliputra (Patna), which he introduced to the Greek world as Palibothra. He left a discursive study of Indian ways, the Indikā, which, taken together with some reports of Onesicritus and Nearchus, naval officers who had written memoirs of their service with Alexander, stood as the core of Greek knowledge of India until the end of the ancient world.

  The Indikā has not survived, but can be reconstructed substantially from the extensive quotations that figure in other authors, such as Strabo and Pliny, writing (in Italy) two centuries later. It contains little or nothing on the political or literary aspects of Indian life, but does contain an analysis of the caste system, identifying no fewer than seven distinct ‘tribes’ or ‘lineages’, which can be fairly well mapped on to the time-honoured four-way division into Brahmans (priests and philosophers), Kshatriyas (kings and warriors), Vaiśyas (merchants) and Śudras (labourers). It also appears to note the prevalence of the cults of Śiva and Krishna, but the inference is indirect: in the usual Graeco-Roman way, it gives only the names of Greek gods which the author had identified with the Indian figures; so the Indians are said to have worshipped Heracles (since like Krishna he carried a club), and Dionysus (since like Śiva he was associated with thriving vegetable life and with Mount Meru, whereas Dionysus had been born from Zeus’s thigh, in Greek mērou, and he was a pretty wild character, worshipped with music and dance).

  Megasthenes does cope more explicitly with the more intellectual aspects of religions practised in the Maurya empire of his time, distinguishing Brahmans (brakhmanai or bragmanai) and Śramans (sarmanai) as different kinds of philosophers. Śramaa is indeed a Sanskrit word sometimes used specifically for Buddhist monks, but there is no explicit mention of Buddhism, which would have been some two hundred years old at the time (having been founded in exactly the same region where Megasthenes was resident).

  The commentary tends to be focused at a fairly superficial level, for example the presence of gumnosophístai, or naked sages, and the fact that male and female students were on a par as disciples to the Śramans. Megasthenes apparently never understood that the Brahmans are in fact one of the ‘tribes’, i.e. castes, that he had distinguished; nor that ‘forest-dwellers’ (what his hosts would have called vanaprastha) are not a species of Śraman, but rather those who have reached a certain period of life, whether Brahman or Śraman.

  India remained the fabulous source of exotic products for the Greeks and beyond them the Romans. In fact, the truest elements of Sanskrit lore that they ever absorbed were the names of some of their favourite substances: canvas (Greek karpasos, ‘cotton’, from karpāsa), ginger (Greek zingiber from śngavera, named after a town on the Ganges), pepper (Greek peperi from pippali, ‘berry’), sugar (Greek sakkharon from śarkarā, ‘grit’)— originally characterised by Alexander’s admiral Nearchus as honey coming from reeds without the aid of bees.15

  Megasthenes’ work, which came to form Europe’s knowledge of India up until the Renaissance, was in some ways lacking in understanding, and never offered any appreciation of philosophy, language or literature. In one case, a sage joked that since the conversation took place through three interpreters, they were as likely to get a clear idea of the philosophy being expounded as to purify water by running it through mud.16

  But this did not mean that the Greeks who lived closer in were similarly lacking. One Greek king of the Panjab, Menander (second century BC), in fact became immortalised for his penetrating interest in Buddhism in the form of the Pali classic Milinda-pañha, or ‘Questions of King Milinda’: ‘Many were the arts and sciences he knew—holy tradition and secular law; the Sākhya, Yoga, Nyāya and Vaiśeika systems of philosophy; arithmetic, music; medicine; the four Vedas, the Purānas and the Itihāsas; astronomy, magic, causation and spells; the art of war; poetry; and property-conveyancing—in a word, the full nineteen.’17

  And another Indo-Greek of the same period, announcing himself as Heliodorus, Greek ambassador (yonadūta) from King Antialkidas, left an inscription in perfect Prakrit on a column still standing at Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh. It ends with the spiritual precept:

  trīni amutapādāni...suanuhitāni

  neyati svagam dame cāga apramāda

  Three steps to immortality, when correctly followed,

  lead to heaven: control, generosity, attention.

  THE CHINESE

  By contrast with Greek writers, who were in India largely as traders, conquerors or representatives of power, the Chinese came as serious students of India’s culture, and particularly Buddhism: some evidently learnt Sanskrit (with Pali and Magadhi Prakrit) in depth during their stay. Their descriptions, therefore, have an authority and penetration that far exceed the Greek testimony; in many cases, they provide the best evidence we have for the details of Indian life at this time, the Indians themselves having always been remarkably unconcerned to set down straightforward descriptions of their own daily life.

  The Chinese testimony comes from four pilgrims in search of authentic Buddhist scriptures, most of whom struggled past the Taklamakan desert and across the Hindu Kush to enter India through this northern route. They came at intervals of about a century. Each of them, besides bringing home quantities of Buddhist manuscripts which they then set about translating, went on to write a memoir after their return to China.

  Fa-Xian (), the first whose tale has survived, travelled to India via the Hindu Kush from AD 400 to 414, returning by sea. For three of these years he was at Patalip
utra, ‘learning to read the books in Sanskrit* and to converse in that language, and in copying the precepts’.18 (His comrade Do-Zhing was so impressed with the holy life of the Indian śramanas that he decided not to go home.) Fa-Xian then moved down the Ganges to another major city, Champa (near modern Bhagalpur), where he spent two more years, principally seeking to acquire Buddhist texts,19 before an extremely eventful voyage home via ‘Ye-po-ti’ or Yava-dvīpa (Java). He says he had resided in central India for six years in all.20

  In 518 Song-Yun () came. He penetrated no farther than Nagarahāra (Jalalabad) and Puruapūra (Peshawar), at either end of the Khyber pass, which now links Afghanistan and Pakistan; and returned to China by the same route after three years.

  Then, in 629, the most famous of them all, Xuan-Zang (), reached India by stealth (the Chinese border being closed at the time), and after a three-year journey stayed for ten years, mostly as a student at Nālandā university outside Pataliputra, but also undertaking a journey around most of the south of the subcontinent.

  Xuan-Zang was followed, a generation later, in 671, by a pilgrim called Yi-Jing (), Yi-Jing travelled by sea from Canton, but he stopped at the Indianised kingdom of Śrī Vijaya (Palembang) in southern Sumatra for two years of Sanskrit study. (He wrote: ‘if a Chinese priest wishes to go to the west to understand and read there, he would be wise to spend a year or two in Fo-Shi [Vijaya], and practise the proper rules there; he might then go on to central India.’) He himself then proceeded to the university of Nalanda, where he studied for ten years. Afterwards, he returned by sea to Śrī Vijaya, where he spent most of his time until 695, organising the translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese, and writing two memoirs: On eminent monks who sought the law in the West, and On the spiritual law, sent from the Southern Seas.21