Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (51 page)

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).
Vyākāra
a
, grammatical analysis, 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:

ardhamātrālāghavena putrotsavam iva manyante vāiyākāra
ā

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 classics, 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 classical 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 utkalā jananī
, ‘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 manuscript tradition, as well as distinctively through the oral tradition of the Sanskrit grammarians, may have prevented the pronunciation 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 assigned 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 pronunciation 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 gods 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 assimilation was recognised somehow as good value, and well worth pursuing and developing.

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 Aśoka 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
Arthaśāstra
of Kautilya, is written in Sanskrit, not Magadhi. This is traditionally attributed to the chief minister of Candragupta (’Moonsecret’) Maurya, Aśoka’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 assured.
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 establishing 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
cakravārtin
, ‘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 Kushāna empire, in the first to second centuries AD. But they never lasted any longer.
^*

All the invaders in this period—they also included Scythians (
Śaka
) speaking Iranian, and Xiongnu (
Hū
a
) 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
Arthaśāstra
shows that it was highly organised and self-conscious, legally and economically.