Fount
(Illustration: VIVEK THAKKAR)
I had come to Sanskrit in search of roots, but I had not
expected to have that need met so directly. I had not expected my wish
for a ‘historical sense’ to be answered with linguistic roots.
Aged twenty-seven or so, when I first began to study Sanskrit as a
private student at Oxford, I knew nothing about the shared origins of
Indo-European languages. Not only did I not know the example given in my
textbook—that the Sanskrit
ãrya, the Avestan
airya, from which we have the modern name Iran, and the Gaelic
Eire,
all the way on the Western rim of the Indo-European belt, were all
probably cognate—I don’t even think I knew that word, ‘cognate’. It
means ‘born together’:
co + natus. And
natus from
gnascor is cognate with the Sanskrit root
jan from where we have
janma and the Ancient Greek
gennaõ, ‘to beget’. Genesis, too.
And in those early days of learning Sanskrit, the shared genesis of
these languages of a common source, spoken somewhere on the Pontic
steppe in the third millennium BC, a source which had decayed and of
which no direct record remains, absorbed me completely. Well, almost
completely. The grammar was spectacularly difficult and, in that first
year, it just kept mushrooming—besides three genders, three numbers and
eight cases for every noun, there were several classes of verbs, in both
an active and middle voice, each with three numbers and three persons,
so that in just the present system, with its moods and the imperfect, I
was obliged to memorise 72 terminations for a single verb alone.
And still I found time to marvel at how the Sanskrit
vid, from where we have
vidiã, was related to the Latin
videre—to see—from where, in turn, we have such words as video and vision; veda too, of course, for as Calasso writes in
Ka, the ancient
seers, contrary to common conception, did not hear the Vedas, they saw them! Or that
kãla, Time and Death, should be derived from the Sanskrit
kãl, ‘to calculate or enumerate’—related to the Latin
kalendarium,
‘account book’, the English calendar—imparting, it seemed to me, onto
that word the suggestive notion that at the end of all our calculations
comes Death. Almost as if k ¯ala did not simply mean Time, but had
built into it the idea of its passage, the count of days, as it were.
These thrills were so self-evident that I did not stop to ask what
lay behind them. But one day, a few months into my second term, the
question was put to me by a sympathetic listener. An old editor at
Penguin. I was in London assailing him over dinner, as I now am you,
with my joy at having discovered these old threads, when he stopped me
with:
But what is this excitement? What is the excitement of discovering these old roots?
An oddly meta question, it should be said, oddly self- referential,
and worthy of old India. For few ancient cultures were as concerned
with the how and why of knowing as ancient India. And what my editor was
saying was, you have the desire to know, fine—you have
jijñãsa, desiderative of
jña:
‘to know’—but what is it made of? What is this hunting about for
linguistic roots? What comfort does this knowledge give? And, what, as
an extension, can it tell us about our need for roots, more generally?
It was that most basic of philosophical enquiries: why do we want to
know the things we want to know?
+++
I grew up in late 20th century India, in a deracinated household. I use that word keeping in mind that
racine
is 'root' in French, and that is what we were: people whose roots had
either been severed or could no longer be reached. A cultural and
linguistic break had occurred, and between my grandparents’ and my
parents’ generation, there lay an imporous layer of English education
that prevented both my father in Pakistan, and my mother, in India, from
being able to reach their roots. What the brilliant Sri Lankan art
critic, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, had seen happening around him
already in his time had happened to us (and is, I suppose, happening
today all over India).
‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes in
The Dance of Shiva,
‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A
single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of
tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of
all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East
or the West.’
This is an accurate description of what we were. And what it meant
for me, personally, as an Indian writer getting started with a writing
career in India, was that the literary past of India was closed to me.
The Sanskrit commentator, Mallinatha, working in 14th century Andhra,
had with a casual ‘
iti-Dandin: as Dandin says’, been able to go
back seven or eight hundred years into his literary past. I could go
back no further than fifty or sixty. The work of writers who had come
before me, who had lived and worked in the places where I lived and
worked today, was beyond reach. Their ideas of beauty; their feeling for
the natural world; their notion of what it meant to be a writer, and
what literature was—all this, and much more, were closed to me. And, as I
will explain later, this was not simply for linguistic reasons.
I was—and I have TS Eliot in mind as I write this—a writer without a historical sense. Eliot who, in
Tradition and the Individual Talent, describes the ‘historical sense’ as:
a
perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence;
the historical sense, he feels, compels a man to write not merely with
his own generation in his bones, but that [for him]—I’m
paraphrasing now—the whole literature of Europe from Homer onwards to
that of his own country has ‘a simultaneous existence’.
My problem was that I had next to nothing
in my bones.
Nothing but a handful of English novels, some Indian writing in English,
and a few verses of Urdu poetry. That was all. And it was too little;
it left the bones weak; I had no way to thread the world together.
The place I grew up in was not just culturally denuded, but—and this
is to be expected, for we can only value what we have the means to
assess—it held its past in contempt. Urdu was given some token
respect—though no one really bothered to learn it—but Sanskrit was
actively mocked and despised. It was as if the very sound of the
language had become debased. People recoiled from names that were too
Sanskritic, dismissing them as lower class: ‘Narindar,’ someone might
say, ‘what a driver’s name!’ They preferred Armaan and Zhyra and Alaaya.
The Sanskrit teacher in most elite schools was a figure of fun. And
people took great joy at having come out of a school, such as The Doon
School, say, without having learnt any more Sanskrit than a derisive
little rhyme about flatulence.
What was even more dismaying was that very few people in this world
regarded Sanskrit as a language of literature. In fact, Sanskrit, having
fought so hard historically to escape its liturgical function and
become a language of literature and statecraft, had in the India I grew
up been confined once again to liturgy. And an upper-class lady, on
hearing that you were learning Sanskrit, would think nothing of saying:
‘Oh, I hate all that chanting-shanting.’
Sanskrit was déclassé; it was a source of embarrassment; its position
in our English-speaking world reminded me of the VS Naipaul story of
the boy among the mighty Mayan ruins of Belize. ‘In the shadow of one
such ruin,’ Naipaul writes in
The Enigma of Arrival, ‘a Mayan
boy (whatever his private emotions) giggled when I tried to talk to him
about the monument. He giggled and covered his mouth; he seemed to be
embarrassed. He was like a person asking to be forgiven for the
absurdities of long ago…’
+++
To have Sanskrit in India was to know an equal measure of joy and
distress. On the one hand, the language was all around me and things
that had once seemed closed and inert came literally to be full of
meaning. ‘Narindar’ might have sounded downmarket to the people I had
grown up with, but it could no longer be that way for me. Not when I
knew that beyond its simple meaning as ‘Lord of Men’,
nara—cognate with the Latin
nero and the Greek
anér—was
one of our oldest words for ‘man’. Some might turn their nose up at a
name like Aparna, say, preferring a Kaireen or an Alaaya, but not me.
Not when it was clear that
parna was ‘leaf’, cognate with the English ‘fern’, and
aparna,
which meant ‘leafless’, was a name Kalid ¯a sa had himself given
Paravati: ‘Because she rejected, gracious in speech though she was, even
the high level of asceticism that is living only on leaves falling from
trees of their own accord, those who know the past call her Aparna, the
Leafless Lady.’
My little knowledge of Sanskrit made the walls speak and nothing was
the same again. Words and names that had once seemed whole and
complete—such as Anuja and Ksitaja—broke into their elements. I saw them
for what they were:
upapada compounds, which formed the most playful and, at times, playfully profound compounds.
Anuja, because it meant ‘born after’, or ‘later’, was a name often given to the youngest son of a family. And
ksitaja, which meant ‘born of the earth’—the
ja being a contraction of
jan,
that ancient thread for birthing, begetting and generating—could be
applied equally to an insect and a worm as well as the horizon, for they
were both earth-born. And
dvi|ja, twice born, could mean a
Brahmin, for he is born, and then born again when he is initiated into
the rites of his caste; it could mean ‘a bird’, for it is born once when
it is conceived and then again from an egg; but it could also mean ‘a
tooth’, for teeth, it was plain to see, had two lives too.
So, yes: once word and meaning were reunited, a lot that had seemed
ordinary, under the influence of the world I grew up in, came literally
to acquire new meaning. Nor did the knowledge of these things seem
trifling to me, not simply a matter of curiosity, not just pretty
baubles. Because the way a culture arrived at its words, the way it
endowed
sabda with
artha, gave you a picture of its values, of its belief system, of the things it held sacred.
Consider, for instance,
sarıra or ‘body’. One of its possible derivations is from
√srr, which means ‘to break’ or ‘destroy’, so that
sarıra
is nothing but ‘that which is easily destroyed or dissolved.’ And how
could one know that without forming a sense of the culture in which that
word emerged and how it regarded the body? The body, which, as any
student of John Locke will tell you
(1), had so different a significance in other cultures.
I thought it no less interesting to observe the little jumps of
meaning a root made as it travelled over the Indo-European belt. Take
vertere, ‘to turn’, from the old Latin
uortere: we have it in Sanskrit too:
vrt,
vartate: ‘to turn, turn round, revolve, roll; to be, to live, to exist, to abide and dwell’. It is related to the German
werden—‘to become’. From where we have the Old English
wyrd—‘fate, destiny’; but also
werde: ‘death’. That extra layer of meaning restored, it was impossible ever to think of Shakespeare’s ‘weird sisters’ from
Macbeth in the same way again.
What Sanskrit did for me was that it laid bare the deep tissue of
language. The experience was akin to being able to see beneath the thick
encroachment of slum and shanty, the preserved remains of a grander
city, a place of gridded streets and sophisticated sewage systems, of
magnificent civic architecture. But to go one step further with the
metaphor of the ruined city, it was also like seeing Trajan’s forum as
spolia on people’s houses. The language was there, but it was
unthought-of, unregarded, hardly visible to the people living among it:
there as remains, and little more. There are few places in the world
where the past continues into the present as seamlessly as it does in
India, and where people are so unaware of it.
Neither is the expectation of such an awareness an imposition of the present on the past. Nor is it an import from elsewhere;
not—to
use the Academic’s word—etic, but deeply emic to India. For it is safe
to say that no ancient culture thought harder about language than India,
no culture had better means to assess it. Nothing in old India went
unanalysed; no part of speech was just a part of life, no word just
slipped into usage, and could not be accounted for. This was the land of
grammar and grammarians. And, if today, in that same country, men were
without grammar, without means to assess language, it spoke of a decay
that could be measured against the standards of India’s own past.
That decay—growing up with as little as I had—was what lay behind my
need for roots and the keenness of my excitement at discovering them. It
was the excitement, at a time when my cultural life felt thin and
fragmentary, of glimpsing an underlying wholeness, a dream of unity,
that we human beings never quite seem able to let go of. But there was
something else. In India, where history had heaped confusion upon
confusion, where everything was shoddy and haphazard and unplanned, the
structure of Sanskrit, with its exquisite planning, was proof that it
had not always been that way. It was like a little molecule of the
Indian genius, intact, and saved in amber, for a country from which the
memory of genius had departed.
+++
1 ‘Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be
common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This
no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the
Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he
removes out of the State of Nature hath provided, and left in, he hath
mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and
thereby makes it his Property.’
This article is taken from:
OPEN
Priya Gupta, TNN | Aug 4, 2013, 12.00 AM IST
Creation of new states means the Centre has to provide funds to develop infrastructure. Chhattisgarh is spending Rs.20,000 crore to develop its new state capital, Naya Raipur, besides other administration-related costs. A new capital for Andhra will cost much more unless both states agree to function from Hyderabad. Other investments will include sharing of water and natural resources. This was the reason why Congress leaders such as Union Science and Technology Minister S. Jaipal Reddy endorsed the now-aborted idea of including Kurnool and Anantapur districts in the new state. Telangana would then have the Srisailam dam and reservoir on the Krishna river, and the 1,670 mw hydel station. Unmindful of the consequences, Congress is working on a plan that will please its dynasts. Digvijaya Singh has set a 215-day timeline to complete the formation of the state. The process for creating a separate state will be initiated on August 20-Rajiv Gandhi's birthday-and given a concrete shape by December 9-Sonia Gandhi's birthday.
