Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  India for them was the home of Buddhist enlightenment. But it was also a fascinating country in its own right. Their accounts of their time there are very largely taken up with travelogue, but Xuan-Zang is particularly detailed about the intellectual life he encountered, and to which he contributed, during his stay. He wrote:

  The letters of their alphabet were arranged by Brahmādeva, and their forms have been handed down from the first till now. They are forty-seven in number, and are combined so as to form words according to the object, and according to the circumstances [viz. tenses, and local cases]: there are other forms [viz. inflexions] used. This alphabet has spread in different directions and formed diverse branches, according to the circumstances; therefore there have been slight modifications in the sounds of the words [viz. spoken language]; but in its great features there has been no change. Middle India preserves the original character of the language in its integrity. Here the pronunciation is soft and agreeable, and like the language of the Devas [viz. the gods*]. The pronunciation of the words is clear and pure, and fit as a model for all men. The people of the frontiers have contracted several erroneous modes of pronunciation; for according to the licentious habits of the people, so will be the corrupt nature of their language.22

  Strictly speaking, Manu’s contemporary conception of Madhyadeśa (’midland’) would, as we have seen, have excluded Magadha and the region of the lower Ganges as too far to the east. But in practice we can infer from Xuan-Zang that in his day the speech of ‘Middle India’ included the language of Pataliputra, ancient capital of several Indian empires, and of Nalanda, even then the pre-eminent university in the land.

  The spread of Sanskrit

  Sanskrit in India

  Sanskrit first appears to us, as do most of its Indo-European sister languages, as the speech of conquering warriors, well capable of using horses and wheeled vehicles to establish domination over their neighbours, and turn them into serfs and subjects. The way of life is familiar from heroic poetry of Indo-European peoples in every direction: men who fight from chariots, speak forthrightly, and care for their own personal honour more than life itself. When, in the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, Krishna advises Arjuna on his duty that day, he could be speaking to the Greek Achilles attacking Troy (a thousand years earlier), or the Irishman Cúchulainn standing against the hosts of Connacht (in a thousand years to come).

  svadharmam api cāvekya na vikampitum arhasi:

  dharmyāddhi yuddhācchreyo ‘nyat katriyasya na vidyate.

  yadcchyā copapannam svargadvāram apāvtam

  sukhina katriyā pārtha labhante yuddham īdrśam.

  atha cet tvam ima dharmya sangrāma na kariyasi

  tata svadharmam kīrtim ca hitvā pāpam avāpsyasi.

  akīrtim cāpi bhūtāni kathayiyanti te’ vyayām

  sambhāvitasya cākīrtir maraād atiricyate.

  Looking to your own duty too, you must not flinch;

  for there is nothing better for a Kshatriya than a righteous fight.

  Blest are the Kshatriyas who gain such a fight,

  offered unsought, O Partha, as an open door to heaven.

  But if you choose not to carry on this righteous conflict,

  then discarding personal duty and glory, you will fall into sin.

  Beings will tell of your eternal dishonour

  and, for a respectable man, dishonour is worse than death.

  Bhāgavad Gītā, ii.31-4

  Being a Hindu god, Krishna does go on to ground this exposition of the heroic code within a theology of reincarnation and a theory of knowledge that reduces the world of action to a shadow-play of appearances; but the basic ethic of nobility expressed through courage and military prowess is clear.

  It is usually presumed that it was this attitude to life, together with the dominating technologies of warhorses, wheeled vehicles and metal weapons, which spread Aryan lordship and language across northern India, and then kept the various kingdoms in an almost constant roil of mutual warfare over this period. (This model of language spread is, after all, well attested in many parts of the world in the historical period, as when the Normans brought Norman French to England, or the conquistadores brought Spanish to Central and South America.)

  But besides the battles recounted in Sanskrit epics there is very little evidence, from archaeology, inscriptions or indeed from indigenous tradition, that the language was spread with fire and sword. Particularly in India, there is an ingrained belief that Hinduism and Sanskrit are not the result of alien invasions, but developed rather wholly within the subcontinent. There has even been a recent attempt to give this story a full quasi-mythological backing, developing the theory that, if there are linguistic and genetic links with the rest of the Indo-European language family, this is due to the spread of the Aryans round Europe before their return to their true home of India.23

  Whatever the truth of the Aryans’ prehistoric wanderings, there is a lot that shows that horses were important to them from the beginning. In the Hittite libraries of central Anatolia (2500 miles to the west of the Indus) we find a manual on horsemanship and chariotry, written by Kikkuli the Mitannian in the mid-second millennium BC: he gives his profession as assussanni-, which can be equated with the Vedic Sanskrit aśvasani ‘gaining or procuring horses’, and his text is full of loan words which are evidently Indo-Aryan: courses can be aikawartanna, terawartanna, panzawartanna, sattawartanna, nawartanna, ‘1-, 3-, 5-, 7- or 9-turns’, which is just Sanskrit eka-, tri-, pañca-, sapta- and nava-vartana. Most Mitannians spoke a completely unrelated language, Hurrian, but in another text written in this language at much the same time (from the city of Nuzi—Yorgan Tepe—in northern Iraq) horse colours are given in something close to Sanskrit: babru (babhru), ‘chestnut’, parita (palita), ‘grey’, pinkara (pingala), ‘roan’.

  Here the Aryan elite culture of the horseman had been superimposed on a populace that spoke another language. The evidence stems from long before and far away; but the situation of the early days of Aryan language in India was probably very similar. This can be seen even within the structure of Sanskrit itself.

  Sanskrit and its related Indo-Aryan languages are different from all their relatives to the north and west, in Iran, Russia and Europe, in possessing an extra series of consonants, known to Sanskrit grammarians as the mūrdhanya (’in the head’) sounds, or to Westerners as the retroflex stops, after the position of the tongue: , , h, h and with the tongue curled backward against the roof of the mouth, as against t, d, th, dh and n, where the tongue touches the back of the front teeth. So paati, ‘splits’, is a different word from patati, ’falls’, and maa, ‘foam, cream’, from manda, ‘dull’. These sounds are also characteristic of the Dravidian languages now spoken to the south of the Aryan languages in India, as well as other neighbours, such as the Munda languages dotted around the north-east of India. Whereas no other Indo-European language has them (making them unlikely as a feature of whatever language they all originate from), they are so systematic in Dravidian that they are probably as old as the family. It would appear, then, that they have established themselves in Sanskrit and Aryan as a ‘substrate’, a residual feature of the languages that the earliest adopters of Sanskrit were speaking, and could not lose when they learned the new language.

  There is also some cultural evidence in the Rig Veda which suggests how the invading Aryans felt they differed from the peoples, the dāsa and dasyu,* their language came to dominate, for they saw them as having darker skins, ‘of black origin’, kayonī.24 This fits with the Sanskrit word used traditionally for the four-fold division into social castes, Brahman~Kshatriya~Vaiśya~Śudra, namely vaa, ‘colour’. The dasyu are represented in the epic Mahabharata by the two younger sons of Pandu (’the Pale’), Nakula and Sahadeva, born to his second wife Madri, who is said to be black eyed and dusky complexioned. Throughout the epic, they act as faithful, but unimaginative, supporters of their apparently nobler Aryan elder half-brothers, Yuddhishthira (’Firm in Fight’)
, Bhīma (’terrible’) and Arjuna (’Resplendent’).

  We have seen that the process of assimilation with various local groups continued well into the second millennium AD, and seems to have involved a kaleidoscopic succession of languages in some parts of north and central India. One of the most memorable moments, at least politically, in this long series of shifting patterns occurred about 260 BC, when Aśoka conquered the eastern kingdom of Kalinga (approximately the area of modern Orissa). This conquest was a high-water mark for imperial unity in India, one not to be exceeded for two thousand years. Aśoka wrote this of the experience all over the rest of his empire (in Magadhi, Aramaic and Greek): ‘In the eighth year of his reign, Piyadasi conquered Kalinga. 150,000 people were captured there and deported, 100,000 others were killed and almost as many perished. Since that time, pity and compassion gripped him, and he was overwhelmed by that…’

  This compassion put an end to his wars of conquest, and made him turn instead to the propagation of dhamma (Sanskrit dharmā), variously translated as ‘virtue’, ‘duty’ or ‘the Law’. It is said that he stood on the hill at Dhauli, and saw the Daya river flow red with blood. Writing specifically to the Kalinga population on a rock inscription at that spot, he says, instead of recounting the campaign: ‘All men are my children. Just as, in regard to my own children, I desire that they may be provided with all kinds of welfare and happiness in this world and in the next, the same I desire also in regard to all men. But you do not understand how far my intention goes in this respect. A few among you perchance understand it but even such of you understand it partly and not fully…’

  In fact, it remains obscure what, if any, linguistic effect Aśoka’s conquest had on Kalinga. It is just too long ago, and too much has happened since.

  Orissa is now a mainly Aryan-speaking area (with a strong sprinkling of unrelated ādivāsi, i.e. ‘aboriginal’, languages): the earliest inscriptions in its language date from the tenth century AD. The language is Oriya, closely related to the Bengali spoken farther north; but little is known of its earlier history, and it has been suggested that Orissa was still non-Aryan even in the seventh century AD.25 Xuan-Zang recognised at least three distinct countries in this region: Ura (the origin of the name Orissa), which he said had ‘words and language different from Central India’, Kōnyōdha, ‘with the same written characters as those of mid-India, but language and mode of pronunciation quite different’, and Kalinga, where ‘the language is light and tripping, and their pronunciation is distinct and correct. But in both particulars, that is, as to words and sounds, they are very different from mid-India.’26 This kind of evidence is just one example of what makes it so difficult to depict in any detail the language map of India in past centuries.

  Sanskrit influence permeated farther south, with the cultural spread of Hinduism, eventually saturating with borrowed words three of the major non-Aryan languages, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Tamil, in the extreme south-east, was less affected linguistically, although its society was ultimately no less Hindu. And besides this gradual export of words, there had also been, in the middle of the first millennium BC, a major transplant of a whole community, with its Aryan language, to the extreme south. This accounts for the presence of Sinhala in Śri Lanka. The history of the movement of people that brought this language is not documented, but it may be reflected through legend in the epic Ramayana, which climaxes in a military expedition to this island.* About two hundred years later, in the late third century BC, the links between Śri Lanka and the Aryan north were reinforced when Aśoka sent his son Mahinda to the island as a Buddhist missionary, so founding the Theravada school of Buddhism which has endured to this day.

  Sanskrit in South-East Asia

  The move to Śri Lanka may be seen as the beginning of Sanskrit’s spread beyond the shores of India. This seaborne expansion makes its significance far greater to the global story, for Sanskrit is the first example in history of a language travelling over a maritime network, through the establishment of trade and cultural links with peoples on the other side. In this, it can be seen as a precursor of the spread of the western European languages in the last five hundred years.

  By the middle of the first millennium AD, Sanskrit was established as the hallmark of Indianised civilisation, all over South-East Asia, including the main islands of modern Malaysia and Indonesia. There is no clear record of how this came about. But one feature of the spread of Sanskrit is clear: it was not a military expansion. There was never a warlike move by Indians into Asia, even of the typical short-term Indian empires, which even in north India never seemed to last more than a very few generations.

  But if we leave aside military ambition, the motives that have been suggested for the Indian successes exhaust every other possibility: refuge from imperial wars from the Mauryas and Aśoka onward, piratical raids, a spirit of adventure, the peaceful pursuit of trade, or a desire to spread sacred learning, of Buddhism certainly, and perhaps earlier even of Hinduism.*

  Each of these has something to recommend it, and they are not mutually exclusive. It must mean something, for example, that the name for India current among Malays and Cambodians was ‘Kling’, that is Kalinga, the coastal realm in eastern India bloodily conquered by Aśoka. There, and especially in its northern region Tāmralipta (’copper-smeared’, modern Tamluk in West Bengal), there was a tradition of producing sārthavāhā or sādhava, ‘merchants’, who were easily confused with sāhasikā, ‘pirates, buccaneers’, proverbial in Sanskrit for their bravery, as well as violence. In the treasury of practical wisdom from the sixth century AD, Pañcatantra, it is remarked:

  bhayam atulam gurulokāt tam iva tulayanti sādhu sāhasikā

  Merchant-buccaneers reckon light as straw the fear instilled by the weighty.27

  The popular Jātaka tales of previous lives of the Buddha, composed around this time, are also full of merchants who seek wealth in Suvaabhūmi.

  * In the romanised script for Sanskrit, c is pronounced as ch in church, j as in judge. A dot under t, d or n means that it must be sounded with tongue turned back, retroflex. A dot under an h means that it is followed by an echo of the previous vowel (e.g. ka, ‘who’, as kaha). A dot under an r or an I means that it is pronounced as a separate syllable, as bitter, little in American English. A dot under an m means that is pronounced simply by nasalising the preceding vowel: aha, ‘I’, is like American ‘uhuh?’. All the stop consonants (k, g, c, j, t, d, , , p, b) can be aspirated, and this is shown by a following h. There are three sibilants, ś, and s: the first two are close to English sh, the former as in sheet, the latter with the darker sound as in push.

  The motive for the trade is also hinted at by the Sanskrit names that the Indians gave to parts of this eastern world. Śri Lanka was known as Tāmradvīpa, ‘copper island’, or Tāmrapaī, ‘copper-leafed’; the land beyond the eastern ocean as Suvaadvīpa, Suvaabhūmi, ‘the isle, or the land, of gold’. These names survived to be taken up, or translated, by Greek explorers, Taprobanē for Śri Lanka, and Khrysē Khersonēsos, ‘Golden Peninsula’, for South-East Asia. There is little in these countries’ known geology to suggest that the names were well founded. But the quest for precious metals was clearly part of the legend of such ancient navigation. One of the most evocative tales in the Sanskrit equivalent of the 1001 Nights, Somadeva’s Kathāsaritsāgaram (’Ocean of the Streams of Story’), recounts the quest of a Brahman, setting out for his lost loves in Kanakapurī, ‘The City of Gold’, located somewhere beyond ‘The Islands’. One of the merchants he meets on his way has a father who returns rich from a long voyage to a far island, his ship loaded specifically with gold.

  More realistically, there was scope for immense profit either in entrepôt business, exchanging Indian aromatic resins (including frankincense (kundura) and myrrh (vola)) for Chinese silk, or in obtaining local products such as camphor (karpūra) from Sumatra, sandalwood (candana) from Timor or cloves (lavanga) from the Moluccas.28

  Indians set out for this
Land of Gold from all round the subcontinent. Evidently, the shortest journey was from Gaua (modern Bengal) and Kalinga: we know that Fa-Xian and Yi-Jing took ship from Tamralipti. But the prevailing wind across the Bay of Bengal from June to November is south-westerly, so the most direct sailing was to be had from the southern shores, and this is the area of all the ports noted by the Greeks.29 A handful of inscriptions in Tamil, turning up in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, confirm this route. The ports of the western coast also had their share of departures for the east: an old Gujarati proverb mentions the wealth of sailors back from Java.30

  More interesting for us than the motivation of the Indian sādhava is how they would have appeared to the receiving populations, known to the Indians as dvīpāntara, ‘islanders’. These people, Burmese in the east, Austro-Asiatic in the south (Mon, Khmer, or Cham), Malay in the islands, already used bronze, irrigated rice, domesticated cattle and buffalo, and had ships and boats of their own. They would not have been able to read or write. The Indians would have presented themselves to the local chiefs as visiting dignitaries, probably claiming royal connections back across the ocean, and offering gifts, and perhaps medicines and charms. Winning favour with local elites, some went on to take their daughters in marriage, and thus sow the seeds of new dynasties.

  What the Indians brought with them was literacy, and an ancient culture with a vast array of rules (the sutras of the Hindu Dharmaśāstras, or the suttas of the Buddhist Tipiaka) for every occasion. There was the whole mythology of Hinduism, making Agastya, Krishna, Rama and the Pandava brothers into household names, as they have been ever since in South-East Asia. There was the distinctive idea of the complementary roles of king and priest, admittedly at sixes and sevens over which was ultimately the higher, but clearly in a relationship of mutual support. This relationship could underwrite, and make permanent, the legitimacy of rulers. And so the rulers that the Indians met were happy to become their friends, business partners and fathers-in-law. The new generation that sprang from the mixed marriages would have been the first to receive a full Sanskrit education.