Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  Now the Japanese kana represent syllables, rather than individual consonants. Their pronunciation has definitely changed over the last millennium, but using the most ancient pronunciation reconstructible, we can state the conventional order as:

  Immediately we note that the arbitrary order of the vowels (a i u e o) is precisely as in Sanskrit, although this has no motivation in Japanese grammar. Furthermore, although there are many fewer consonants in Japanese than in Sanskrit, they occur in almost exactly the same order as in the Sanskrit alphabet. In fact, there is only one apparent exception, s, which occurs where c or should be, not at the end like the Sanskrit sibilants. In fact there is reason to believe that the pronunciation of this phoneme was actually [š] (English ‘sh’) or [ts], when the conventional order was set up, which means it would be closest to Sanskrit c (English ‘ch’, [tš]).

  This thoroughgoing intellectual borrowing at the root of the writing system demonstrates that not just the sound of the Buddhist chants but also elements of the traditional analysis of the language had spread to Japan with Sanskrit.

  Another example of Sanskrit intellectual influence on the technology of writing is the Tibetan script, which we first see in use in the eighth century AD, derived directly from the Siddha script. The earliest-known use of it is on a stone pillar at Žol near Lhasa, dated to 764.42

  It is not quite clear if Tibet owes its literacy to Buddhism, or to attempts to modernise administration. The era of the first surviving inscriptions is precisely the time when Buddhism first came to Tibet, with the monk Śāntarakita. But there is no mention of Buddhism on the Žol pillar inscription, which is a record of a royal minister’s achievements.43

  Whatever the motivation, it is clear that the Tibetan alphabet was inspired by an Indian model, and one that was used for the writing of Sanskrit or

  Prakrit. And Tibetan writing, once established, was very largely taken up with the translation of Buddhist classics from Sanskrit or Pali. This became such an industry that there was a Tibetan royal commission in the early ninth century to establish precise rules for equivalences (comparable to the ‘controlled language’ used in some industrial translation today). The result was a lowering of the literary skill displayed in translation, but such punctilious work was done that it is often possible to reconstruct lost Sanskrit originals simply on the basis of their Tibetan versions.

  These religious foundations of Tibet’s Sanskrit culture were surmounted by a superstructure of wider-ranging classical literature in the thirteenth century, for then Muslim invaders devastated all the centres of higher learning in northern India, and many scholars fled northward into Tibet with their books. Nine Sanskrit pundits accompanied the Khatšhe pantšhen Śākyašrībhadra to Tibet in 1206, and fifty years later there was collaboration on Sanskrit drama, poetry and poetics between the Indian pundit Lakmīkara and the Tibetan scholar šo-ston Rdo-rdže rgyal msthan.44

  It is somehow reassuring to think that eight hundred years ago Tibet was a refuge for Buddhists fleeing from marauding infidels in northern India—the precise opposite of what we have known in the latter part of the twentieth century.

  Sanskrit supplanted

  Muslim invasions had started from Ghazni in Afghanistan in the late tenth century. It took three hundred years for the Muslims’ ‘Delhi Sultanate’ to take control of the whole plain from Indus to Ganges, and another century to grasp most of the rest of the subcontinent. Their unity was not sustained, but their presence in India continued to count, especially after 1505, when Babur, leading yet another army down from Afghanistan, founded the Mughal empire.

  The incomers were known to the Indians as Turuka (’Turks’). They brought in a new self-confident civilisation that conversed in a form of eastern Turkic (Chagatay), prayed in Arabic, but was literate above all in Persian.

  Their cultural self-confidence, their totally alien concepts of decorous behaviour and the point of life, and above all their developed systems of administration conducted in Persian, meant that they had far, far more linguistic effect than the previous, non-doctrinal, incursions from the same direction of the Śaka, Kushāna and Hūa. Now for the first time Sanskrit was supplanted as the elite language of India.

  Ironically, the Muslims’ success in invading the continent was largely a result of their skill with cavalry, and the fine Afghan-bred horses that they brought with them. The distant descendants of the Aryan horse-borne invaders of the second millennium BC had at last been beaten at what had once been their own game.

  At about the same time, some of the civilisations of South-East Asia that had been Sanskrit-speaking were taking up the same new religion, but apparently for quite different motives.

  There was no military conquest here, nor social revolution in favour of lower castes. Nevertheless, some ports in northern Sumatra became Muslim in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and Melaka (Malacca), the most important trading centre, situated on the Malay peninsula, embraced Islam some time in the early fifteenth.* The religion spread widely among its trading partners, notably to Java, south Sulawesi, the Moluccas and Mindanao. It is presumed that the influence came from Muslim traders out of India, perhaps in a kind of commercial domino effect, with kingdom after kingdom reckoning that they stood to maintain their Indian links only if they took up the faith—or perhaps responding to a desperate Islamic rush to proselytise before the arrival of the Portuguese.45 Whatever the linkage, the new religion created a new social climate, and put an end to Sanskrit’s reign as the representative language of culture here.

  The charm of Sanskrit

  The roots of Sanskrit’s charm

  keyūrā na vibhūayanti puruām hārā na candrojjvalā na snāna na vilepana na kusuma nālaktā mūrdhana bhāāikā samalakaroti puruam yā sasktā dhāryate kīyante khalu bhūaāni satata vāgbhūaa bhūāam

  Bracelets do not embellish man, nor necklaces bright as the moon; bathing, cosmetics, garland, head-dress, none can add a whit. Man’s one true embellishment is language kept perfected: finery must perish, but eternal the refinement of fine language.

  Bharthari, ii. 17-20

  A language that began as an Indo-European offshoot settled in a decidedly quiet corner of the world, the foothills of the Hindu Kush, spread as a vernacular all over the Indo-Gangetic plain, and as an elite language, borne by Hindu religion, to the rest of the Indian subcontinent. From there it spread eastward across the sea through trade, and became for a thousand years the cultural inspiration to a whole new subcontinent and archipelago. This was the autonomous growth of Sanskrit.

  But one of the religions that had started in Sanskrit’s first millennium continued to grow through its second and third: Buddhism spread first with Sanskrit and the Prakrits across India and Indo-China. Then the religion showed that it could transcend its native state, its home in Indian culture. Moving northward and finally eastward, it won converts and flourished in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Tibetan and Mongolian societies. Although the religion metamorphosed as it progressed across the world, Sanskrit and Pali travelled with it without significant change, as adjuncts to Buddhist higher learning wherever it took them. This was Sanskrit’s free ride, its vehicle Buddhism in all its many forms.

  It is now time to consider what it was about Sanskrit which made it grow, and whether Buddhism itself may have owed something to this consummately charming form of human expression.

  Sanskrit had many advantages. It was the language of a self-conscious elite, the Brahmans and Kshatriyas, who considered themselves entitled to dominate other peoples with whom they came into contact, and had the technical means to do so. Furthermore, their language was at the very centre of their own picture of their culture, since grammar was the queen of their sciences. Facility in Sanskrit was seen as the hallmark of civilised existence, of one’s place in the world as an ārya, but it was also something that was teachable, and was taught.

  Beliefs about the true value of this knowledge gradually changed over the centuries, from the need
to guarantee the cult of the gods, to maintenance of the social order, and then to enhancement of the patina of cultural appreciation.

  Although some social forces promoted less elite forms of the language, both at a secular level (for example, in the practice of kings such as Aśoka) and in the spiritual world (for example, in the attitudes of the Buddha), they gradually lost out to the cultivated, self-conscious charm of the self-styled Perfected Language, sasktā bhāā: because of its elaborated descriptions and analyses of itself, it could always demonstrate what was best and why it was best. It thereby made itself irresistibly attractive to upwardly mobile institutions: Hindu kingdoms (such as that of Rudradaman) seeking wider recognition in India, Indo-Chinese dynasties (such as the Śailendra of Bnam) seeking to demonstrate their legitimacy, Buddhist schools wanting to endow their devotional texts with prestige.

  The natural conservatism of institutions meant that their symbols would tend to ossify—witness the fate of the Pali language among the Buddhists, starting as an attempt at an unstuffy people’s lingua franca but ending up as just another classical language. India, with its caste system, was nothing if not a home of conservative institutions. Such conservatism always played into the hands of Sanskrit: it was defended through its own sutras as the unchanging linguistic standard, from which any change would mean decline and degradation.

  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). Vyākāraa, 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 vāiyākāraā

  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.

  Limiting weaknesses

  And yet the human world of Sanskrit was not, and is not, without it
s 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