Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

paracakraṃ parikrāmann aśokagahanaṃ gataẖ:

kṣanād iva kṛtārtho ‘bhūn maheyīdarśanena saẖ.

Going round the enemy’s kingdom/ forces , he came to a thicket of Aśoka trees/ the reverse of grief:

in an instant as it were, his task was accomplished, by his sight of the daughter of the earth/ the cows.

Here the first of the variant translations (in bold) of phrases applies to Hanuman seeking Sita, and the second (italicised) to Arjuna on a cattle-rustling expedition behind enemy lines. But to maintain a coherent narrative, most of the phrases still have an unambiguous translation.

In every sense of the word, then, Sanskrit is a luxuriant language. Sir William Jones, Chief Justice of India and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, memorably described it in 1786: ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.’

The question of who or what provided the model for the best Sanskrit has been answered in various ways over its long life. It was far more fraught than the question of the standard for Greek or Latin, since those languages did not carry the heavy theological overtones that have remained with Sanskrit throughout.

Originally, as we have seen, the focus was purely religious, and the promoted aim was to pronounce and articulate the Vedas properly. What would now be seen as a matter of social and pious propriety was represented otherwise in ancient India. Intoning the Vedas, after all, was held to give supernatural power, and Patanjali gave an example of the potentially life-threatening nature of bad grammar: the demon Vritra performed a sacrifice to obtain a son who would be indra-śatruẖ , a killer of Indra, his sworn enemy among the gods. Unfortunately he accented it wrong, on the first rather than the last syllable, and so conjured up a son whom Indra would kill. [375]

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 [757]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 ( śiṣṯa ) 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. [376]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 Dṛṣadvatī’ ), 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.’ [377]

Patanjali conveniently places the limits of Āryāvarta more or less at the borders of the Śunga empire of which he was a citizen. [378]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 Pāṯaliputra (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 Mahārāṣṯra (’great kingdom’) were still in Kannada; but it then became another totally Aryan-speaking area, with a language known as Marathi. [758]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 Junāgaḏh (’Greek fort’) on the western coast, in Gujarat.