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

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.

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 Turuṣka (’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 Hūṇa. 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. [775]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. [410]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.

keyūrā na vibhūṣayanti puruṣām hārā na candrojjvalā na snānaṃ na vilepanaṃ na kusumaṃ nālaṃkṛtā mūrdhanaẖ bhāṣāikā samalaṃkaroti puruṣam yā saṃskṛtā dhāryate kṣīyante khalu bhūṣaṇāni satataṃ vāgbhūṣaṇaṃ bhūṣāṇam

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.

Bhartṛhari , 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, saṃskṛtā bhāṣā: 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). Vyākāraṇa , 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 vāiyākāraṇāẖ