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

agrāhyā mūrdhajeṣv etā striyo guṇasamanvitāẖ na latāh pallavacchedam arhanty upavanodbhuvāẖ

Ladies like these, who are accomplished, should not be seized by the hair;

for creepers growing in orchards deserve not to have their foliage lopped off.

Śūdraka , The Little Clay Cart, 8.21

After the Muslim invasions, India became a very different place.

It is hard now to conceive what opposite and harshly conflicting extremes, both of daily life and of values deeply held, had to be reconciled to create the India now familiar to us.

Indians had perceived themselves as being firmly at the centre of their world, their gods running it, their social order complex but immutable, because ordained at the highest level. Even as austere an analyst as the Buddha had called the highest path the Arya way. Intellectually, they knew that they were not alone in the world, but the only role in which they had seen foreigners was as outsiders whose best hope was to partake in the blessings that India could provide, whether by trade or by adoption. They dressed scantily, as was comfortable in their climate, but adorned themselves as gaudily as their incomes and caste allowed. Their relations with their gods were largely a matter of personal devotion, except at festival time. They built their monuments with loving attention to intricate detail, and lavish illustration and decoration. Their religions were frank in acceptance of all aspects of life and nature, with destruction on a par with creation, and sexuality openly acknowledged as central to all.

Their rulers were now foreigners with an alien, and uncompromising, vision. They were firm believers that there was but one god, of universal dominion, and that idol-worshippers were fit only for conversion or death. They believed that all men were spiritually equal before God, and that they should worship him, publicly and en masse. Their style of dress was to cover the body fully, and they believed that modesty required this. Their buildings were austere, and they believed that any graphic or sculptural illustration was tantamount to blasphemy. Their idea of the workings of the world was austere and abstract: sex had no part in creation, and females (and the delights associated with them) should be kept decently out of sight in purdah.

Somehow, around the middle of the second millennium, a compromise, or at least a modus vivendi, was reached between these polar opposites.

Linguistically, the effects of this are visible in the largest and most widespread single language now spoken in India, especially in its northern regions. It goes under two names, Hindi and Urdu, because it is felt to be two different languages. Hindi is written in Devanagari, the characteristic ‘washing on the line’ script derived from the Brahmi tradition, and likes to borrow words from Sanskrit. Urdu is written in Persian (by origin Arabic) script, and draws on Persian and Arabic. Urdu is the official language of the state of Pakistan, while both Hindi and Urdu are dignified as official languages in the Indian constitution.

But neither can really run true to its cultural ideal in sourcing its vocabulary, and when they are spoken Hindi and Urdu are in practice one language. [780]This maintenance of a distinction without a difference speaks eloquently for Indian civilisation after the Muslim invasions, each side believing it maintains its own standard, but in fact conforming to a common, wider, norm, which unites them in a common society.

Despite their determined maintenance of Islamic ideals—along with educated use of Persian, which lasted until the British imperialists had fully taken over from the Mughals, well into the nineteenth century—the invading Turuṣka have ultimately fallen into the old pattern of invading conquerors adopting the speech of the conquered. For if the names Hindi and Urdu come from the Persian side of the language’s heritage, its substance turns out to be pretty much pure Aryan, with the basic vocabulary, and the endings on verbs, adjectives and nouns, all traceable to something like Sanskrit, though radically simplified. Historically, it is evidently the continuation of the Prakrit spoken round Delhi, known successively as Śauraseni (’language of Śura-sena’, the region to the south of the city), Apabhramśa (’falling off) and Khaṛi Bol i (’standing speech’).

In a quite different and unexpected way, the fall of Sanskrit into a world where it was no longer seen as the sole standard of linguistic excellence came to enrich the whole world’s understanding of language. The new Muslim masters, despite their independent knowledge of Arabic, Persian and Turkish, did not distinguish themselves for their linguistic scholarship. But when the British succeeded in the eighteenth century, a new and equally confident alien civilisation became acquainted with Indian culture, and through it with Sanskrit. They approached it from the new perspective of knowledge of the classical languages of Europe, Greek and Latin, and were soon struck by its remarkable similarity to both of them. Sir William Jones, Chief Justice in India, ventured in 1786 the wild surmise that they were all three ‘sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists’.

This was the origin of historical comparative linguistics. Applying it to languages all over the world was one of the great intellectual adventures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and as a direct result we now know much of the flow of human languages, and so of human history, well before the start of the written documents. To give just three examples, this is how we know that the Hungarians came from northern Siberia, that Madagascar was colonised from Borneo, and that the European Gypsies originated as far away as India.

For all the self-generated excellence of Sanskrit’s own tradition in linguistics, it could never have gone off in this new direction on its own: what was needed was confrontation with other languages, far beyond the Indian ken, but also the ability to view these languages as somehow on a par with Sanskrit, something else that the tradition would have found simply inconceivable.

Sanskrit’s subsequent history is one of survival, rather than new triumphs. In India it is still the language of a traditional elite, but now it is denied its ancient and medieval role as the principal vehicle of intellectual discourse in India. That is conducted either in the principal vernacular languages, or much more in English. Sanskrit’s culture was always based on a disarming view of its own importance, which held India to be the only significant part of the world; it has not adapted to a world where even in India itself this view is dismissed. The world touched by Indians, the whole of East and South Asia, once took India at its own valuation, but not any more.

Perhaps it could still have achieved the revolution in viewpoint needed to incorporate Western learning. Until the early nineteenth century the English East India Company, like the Mughals before them, had patronised Indian learning as they found it, both Arabic/Persian and Sanskrit. When a Committee of Public Instruction was formed in 1823 to spend an annual sum of 100,000 rupees on ‘the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of the Natives of India and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British Territories in India’ they were split for a decade on whether this should go towards the traditional learning or on modern studies conducted in English. The decision ultimately came down in favour of English, a cultural clean break: and no serious attempt was made afterwards to bridge the gap between India’s tradition and the swiftly developing sciences, ideologies and technologies that created the modern world in the Victorian age. Sanskrit became more and more a symbol of certain religions, certain cultures, certain philosophies—of interest to humanists, but somehow offering no contest in the world of the scientists. [781]