Lost languages in Indian perspective

The enigma of the world's undeciphered scripts, may be it's tantalizing possibility of giving new voice to long-hushed peoples and civilizations.

'cave inscription'  found in  India>Chhattisgarh>Surguja>Ambikapur>Ramgarh

Perhaps it's the puzzle solver's delight in the mental challenges posed by breaking their codes.

Whatever the reasons, the public has long been fascinated with undeciphered ancient scripts !!

The Language of the Gods in the World of Men

Sheldon Polloc

Sheldon I. Pollock is a scholar of Sanskrit, Indian intellectual and literary history, and comparative intellectual history. He is currently the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He was general editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library and is founding editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Pollock has received the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award and the Government of India's Padma Sri.

'cave painting'  found in  India>Chhattisgarh>Surguja>Ambikapur>Ramgarh

  In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of  Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. The corpus of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as scientific, technical, philosophical and dharma texts.   He traces the two great moments of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the start of an amazing career that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of  Latin literature and the Roman empire, and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men asks whether these very different histories challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.

Crisis in the classics 

Ananya Vajpeyi teaches South Asian History at the University of Massachusetts. She was educated at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Oxford University, where she read as a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Chicago. 

It is stunning that in a country with dozens of Sanskrit departments at all major state-level and national universities, a number of Sanskrit colleges dating from the colonial period, an entire network of matha, pathshala, and vidyapeeth institutions comprising a parallel educational economy (especially in southern India), compulsory Sanskrit at the middle school level for millions of school children (which implies thousands of school teachers), and innumerable texts stored in homes, libraries, archives, and temples, we do not have the most basic infrastructure to read, preserve, or create knowledge in or about Sanskrit. Neither the inertia from a prior era, nor new initiatives have kept Sanskrit going.

Study needs to be undertaken for not just Sanskrit, but also a number of other classical languages, such as  Malayalam, Kannada,  Bengali, Tamil,  Persian, and Brajbhasha ( Brij). 

 No Future without the past

Try to imagine independent India without its founding, fundamental, and inalienable texts, whether ancient or modern, upper  caste or  outcaste, the sermons of the Buddha, the edicts of  Aśoka, the epics of Ved Vyasa's (Mahabharata) and  Valmiki (Ramayana), the songs of its Sufis and bhakti poets ( Kabir and Tulsidas), the teachings of its saints and sages, the lessons of its gurus, the Indian Constitution of Republic of India , Mahatma Gandhi’s letters,  Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s articles, Jawaharlal Nehru’s speeches,  Rabindranath Tagore’s national anthem (Jana Gana Mana), and the innumerable stories that we continuously recount. Not land, blood, race, religion, or state – language itself is our essence. Without our words, we are nothing. 

Arguably, linguistic diversity and literary richness ought to be India’s strongest suit, given its history both as an old civilization and as a diverse and multi-vocal democracy. Alas, we have driven our languages and literatures into the ground. Linguistic chauvinism and language-centred identity politics abound. Yet, not a single political ideology protects and nurtures the languages, which remain orphans in the political process and in the networks of institutional patronage cultivated by different parties. 

It may seem perverse to worry about Sanskrit – a so-called “ dead” language – when Indians are becoming less and less fluent in the living regional languages, most of which have numerically more or as many speakers as major European and Asian languages. It may seem that with the downfall of Brahmin and upper-caste hegemony in the social, political, and cultural spheres, it was only natural for the language constitutively linked to savarna power for centuries to go into terminal decline. 

The future gloom

As usual in India, the root of the matter lies not in a shortage of money, but in the lack of a vision. Politically motivated interest, fitful as it has been, has only worsened the situation, ruining even the few centres of excellence that had survived on the intellectual steam and personal integrity of their staff until the early 1990s – University of Pune, the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, and the Banaras Hindu University come immediately to mind.

The inscriptions found in the eastern part of India were written in the Magadhi language, using the Brahmi script. In the western part of India, the language used is closer to Sanskrit, using the Kharoshthi script, one extract of Edict 13 in the Greek language, and one bilingual edict written in Greek and Aramaic. These edicts were deciphered by British archeologist and historian James Prinsep in 1837.

James Prinsep in medal cast circa 1840. National Portrait Gallery (London)

 If the Indian education and learning continued in the present set of mood and mode then very soon the number of people capable of reading and understanding the old scriptures ( sacred languages)  shall come to naught. India is going to be the only cultural center whose literary heritage including the history shall rest in the hands of scholars from foreign countries.
  We must be connected live with our rich linguistic past. Our mythological subjects portray universal approach and paint eternal truth about humanity !!

*author Sheldon and Ananya's pictures and views shared thankfully.