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Subject: [agathiyar] Language, sacred and secular
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GAIL OMVEDT writes about Sanskrit and Tamil, sacred and secular languages in her opinion piece in the Sunday Hindu, September 19, 1999.

http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/stories/1319067p.htm

The mythic claims to the priority and Centrality of Sanskrit and the Aryan component of Indian culture has had wide influence even on secular scholars. It is sad that there is a reluctance to admit the priority of Dravidian languages. The failure to really challenge the priority asserted for Sanskrit has made it impossible to achieve an alternative understanding of history. It only shows that language remains subordinated to politics, says GAIL OMVEDT.

LANGUAGE is a crucial component of identity, and so an important locus of emotion, controversy and aspiration. India, perhaps the most multicultural country, is blessed or cursed, whichever may seem appropriate, with a multitude of them. Among these, Sanskrit stands out for its sacred character, symbolising the cosmic and social divine, while Tamil, in contrast, can claim a largely secular literature of great antiquity, Sangam literature and the Thirukkural. The ``Prakrits'' - a blanket and misleading term for the languages spoken by ordinary people throughout India two millennia ago - can claim a mixture that includes the sacred literature of the Buddhists and the Jains as well as the unabashedly secular and often bawdy poetry of the Gatha Saptasati in early Maharashtri.

Sanskrit, though, to its proponents, is much more than sacred, it constitutes both the divine world and the core of Hindu/Indian culture. To the early Indian sociologist, M. N. Srinivas, ``Sanskritisation'' was a term symbolising the lower castes' movement towards the social standards that symbolised all that was elite Indian; to the now-caretaking BJP Government, it is a language that all the children of India should learn and as early as possible, the only language that would really assure their Indianness. And there has always been a stubborn element claiming that Sanskrit is also the oldest language, the language not only of the Aryans but of the Indus civilisation itself. A recent version of this, put forward in a book by N. S. Rajaram, a retired computer scientist in Bangalore and Natwar Jha, a traditional Vedic scholar of West Bengal, argues that Vedic Sanskrit was the language of the Indus valley civilisation. Its authors base themselves on the now-familiar Hindutva theme that the Aryans actually originated in India. In the process they claim that the ``myth of an Aryan invasion is a creation of European scholars with their own vested interest''.

The discovery of linguistic connections between Sanskrit and the European language did indeed give rise to an ``Aryan myth'' in which many Europeans, in true orientalist fashion, exalted the Aryan past of India, romanticised its mystic traditions, and explained caste in terms of an Aryan conquest over inferior native peoples. Europeans like Max Mueller were thrilled to discover Sanskrit and its linkages with European languages; the term ``Indo-European'' hence forward symbolised a newfound identity and Muller's ``Sacred Books Of The East'' represented its divine claims. But the ``Aryan Myth'' also won widespread acceptance in India itself. The Indian elite in the 19th Century themselves took up and used this myth for their own purposes, with leaders like Lokmanya Tilak proclaiming an ``Arctic Home Of The Vedas'' and even that most famous of ``unknown Indians,'' the late Nirad Chaudhuri, proclaiming his own Europeanness. This acceptance of the Aryan myth meant justifying upper-caste dominance through their identification with Europeans, while the non-Aryan ``indigenous'' peoples, the shudras and dalits, were taken as a non-Aryan black majority. It was only when non-Brahman and dalit movements, first Phule and then the Dravidian movement and finally the dalit movement even in north India in the Twenties reversed this, claiming an ethical as well as historical superiority for the conquered non-Aryans, that the elites changed their line. Golwalkar, who took charge of the RSS after Hedgewar, argued in the Thirties that in fact the Aryans had originated in India. It is this revised form of the Aryan myth that forms the basis for much of Hindutva thinking today and motivates pseudo- scholarly books like that of Rajaram and Jha. It represents an ideology which tries to reconcile the assertion of Indian ``national unity'' with the claim to priority of Sanskrit and the Aryans.

Myths, though, have to confront scientific evidence, and contrary to post-modernist tendencies to treat all myths alike, there is fairly clear evidence on this issue. The fact is that no serious scholars would deny that sections of what are generally called ``Indo-European'' peoples migrated into India from Iran sometime before 1500 B.C. None would deny that the language they spoke, later to become classical Sanskrit, was related to European languages. None outside of India would accept the current Hindutva theory that their language was the language of the Indus civilisation. There is still debate about whether these ``Vedic Aryans'' actually destroyed the Indus civilisation, many archaeologists argue that the primary agent of its fall was ecological destruction. Most historians and archaeologists also dispute the notion that there was a single, massive Aryan ``invasion''. Rather they see a slower movement of many bands over centuries, and perhaps even two basic waves of Aryans, giving rise to the ``outer wing'' of Indo-European languages (Marathi, Oriya, Bengali) and a later Vedic wave giving rise to the north Indian languages. There has been a mixture of both languages and ethnic groups.

But there is little doubt that the Aryans were a more war-like group than the inhabitants of northwest India at the time; there is little doubt that they were less ``civilised'' (they had no cities, no writing) than many of those they confronted, with superiority only in weapons technology - the horse, the bow and the chariot. There is also little doubt that they fought against the people who represented at least the remnants of the Indus civilisation and considered them bitter enemies. Stories in the Rig Vedic of Indra destroying the demon Vrtra testify to a momentous historical conflict between a patriarchal, pastoral people and a matrilineal, urban-based people. And such passages as ``Strike down, O Maghavan, the host of the sorceresses in the ruined city of Vailasthanaka in the ruined city of Mahavailastha'' are cited by archaelogists like the Allchins to indicate the confrontation of the Aryans with the inhabitants of the land they were entering.

And finally, though the language found on the seals of the Indus civilisation has still not been deciphered, there is consensus that this language was Dravidian, that proto-Dravidian languages were prominent in North India at the time of Aryan entry. There is also, even more interestingly, strong linguistic evidence for the influence of Dravidian linguistic characteristics on even the earliest known forms of Sanskrit. (There was also perhaps a lesser but still important influence of Austro-Asiatic languages). Sanskrit itself emerged in the context of conflict, conquest and struggle with Dravidian speakers, in a social process in which the Vedic Aryans were trying to protect themselves from social-linguistic contact, maintain the purity of their language and stigmatise the speech of those they considered to be slaves or ``dasas''. Language became a sign not only of identity but also of purity. The remarkable fact, as linguists like Frank Southworth of the University of Pennsylvania have pointed out, was that in spite of this attitude, they could not avoid Dravidian influences on some of the basic features of the language.

What are these? European language speakers learning Indian languages can easily recognise them. One such feature is the dental-retroflex distinction - in simple terms, the existence of what seem to be two ``Ns'' and ``Ds'' and ``Ts'' in Indian languages. (An example is the difference between the ``n'' of Ramayana and the ``n'' of the Hindi ``pani''). One of the most difficult things for native speakers of English, like myself, is to speak and even hear this distinction in Indian languages. It is a fundamental phonetic feature of Indian languages, whether these are classified as ``Indo-European'' or ``Dravidian'', but it does not exist in any European language. Obviously it came into Sanskrit and the languages derived from Sanskrit after the Indo-Europeans had come into the Indian subcontinent. Its origin was Dravidian. Historically speaking, then, Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit a millennium before Sanskrit influenced them.

There are other important similarities between most of the so- called ``Indo-European'' languages and ``Dravidian'' languages; similarities important enough to lead linguists to assert the existence of a ``South Asian'' group of languages. Perhaps the most important of these lie in sentence structure: with verbs coming at the end of the sentences and ``post-positions'' rather than prepositions, languages like Marathi and Hindi have sentence structures that are basically Dravidian and radically different from European languages. Indians will say something like (if literally translated), ``I village-to go'', not ``I go to the village''. Such structural forms are sometimes simple, sometimes complex, but the differences from European languages, and the similarities with other South Asian languages, are basic. For these reasons, linguists will say that languages like Marathi have ``a Dravidian substratum''. But this leads to a fundamental question: if a language like Marathi is similar to Tamil in grammar and phonetics, and is close to European languages only in vocabulary (though many terms also come from Persian), then why classify it as ``Indo-European''? It is through such terminologies of identity that people are taught to think of ``Dravidians'' as inhabiting only the ``South'', a fundamentally different part of India.

Dravidian languages, then, are older than Sanskrit. The secular, perhaps even, can claim priority with the sacred. It is for instance, suggested that the word ``Meluhha'', which the Mesopotamia peoples seemed to have used for the Indus civilisation, gave rise to the word mleccha and its equivalents, thus giving some priority to what later brahmanic culture considered the polluted. There is also some argument to argue that the language of the Indus civilisation might as well be called ``Tamil'': since the Mahabharata includes ``Dramidas'' or alternatively ``Dramilas'' in a list of war-like groups collectively described as ``mlecchas''. This would suggest that the ``Tamil/ Dravid'' terminological distinction is fairly recent historically. Nevertheless, there is reason to maintain a ``Dravidian-Tamil'' distinction, since Dravidian languages were spread throughout most of the Indian subcontinent, and it is not necessarily true that contemporary Tamil is closer than others to the early Dravidian of northwest India. Still, Dravidian is clearly older in the subcontinent than the Sanskritic languages.

But Hindutva proponents are reluctant to admit this; to them Indian identity involves not only the sacredness of Sanskrit but its centrality, its priority. As a result, widespoken ``adivasi'' languages like Santhal and Munda hardly receive any linguistic or media recognition, while Sanskrit is taught in schools and given programme on the media. This effort to derive everything from Sanskrit has led to contradictions, indeed the proponents of Hindutva sometimes tie themselves up in logical knots trying to maintain their particular version of unity-in-diversity. How, for instance, can the condemnation of efforts to divide ``North'' from `South'' or ``Aryan from Dravidian'' at the same time insist on an ``Aryan-Sanskritic'' priority that can only increase the resentment of southerners, not to mention inviting ridicule from serious scholars?

Nevertheless, the mythic claims to the priority and centrality of Sanskrit and the Aryan component of Indian culture has had wide influence, not only on ``sacred'' but also ``secular'' scholars. It is a sad reality that so many, even progressive North Indian scholars are reluctant to admit the priority of Dravidian languages, or face up to the destructive aspects of the role of the Aryans.


For example, Romila Thapar, who has been one of the most articulate critics of Hindutva ideology and the ``Aryan myth'', still gives a very subordinate role to the Indus civilisation in the 1999 Penguin books edition of her History of India. Here she relegates the Indus civilisation to the ``prehistoric'' antecedents of Indian history, does not discuss its Dravidian (or non-Aryan) characteristics, and states that ``the development of India as we know it stems from the impetus of the coming of the Aryans and the culture they brought, but there were to be many other and often divergent forces which affected the course of Indian history''.

It is not surprising then, that students in schools throughout most of India should go on thinking that Sanskrit indeed is the fount of Indian culture and the Aryans are ``our ancestors''.

The failure of progressives throughout India to really challenge the priority asserted for Sanskrit and to confront the genuine claims for the priority of Dravidian languages has made it almost impossible to achieve an alternative understanding of Indian history and culture that could really confront Hindutva. Language, in so many ways the core of identity, the shaper of emotion and the tool of communication, remains subordinated to the distorted politics of India today.