Book: LANGUAGE OF THE IMMORTALS: A CONCISE HISTORY OF SANSKRIT
Author: G.N. Devy
Published by: Aleph
Price: Rs 399
G.N Devy’s book is part of the Essential India Editions’ series (Aleph). It is reminiscent of OUP’s Very Short Introductions series a quarter of a century ago whose subject matters ranged from religion and philosophy to literature and the social sciences. However, the Aleph series limits itself to India, exploring “foundational aspect(s) of the country in new and thought-provoking ways”.
In two crisp chapters, Devy lays before his readers some key aspects of the development of Sanskrit as a language and its uniqueness in terms of use and influence. We come across many lists and quotations in the build-up to the argument in both
chapters. Acts of enumeration are perhaps inevitable in a volume like this. For example, in the first chapter, the lists we get — from South Asian scholars of Sanskrit in the last two centuries and creative writers and philosophers in numerous languages outside India to iconic European and American scholars of the language — establish Devy’s point about the abiding scholarly interest in Sanskrit without a doubt. The quotations though are the ones that are more striking.
In the first chapter, Devy uses two such quotations to earmark significant moments in the history of Sanskrit between the late-18th and mid-20th centuries: Sir William Jones’s “Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society” (February 2, 1786) and the 1949 Constituent Assembly debates on the linguistic future of India. The latter actually leads back to the former. Devy quotes Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra, a member elected to the Constituent Assembly from Bengal, who proposed the use of English as India’s “official language” for a short initial period and then its replacement by Sanskrit. His chief reasons were: “Sanskrit will keep India united; the world respects India because of the Sanskrit language.” That did not happen, but Sanskrit became one of the 14 languages to be included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution — the only one “not in use” to do so. Leading on from here, Devy opines that modern India’s “somewhat disproportionate pride” for a language long out of circulation (except for scriptural purposes and in literary transactions originates in William Jones’s (aforementioned) 1786 Discourse where he put forward his hugely influential hypothesis of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language — of a prehistoric, common origin for Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Iranian, and other languages.
The final part of Chapter I is devoted to two debates — the Indus Valley script debate and the Aryan migration debate. In addressing the historical impossibility of the contention that the language that the Indus script represented was an older version of Sanskrit — given that Sanskrit arrived in India (14th c. BCE) five centuries after the decline of the Indus civilisation (19th c. BCE) — Devy says: “To give credence to it would be as fanciful as claiming that Persian was spoken in India during Kalidasa’s times, or English was being spoken during the era of the Sultanates!”
The second chapter delves into Sanskrit as a literary language and the centrality of the oral tradition in it. Its most engaging bits are where the author elucidates on the nuances of “shruti” and “smriti” in the Vedas, Upanishads and epics, and the distinction between “suta” and “mantra” literature. He contends that it is the mnemonic accomplishment of Vedic poetry that gave it its inviolable status: “Sanskrit may not have much spread in ancient India, but it had something which no other language in Indian history has had in the same measure, the status as ‘dev-bhasha’, the language of the immortals.”
A memorable commentary on “suta” literature (composed by a non-priestly class) — especially in the way that the epics have traditionally functioned as one in the subcontinent — is found in the reflections of the American anthropologist, Milton Singer, who said his reading of the Indian epics had not prepared him “for the rich variety of ways in which they are told and retold” in India — and not just read in/as a book — and the “sense of intimate familiarity with the characters and incidents” that people had, “as if the world of the stories were also the everyday world”.
Language of the Immortals is aimed at lay readers. The biggest takeaways for them might well be not the arguments and the analyses but the startling facts that Sanskrit’s reach and influence were not achieved through conquest or commerce, and that it was never truly a language of the people.