Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [108]
Sanskrit influence permeated farther south, with the cultural spread of Hinduism, eventually saturating with borrowed words three of the major non-Aryan languages, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Tamil, in the extreme south-east, was less affected linguistically, although its society was ultimately no less Hindu. And besides this gradual export of words, there had also been, in the middle of the first millennium BC, a major transplant of a whole community, with its Aryan language, to the extreme south. This accounts for the presence of Sinhala in Śri Lanka. The history of the movement of people that brought this language is not documented, but it may be reflected through legend in the epic Ramayana, which climaxes in a military expedition to this island.* About two hundred years later, in the late third century BC, the links between Śri Lanka and the Aryan north were reinforced when Aśoka sent his son Mahinda to the island as a Buddhist missionary, so founding the Theravada school of Buddhism which has endured to this day.
Sanskrit in South-East Asia
The move to Śri Lanka may be seen as the beginning of Sanskrit’s spread beyond the shores of India. This seaborne expansion makes its significance far greater to the global story, for Sanskrit is the first example in history of a language travelling over a maritime network, through the establishment of trade and cultural links with peoples on the other side. In this, it can be seen as a precursor of the spread of the western European languages in the last five hundred years.
By the middle of the first millennium AD, Sanskrit was established as the hallmark of Indianised civilisation, all over South-East Asia, including the main islands of modern Malaysia and Indonesia. There is no clear record of how this came about. But one feature of the spread of Sanskrit is clear: it was not a military expansion. There was never a warlike move by Indians into Asia, even of the typical short-term Indian empires, which even in north India never seemed to last more than a very few generations.
But if we leave aside military ambition, the motives that have been suggested for the Indian successes exhaust every other possibility: refuge from imperial wars from the Mauryas and Aśoka onward, piratical raids, a spirit of adventure, the peaceful pursuit of trade, or a desire to spread sacred learning, of Buddhism certainly, and perhaps earlier even of Hinduism.*
Each of these has something to recommend it, and they are not mutually exclusive. It must mean something, for example, that the name for India current among Malays and Cambodians was ‘Kling’, that is Kalinga, the coastal realm in eastern India bloodily conquered by Aśoka. There, and especially in its northern region Tāmralipta (’copper-smeared’, modern Tamluk in West Bengal), there was a tradition of producing sārthavāhā or sādhava, ‘merchants’, who were easily confused with sāhasikā, ‘pirates, buccaneers’, proverbial in Sanskrit for their bravery, as well as violence. In the treasury of practical wisdom from the sixth century AD, Pañcatantra, it is remarked:
bhayam atulam gurulokāt tam iva tulayanti sādhu sāhasikā
Merchant-buccaneers reckon light as straw the fear instilled by the weighty.27
The popular Jātaka tales of previous lives of the Buddha, composed around this time, are also full of merchants who seek wealth in Suvaabhūmi.
* In the romanised script for Sanskrit, c is pronounced as ch in church, j as in judge. A dot under t, d or n means that it must be sounded with tongue turned back, retroflex. A dot under an h means that it