Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [122]
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 Turuka 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 Khai 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