Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [123]
It continues to enjoy an enviable status for a language that was codified 2500 years ago, and has admitted no significant change except new words since. In 1947, it was adopted as one of India’s official languages, and 200,000 people still claimed to speak it in the Indian census of 1971—though out of a then population of 400 million.
In a final irony, it assumed a new symbolic value in the last decade of the twentieth century, adopted by the Bhāratiyā Janata, ‘Indian Community’ Party (BJP), which was often in government, as a totem of Hindu identity. So, for example, 1999 was declared a Sanskrit Year in India, and a government-funded ‘World Sanskrit Conference’ held in New Delhi. There is something decidedly bizarre in this. Outside its use for prayers and mantras in the temple, as we have seen, the study of Sanskrit has always been an elite pursuit; and Hinduism’s strict hierarchies, denying status to lower castes, have long encouraged them to desert it for the totally egalitarian Islam. Now this badge of Brahman intellectuals is paraded as the banner for a popular mass movement that demolishes mosques as a crass and simple assertion of Hindu power.
Sanskrit’s career is not over, although the exclusively Indian world-view that has underlain its distinctive character over the past 3500 years probably is. Nonetheless, it coexists in India with a large family of modern daughter languages, and carries on in its own right as the sacred language of two world religions, Hinduism and Buddhism.
It is a language of paradox. Perhaps it is technically extinct, since there can be few if any infants who pick it up as their first language. Yet it continues to be transmitted to the next generation by an artificial system of rote learning and grammatical analysis that has somehow proved as robust as the natural way—and far less liable to introduce change.
Sanskrit has always been very much a garden variety of language, but in the tropical climate where it has flourished the gardeners have always chosen to encourage its luxuriant side.
adhara kisalayarāga komalaviapānukāriāu bāhu kusumam iva lobhanīya yauvanam angeu sanaddham
Truly her lower lip glows like a tender leaf, her arms resemble flexible stalks.
And youth, bewitching like a blossom, shines in all her lineaments.
Kālidāsa, Śākuntalā Recognized, i.21
* This is not a metaphor, or anachronistic interpetation of Sanskrit grammar, but a straightforward description of the working of the sutras in Panini’s system. Consider the application of a single sutra: iko ya aci
The three words that constitute the sutra are not words of Sanskrit itself, but of an artificial metalanguage that refers tersely to other sutras of the grammar. Nevertheless, they are treated as if they are consonant-stem nouns, with the regular ending for genitive (-as), nominative (a bare ending) and locative (-i). (There is a slight complication, in that both a voiced segment, a final -as, is realised phonetically as -o. This is a regular principle of liaison in Sanskrit, itself a highly complicated part of the grammar.) The sutra could therefore be analysed functionally as
In the context of a sutra, these cases have special interpretation, referring respectively to the input, the output and the right-hand context of a phonological rule. The sutra is therefore to be understood as:
But what is the reference of the strange words themselves? They are to be understood as applications of another set of sutras (known as the Śiva-sutras), which plays the role of a system for defining natural classes of sounds in Sanskrit. This