Venerating age beyond reason

Linguistic purity is as illusory as racial purity
Agha Shahid Ali
Agha Shahid AliPicture credits: Wikimedia Commons
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4 min read

The air is suddenly thick with classical languages―Bengali, Marathi, Assamese, Pali and Prakrit have joined Sanskrit, Tamil, Odia, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu in the pantheon of languages of eminence in antiquity. It’s all in good cause, apparently―classical languages get special commitments in scholarship and culture. But they do it the easy way elsewhere. They fund chairs, courses and institutions for modern languages. It saves the trouble of dressing them up as classical.

So, obviously, the classical manoeuvre offers other benefits to interested parties. It is noteworthy that the three living languages recently elevated are spoken in states which the ruling party intends to gain or retain. Elevation confers a nebulous pride on speakers, which is useful in identity politics, but the unexpected honour is also bemusing people.

In Kolkata, Bengalis familiar with their literature are positively amused because modern Bangla and Marathi have been bundled with the dead languages Pali and Prakrit. There are other oddities: Pali grew from Prakrits. There were multiple Prakrits, too; so it’s strange to speak of a single tongue. Bangla is traced to Magadhi Prakrit. So is Assamese, via Kamrupi Prakrit. So the government has lumped grandparent, parent, child and cousin languages together.

That brings us to the awkward question of age. Modern languages have been rendered classical by easing the requirement to demonstrate an independent literary culture 1,500-2,000 years old. This blurs the boundary between classical and modern. For contrast, consider Europe, which is as diverse as India. It has two classical languages, Greek and Latin. English and the Norse tongues trace their oral cultures back to antiquity―Beowulf was composed in 650-1,000 CE, while the Elder Futhark runic inscriptions go back to the 1st century. But they are not regarded classical languages.

Agha Shahid Ali
Cabinet approves classical language status to five languages, including Marathi and Bengali

There’s cherry-picking, too. Mainstream and distinctively Bangla literature began with Vaishnava poems attributed to Chandidas, who lived in the 14th century. The counterculture began with the subversive women’s Ramayana of Chandrabati, dated to the 16th century. Both streams remain lively and productive. Similarly, the Kashmiri poetic tradition stretches from Lal Ded and Nund Reshi in the 14th century to the poets of the insurgency era influenced by Agha Shahid Ali, whose work is now off the curriculum in his native Kashmir.

But Kashmir is treated differently. Bangla has been declared a classical language. The BJP has fought hard and fruitlessly to gain West Bengal and its politically valuable heritage―Vivekananda, Ramakrishna Paramhamsa and cultural nationalist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. Now, with the murder in R G Kar Hospital agitating hearts and minds in Kolkata as forcefully as the Nirbhaya case did in Delhi, the party stands a fighting chance of unseating Mamata Banerjee. Playing with language will help it in the next state election.

In contrast, Kashmiri, which was a court language in the 14th century in Chandidas’s time, is not deemed classical. It so happens that the BJP has just lost the Kashmir election.

But do languages hold still in a classical pose, waiting to be acknowledged? Amid the classical wave, there’s good news about the Maldives. It’s an occasion to look at the Maldivian word atoll, which has travelled far into the Pacific, driven by the winds of trade and exploration.

Bikini is the best-known atoll, America’s nuclear weapon-testing ground commemorated for posterity in swimwear. Bikini Atoll is in the Pacific, far from the Maldives; but the modern word ‘atoll’ is traced to the Portuguese atol, which is from Malayalam atolu (a reef), which was borrowed from an almost identical word in the Maldivian language Dhivehi, which is related to the Sinhala strain of Prakrit.

Agha Shahid Ali
Promotion of classical languages: More funds for Sanskrit; less for Tamil, Telugu & Kannada

It’s an example of how far, wide and fast language can be carried by the churn of history. This is especially true of the Old World, which was globalised centuries before the Portuguese led off the age of European exploration. And it’s particularly true of ancient trading zones like the Indian Ocean.

Trade transmits the names of goods. The English ‘ginger’ derives from the Greek/Latin zingiber, which is from the Prakrit singhabera, which is similar to the Tamil inji/injivera. A suburb of Chennai on the beautiful East Coast Road that runs past Mahabalipuram is called Injambakkam. Was ginger, an early export from India to Greece and Rome, cultivated or traded there once upon a time?

Linguistic borrowings are commonplace across languages, especially those spoken in places through which many cultures have transited. Bangla, which has been declared to be classical on account of its independence, has no old words for ‘chair’ and ‘table’.  The terms were imported along with the furniture when the Europeans made landfall. Linguistic purity, which the classical tag seems to value, is as illusory as racial purity.

The genetics of language lies mostly in the realm of questions. The answers lie in grey areas which politics likes to cultivate. For a contrast, let’s look again at Europe. Demands for recognition there come not from power languages but from language communities that were historically sidelined, like Basque, Cymraeg and Gaelic. They seek acknowledgement of their linguistic identity, rather than appreciation for antiquity of their mother tongue. But in India, we’re playing silly games of ‘my grandma is older than your grandma’, which can be taken seriously only in a culture which venerates age beyond reason.

(Views are personal)

Pratik Kanjilal

For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public

(On X @pratik_k)

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