Thursday 12 April 2012

BHIMSEN JOSHI and the North Indian Classical Music


With the death of Bhimsen Joshi an era of North Indian classical music has come to an end. This era dominated the last four decades of the 20th century and had luminaries like Kumar Gandharva, Amir Khan, Gangu Bai Hangal, Hirabai Barodekar, Begum Akhtar, Pannnalal Ghosh , Bismillah Khan, Vilayat Khan, Ali Akbar and Ravi Shankar.

Although I come from the same region and my father was a musician, and I have listened to Bhimsen Joshi since my early youth, this article is not meant to be a tribute to him. He had a large following and I am sure a large number of decent articles will appear. For me he had a wonderful voice and he will be remembered more for his bhajans in Kannada and Marathi than his renderings in the more 'classical' mode.

This article instead offers a few critical comments on the North Indian classical music and its place in Indian culture. In the late sixties P. C. Chatterjee (the then director of All India Radio, Calcutta) asked me, 'How does the Indian classical music reflect contemporary sensibilites?' He added that when he asked this question to the musicians themselves, it made no sense to them. I can understand it not making any sense to the musicians, but it surprises me that why this question has not been raised at all? Hereafter,  the word Indian music, refers to north Indian music only. Indian classical music does not reflect contemporary sensibilities as does art or writing. Why so? Classical music in the West reflected the triumph of the bourgeoisie, Napoleanic wars and so on. Can the  Indian classical music be actually called classical?

 Before we come to comment on it let us have a look at the terrain we are dealing with. Indians like to trace every thing back to the Vedas. However the living and continuous tradition of   this music dates after the Mutiny (The Indian War of Iindependence) of 1857. Many Indian princely states, having their wings clipped, patronised musicians. In as much as the Mutiny was mainly a north Indian affair, it is not surprising that six of these music gharanas (schools/traditions) found patronage in the small kingdoms in Deccan, in the border districts of today's north Karnataka and Maharashtra. Bhimsen Joshi also belonged to this region. These musicians rendered a refined version of the folk music. Later with the increase in competition they developed styles, some of which are quite unmusical to distinguish themselves. With the advent of railways they began to travel and had musical conferences in various Indian cities. These were patronised by 'patriotic' gentry.

 It was Bhatkhande who systemised the knowledge in the early decades of the 20th century. First he published two volumes of dialogues discussing aspects of each raga and the way they were rendered by different schools and trried to fix a standard. Later he published six volumes of 'Kramik Pustakmala' which was a proper course in Indian music and was taught in Benaras by Ratanjankar and others.

Bhatkhande and others by this time were part of the 'nationalist' discourse and taking pride in the 'great Indian traditions'. In Bengal the Brhamo Samaj used music in their assembalies and were probably the first to publish Indian notations in Devnagari script by 1880s. Rabindranath himself took lot of interest and a school of aesthetics and divinity through  music (you can reach God through great music!) came into being with Dilip Kumar Roy as its chief exponent.

 We must remember that in spite of the styles these gharanas developed it was still very musical and pleasing even to ordinary people, unlike the post independence, particularly the post 60s period to which Joshi belongs. In the 50s and even up to middle of sixties the musical conference tradition of the pre independence continued. 1967 changed all that.

We need harldy delve in to the details of sea change this period brought in India. It was the end of the Nehru era, or the euphoria of independence. Now on Indian people knew that a new ruling class has entrenched itself and they have to fight it.

 In music the classical music was driven to the drawing rooms of the rich and of course it went abroad. An affected sense of appreciation came in to being and musicians also began to perform to cater to this class and moved away from the larger middle class audience, although individually they nostalgically craved for it. Kiran  Seth in Delhi tried to revive interest in the children of these rich people in the universities by starting SPICMACY (Society for Promotion of Indian Classical Music Among Children and Youth). It was patronised by these classes but is more or less dead.

Coming back to the questions that we raised about its relevence to contemprary sensibilities, the answer is that largely it does not reflect. The reason is that it was always mainly a performing art for the patrons and with increrasing alienation of the ruling classes from the people it too distanced itself from its folk origins and got in to musical gymnastics and frankly became quite unmusical a nd un melodius. As one musician put it , music without melody is 'sic'. I am afraid Bhimsen Joshi was no exception along with Ravi Shankar and almost all the others. How about the word classical?  In spite of Indian system of notations we do not have written composition like in the west.  So there will not be musicians rendering 'old' classics. What propbably will remain the method of instruction and the daily practice, the 'riaz'. I think the word classical does not apply to the Indian music except to say that there was a so called 'golden' era of gharanas. 

 And that era to which Bhimsen Joshi belonged has gone. I am afraid it will be quickly forgotten, except for  what it did to popular music particularly in the Hindi cinema but also in Bengali and other north Indian cinema and to theatre. It gave great lyrics sung in a melodius and meaningful style that has endeared to every one during those decades and today they still live in the albums and are heard every where. As an aside classical music also rendered itself very nicely to humorous music. The great Manna Dey singing play back fo Mahmood exploited it fully.

 Among these classical musicians, Bhimsen Joshi himself will be remembered for his 'lighter' renderings of devotional songs. Probably the lone survivor among the greats  from this era will be Begum Akthar and Bismillah Khan, who never gave in to the gymnastics that these greats went in to please the new class. They remained melodius and meaningful.

RELIGION AND POLITICS Understanding Contemporary Hindu Politics: Exploring a People's Project


Introduction

This is not meant to be a definitive essay on Hinduism. It does not deal with the theological, spiritual or ethical aspects of Hindu Religion. For readers who want to explore these aspects more they can start with the excellent monograph, eHinduismf by K. M. Sen. Acharya Kshiti Mohan Sen was at Shantiniketan with Tagore and was an authority on medieval Indian religion. His eMadhyajuger Sadhanaf is a classic contribution in this field.

This essay is meant mainly to remove a lot of confusion and vagueness that surrounds the term Hindu and Hinduism, and to understand the how and why of the mischief and violence carried out by the eSangh Parivarf in the name of Hinduism. The essay is addressed to the so called elaymanf, who has wisdom to understand but may not have access to technical and academic jargon.

Terminology

The political and social system we live today is called capitalism. It is a system based on exploitation of labour and natural resources by the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class. Since it is a complete social and political system, it affects every aspect of life including religion. The way it does is referred to as the project of the capital. As opposed to  this the working classes too struggle against it and struggle in various ways, including in the religious domain. This is referred as the project of the proletariat or the project of the people.

The word Hindu comes from the river Indus (Sindhu in Indian languages) and was used by medieval world of Arabs and Europeans to refer to people living east of the river. Hinduism is a relatively modern term and is an omnibus word referring to the religious practices, rituals, philosophical and theological ideas of these people. The word Hinduism or Hindu do not signify a homogeneous religion or people. The word Dharma does not mean religion. It means a set of duties and obligation according to one's station in life. This could be caste or that of husband, wife, father, son, teacher, student and so on. These were defined originally by Manu in Manusmriti or Dharmashastra around 200 BC. The word for religion in the Indian tradition is eSampradayaf and not eDharmaf.




Who are the Hindus?

More than 90% of the people called Hindu live in todayfs India. Nepal is the only other country that has a significant number of Hindus. There are a small number of Hindus scattered all over the world, particularly in the USA, UK, Canada, Fiji, Mauritius, British Guyana and East Africa.

Within India out of a population of 100 crores about 20 crores account for Muslims and Christians, 7 crores Tribals and 23 crores Scheduled Castes. These are round figures for convenience of tackling them. These 50 crores are, by most reckoning are not Hindus, though the Sangh Parivar would claim the SC/ST population of 30 crores as Hindus. The position of scheduled caste is ambiguous. Traditionally the were the shudra and panchamas, the lowest castes within the Hindu religion. Today there is a sense of revolt against  mainstream Hinduism and large scale conversion to other religions ( Christianity, Buddhism and Islam) have occurred. What is clear is that the ideology of the Sangh Parivar wants to keep them as slaves and second class citizens within the Hindu fold. These 50 odd crores Hindus live in todayfs political India. North East India and Kashmir have very few Hindus and Hindu Indians are treated as foreigners/exploiters/enemies by the majority of these people.

Inside Hinduism

As has been said above, Hinduism is a set of religious and spiritual practices comprising of many religions/sampradayas.

Hindus trace their origin to the Vedic period (1200 BC-600 BC), but the Hinduism as we know today dates from Arthashastra and Dharmashastra (or Manusmruti) around 200 BC. It got consolidated between 200 BC to 300 AD or so. Buddhism and Jainism dating from 500 BC were a big challenge which lasted up to 800 AD or so. Buddhism almost vanished from India but Jainism has survived as a small but powerful sect of traders. However their daily life is indistinguishable from other upper caste Hindus except for their vegetarianism and for all practical purposes it is treated as one of the Sampradayas of Hinduism.

Arthashatsra and Manusmruiti helped to consolidate the peasant society. Many tribal communities were probably forced to clear land for agriculture and later were absorbed in the Hindu society as the Shudras and Panchamas (untouchables). This was the Indian form of slavery which continued till independence in 1947. It was Ambedkar and the Hindu reformers who finally managed to abolish it legally through the Indian Constitution.

The daily life of the Shudras and Panchamas is closer to the tribals because of this history. Their gods and goddesses are not the normal Hindu deities like Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Rama and Krishna. Nor are their festivals same as Diwali, Dussera, Holi, Ugadi etc. Even in the 20th century some tribals became scheduled castes and some scheduled castes went to the forests to become tribals. This probably kept on happening for the last 2000 years. That is the reason why these communities are viewed outside Hinduism. The political leaders of these communities also do not see a future within Hinduism and conversions to Buddhism, Islam and Christianity keep on occurring much to the ire of the Sangha Parivar.

Hinduism: An Upper Caste Phenomenon

Even today two thirds of India lives in rural areas and here is where the Hindu religion and castes system plays a major role. Daniel Thorner once described rural Indian caste system in terms of Malik, Kisan and Mazdoor, thus identifying the class aspect of the caste system. The Maliks were of course the upper castes of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Kayasthas. The Kisan castes were the vast majority of what are known today as backward castes whereas the Shudras and the Panchamas made of the Mazdoor or the agricultural labour class as well as castes dealing with dead animals etc.

Hinduism is mainly a signifier of the upper castes, known as OCs (Other Castes -Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Kayasthas) and BCs (Backward castes– peasant castes, artisan castes and their sub castes.) Let us have a closer look at it.

The highly articulated Advaita (of Shankaracharya) and Dvaita (of Madhwacharya) sampradayas are restricted to Brahmins. Like the Jains, though small in numbers, they have access to much greater power. Among these three so called great theologians, only Ramanujacharya of Vishishtadvaita has a bigger constituency in the name of Vaishnavism. Apart from Brahmins many traders, peasants castes are also Vaishnavas although their priests are normally Brahmins. The Sagun tradition of Bhakti of Chaitanya in Orissa and Bengal, other Vaishnavas of Braj, Gujarat, Western M.P., and Rajasthan etc. belong to it.

The BCs have a dual religious allegiance. The peasant caste subscribe to mainstream Hinduism, often Vaishnavism, whereas the artisan castes subscribe to the Nirgun tradition of the Bhakti movement. There are regional differences too. Deccan, for example, is not a very productive regions and has relatively poorer peasants. Here, therefore peasants too tend to belong to the Nirgun traditions. Most of the twentieth century peasant movement involved the peasant caste and today they are ruling groups in many of the regional states whereas the centre is still dominated by the OCs.

The Shudras and the Panchamas do not belong to any of these traditions and as we have said above there is tendency  to leave Hinduism for other religions, although the Sangh Parivar tries very hard to keep them in the Hindu fold. Their political aspirations and its articulation is a relatively modern phenomenon, Ambedkar being the most famous of them.

The Small Tradition

The small tradition to which lower castes (mainly the BCs) Hindus belong, is called small not because of number of people involved, but because they are in small local groups, unlike the egreatf tradition which is highly articulate, powerful and tends to have an all India face. This tradition in the North is that of nirgun bhakti saints, the most famous of them being Kabir. Theologically they maintain that between God and man there is no need of intermediary like the Pandit or the Mulla. They do not have rich temples or expensive religious rituals. Typically the artisan castes are the followers and their saints also came from these castes. In India the Muslim Sufi tradition is very similar and most of the converts to Islam came from the artisan castes. This small tradition tended to oppose the division between man and man based on caste and birth and generally had a more egalitarian approach. They used simple language and have contributed to the emergence of modern Indian languages in a big way. This tradition has different names in different parts of India and in many places it is close to the Sufis.

The small tradition left to itself could have contributed to the emergence of a modern egalitarian society, something like Protestantism in Europe. However this was not to be. Colonialism intervened and the development of the Indian society took a different route. It is only today with the birth of poor peoplefs movement that this tradition is receiving more attention.

The Modern Period – The Apologist Hindu - The Reformist Era

Colonialism presented a dilemma to the Hindu upper castes. The Christian missionaries criticised the Hindu religion and society severely for its cruelty to lower castes, practice of untouchability, its differentiation between different people, its Gods in the images of animals and made of stone images etc. Islam too had criticised Hinduism on similar premises and managed to convert a section of the artisan castes.

The first response of the Hindu upper castes was to convert to Christianity. Second was to reform it to suit to modern times. Thus Brhamo Samaj and Arya Samaj and many similar organisations came up. But they did not turn to the small traditions of the lower castes for egalitarian inputs but instead went to eAncient Indiaf. Why?

The colonialists colluded with the upper castes to create this eGlory that was Indf. This was achieved by William Jones in his famous inaugural address to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. In it he showed the similarity between Sanskrit, Persian, Greek and Latin. Thus Ancient India had an affinity to the White man. Nay it even taught the white man!

This achieved two purposes for the colonialist. It brought the upper castes into their side and it created the Hindu Muslim divide. For, it created a discourse which blamed the Muslim for all the ills of  Hindu Society. The slavery of the poor remained relatively untouched.

Of course many reformists were patriots and they also contributed to anti colonial movement, but the reformist movement lacked the support of the poor. It remained an upper caste movement.

Vivekananda and the Birth of Assertive Hinduism

By the turn of the century the upper caste Hinduism began to regain some confidence. A lot of texts were translated in to English because of the efforts of scholars like Max Mueller in Germany, Asiatic Society and support of some princely states like Mysore, Travancore, and Baroda.

In this atmosphere Vivekananda appeared. He was a young man with some unusual skills. First he had tremendous energy to propagate the cause. He was a very skilled promoter and good administrator. All this came useful after his return from Chicago where he attended the world conference of religion. On its own his performance was not very different from other representatives, including the one from the Buddhist from Sri Lanka. However one newspaper reported it very enthusiastically and Vivekananda used the report very effectively in India to promote himself and the Ramakrishna Mission. Upper caste Hindu society was ready to receive this foreign certificate to its greatness. To boot Vivekananda also brought a white woman (Sister Nivedita) as his disciple. The latter became a must for every greatf man in India. Aurobindo had his Mother Gandhi had his Mira Ben and Tagore had Marrjorie Sykes. Gandhi borrowed her from Tagore for training his Basic Education teachers. Although they were called sister and mother, the upper caste Hindu India saw this as the spiritual conquest of the West with war booties and wallowed in this recognition of  its glory from the white men and women.

Vivekananda gave Hinduism an all India image and made it in to a religion. Neither of which is the nature of Hinduism. As we had said earlier Hinduism is not a religion. It is a set of several religions (sampradayas), many of which have deep contradictions with each other. Theologically Vivekananda identified Hinduism with Advaita of Shankaracharya (8th century AD). Within the Indian tradition, as we have noted above, Advaita was a small unimportant sect and was heavily criticised in the theological debates of medieval India, often accused of borrowing from Buddhism and passing it off as the correct interpretation of Vedas, Gita and Brahmasutra Bhashya. However it suited the imperial design of one great India because Shankaracharya was supposed to have set up places of pilgrimages in the four corners of India viz. in North (Badrinath), East (Puri), West (Dwaraka) and  South (Rameshwaram).

Vivekananda also gave it a Christian Mission kind of character in the form of Ramakrishna Matha/Mission. It is modelled on Jesuits of Catholic Christianity with its celibate priests, schools, colleges and hospitals and more recently with its erural developmentf programmes. Over time it developed all the ills of the Catholic Church. That is, its high handed authoritarianism, corruption – both material and moral, enormous wealth, landed property and real estate.

Post Independence : The Rise of the Aggressive Hinduism

Such an assertive, imperialf image of India that Vivekananda created, inspired Hindu chauvinists right from Sarvarkar, Golvalkar to Advani and Bajpai. The present generation of leaders like Modi and his ilk use this kind of Hinduism to achieve political power only. The Sangha Parivar also publishes and sells a lot of literature about Vivekananda. They fought for the land at Kanyakumari, which was a joint place of spiritual worship for both Christians and Hindus and where Vivkenanda spent some time (as did many spiritual leader of Hindu and Christian community) created a Vivekananda memorial. Their agenda is to use the different images of Muslims and Christian to portray them as danger to Hinduism, create a hate propaganda and carry out mass killings whenever they can get away with it.

What is the basis of this aggressive Hinduism? Aggressive Hinduism aims primarily to achieve political power in post independence India through elections. Not all upper class Hindus support it nor do the really religious people support it. But most of them do not oppose it either. And for these communal forces it is enough if they are not opposed. The discourse they use is that Hinduism is threatened by conversions and reservation policies. Hinduism is threatened by the Muslims, Christians and SC/ST population because of their aspirations to acquire education, sharing power etc. The aim of the Sangh Parivar politics is that these communities should stay as second class citizens and be available as slaves and workers to the mainstream upper caste Hindus. This of course strikes a sympathetic chord in the hearts of many upper caste Hindus, many of whom have power and wealth in the present society.

There is of course a real basis for perception of this threat. It was Ambedkar who first said, eI am born as a Hindu, but I will not die as a Hinduf. For centuries Hinduism faced this threat because of its practice of inhuman slavery towards lower castes. First a large section of the artisan converted to Islam and later a large section of tribals and scheduled communities converted to Christianity. While part of the Hindu society did respond to it through reform of the Hindu society and abolishing untouchability and creating reservation policy through the Indian constitution, many did not accept it in their hearts.

This battle raged through out post independence India. It took an ugly shape in 1975 when reservation did not get abolished as envisioned in the Constitution anti reservation agitation shook the country. Mandal commission in 1977 added fuel by prescribing reservation to backward classes also. Finally the crisis came to head with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The Hindu fascist threw its challenge and battle lines were clearly drawn. The Sangh Pariwar gave a message that the Muslims, Christians can exist in India only as second class citizens, obedient to the upper caste Hindu society. If you condemn the demolition of the Babri Masjid, you are opposing this agenda and vice versa.

Rest of India stood aghast and helpless at this naked flexing of muscles. Why helpless? Because the ruling classes were following a similar agenda in a secular and religious discourse since 1984. On one hand Rajiv Gandhi appeased Hindus by opening the locked gates of the makeshift temple at Ayodhya in the Babri masjid premises, changed the Indian Constitution to appease the Muslim clergy in the Shah Bano case, on the other hand he helped Anderson of Union Carbide to escape from India and prepared grounds for neo liberal policies or what came to be known as liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. This policy actually came into being in a full scale through Narsimha Rao and Man Mohan Sigh in 1991. Hence Narsimha Raofs government stood frozen, time stopped, while the masjid was being demolished over several hours. All the parliamentary parties had joined this agenda ever since the Bhopal gas leak. They had declared a war on the working classes since then. What bothered them was election politics, how to stay in power. So they the esecularf parties began to woo Muslim clergy and political parties and the Sangh Pariwar rightly dubbed them as pseudo secularists and Muslim appeasers.



India Today

Today the agenda of neo liberal policies has overshadowed the communal agenda as can seen by the response to the Court judgement on the Ayodhya issue. Even the communal forces, once they have got power in Gujarat, Karnataka, and Chhatisgarh etc. are busy in pursuing these policies, although they keep the communal agenda alive. These neo liberal policies have resulted in:
1. Enormous creation of wealth
2. The rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer. However a creamy layer has emerged from each section of the middle and poor classes.
3. Incredible levels of corruption.
4. Ecological disaster
5. Enormous rise of conflicts.
With the global recession all these are reaching crisis proportions and the Indian society may be on the verge of collapse.

However the Indian poor, Muslims and Christians continue to face the twin attacks of the Hindu right and the attack of the neo liberal policies. Here we will only consider a meaning full response to the religious question.

Reviving the Small Tradition

The small tradition or the anti authoritarian trend in religion carries the seeds of democracy and secularism. This is the role Protestantism played in European renaissance. As has been said above in India,  it has been suppressed by capitalism under colonial conditions. The present crisis gives an opportunity to revive and make it a tool for liberation of the poor.

Politically it was Ambedkar who tapped the potential of buddhism for dalit liberation. However even before Ambedkar, Acharya Dhramand Kosambi, Rahul Sankrityayan, Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan and other Buddhists had realised this potential. Rahul sankrityayan personified this kind of blending of communist and Buddhist and rationalist ideas coming together.

After the emergency, by 1977 a new  political/ideological common platform started emerging. The rationalist movement in parts of India is joining the Buddhist and other dalit and religious groups like Kabir panthis and creating a lot of litreature and activites represnting the small traditions. This has the sort of role that communist litreature has for cadre education. In fact they also use communist litreature for this purpose.

 Culturally the small traditions of Hindus and Muslim in India have lived peacefully together for centuries. Sufi majars are visited by both Hindu and Muslim. Acharya Kshiti Mohan Sen has recorded this tradition in his eHindu Muslim Jukta Sadhanaf. In as much as the Hindu right is attacking all the poor both economically and on religious front, it opens a possibility of coming together of these anti authoritarian religious tendencies. There is possibility of genuine secular forces helping this tendency as has been witnessed in the Kabir festival in Bangalore last year. As this article is being written in Hyderabad, we had a performance about Lal Deg, the Sufi woman poet from Kashmir and today (31. 10. 2010) Mujaffar Ali is performing with Abida Parveen. As a follow up of Kabir festival in Bangalore Sindhi sufi poets are being presented next month and so on. The theatre movement in India has a long tradition of this kind of work. Some trade union activists and some dalit activists are also exploring these possibilities. Time alone will tell the future of these efforts. However one can make an observation that many of these efforts are addressed to a secular and national audience and not to local and regional. As such they too carry a enationalf flavour which we have been criticising above.


Mean while the sentiments of the man in the street irrespective of religion and class appear to be:

24.              The function of religion should be only to satisfy spiritual, moral and cultural need of human beings.
     2. Religion should not be used for political purpose.
3.                  There should be limits and regulation of public space and resources to be used by religions
4.                  Religions should not be authoritarian, should not generate hate to other religions or hate towards people who are irreligious and atheists.

The challenge is to unite all these with a political struggle of the poor for liberation, equality and peace. Some observation in this regard are:

1.                  This struggle is possible mainly at a regional level, using local language and culture. This at a positive level means using local peoplefs religious festivals, such as Jatras, Urs or mass pilgrimage walks in Deccan like Warkaris. One should however note the capitalism has penetrated many of these festivals and it needs  to be combated. Only local traders with local wares should be allowed. Multinationals, particularly of electronic gizmos – mobiles, Ipod and clones, bottled water and soft drinks, plastics etc. can be banned. This can be done by local organising committees. They can also be enriched by secular independent inputs, like secular interpretations of these traditions.

2.                  At a negative level, the so called national or imperial festivals like Ganesh Puja and Durga Puja, Diwali, Dussera, Holi etc., can be boycotted, and controlled by not allowing forced collections, use of public tanks and rivers to dump the idols, control of loudspeakers, use of roads for erecting pandals etc. Similarly pilgrimages to Tirupati, Sabrimalai, and the four great traditional places of Badri, Puri, Dwaraka and Rameshwaram should be discouraged as they all have become capitalist money grabbing institutions.


3. Essentially these efforts can be a part of anti capitalist anti - consumerist movement.


SANSKRIT AND THE INDIAN LANGUAGE FAMILIES

In the making of the modern Indian nation a lot of myths and popular notions got created in the 18th and the 19th century. One of the common threads among these was that ancient India (read Hindu) was great and that India became backward and decadent during the medieval (read Muslim) period. This article attempts to explore some of these myths and popular notions about Sanskrit language and its relationship to Indian languages. These are: 1. Sanskrit is the mother of all Indian languages and 2. Indian languages are divided into two large families known as Dravidian and Indo Aryan families. The article argues that Sanskrit is not mother to any Indian language. It also traces the history of the creation of this notion. Then it argues that the division of Indian languages into Dravidian and Indo Aryan families is  false. It goes on to explain the true relationship of Sanskrit to Indian languages and argues  that all Indian languages form one family.

Contents

 

 I. Is Sanskrit the Mother of Indian Languages?


What is Sanskrit?
The Indian Languages Families
The notion of  Sanskrit as the Mother of Indian Languages?

Where did this notion come from?

Where did William Jones get his ideas from?
Sanskrit is not related to any Indian Language
The Future of Sanskrit

 II. The Myth of Indo Aryan Languages and Dravid languages

Indian Languages form one family

The Real Nature of Relationship between Languages

 

III. Concluding Remarks

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 I. Is Sanskrit the Mother of Indian Languages?


What is Sanskrit?

Sanskrit is the classical language of India. Today there is no speech community of Sanskrit, that is, nobody uses Sanskrit as the main language of normal daily use (except a couple of Brahmin villages in Shimoga district, Karnataka). But it is not a dead language either. It is taught in schools though practically no one learns. However, many upper caste Indians would know a few phrases/couplets of Sanskrit. In the vocabulary of standard modern Indian languages there are a large number of words from Sanskrit. It is the language of rituals for the upper castes. There are probably a few hundred people who know Sanskrit well, most of who are Brahmins. There are also a large number of Brahmin priests who perform rituals and they know enough Sanskrit to perform the rituals. The level of their knowledge varies a lot.

Sanskrit also has been the language of Shastra, of knowledge of the Indian tradition. Even in the 20th century the musicologist Bhatkhande wrote his book in Sanskrit. Over  the last two thousand years, there have been books in Sanskrit on politics, philosophy, religion, theology, ethics, mathematics, astrology, medicine and a host of other fields of knowledge. Panini's grammar, Patanjali's Yogashastra, Chankya's Arthashastra  Manu's Dharmashastra, Aryabhatta and Varahamihir in mathematics and astronomy are just some of the known books. Today many of them are translated into English and into some Indian languages and are used mainly by scholars. However, in the mainstream of Indian life, knowledge and industry, Sanskrit has practically no role. English and modern Indian languages rule.

Historically Sanskrit was the language of the people in North-West India, west of the river Ravi. The area covered then are today’s Afghanistan, Baluchistan and western parts of Kashmir, and Punjab. The area probably extended up to Iran whose language and culture had close affinity to the Vedic Sanskrit. The important centre was in Pakhtunitsan (the land of Pathans) or the North West Frontier province of Pakistan and was known as Gandhar whose main town Takshashila (today’s Taxila in Pakistan) was famous as a seat of learning roughly between 5th century B.C. and 5th century A.D.

The Sanskrit that we know today got the present classical form between the 3rd century B.C. and the 3rd century A.D when it got patronage from the Hindu kings. During this period Kautilya's Arthashastra, Manusmriti or Dharmashastra and an elaborate and perfect grammar was created. The other important language of the era was Pali, with its centres in Patliputra (Patna) and Nalanda under the patronage of Buddhist kings. Sanskrit and Pali coexisted and competed as language of the state during the 1000 years between the  5th century B.C. and the 5th century A.D.

With the arrival of the Muslim rulers, both the languages gradually ceased to be the language of the state. Persian replaced it although no Persian ever ruled over India! Pali more or less vanished from India, although it remained in Sri Lanka. And as every one knows, English replaced Persian and today in spite of many efforts by the supporters of modern Indian languages, English remains the language of power and knowledge.

Several questions arise. Why and how has Sanskrit survived? Latin does not have this kind of presence in Europe. Why was such a perfect grammar created? What is the relationship between Sanskrit and modern Indian Languages?

The Indian Languages Families

For the purpose of this article, India is linguistically defined as the area east of the Indus river system, south of the lower Himalayas. In the east it covers western regions of Bangladesh  and finally it is bounded by the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. In that sense the political boundaries of present day India do reflect, at least linguistically, a homogeneous region. By the same count, Sanskrit would appear as a language from across the border, a foreign language, although there are no takers of Sanskrit in its original land.

India today has 415 living languages, 196 of which are endangered and 9 are extinct. However the majority of these have small speech communities. While the 18 languages recognized by the constitution have large speech communities of a few crores, they do not include many languages  which are equally large, like Bhojpuri or Dakhni.

The two large families popularly known as the Dravid of the South and Indo-Aryan in the North make up the majority of Indian population. There are tribal languages in the Jharkhand area and in the North East which have relatively small speech communities, from a few thousands to a few lakhs. Here only the Dravid and Indo Aryan families will be discussed because they are the ones that are influenced by Sanskrit.

The notion of Sanskrit as the Mother of Indian Languages?


The popular notion about Sanskrit is that it is the mother of all modern Indian languages. The main argument is the profusion of Sanskrit words in all Indian languages. It is also noticed that in South Indian or Dravid languages relatively more Sanskrit word occur in their original 'tatsam' (as it is) form than in the North. In the North many words acquire a 'tadbhava' (as it has become) form.

The development of modern Indian language is traced  as: Sanskrit-Prakrit-Apabhransh-modern languages-for both the Dravidian and Indo Aryan language families. Although this formula is more applicable to the North Indian languages than to the South, it is taken as given.

These notions have been challenged by modern scholarship in many ways. First there is no Indian tradition of this kind of linguistic history. Secondly they have been challenged empirically too. However they not only remain popular, but are also in the text books, and many Ph.D.s on languages subscribe to these notions.

Where did this Notion come from?

As we said above, these notions do not occur in the Indian tradition. So where have they come from? They are essentially of European origin and for India they came through the British. They came through a new discipline called comparative linguistics. As Pt. Kashiram Sharma says, 'In the last two hundred years, in the name of comparative linguistics absolutely irrelevant and useless propositions and fictional accounts have been created which have poisoned the political, social and cultural environment of our country.'

It is said that comparative linguistics was born with a lecture by a learned judge called William Jones, which he gave at the inaugural function of the Asiatic Society in Bengal. William Jones was a judge at the Supreme Court of Calcutta and had learnt Sanskrit and Persian. In 1786, in the Journal of the Asiatic Society, Sir William Jones announced that:
'The Sanscrit language, whatever its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in root of verbs and in the form of grammar(...)No philosopher could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.'('On the Hindus', The Works of Sir William Jones, III, London 1807, 34-5)

Where did William Jones get his ideas from?

There is a long European tradition of these ideas. Umberto Eco in his book The Search for the Perfect Language has told this story. It starts from the Bible. 'In Bible the linguistic theme is taken in a very explicit fashion, in Genesis 11:1.We are told that after the Flood, the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 'Yet, men in their vanity conceived a desire to rival the Lord, and thus to erect a tower that would reach up to the heavens. To punish their pride and to put a stop to the construction of their tower., the Lord thought:” Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech...Therefore is the name of it called babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth' (Genesis 11:7, 9).'

It occupied the European mind to search for this original one language and one speech, the perfect language. The search for this  perfect language is called  the  monogenetic hypothesis which assumed that all languages descended from a unique mother tongue. William Jones' hypothesis comes from this world view and the theory that Sanskrit is the mother of all Indian languages originated here, just as Latin is popularly considered as the mother of European languages.

However, once launched, this comparative linguistic took its own bizarre form in the colonial context. It gave rise to colonial historiography and colonial anthropology.

First it gave birth to the Indo European hypothesis which says that Latin, Greek, Persian and Sanskrit belong to one group and that Sanskrit was the original language of the group.  It also thus claimed one root for one family - the Aryans. Thus the Aryan myth got created with tragic consequences during Hitler's regime. It created the ideal of the 'white man's burden'. Thus Adolphe Pictet, the great linguist sang the hymn to the Aryan culture: 'It is not perhaps curious to see the Aryans of Europe, after a separation of four to five thousand years, close the circle once again, reach their unknown brothers in India, dominate them, bring them the elements of a superior civilization, and then to find ancient evidence of a common origin?'

Why did these so called Aryan languages travel? The myth of Aryan invasion to India got created. Apparently there was a famine and the Aryans in search for grass for their herds went wandering in search of greener pastures and landed in India. Not only that, waves of these invasions occurred and the later invasions pushed the earlier settlers in concentric circles, with its centre in North West, outwards to East and South and to deep jungles. Linguistic and anthropological evidence got created for all these mythologies. The excavations in the Indus Valley Civilization regions further 'proved' the Aryan invasion and even dated it!

Why did India buy all these theories when there was no Indian tradition to corroborate it? Nineteenth century Indian upper castes/classes were eager to denounce the negative aspects of Hindu religion and were ready to embrace the Western Civilization. This theory was very convenient. Western civilization owed its roots to India, ancient India was great and all the ills/bad things of Hindu society were due to  the Muslim invasion! This was convenient to the colonialists too. It created a Brown sahib and created the Hindu Muslim divide.

Sanskrit is not related to any Indian language

The first major attack on this concept came from Rt. Rev. Albert Caldwell in 1856 when he showed that the Dravidian languages are not related to Sanskrit at all. Then it was shown that Prakrit languages were not related to Sanskrit either. Using the same logic Pt. Kashiram Sharma demonstrated that Hindi is not related to Sanskrit either. Serious linguists do not believe that any of the Indian languages are related to Sanskrit.

In the struggle between Pali and Sanskrit, that is, in the struggle between Buddhism and Hinduism between 3rd century B. C. to 8th century A. D., Hinduism and Sanskrit won. Sanskrit became the official language of India – of the courts, of learning of the 'Shastras'. The story of how and why Hinduism and Sanskrit starting from Magadh in the North 'conquered' rest of India is a fascinating story and is still being explored by historians. But it did happen and Hinduism, with its caste system, untouchability and the power of Arthsahstra and Manusmriti occupied the regions from U. P. to Kerala and from Bengal to Gujarat. It created a stable rural society based on hierarchy of castes and occupation,  on caste based exploitation and oppression, impervious to change of rulers at the state level. Brahmins and Sanskrit played the legitimising role for the rulers.

For this learning Sanskrit became very important, just as learning English is very important today. Initially the Brahmins and the bureaucrats  had to go to  Takshshila to learn Sanskrit for several years. Even today in the ritual of Yagnopavit, (of twice born) the Batuk (learners) has to perform a ritualistic trip to Kashmir ( of a few steps) to start his education. It was unrealistic for scholars and bureaucrats to do this from all over India and face that extreme cold weather.

As a result, at Takshashila the Sanskrit scholars developed wonderful methods of  teaching Sanskrit to Indians. Since it was a case of 'adult learning of a foreign language', they created special learning tools, one of which was of creating the most perfect grammar in the world. In the  discipline of grammar and phonetics, no author had a greater influence than Panini with his Ashtadhyayi (5th century A. D.) Now one does not need a grammar to learn one's own language, but it was very useful when learning a foreign language. They also created rules for pronunciation and it was so perfect that after two thousand years, today it is still possible to hear the same pronunciation and recitation of Sanskrit from any part of India. They created dictionaries in verse form so that scholars learnt them by heart.

We have mentioned that Sanskrit vocabulary has penetrated many modern languages. This is due to the official status it enjoyed. It is the same as Persian vocabulary of legal terms that has come into all the Indian languages, and in modern times, English words have entered  Indian languages. Today any FM radio bears eloquent testimony to this.  With the arrival of Islam and Sufism social changes occurred at a faster rate in the North and influence of Sanskrit decreased rapidly. In the South the influence of Sanskrit remained stronger and that is why there are more Sanskrit Tatsam words in the South Indian languages.

However there is another side to it. All the Sanskrit words are not from Sanskrit. Sanskrit has borrowed many words from Indian languages, Sanskritised them (gave them Tatsam form) and today we are made to believe that many Indian words are vulgarised (tadbhav form) of the original Sanskrit word. English too has borrowed thousands of words from India. In fact there is a dictionary of these words called 'Hobson Jobson'. It is possible to create a similar dictionary of Sanskrit words borrowed from Indian languages. Fr. Caldwell provided long lists of such Tamil words. For example: Amba (mother), Atavi (forest), Neer (water) Pattan (town), Palli (village) Meen (fish) Shav (dead body) and so on. Other scholars have done similar works with other Indian languages.

The Future of Sanskrit

D. D. Kosambi once wrote that Sanskrit had literally no future since it did not have a normal future tense. (I do not know Sanskrit grammar so I cannot say what exactly he meant). Vir Bharat Talwar in 'Rassakashi' wrote that although Hindi had won the right to be the Court language in North India it could not replace Persian words. Now English words have replaced the Persian words. It is not possible to go  back in time. Dharma Vir wrote in 'Hindi Ki Atma', that a language absorbs those foreign words that suit its nature or genius. He gave the classic example of 'Table Kursi', where 'table' got absorbed in Hindi but not the 'chair'! Modern Indian languages have definitely replaced both Sanskrit and Persian and have absorbed Sanskrit, Persian and English words according to their nature.

Sanskrit will remain as a language of ritual to some upper caste Indians and a language for scholars of linguistics. Some experts opine that it may be useful for computer programming. The Backus-Naur Form or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities with Panini's grammar rules. Great libraries will have Sanskrit classics available for serious students.

 II. The Myth of Indo Aryan Languages and Dravid languages


The terms Dravidian and Indo Aryan families do not occur in Indian tradition. They have been introduced by the linguistics developed in the colonial era. So do these language families have any validity? Why and how have these concepts got created?

As we have seen above the comparative lingustics  gave birth to the Indo European hypothesis which says that Latin, Greek, Persian and Sanskrit belong to one group and that Sanskrit was the original language of the group.  It also thus claimed one root for one family - the Aryans. Thus the Aryan myth got created and Indian languages were called Indo Aryan languages.

After Caldwell established that the Dravidian languages are not related, the idea of two groups came. The North Indian languages wre called Indo Aryan and the South Indian group was called Dravidian. However as we have seen scholars have showed that the so called Indo Aryan languages are not to related to Sanskrit either. So it leads to explore the possibility that the notion of two large groups - Dravidian and  Indo Aryan is false.

Indian Languages form one family

It was Pandit Kashiram Sharma who proposed that in fact all Indian languages form one family. He published a booklet called : Dravid Parivar ki Bhasha: Hindi, (Hindi: a language of Dravid Family) from  Roorkee in 1968. The provocation for publishing and distributing this pamphlet is also interesting. ”I will never forget an incident I saw in Roorkee in 1967. The Angrezi hatao (Remove English) movement burnt 'Gandhi Vastra Bhandar' because its name was written in Devanagari and Roman. However  the 'Motel Polaris' got saved because they changed the name plate to Devanagari over night!”

What is the basis to argue that in fact they form one family? The Dravid and the Indo-Aryan families share a lot:

1.    They are in one large geographical contiguous area bounded by the seas, the Indus river system, the Himalayas and the river Brahmaputra.
2.    There is a ‘morph by morph’ equivalence between these languages. That is if you write the same sentence in the two  languages one below the other they will match vertically. In other words the sentence structure is similar in all these languages.
3.    There is a ‘Dravidian sub stratum’ in all these languages.
 4. There is an overlay of Sanskrit vocabulary in all these languages, particularly in the written form and spoken by the upper castes/classes.
 5. The ease with which Khari boli and Braj spread allover India: Braj spread in the medieval period, due to the Krishna Bhakti and Vaishnavism, to the East and even to South India. Khari Boli also spread from 12th century onwards due to the Sufis and Nirgun saints up to Tungabhadra in the South. In the South it became known as Dakhni. Later variants of Bombay Hindi and Calcutta Hindi also came into being during the colonial period. Similarly, The Dravidian languages, numbering 29, extend as far north as Jharkhand (the Oraon language) Madhya Pradesh and Chhatisgarh (Gond languages) and even in the North West beyond the Indus river system (The Brahui language).
 6. The script of all Indian languages are syllabic in nature and the order of the letters in the scripts is same with a few regional variations.
 7. The Indian Standard Sign Language: Sign language is a language used by deaf      people to communicate with each other with the help of signs made by hand. In theory each language or speech community has its own separate sign language. Or in other words there can be as many sign languages as there are languages. However this is not practical for purposes of teaching. So normally a family of languages evolve a common sign language. As we have tried to argue above, Indian languages as a whole form one family, so  it is no surprise that people working with deaf people have in fact evolved a standard Indian sign language. This is one more ‘proof’ to indicate that Indian languages form one common family and their division between Dravidian and Indo Aryan may not be correct.


The Real Nature of Relationship between Languages

Different languages are born in different eco regions. Malwa has Malwi, Awadh has Awadhi or Mithila has Maithili. Different forms of Marathi, Telugu or Kannada exists in different regions. If they share a larger eco region a family of language gets created. Thus Hindi is a set of some 30 languages or Marathi is of 6. Similarly India, as we defined it ecologically and linguistically  above, has one large group or family of modern Indian languages.

III. Concluding Remarks
Local languages can be super imposed by a ruling language. In case of India they have all been 'foreign'. First it was Sanskrit, then Persian and now English. Is there something special about Indian people or the Indian climate  that they are ruled by foreigners or at least by foreign languages? Such a colonial idea has been around for quite some time and was eloquently expressed in the book, 'The Continent of Circe' by Nirad Chaudhuri.

In fact India twice had an Indian language as a ruling/national language. First it was Pali. It remained from the time of Ashok to 9th century or so – more than 1000 years! Secondly today officially Hindi is India's national language although in fact English has taken it over. Why did Hindi fail? Among others one of the reasons was that its proponents subscribed to the Sanskrit origin theory and filled it with Sanskrit words and used Sanskrit grammar to teach it! However, Hindi in its various popular forms remains the link language in India.

Another way of looking at it is that India is a federal entity and it is artificial (imperial) to have one common language. In fact these imperial periods have been of relatively short durations but their linguistic impact is of much longer duration. And during all these 'imperial periods'  some provinces were always in a state of revolt, not excepting the present Indian state. The only difference is that in the past the revolting forces were mainly local kings or Kshatraps (though there were exceptions), whereas today a large number of people are involved in these revolts against the centre.

The rest depends on the political course that India will take in coming decades. If the centralised Indian state remains, English will dominate. If it breaks into federal units, modern Indian languages will take over with appropriate absorption of Sanskrit, Persian and English language words as well as words from each other. There may even be a move to de-Sanskritise the languages and to discover very good local words of lower caste/working class origin. This has happened before. In Kannada the great poet D. R. Bendre discovered and used many original Kannada words in his poems. Similar things have happened in many Indian languages. One can only hope that this will not give rise to a new kind of chauvinism/fascism like the Shiv Sena or Kannada Abhimanis.

References
1.   Bajpai, Kishoridas: Hindi Shabdanushasan, Varanasi v.s. 2013, Nagari Pracharini Sabha
2.   Bora, Rajmal:  Bharat ki Bhashayen: Aitihasik Evam Bhougolik Vivechan, 1995, New Delhi, Vani Prakashan
3.   Caldwell, Rt. Rev. Robert. : A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages, 1856, Reprinted 1961, University of Madras
4.   Chaudhuri, Nirad C.: The Continent of Circe,1965, New Delhi, Jaico Books
5.   Dharmavir: Hindi ki Atma, 1987, New Delhi, Samata Prakashan
 6.   Eco, Umberto, The Search for a Perfect language, 1997, London, Fontana Press
7.   Sharma, Kashiram: Dravid Parivar ki Bhasha: Hindi, 1968, Roorkee
8.   Talwar, Vir Bharar, Rassakashi, 2002, New Delhi, Saransh Prakashan Pvt. Ltd.