Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (38 page)

Here the first of the variant translations (in bold) of phrases applies to Hanuman seeking Sita, and the second (italicised) to Arjuna on a cattle-rustling expedition behind enemy lines. But to maintain a coherent narrative, most of the phrases still have an unambiguous translation.

In every sense of the word, then, Sanskrit is a luxuriant language. Sir William Jones, Chief Justice of India and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, memorably described it in 1786: ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.’

The question of who or what provided the model for the best Sanskrit has been answered in various ways over its long life. It was far more fraught than the question of the standard for Greek or Latin, since those languages did not carry the heavy theological overtones that have remained with Sanskrit throughout.

Originally, as we have seen, the focus was purely religious, and the promoted aim was to pronounce and articulate the Vedas properly. What would now be seen as a matter of social and pious propriety was represented otherwise in ancient India. Intoning the Vedas, after all, was held to give supernatural power, and Patanjali gave an example of the potentially life-threatening nature of bad grammar: the demon Vritra performed a sacrifice to obtain a son who would be
indra-śatru
, a killer of Indra, his sworn enemy among the gods. Unfortunately he accented it wrong, on the first rather than the last syllable, and so conjured up a son whom Indra would kill.
¹⁰

Coming from Patanjali, this is an anecdote of the second century BC, showing that some features at least of the language defined by Panini’s grammar had already ceased to be routine. Panini had lived in the fifth century in the extreme north-west of the Sanskrit- or Prakrit-speaking area. By Patanjali’s time, this region had fallen under the control of
mleccha
^*
peoples, non-Hindu (and non-Sanskrit-speaking) foreigners, the
Yavana
(Greeks) and
Śaka
(Scythians speaking an Iranian language, comparable to Pashto) from the west and north.

The religious motives emphasised by Patanjali for ensuring one’s Sanskrit was correct developed naturally, in India’s hierarchical and theocratic society, into social markers, and indeed status symbols. Patanjali worries that there may be a circularity (
itara-itara-āśraya
) in his natural wish to identify the best educated (
śi
a
) usage with what grammar prescribes: after all, how does the grammarian know what to prescribe? So he appeals to the usage of the
Āryāvarta
, defined geographically: this turns out to be northern India, bounded by the Himalayas in the north and the Vindhya mountains in the south, and the Panjab in the west and Allahabad in the east.
¹¹
This was to remain the received view of the Aryan centre, although there are refinements to be found in the Manu Law Code, written perhaps seven hundred years later, about AD 500:
Madhyadeśa
(’Mid Land’) is identified with this definition— effectively modern Haryana and Uttar Pradesh—while the
Āryāvarta
has expanded to encompass the whole of the north of the subcontinent; meanwhile, a small region round Delhi (’between the divine rivers
Sarasvatī
and
D
advatī’
), identified as the
Brahmāvarta
, has the supreme accolade: ‘All men in the world should learn their proper behaviour from a Brahman born in that country.’
¹²