Our Oriental Heritage: 001 by Durant Will

Author:Durant, Will [Durant, Will]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XX

The Literature of India

I. THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA

Sanskrit—The vernaculars—Grammar

JUST as the philosophy and much of the literature of medieval Europe were composed in a dead language unintelligible to the people, so the philosophy and classic literature of India were written in a Sanskrit that had long since passed out of common parlance, but had survived as the Esperanto of scholars having no other common tongue. Divorced from contact with the life of the nation, this literary language became a model of scholasticism and refinement; new words were formed not by the spontaneous creations of the people, but by the needs of technical discourse in the schools; until at last the Sanskrit of philosophy lost the virile simplicity of the Vedic hymns, and became an artificial monster whose sesquipedalia verba crawled like monstrous tapeworms across the page.*

Meanwhile the people of northern India, about the fifth century before Christ, had transformed Sanskrit into Prakrit, very much as Italy was to change Latin into Italian. Prakrit became for a time the language of Buddhists and Jains, until it in turn was developed into Pali—the language of the oldest extant Buddhist literature.2 By the end of the tenth century of our era these “Middle Indian” languages had given birth to various vernaculars, of which the chief was Hindi. In the twelfth century this in turn generated Hindustani as the language of the northern half of India. Finally the invading Moslems filled Hindustani with Persian words, thereby creating a new dialect, Urdu. All these were “Indo-Germanic” tongues, confined to Hindustan; the Deccan kept its old Dravidian languages—Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese and Malayalam—and Tamil became the chief literary vehicle of the south. In the nineteenth century Bengali replaced Sanskrit as the literary language of Bengal; the novelist Chatterjee was its Boccaccio, the poet Tagore was its Petrarch. Even today India has a hundred languages, and the literature of Swaraj† uses the speech of the conquerors.

At a very early date India began to trace the roots, history, relations and combinations of words. By the fourth century B.C. she had created for herself* the science of grammar, and produced probably the greatest of all known grammarians, Panini. The studies of Panini, Patanjali (ca. 150 A.D.) and Bhartrihari (ca. 650) laid the foundations of philology; and that fascinating science of verbal genetics owed almost its life in modern times to the rediscovery of Sanskrit.

Writing, as we have seen, was not popular in Vedic India. About the fifth century B.C. the Kharosthi script was adapted from Semitic models, and in the epics and the Buddhist literature we begin to hear of clerks.3 Palmleaves and bark served as writing material, and an iron stylus as a pen; the bark was treated to make it less fragile, the pen scratched letters into it, ink was smeared over the bark, and remained in the scratches when the rest of it was wiped away.4 Paper was brought in by the Moslems (ca. 1000 A.D.), but did not finally replace bark till the seventeenth century.

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