Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (34 page)

There is a persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed. Over two thousand years it spread itself round the centres of Asian population: from north to south of the Indian subcontinent, and thence to South-East Asia and the East Indies, to the Tibetan plateau and to the Far East.

The word
Sanskrit (sa
sk
ta
) means ‘composed’ or ‘synthesised’. It is a term for the language as formulated in the grammar books, contrasting it with its colloquial dialects, known as the
Prakrits (prā
ta
), the ‘naturals’. It also distinguishes it from an older form, sometimes called Vedic, known from its use in the
Veda
, ‘the knowledge’: these are hymns to the gods which appear to go back to the earliest days of the language as spoken in India, in the last centuries of the second millennium BC, but which are still recited unchanged in Hindu rituals today. Most of the modern languages of northern and central India are descendants of Sanskrit, developed versions of the Prakrits, much as the Romance languages developed from forms of vulgar Latin. But outside the Indian subcontinent, Sanskrit was never taken up as a popular language; it remained purely a medium of learned communication and sacred expression, strongest where the dominant religion had come from India.

Although it is religious tradition which has proved the most reliable preserver of Sanskrit in many an
avatāra
(’descent’, as of a divine being from heaven), and despite the heavy association, in the West today, of the language with transcendental spiritualism, Sanskrit was never just a liturgical language.

Even the Vedic corpus contains a joyous yet wry evocation of
mā
ūkā
,
¹
‘frogs’, doubly like the priestly caste of Brahmans: they take a vow of silence for a year (until the rainy season); and when they do pipe up ‘one of them repeats the speech of the other, as the learner does of his teacher’. It also brings us the wry self-pity of a compulsive gambler,
²
enslaved to
babhrava
, ‘the browns’, the nuts then used as dice:
rājā cid ebhyo nama it k
oti
, ‘even a king bows before them...’ he excuses himself, going on:
tasmai k
omi, ‘na dhanā ru
adhmi’ daśāham prācīs, ‘tad
tam vadāmi’.
‘I show him my empty palms: “I am not holding out on you—it’s the truth, I tell you."’