Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (37 page)

In this ancient India was like many cultures as widely divided as the Druids of Gaul in the first century BC
⁵
and modern Guatemala (where Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to have to remember them).
⁶
Even Socrates recalled a story that when the the god Thoth first offered the craft of writing to the king of Egypt, the king was not impressed: ‘it will set forgetfulness in the minds of learners for lack of practice in memory’.
⁷
The doyens of Indian learning took this undeniable side effect of book learning very much to heart.

Even though the language had undergone a full phonological analysis by the fifth century BC, which was even incorporated into the official order of letters in the alphabet, reliance on written texts for important (especially spiritually important) documents was decried. Hence another saying:

By contrast the ideal was the rote learning of all the principal texts, through judicious use of mnemonic techniques. This learning then made possible true engagement with all aspects of them, including the composition of new texts and commentaries, which might indeed benefit from being written down.

The character of the language that received this attention has already been exhibited in the quotations. It was a typical ancient Indo-European language, with nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs all highly inflected in a system that, although susceptible to elegant analysis (as Panini and the grammatical tradition demonstrated), was rife with special exceptions. Words tended to be polysyllabic, and their length was often increased by the propensity of the language to tolerate compounds of almost unlimited length, a feature of Sanskrit that became more extreme (in all genres of literature) as the centuries and millennia wore on.

The vocabulary is vast: there are over ten thousand nominal (i.e. nonverbal) roots in the traditional thesaurus for poets (
Amarako
a
, ‘the Immortal Treasury’, organised of course into sutras for memorisation) and, when verbs and compounds are allowed in, Monier Williams’ 1899 dictionary runs to 180,000 entries.
^*
This means that there are vast resources in near-synonyms: at an extreme, John Brough claims there are fifty synonyms for ‘lotus’, a favourite concept of Sanskrit poetry in both literal and metaphorical senses.
⁹
Words tend to have multiple senses anyway: the most straightforward word for lotus,
padma
has eleven extra senses in the neuter gender (
lotus-like ornament, form of a lotus, root of a lotus, coloured marks on the face and trunk of an elephant, an army formation, a trillion (
¹⁰
), lead, a tantric chakra, a mole on the body, a spot, part of a column
) and eight more in the masculine (
temple, quarter-elephant, species of serpent, Rama, a treasure of Kubera, a mode of sexual enjoyment, a posture in meditation, a treasure connected with magic).
These lexical resources are exploited to the full in Sanskrit poetry, which is gratuitously allusive and periphrastic, and addicted to
śle
a
or punning.

But we have already noted that a special characteristic of Sanskrit is a complicated system of word
liaison.
This is known as
sandhi
(’putting together’). It means that word boundaries are often effaced, and a single stream of syllables, as pronounced or even written, becomes susceptible to multiple interpretations. The combined result of these two properties of Sanskrit is an opportunity for punning on an almost inconceivable scale. This opportunity was amply taken up in literary composition. The ultimate in this was achieved by the poet
Kavirāja
(’poet-king’), who in his
Rāghavapā
avīya
(twelfth century AD), set himself the task of retelling simultaneously the stories of both the great epics of India, the
Rāmāya
a
and
Mahābhārata
, in ambiguous (and highly ornate) verses. In a way, this can be seen as a release of meaning from its expression in words, for it is difficult to conceive how the work could have been understood, in either of its senses, without active and detailed pre-knowledge by the audience of the tales being told. Author and audience share the stories, but are focused exclusively on the verbal details of their expression. This in practice forces not only the use of ambiguous terms, but an analogy to be set up between the narrative flow of the two epics. So, to quote one couplet (vi.8):