108 Facts about Sanskrit you didn't know

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I need to thank my late father, K.H. Nambudiripad, who instilled in me an interest in Sanskrit. In school, I had taken French

as my second language; so, my father insisted that I learn Sanskrit at home. He therefore went around trying to engage a Sanskrit teacher. I resisted at first, thinking it would be boring. But when my cousin, K. Savithri, who was staying with us and going to college, offered to keep me company in this venture, I agreed. Thank you, Savithrietti.

The most important person I have to thank is the teacher engaged by my father, the late Raman Master of Calicut. He was already around eighty when he came to teach us. He taught us for five years–from my eighth standard through my pre-degree years–till I went to IIT for my engineering. Some of the lessons he taught us are still fresh in my mind. Thank you Master.

While I was in school, in the ninth and 10th standards, another cousin of mine, K.V. Krishnan, was doing his pre-degree and he had taken Sanskrit as his second language. He had to study a few shlokas of Kālidāsa and he used to quote them aloud to us and one particular favourite of his was, verse 6, act 4 of Abhijñānaśākuntalam, “yāsytyadya śakuntaleti hr̥dayaṃ saṃspr̥ṣtamutkaṇṭhayā...” His frequent quotations of these shlokas made me determined to take Sanskrit as my second language in my pre-degree. Thank you, Krishnetta.

During those days, another person who kept my interest in Sanskrit going was our family purohit, the late C.P. Kuberan Nambudiri. He was a great scholar of Sanskrit and the Vedas. Thank you, Sir.

During my pre-degree days, my two Sanskrit teachers were the late Prof. Eswara Warrier and the late Prof. Devasia Thakadiyel. Thank you, Sirs.

Once I finished my pre-degree and joined IIT, Sanskrit took a long break. Except for occasional discussions with some friends or the occasional looking at a book, Sanskrit was almost forgotten. Later on, when I was working in Bengaluru, I used to occasionally go to the Motilal Banarsidass bookshop and look at a few books. But that was it.

But one day I picked up the book A Rapid Sanskrit Method by G.L. Hart and started going through the contents. This rekindled my interest in Sanskrit and there was no looking back. This is a good book to restart our Sanskrit learning. This, and Lanman’s Sanskrit Reader. I developed interest in Vedic Sanskrit when I was researching the Vedas for material for my first novel, The First Aryan.

I got the idea about writing this book about three years ago. There are many people whose contributions have to be acknowledged.

My colleague and friend S. Gopalan, who was my Tamil consultant and provided inputs on various Tamil words in the book; other colleagues and friends, S. Sivaguru, S. Sivakumar and J. Veeraraaghavan, also supported me in the writing of the book. A. Narasimhan, who is himself a Sanskrit scholar, was a source of encouragement. Narasimhan also reviewed the book and made some suggestions for improvement. Thank you all.

My wife’s cousin, Vineetha Kurur, my friend Vandana Malaiya (and her mother), my colleagues and friends, Milind Rummade and Zafar Ahmad, provided inputs on Hindi words and usages in the book. Vandana also reviewed the book. Thank you all.

My old friend and classmate from IIT, Rajeev Srinivasan, was an early supporter of this work. He reviewed the book and suggested many changes to improve the content. He introduced me to the works of Dharampal. He also later recommended that I publish the book through Garuda Prakashan. Towards that end, he introduced me to Sankrant Sanu. Thank you, Rajeev.

Other friends and classmates from IIT also reviewed this book and gave many suggestions for improvement: K.V. Bapa Rao, P. Narendran and Sukumar Muralidharan. Another friend and classmate, Arun Bahulkar, is a great supporter of my endeavours. Thank you all.

I would also like to thank my nephews Satish Nambudiripad and Dr. K.V. Arun. Arun is a great supporter of my work. A question Satish asked me prompted me to write the “fact” on the interchangeability of l and r. Thank you both.

I would also like to thank Subhash Kak, the great linguist and Indologist, for reviewing my book and writing an endorsement for it. Thank you Subhash, for your encouragement.

And, the unflinching support of my family was crucial in the writing of the book. My wife Preeta, daughter Arya, son-in-law Athul and son Jayanta have all been of great support. I had many discussions about the book with them. Jayanta also reviewed some parts of the book and made some suggestions. Thank you all.

And thanks are also due to my publishers, Sankrant Sanu, Ankur Pathak, Prashant Pandey and the editors. Thank you all.

And many thanks to V. Subramaniam (Legal Mani) and S. Kalayanaraman, my colleagues and friends, for reviewing the contract with Garuda Prakashan and suggesting changes. Thank you both.

I hope I have not missed out thanking anyone who helped me and supported me in writing and publishing this book. Indeed, there are so many people who have given me suggestions and ideas in passing. Thank you all.

SECTION 1

The History of our Mother Tongue

FACT 1

Sanskrit is 6,000 Years Old or Older

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in his book The Orion, or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas, has shown, based on internal evidence (using astronomical references) of the Vedas, that the R̥ g Veda and some of the portions of the Yajur Vedic Samhitas are at least 6,000 years old. The language of the Vedas, called Sanskrit, is highly refined and sophisticated. (In fact, Saṃskr̥tam ‘Sanskrit’, means ‘well-made, refined’.) So, Sanskrit must have been evolving as a language for quite some time before that.

The R̥ g Veda and later compositions (together called the Vedas) of the ancient ancestors of the Indians have come down to us as pitch (tone) accented chants without any mistakes creeping in over the 6,000 years of their existence. It is clearly the oldest unbroken oral tradition in existence in the world. In fact, UNESCO (on November 7, 2003) has recognised the tradition of Vedic chanting as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

The technique our ancestors used to ensure this high level of fidelity while transmitting them orally from generation to generation, over the centuries, was to devise many different, special methods of rendering each line and each verse of the Vedas. In addition to the normal, continuous recitation of the verses of the Vedas, applying the rules of phonetic and euphonic combination of the words (the so called Saṃhita), there was a tradition of recitation with a pause applied after each word (the so-called Pada Pāṭha), and other traditions where the words were permuted, combined and repeated in various ways. There were eleven such ways (the Krama Pāṭha and the Ghana Pāṭha being two examples) of rendering the verses and Vedic scholars memorised every one of these! This ensured that any error that crept into a recitation was automatically corrected with reference to the other types of recitations.

Now why did the ancients devise such an elaborate system of oral transmission to ensure fidelity over generations? Why didn’t they just write down the Vedas? Many of the current authorities think that the main reason was that the ancients considered the technique of preserving the fidelity of the Vedas using the Pāṭha techniques to be so “pure” that rendering and communicating them in any other manner would make them lose their character.

But I think that the main reason why our ancestors did not choose to write down the Vedas, but chose to invent some elaborate recitation schemes to preserve the oral chants, was that when the Vedas were composed, the art of writing had not evolved. If writing had evolved, surely the Vedic seers, who had the energy to create such complicated systems to maintain the fidelity of their creations, would not have balked at another new (and surer) approach for preservation? There were no elaborate techniques then to consider “pure”. So, they could have written them down without violating any “pure” traditions. Remember that the Vedas were considered sacred and handed down to our ancestors by divine authority. So, any method of preserving their purity would have been eagerly welcomed in the early stages of the Vedas.

The fact that writing had not evolved when the Vedas were composed again attests to their great antiquity. Definite proof of writing being available dates back to 5,500 years ago from the Euphrates-Tigris regions. (Of course, other civilisations, including that of our ancestors, may have also independently invented writing.) This writing form is supposed to have spread from Euphrates-Tigris regions to the other regions like the Indus-Saraswati regions. This spreading would have happened over many generations. The Indus-Saraswati civilisation (The Indus-Valley civilisation) clearly had some form of writing. So, we can safely guess that writing must have reached this region around 5,000 to 5,200 years ago. (Of course, I am discounting the so-called Aryan invasion theory which postulates that the ancient Aryans came from some faraway place, conquered and displaced the indigenous population to establish their sway over the Indus-Saraswati region. I am assuming that our ancestors were already in the valley by then, either having been born there or having migrated there from nearby places.)

Now, the ancient seers of India were constrained to devise complicated systems for preserving the fidelity of the Vedas precisely because writing was not available to them. So, the R̥ g Veda (and portions of the other Vedas) were composed and in use before writing was widely available. This again pushes the compilation of the R̥ g Veda to around 6,000 years ago.

Western Sanskritists have arbitrarily set the date of the composition of the R̥ g Veda at around 1,500 BCE (or 3,500 years ago). This date was, I think, set by people such as Max Mueller, trying to reconcile the Vedic dates with the time periods deduced from the Bible for the creation of the world (based on Semitic and Sumerian mythologies for the creation of the world). There was also a need to reconcile the dates of the development of Indian thinking and literature with the development of thinking and literature in the Semitic (and Sumerian) world. Max Mueller divides the Vedic literature into four periods–Chandas (the golden age of poetry of the ancient R̥ ṣis), Mantra (the age of rituals or the age of priests rather than poets), Brāhmaṇa (the age of pedantry and exegesis) and Sūtra (the practical age; the age of grammar, etymology, phonetics and astronomy). He assumes that these four periods were sequential, arbitrarily assigns 200 years to each period, decides on a date of around 400 BCE for the Sūtras and so gets the date of around 1,200 BCE for the composition of the early Vedic literature. Interestingly other Western scholars have assigned 500 years for each period and arrived at 2,400 BCE using the same base! (If we assign 900 years, which is as believable as 200 or 500 to each period, we will reach our 4,000 BCE! One argument in favour of these large gaps is the fact that we can clearly see the writers of the Brāhmaṇas struggling with the import and the meanings of the Vedas and indulging in wild speculations. This means that when the Brāhmaṇas were composed, the meanings of the Vedas had already become obscure owing to the long gap between their creations. (A couple of hundred years is too short for this level of haziness to have happened.)