Sanskrit – The Deva Bhasha
Sanskrit – The Deva Bhasha
The Language Spoken By Gods, But Ignored by Us
Researchers at NASA have been looking at Sanskrit as a possible computer language because of its perfect morphology that leaves very little room for error. Pānini’s Ashtadhyayi shows significant similarities to the Backus-Naur Form grammar that is used to describe modern programming languages today.” §Recent Past-The Nadir
In 1948, when Israel became a nation, they chose Hebrew, as their official language. With that one golden stroke, Hebrew, a language that was dead as a Dodo but for the Rabbis, had received an ambrosial injection. Before that, in 1947, Indians ignored a similar claim of Sanskrit, their cultural unifier for eons and chose Hindi as the national language.
Unlike Hebrew, Sanskrit was not dead. Sanskrit was in a prolonged coma for nearly a millennium under the various alien rulers from Delhi Sultanate to the British crown. These invaders had one trait in common, that is, they were inherently abhorrent towards anything that emanates from the Bharathiya Samskriti (Indian Culture) led by Sanskrit. While the pre-British trespassers used physical means to weaken the Indian cultural icons, the English opted for the highly effective and at the same time long-lasting highbrow route. Indian intellectuals are yet to be recovered from that cerebral washout!
The protagonists who initiated the redrafting of Indian cultural history in nineteenth century were Macaulay , a British colonial official and Max Müller, a German philologist-orientalist. Macaulay was the man behind the blueprint of the Colonial India’s schooling system that served the empire by producing clerks for hundred years. The age-old indigenous village schooling system that ensured high level working literacy across the rural India and the status of Sanskrit as the pan Indian communication link were purged by Macaulay’s assault. As English became the lingua franca of the elite and the influential, Sanskrit was ejected out of the main stream. Even after sixty years of independence, the handiwork of Macaulay is still the hallmark of our general education and the governmental apathy towards Sanskrit is flourishing unabated. . Many educated have to depend on the imperfect English translations to understand the multidisciplinary knowledge contained in the Sanskrit scriptures and literature! ¨
Max Muller’s net was much wider. He targeted the very root of the Indian cultural edifice – the Holy Vedas, the sanctum sanctorum of Sanskrit. He painted a racial halo around Vedic era and invented the Aryan Invasion Theory to degrade and divide the Indian society. This theory introduced the fictional Aryan race (Vedas never mentioned them as a race but as a class of people who accept and revere the Vedas and Sages. As such, the Dravidians also belong to Aryan Class) to the unsuspecting intelligentsia. The theory propagates the myth that the Aryans originally the inhabitants of Central Asia . One group moved towards Indian planes and established the Vedic Civilization over that of the Dravidians the original inhabitants, and forced them to retreat to the Southern Peninsula . . Max Muller also tinkered with the antiquity of the Vedas and attributed it to be of as recent as 1600 BCE. The scientific evidences disprove these implanted conjectures.
Max Muller spent nearly 25 of his 77 years of life to translate Vedas and Upanishads. Unfortunately, the translations were mottled vis-à-vis elucidation due to intention and ignorance. Max Muller had confessed about these intentional inaccuracies and his arbitrary fixing the date of Vedas towards the twilight of his life. It is pity that the so called Indian scholars were/are no longer listening to him and preferred to go along with the rash theories of his younger days. ©
That proves that Macaulay’s victory parade is in full flow even now. However, in spite of all the negative forces viz., governmental apathy, subjective secularism, its prejudicial implementation, opportunistic political parties and vote bank based policies, the Sanskrit is bouncing back to old glory. For this, one must thank the internet and private initiatives.
Ancient Past-The Zenith
Samskrit, as the name suggests, is formed to perfection. “The one which is introduced or produced in its perfect form is called Sanskrit. The word Sanskrit is formed from “sam +krit” where (sam) prefix means (samyak) ‘entirely’ or ‘wholly’ or ‘perfectly,’ and krit means ‘done.’ Sanskrit was first introduced by Brahma to the Sages of the celestial abodes and it is still the language of the celestial abode, so it is also called the Dev Vani.” [‡]
Vis-à-vis antiquity, cultural richness and linguistic perfection, it is unrivaled. Sanskrit is the treasure trove of priceless Vedic knowledge and the veritable corpus of a vast literature including a rich tradition of poetry and drama, and huge array of scientific, technical, philosophical and religious texts. Moreover, Sanskrit acts as a depository of ancient Vedic rituals. During the last hundred years, the Rig Vedic Purusha Suktham ( ‘Hymn of the Cosmic Man’) based Athirathram, a 12-day long Yagna, was performed 18 times, exactly replicating as it was performed 5000 years ago, the latest was in 2006 in Kerala. Vedic rituals are very sophisticated, oldest, largest, and best documented among the rituals of man. And Sanskrit brought them to us in their pristine purity .
Sanskrit is a highly inflected language and has a huge vocabulary with which to render even the most abstract of philosophical, psychological, and scientific concepts.
The phonology (the speech sound) and morphology (the science of word formation) of the Sanskrit language are peerless. Some of the unique features of Sanskrit are depicted here through the following five paragraphs: [§]
The sounds of the 36 consonants and the 16 vowels of Sanskrit are fixed, precise and unaltered since the very beginning. The Sanskrit words always had the same pronunciation.The reason is, in Sanskrit, the basic structure of its vowel-consonant pronunciation is the unique foundation of the language that precisely stabilizes the word pronunciation.
The morphology is distinctive, where a word is formed from a seed root (called dhatu) in a precise grammatical order, which has been the same from the inception. Any number of desired words could be created through its root words and the prefix and suffix system as detailed in the Ashtadhyayi (Paniniyam). Furthermore, 90 conjugations per verb and 21 forms per noun or pronoun could be formed that are useful in any situation. . The formation, modulation and creation of words have been in an absolutely perfect state since the beginning. This ‘perfect’ status of Sanskrit all through the history is in contrast with the other languages, which started, in a primitive form with incomplete alphabet, and sparse vocabulary. Even the English language, when it took its roots from West Germanic around 800 AD, was in a primitive form. While growing to the Modern phase, it absorbed words from Latin, French, and Greek and the journey was long.
There has never been any change in the science of Sanskrit grammar as is common in other languages as they passed through stages.
The perfect form of the Vedic Sanskrit language had already existed for thousands of years before the infancy of the earliest languages Greek, Hebrew and Latin etc. When a language is spoken by unqualified people the pronunciation of the words change; and when these people travel to another region, and as the time moves, the change of the word-form becomes permanent. Just like the Sanskrit word matri, with a long ‘a’ and soft ‘t,’ became mater in Greek and mother in English. The last two words are called the ‘apbhransh’. Such apbhranshas are found in all the languages of the world and thisproves that Sanskrit was the mother language of the world.
“Furthermore, the perfection of the pronunciation (of the consonants and the vowels) and the uniqueness of the grammar that stays the same in all the ages from the very beginning of human civilization and up till today are such features which prove that Sanskrit is not manmade; it is a Divine gift to the people of this world. The following six examples demonstrate some of the unique features of Sanskrit that distinguishes it from other languages of the world .”[**]
Present To Future –The REBOUND
Despite many negative forces led by governmental apathy, the Sanskrit is slowly bouncing back to its old glory due to the internet and private initiatives like Shri Vedabharathi and Samskrita Bharati.
Let us have a look at some of the positive happenings pointing to a slow revival of this beautiful language.
ü The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has made Sanskrit an optional third language after English and Hindi in the schools it governs.
ü All India Radio transmits regular Sanskrit news bulletins and tutorials.
ü Numerous online Sanskrit courses are available now and more and more young people are learning Sanskrit. Samskrita Bharati is the leading light in this area. ü Sanskrit lines and slokas are finding increasing favour to be used as Radio and TV ad jingles, background of movies and corporate slogans.
ü Sanskrit has even made a maiden appearance in Pop music recently in an album by Madonna.
ü Everybody in the Mattur village in Karnataka converses in Sanskrit. Inhabitants of all castes learn Sanskrit starting in childhood and speak in the language. Even the local Muslims communicate in Sanskrit . ü The tribal village called Ganoda in Rajasthan, many of the people are able to speak Sanskrit and use in their daily lives. For the motivated Sanskrit speaking people of Ganoda, the ultimate aim is to make it a unique model Sanskrit village. Their punch line is “don’t say hello, say Hari Om”.
ü Shri Vedabharathi based in Hyderabad , is one of the organizations, that has been digitizing the Vedas through voice recording the recitations of Vedic Pandits, to preserve the oral tradition of the Vedas. ü Sanskrit is strongly recommended as a metalanguage for knowledge representation in machine translation, and other areas of natural language processing because of its highly regular structure. ü Gérard Huet, a French computer professional and ardent admirer of Indian culture, developed the first ever Sanskrit-French dictionary on the Internet. He has also developed computational linguistics tools for Sanskrit.
ü The oral Sanskrit tradition of Vedic Chanting has been declared intangible Heritage of humanity by UNESCO in 2003. ü Computer researchers believe Sanskrit and computers are a perfect fit. In 1985, Rick Briggs, a researcher for NASA, published a paper on the potential uses of Sanskrit as a machine language. Natural languages are basically too imprecise for use as machine languages. Thus programmers have been forced to create artificial languages. But the researchers and the programmers are realizing that they were reinventing the wheel when the millenniums young Sanskrit is the best natural language that is even better than the best artificial language for the purpose.
ü According to Briggs, one of the factors that makes Sanskrit such a perfect machine language is that the word order of its sentences is not strict. For example, consider the sentence "Raamah Phalam Kaadhathi." All the six sentences formed from the various combinations of these three words carry the same meaning. For instance, "Phalam Raamah Kaadhathi" also means, "Raama eats fruit," where as in English, obviously, "Fruit eats Raama" will give a very wrong meaning to the sentence.
“Siddique Ahmed and Kysar Khan, both Standard IX students of Sharada Vilas School, recite shlokas effortlessly along with their classmates. Even after lessons, whether they are at play or back home, they slip into Sanskrit. Indeed, they are even teaching their parents the language. "Our elders began with a smattering hold over it but can now manage to talk," they say.
That Sanskrit is the language of Gods need not apply to Mathoor. It is the vernacular of a majority of the 5,000 residents of this quaint, sleepy hamlet situated a little over 4 kms from Shimoga. Away from the hustle-bustle of the district headquarters, Mathoor sits pretty with a garland of areca nut and coconut plantations along the Tunga River
“At dusk, the melodious chanting of the Vedas emerges from around the banks of the Tunga. The river is unusually calm. And the stillness removes one from modernity to another era when Sanskrit reigned and when there were no mobile phones. Or, as the residents of Mathoor would put it, when there was no "nishtantu dooravani!” [††]
That in short is the story of the fall and rise of the Deva Bhasha.
Shubh Dinam Astu
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