Written in stone, or not at all

 

Written in stone, or not at all

A Hindi polemic argues that Sanskrit is a late invention and that the script of Ashoka could never have written it. Linguists disagree, but the book’s questions are harder to dismiss than its answers

Every few decades, India rediscovers that its past is contested. The latest weapon in the argument is a modest paperback. Bhram Ka Pulinda (“A Bundle of Delusions”), by Rajiv Patel, sold by a small Delhi press that specialises in Buddhist and anti-caste writing, makes a bold claim: that Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas and the epics, is a late, manufactured tongue, and that the evidence is carved in stone for anyone willing to read it.

The argument begins with Darwin. Mr Patel holds that language, like humans, evolved by degrees. In the Stone Age, he writes, people communicated with bare vowel sounds, the sur that a newborn or an animal still makes. The Indus Valley civilisation left a script, but nobody can read it, which is why the period is called proto-history. Only from about 600BCE does the written record become legible. Its script, which Ashoka called dhamma lipi (and which scholars call Brahmi), and its languages, Pali and Prakrit, are the first that can be known.

Pali, he says, grew out of the Buddha’s teaching. Once it existed, a grammar was needed to keep it correct, and two of the Buddha’s followers, Kaccayana and Moggallana, supplied one. The order matters to him. A grammar follows a language; it cannot precede it. Hindu tradition places the Vedas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata many thousands, even millions, of years ago, yet the grammarian Panini, on its own account, lived around 600BCE. Were the sacred texts then composed in a language with no grammar, no alphabet and no script? Mr Patel’s answer is that they were not composed then at all.

The missing letters

The book’s centrepiece is a list of what Brahmi cannot do. It has no letter for the vowel ṛ, nor for au or the visarga, the breathy final sound marked with two dots. In Ashoka’s day it lacked the sibilants ś and ṣ. It has no ready conjuncts for kṣa, tra and jña, no halant (the sign that strips a consonant of its inherent vowel) and no chandrabindu. Without ṛ, Mr Patel notes, one cannot write the word “Sanskrit” itself. He challenges readers to render in Brahmi a handful of Sanskrit words and then to find a halant or a visarga anywhere in the inscriptions he reproduces.

He then makes a point about sound. Words in Brahmi end in full vowels, each pronounced completely. Sanskrit, by contrast, depends on truncated endings: namo becomes namaḥ, and the mantra om maṇi padme hūṃ is written with a halant. Only Nagari, the later script, supplies the marks. Sanskrit can be forced into Roman letters, he concedes, but it cannot be heard properly there. A language that needs a script which did not yet exist, he reasons, did not yet exist either.

The word “Sanskrit”, moreover, means “refined” or “processed”. Prakrit means “natural”, the language of nature’s lap; Pali, he suggests, is the language that the people nurtured. Mr Patel concludes that Sanskrit is by definition derived. His table of examples is the book’s most memorable device: Vekamadataya becomes Vikramaditya, Chandagupata becomes Chandragupta, Dimita becomes Demetrius, Kasana becomes Krishna, Bamhan becomes Brahmin. The inscriptions carry the plain forms; the “refined” ones appear only in later books.

A parade of stones

To make the point, Mr Patel parades the inscriptions. The Indo-Greek king Demetrius is Dimita on a Mathura record; a Greek donor at Karla gives a pillar in Pali. The Shaka satrap Rudradaman’s long record at Junagadh, which many scholars call the first major Sanskrit inscription, is in his view plain Brahmi with no halant, no visarga and no chandrabindu. Kushan, Satavahana and Gupta coins, pillars and seals follow, each with legends he reads as Pali. At Prayag, a pillar carries Ashoka’s edict at the top, Samudragupta’s text beneath it and, at the bottom, an inscription in Nagari by the Mughal emperor Jahangir. The stack, he says, is a time-line in stone: Nagari and Sanskrit arrive with the Mughals.

The most telling exhibit, for Mr Patel, is the clay seals from Nalanda. A Gupta-era seal is in pure Brahmi. A seal of roughly the ninth century reads “Shri Nalanda Mahavihara” in Nagari, yet its letter ha still has the old shape. The script, he says, was caught mid-metamorphosis. He adds James Prinsep’s famous chart of letter-forms, showing Brahmi growing rounder over the centuries until it becomes Nagari.

Who could read the stones

A second strand concerns decipherment. In the fourteenth century Firoz Shah Tughlaq hauled two Ashokan pillars to Delhi, and found nobody who could read them. Akbar, too, asked his court scholars, and none could. When Sir William Jones sent a facsimile to Benares, the city’s best pandit, Mr Patel relates (citing the Hindi essayist Hazari Prasad Dwivedi), declared it a record of the exile of the Pandava Yudhishthira, and provided a translation. It was Europeans, Captain Troyer, Dr Mill and above all James Prinsep, who cracked the script in the 1830s. The historian D.N. Jha, Mr Patel notes, himself dates the writing of ancient Indian history to the East India Company. The inference: traditional scholars knew nothing of the older record, because their own tradition was a different, later one.

Hence the materials. Before the Common Era, everything was written on stone. Paper arrived from China (zhi), travelled to Arabia (kaghaz), then to Europe (paper), and reached India with the Turks. Indians, Mr Patel observes with relish, kept the Arabic word for paper while “refining” every Pali word that smelled of Buddhism. The entire Brahmanical corpus, he points out, survives in Nagari and Sanskrit on paper. Not one verse of Panini, Kalidasa or Valmiki has turned up carved or inked in Brahmi.

The book ends with a dare. Let the defenders of the tradition produce a television serial, Abhilekh ki Khoj (“The Search for Inscriptions”), showing the original stone for any Sanskrit text. Until then, Mr Patel says, claims about a Vedic antiquity are a bundle of delusions.

The Stone Age (prehistory). There was no script, and no developed language either. People communicated through sur (vowel sounds), such as a, e, o. These are the first speech of all living beings, and are still used by a newborn child and by animals.

The Indus Valley (proto-history). This civilization had a script and plenty of inscriptional evidence, but it has never been deciphered, so its language and its history remain unknown. For this reason it is called proto-history.

The historical period. From about 600 BCE, scripts become readable. The script is Dhamma lipi (called Brahmi lipi in literature) and the languages are Prakrit and Pali. Every ruler and scholar of this period wrote in them, which is why we can know their history.

The origin of Pali and its grammar

Pali developed from the Buddha’s teaching. He was born in 563 BCE and taught the people in their own language until his Mahaparinirvana. Once Pali existed, a grammar was needed to keep it free of error, and Kaccayana (Mahakaccayana) and Moggallana contributed to it. Kaccayana later became the Buddha’s disciple. A grammar can only come after a language. The author argues that Sanskrit would therefore have had no grammar if it had existed millions of years ago, as claimed, and would have been full of mistakes.

Naming the script

Ashoka called his script Dhamma lipi, and Samudragupta also wrote iyaṃ dhamma libi likhāpitā (“this Dhamma writing was caused to be written”) on the Prayag pillar. Patel concludes that the script was still known by this name in the Gupta period.

What Dhamma lipi cannot write

The central point of the chapter is that the Dhamma lipi alphabet lacks:

• the vowels ṛ (ऋ), au (औ) and aḥ (अः), and in the pre-Christian period also ś (श) and ṣ (ष)
• the conjuncts kṣa (क्ष), tra (त्र) and jña (ज्ञ)
• chandrabindu, halant (the sign that cuts a final vowel) and visarga
• the joined use of r

Since the script cannot write ऋ, Sanskrit kṛ cannot be written, and “not even the word Sanskrit itself” can be. He therefore says that grammar of Panini, the Chanakya Niti, Kalidasa’s plays, or any Sanskrit verse could not have been written in it. He offers a challenge: let anyone write these words in Dhamma lipi: संस्कृत, श्री, लक्ष्मी, ॐ भूर्भवः, त्र्यम्बकं, पुष्टिवर्धनम्, यज्ञः, ऋषि, शाम. He asks where a halant, visarga or ṛ appears in any inscription he reproduces.

Pronunciation: complete versus incomplete sounds

Patel explains the difference between Pali and Sanskrit through endings.

• Dhamma lipi has the vowels a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, e, o and the niggahita (aṅga). Every word ends in one of these, so the final sound is pronounced fully, with the hidden “a” audible.
• Nagari has ṛ, aṃ, aḥ and the halant. These make the last sound of a word incomplete and drop the “a”.

Examples he gives: Om maṇi padme hūṃ becomes Om maṇi padme hūm, and namo is written namaḥ. Sanskrit needs these half sounds in large numbers, and only Nagari supplies them. Roman script can be forced to write Sanskrit, but it cannot reproduce the full sound.

He also reads the two-dot sign after Samudagupata on a Gupta coin: it is not a visarga but the Pali full stop. In Pali, “r” was written like today’s full stop (danda), as in Chandagupata.

“Sanskrit” means “refined”

For Patel, the words themselves prove the point.

• Prakrit means a language born from nature’s lap. Pali (connected by him with pāla, to nurture) is the language people raised, nourished and grew up with.
• Sanskrit (saṃskṛta) means “processed.” A person is “refined” only when he is infected by outside knowledge, so Sanskrit has been built by modifying existing words.

His examples of Pali names that were “refined”:

Pali (as inscribed)	Refined form
Vekamadataya	Vikramaditya
Chandagupata	Chandragupta
Dimita	Dimitra/Demetrius
Kasana	Krishna
Dhamma piya	Dharma-priya
Bamhan/Bābhan	Brāhmaṇa

He adds that the Pali forms are what appear in the inscriptions, and that the refining happened later, in the “pen-butchers’” books.

Borrowed words are not a new language

Patel anticipates the argument that later Brahmi inscriptions contain foreign words and are therefore “pidgin Sanskrit”. His reply is a series of analogies.

• Pali words like jhāna and bodha are used in neighbouring countries in altered form. By the same logic, those countries’ languages would be “pidgin Sanskrit.”
• Litti-chokha has entered European languages. Would European languages become “pidgin Sanskrit”?
• English, Persian and Arabic words such as ticket, rain, shirt, pant, glass, kagaz, safed, churi, jalebi, pyjama, kabuli and lipstick have entered Hindi. That does not make Hindi English or Persian.
• In Mumbai, speakers of many languages produced “Bambaiya” bolī, which no one calls Sanskrit. In the same way, Urdu and Hinglish formed under Sultans, Mughals and British.

He says the same happened with Shaka, Kushan, Pahlava and Hun rulers. Their words entered Pali and Prakrit, but Pali lost nothing of its pure form. Sanskrit, by contrast, was built entirely by “refining” (being infected by outside influence).

Up to the Mauryan period, he says, the language and script were completely pure. The first changes came with the Shakas and Kushans: some outside sounds and a few consonants. In the Gupta period, ś and ṣ had developed, but even then no Sanskrit had been created.

The inscriptions he cites

For each ruler he shows the inscription and reads it as Pali in Dhamma lipi.

• Indo-Greek: Madhuraṃ apayato Yavana-rājā Dimita (the Yavana king Dimita). Another, at Karla: Dhenukākaṭa Yavanasa ... thabho dāna (a pillar donated by a Yavana).
• Junagadh (Shaka, Rudradaman): written in Dhamma lipi, with no halant, visarga or chandrabindu, and none of the extra Sanskrit letters. Calling it Sanskrit is, he says, an “empty claim.”
• Kushan: Mahārāje rājadhirāja deva-putasa Kaniskasa.
• Satavahana: Rāñño Gotamiputasa Siri Sātakaṇisa and Rāyā Simuka Sātavāhano Sirimato, with Pali siri (honoured), which he says is the earliest form of today’s “Shri”. Also Kasana Vāsudevā at Nane Ghat.
• Gupta: coins with samudagupata and chandagupata, a horse with so beneath it, a queen with a Pali legend, the Sanchi inscription of Chandragupta II, Kumaragupta’s Guptasya vijaya rāje on pillars, and the Guna inscription.
• Prayag pillar: Ashoka’s text at the top, Samudragupta’s below it, and, at the bottom, an inscription in Nagari by the Mughal emperor Jahangir. From this he says it “becomes clear” that Nagari and Sanskrit arose in the Mughal period.
• The Delhi iron pillar: written in Brahmi in the curved style of the late Gupta period, with the name Chandra. The government plaque calls the language Sanskrit but no one will say what the pillar actually says.

Scripts developing into Nagari

He treats the development of script as a visible chain.

1. Ashokan Dhamma lipi, pure and angular.
2. Gupta Dhamma lipi, rounder as writing “naturally” develops, as in Kumaragupta’s and Chandragupta II’s records.
3. Late Gupta and Huna-period writing, more curved (Mihirakula’s Gwalior inscription, the Delhi pillar).
4. Nalanda clay seals. The Gupta-period seal is in Dhamma lipi. A seal of about the 9th century reads Shri Nalanda Mahavihara in Nagari, but the letter ha is still in the old Dhamma form. Patel says this shows the conversion to Nagari was “still in progress.”
5. Pala-era Nagari on copper plates and stone slabs.

He includes James Prinsep’s chart of the development of the script. Where Nagari appears, he says, it is in Pali (before this time) or later Sanskrit, but never Brahmanical literature on stone or copper.

Decipherment: who could read the stones

Patel draws on Hazari Prasad Dwivedi’s Ashok ke Phool (1948, chapter 13) and D.N. Jha’s Prachin Bharat: Ek Rooprekha.

• In the 14th century Firoz Shah Tughlaq had two Ashokan pillars (Topra and Meerut) hauled to Delhi, but no pandit could read them.
• Akbar wanted the writing explained, but none of his court scholars, including Birbal, could read ancient scripts. This was in the era of Sayana (the first commentator on the Vedas), Ramananda and Tulsidas.
• When Sir William Jones sent an impression to the Governor at Benares, the city’s “best pandit” declared it to be the exile inscription of the Pandava Yudhishthira, and produced a “forged translation.”
• European scholars kept working. In 1834 Captain Troyer read part of Samudragupta’s Prayag inscription, and Dr Mill completed it. In 1837 Mill read Skandagupta’s inscription from Saidpur Bhitari, and James Prinsep read the Dhamma lipi that year.
• D.N. Jha writes in his preface that the writing of ancient Indian history began only after the East India Company, in the 18th century. Patel takes this to mean that traditional scholars knew nothing of the earlier record.

The question of writing materials

Before the Common Era, he says, everything was written on stone, because paper, copper plate, birch bark and palm leaf had not been invented. Ashoka’s writings are on stone, as are those of the Shungas, Satavahanas and Kushans. Gupta, Vardhana and Pala records are on stone, metal plates and clay seals, never paper.

Paper was first invented in China (called zhi), went to Arab lands (kāghaz), and reached Europe as paper. When the Turks brought it to India, the Brahmanical writers did not “refine” the name, unlike every Pali word that sounded like Buddhism. The “Brahmanical” literature, he says, is exclusively in Nagari and Sanskrit on paper. Nagari and Sanskrit texts on stone or copper from the Pala middle period exist, but they contain no Brahmanical literature.

The conclusions he draws

• No Panini, Chanakya, Kalidasa, Valmiki, Manu or Vyasa inscription exists on stone in Dhamma lipi.
• Pali and Dhamma lipi were the first known language and script. Sanskrit and Nagari come after them, with the full forms by the 9th-10th century and the heavily written tradition in the Mughal period.
• To claim that the Vedas, Ramayana and Mahabharata were composed millions of years ago, he says, is to claim a language with no grammar, script or alphabet. So the whole claim is a “bundle of delusion.”
• He repeats his demand that those who disagree make a serial and a book called Abhilekh ki Khoj (The Search for Inscriptions), showing the original stone or copper record of any Sanskrit verse, grammar or text.