Languages-lost and found

I have always been surrounded by storytellers. My parents were excellent storytellers, so were my two sisters and even my husband.  No wonder on most important issues of life, I cannot think without thinking of a parable. Today when I plan to write about the languages, their purity, their extinction and use…some of the most memorable tales of my childhood come to my mind.

I will narrate the one I love most. Gunadhyay was a minister to satvahana king Gautamiputra Sātakarni (also known as Shalivahan) in first century AD. One day young king was playing in water with his wives. The queen pleaded with him not to throw any more water on her (modaikah), which the king in his ignorance of laws of verbal conjugation in Sanskrit took for request for sweetmeats (modaka). The queen laughed at his ignorance . King’s ego was badly hurt and he decided to master Sanskrit at the earliest. Gunadhyay promised him desired proficiency in 6 years but Gunadhyay's rival Katantra came with a proposal for 6 months to master the language. Overconfident Gunadhyay vows not to use Sanskrit, Prakrit or any vernacular ever again if the deed is done.  But the King mastered Sanskrit language under Katantra's tutelage and Gunadhyay was forced to leave the city of Pratishthan (present Paithan) to wander disconsolate in the Vindhyas. Later he met Kanabhuti and learnt a lesser known Paishachi language to write his stories. He sent a collection of his stories to his king. The king , now a master in Sanskrit, insulted the language in which it was written and sent it back without reading. Heartbroken and insulted , Gunadhay started reading his stories to the animals and then burning them. The legend goes that the animals listened to those stories and were so mesmerized that they stopped eating and moving. The news reached the King who rushed to save the stories. By the time he found Gunadhyay, 6 lakh stories were already lost in fire. The remaining ones,  today form Vrahat katha- a compilation which inspired Kathasaritsagar and many such compilations. As a child, I wondered how powerful this Paishachi language would have been. Today Paishachi - a form of Prakrit, is an extinct language. It is mentioned as a medium of debate and literary expression in various Theravada Buddhist sources, and in Prakrit and Sanskrit grammars of antiquity. But still, we lost it, perhaps forever.

I resist telling other equally fascinating stories about birth of a new Sanskrit grammar or about lust for learning a puritan language – stories of Panini and of Kalidasa. The point I am driving at is about our languages- old and new, changing with the times, losing their original character- developing in few forms, losing identity in most others . How our tradition tells us about people who loved them, preserved them, revered them and passed them on to next generations! Then somewhere we lost this penchant for the spoken word. Our languages world-over are losing their strength. Some are lost others are in a process of being extinct.

Languages are much more than just a medium of expression. They tell you so much about the people who spoke them. They are a mirror of people’s perception. In my class of Philology in the University, we learnt about the relation of different languages, their history and development. It was extremely enlightening.

Now that I try to recall, it must have been in middle school that I first  thought about the delicate matter of languages- the impact of not getting them right. It was when I came to know about Harappan Script and how it is yet to be deciphered. I looked at those pictorial alphabets and wondered what people who wrote them were trying to convey. In all probability, they narrate daily transactions and instructions. This is unlikely that the authors had any intention of spreading their word for  times to come. But then, what is so tough in those signs, those symbols of daily life that we are unable to find meaning behind them. Why we could not try all permutations and combinations to break the code behind these symbols.  It’s not that no one ever fell in love with these undeciphered languages and their mystery. I can think of Iravadan Mahadevan , a former IAS officer of 1954 batch who dedicated his life for study of Indus script and Brahmi. I can also think of one of world's greatest experts on the Indus script, Asko Parpola, who has been studying this undeciphered writing for over 30 years at the University of Helsinki in Finland. But despite some such people , despite our advancement in technology and our power of computing , we are unable to get back the tongues of the past. We are unable to do so, because the link of passing them on - was broken. May be no one was interested in knowing them anymore. May be they were tongues of people who lost the war. Of people who do not matter anymore. Of people whose thoughts and expressions were not considered important to be understood. And it happened everywhere on the earth .

    Sometimes I feel that my generation is ungrateful. We do not respect what we inherited- be in monuments, skills, traditions or anything else. But then, perhaps each generation was like that ….and who knows how complete our inheritance was in case of languages. Till James Princep conclusively deciphered Kharoshthi in the middle of 19th Century, we knew little about 600 odd years of our history. Many pre-biblical scrolls are yet to be read . Very few are interested in them. Leave aside them, very few care to learn languages just for the love of it.
Once I heard a story of Pt. Sakal Narayan Shastri, an upcountry Brahmin who came to Kolkata looking for employment. Someone suggested him to meet the Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University – legendary lawyer Ashutosh Mukherjee . The VC asked him what all he has read. The answer was simple- “Published-I have read all, unpublished- whatever I could lay my lands on.” It took the university administration sometime to decide in which department such a person can be placed. He knew many languages, arts, philosophies and more. One hears about many others of that generation, who painstakingly learnt and mastered the languages .
Then we also know how like everything else the love for languages is also politicized in today's world. Languages are looked upon as a political tool. They are imposed on people in tthe packaged deal for education, employment etc. While I appreciate the sentiment that people consider language as such an important ingredient of their identity, I can never appreciate why they need to compete .e.g. the biggest disservice to Hindi was done when it was made Rajbhasha and was imposed on people. It harmed the language , made more people resist it, made more people against it. It nearly killed the literature of the language. Knowing Hindi become a profession after all. At the end of it - we have hundreds of Hindi Officers, Hindi academies, Hindi Directorates, Hindi Pakhwaras  but very few Hindi lovers. Even those who speak it as their first language - do not feel proud of it. Do not know it too well. I wonder how many of us would be able to recall the old devnagari script in which Hindi was written just about a hundred years back. And yet, no one learns by this experience. Each regional language and its speakers only think of making institutions to spread their tongues- no one really cares to spread the love for the languages- all of them. Going this way , we might just  turn more people away from the languages - from the joy of it, the thrill of understanding the symbols and scripts and the history they carry with them.