(The Blog is reverently for all the seekers of truth, lovers of wisdom and to share the Hindu Dharma with others on the spiritual path and also this is purely a non-commercial blog)
How Sanskrit reconnected me with my ancient and profound cultural heritage
(BY AATISH TASEER)
IGREW UP IN INDIA, where a cultural and linguistic break had
occurred. Between my grandparents’ and my parents’ generation there lay an
impervious layer of English education that prevented them from being able to
reach their roots. As the brilliant Sri Lankan art critic Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy
had written, “It is hard to realize how completely the continuity of Indian
life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to
break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial
being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong
to the East or the West.”
What
Coomaraswamy’s understanding meant for me was that the literary past of India
was locked. I could go back no further than fifty or sixty years. The work of
writers who had come before me—who had lived and worked in the places where I
am today—was beyond reach. Their ideas of beauty, their feelings for the
natural world, their notion of what literature was—all closed.
I
therefore knew nothing about the shared origins of Indo-European languages when
I first began to study Sanskrit at Oxford. I quickly became completely absorbed
in learning of this shared genesis of languages and of its decay, to which no
direct record remains.
I
would marvel at how the Sanskrit vid, from where we have vidiã, was related to the Latin
videre—to see—from where, in
turn, we have such words as video and vision; veda, too, of course. Or that
kãla—time and death—should
be derived from the Sanskrit kãl—to calculate or enumerate—which related
to the Latin kalendarium “account book,” and the
English calendar. It imparted to me the
suggestive notion that at the end of all our calculations comes death. Almost
as if kãla did not simply mean
time, but had built into it the idea of time’s passage, the counting of our
days.
The
little knowledge of Sanskrit I’d gained made the walls speak, and nothing was
the same again. For me, Sanskrit laid bare the deep tissue of language. Words
and names that had once seemed simple dissolved into their elements. Ksitaja, which meant “born of
the earth,” could be applied equally to an insect and a worm as well as the
horizon, for they are all earth-born. And dvija, twice born, could mean
a Brahmin, for he is born, and then born again when initiated; it could mean a
bird, who is born once when conceived and then again from an egg; and it could
also mean “tooth,” for teeth, it was plain to see, had two lives.
No
ancient culture thought harder about language than India; no culture had better
means to assess it. Nothing in old India went un-analyzed; no part of speech
was just a part of life. No word just slipped into usage and could not be
accounted for. This was the land of grammarians. And if today, in that same
country, men were without grammar, without means to assess language, it would
speak of a decay to be measured against the standards of India’s own past.
That
decay lay behind my excitement at discovering my linguistic and cultural roots
and glimpsing an underlying wholeness, a dream of unity that we humans can
never quite let go of. In India, where recent history has heaped confusion upon
confusion, where everything seems shoddy, haphazard and unplanned, the
structure of Sanskrit, with its exquisite perfection, is proof that it has not
always been that way. Sanskrit is like a little molecule of the Indian genius,
intact and saved in amber, for a country whose memory of it has departed.
( AATISH
TASEER, is a British-born writer, journalist, and
contributes to many publications, including Time Magazine, Prospect, Esquire and others.)
Om Tat Sat
(My humble salutations to Sadguru Sri Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
ji, Satguru Bodhianatha Velayanswami ji, Hinduism
Today and Articles writers for the collection)
(The Blog is reverently for all the seekers of truth,
lovers of wisdom and to share the Hindu Dharma with others on the
spiritual path and also this is purely a non-commercial blog)
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