Trials, tribulations & triumph of a cultural archeaologist - I

August 20, 2006

V SUNDARAM Barbara Tuchman, the great American woman historian rightly observes: Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilisation would have been impossible. They are agents of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print. These instructive and inspiring words are wholly applicable to 'AN ENTYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES' by Dr S Kalyanaraman and published by Asian Development Bank, Manila, Philippines. In more senses than one this is a landmark book in the world of languages, linguistics and culture. This book is a Multilanguage historical and cultural dictionary of South Asia; it is a lexicon; it is an encyclopaedia. To quote his own words: This is a

comparative dictionary covering all the languages of South Asia (which may also be referred to, in a geographical/historical sense as the Indian sub-continent ). This dictionary seeks to establish a semantic concordance, across the languages of numeraire facile of the South Asian sub-continent : from Brahui to Santali to Bengali, from Kashmiri to Mundarica to Sinhalece, from Marathi to Hindi to Nepali, from Sindhi or Panjabi or Urdu to Tamil. A semantic structure binds the languages of South Asia, which may have diverged morphologically or phonologically as evidenced in the oral tradition of Vedic texts, or epigraphy, literary works or lexicons of the historical periods. This dictionary, therefore goes beyond, the commonly held belief of an Indo-European language and is anchored on proto-South Asian sememes. Dr S Kalyanaraman The great pioneering Indologist Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1783, pronounced with authority

the underlying genetic relationship between the classical languages, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in his third Annual Discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal on the History and Culture of the Hindus in February 1786 when he made the following epoch-making observation: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure : more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident, so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from a common source, which perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be

added to the same family. Long before Sir William Jones in 1786, the 16th century Italian scholar Sassetti apparently studied Sanskrit calling it 'a pleasant musical language' and uniting Deo with Deva. In the 17th century, the Dutch protestant missionary, Abraham Rogerius, published in 1651 the translation of Bhartrihari in Europe for the first time. So we find many Catholic missionaries of South India, French and Belgian, studying a little Sanskrit, and mixing with Tamil, producing the faked Ezour Vedam , the target of Voltaire's criticism; and Anquitil du Perron, visiting India before Sir William Jones, provoked the latter's sarcastic criticism of premature handling of Sanskrit texts. As early as 1725 we find the German missionary (translator of the Bible into Tamil) Benjamin Schultze emphasising the similarity between the numerals of Sanskrit, German and Latin. Another remarkable Englishman, Horne Tooke, in his 'Diversions of Purley ' in 1786

anticipated Bopp and other pioneers of Comparative Grammar. The German traveller, Pallas, worked out the project of the mathematician-philopher Leibniz (1646 - 1716) and published 'Comparative Vocabularies of all the Languages of the World' in 1787. This uncritical work was soon superseded by the German grammarian-philosopher Adelung's Mithridates or General Science of Languages, published in four volumes between 1806 and 1817. Dr S Kalyanaraman legitimately belongs to this great tradition of philologists and lexicographers, dictionary-compilers, etymologists, scholars and savants. He has compiled this unique, multilingual dictionary of the Dravidian, Arian and Mundarica language families which he took 18 years to complete. It has been published in three volumes, running to over 2000 pages with nearly 5 lakh words from over 25 ancient languages. This work covers over 8000 semantic clusters which span and bind the South Asian Languages. The basic finding is

that thousands of terms of the Vedas, the Munda languages (eg.Santali, Mundarica, Soral), the so-called Dravidian languages and the so-called Indo-Aryan languages have common roots. This dictionary called Indian Lexicon has also been made available on the internet. He declares with humility: The author assumes full responsibility for the semantic and etymological judgements made and the errors that might have crept in with thousands of database iterations in organizing the semantic clusters found in the word lists (the lexicon includes over half-a-million Indian words). The author hopes that with the impossibility of 'dating' the origin of a word, all its inherent limitations, the omissions, intentional or otherwise and errors that will in due course be pointed out by scholars specialized in their fields, the Indian Lexicon will be a tentative, but bold start of a skeleton dictionary of the Indian linguistic area ca. 3000 B.C. and will be expanded further to include modern

words. Dr S Kalyanaraman was born on 20 October 1939. His mother tongue is Tamil. But all his school and under graduate education was in Telugu and Sanskrit in Andhra Pradesh. He is conversant with Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and Sanskrit languages. He graduated from Annamalai University in Economics and Statistics. He has a Doctorate in Public Administration from the University of the Philippines and his thesis Public Administration in Asia, a comparative study of development administration in six Asian countries ?? India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines. He joined the Asian Development bank in 1978. Earlier he was a Member of the Indian Railway Accounts Service from 1962. During the last 11 years, starting from 1995, he has been working on Sarasvati River Research Project through his Sarasvati Sindhu Research Centre in Chennai. Ever since his return to India in 1995 and his presentation of a paper in the 10th World Sanskrit

Conference on his research findings, he has devoted himself to promoting projects for the revival of the Sarasvati River. Apart from the massive multilingual dictionary of South Asian languages, Dr Kalyanaraman has also authored several volumes on Sarasvati Culture and Civilisation. His other notable work is Indian Alchemy: Soma in the Veda. He has also contributed to Professor Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya's multi-volume work on History of Science and Technology in Ancient India To return to Dr Kalyanaraman's Multilingual Etymological Dictionary of South Asian languages once again. The history of civilization is more than a tally of our dynasties, governments, wars, class struggles and cultural movements. Dr Kalyanaraman proves through this book that it is also the story of how human beings in the South Asian Region have learned to develop and operate systems of reference and information retrieval that are external to the brain. According to current

estimates, Homo has been in existence for about 2 million years, although it may not have become Sapiens till around 100,000 years ago. If this estimate is reliable, then for 99.75% of the existence of the species Homo and for some 95% of the time that it has been Sapiens, there were no external systems at all. The brain with its erratic memory was the only apparatus available for knowing, referring and recording??and that was the natural state of things. The bulk of our ancestors would have found anything else unimaginable, and for some aboriginal peoples today, in remote areas, this statement still holds true. This Etymological Dictionary clearly brings out the fact that language in the region which Dr Kalyanaraman has covered has been the master tool which man, in his endless adventure after knowledge and power, has shaped for himself, and which, in its turn, has shaped the human mind as we see it and know it. It has continuously extended and conserved the

store of knowledge upon which mankind has drawn. It has furnished the starting point of all our science. In this context the great words of L.S.Amery come to my mind: 'Language has been the instrument of social cohesion and of moral law, and through it human society has developed and found itself. Language, indeed, has been the soul of mankind'. We learn from Dr.Kayanaraman's Himalayan effort that language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous works of unconscious generations. Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Language is itself the collective art of expression, a summary of thousands upon thousands of individual intuitions. George Steiner in his great work Language and Silence observed: 'Languages code immemorial reflexes and twists of feeling, remembrances of action that transcend individual recall, contours of communal experience as subtly decisive as the contours of sky and land in which a

civilization ripens. Any outsider can master a language as a rider masters his mount; he rarely becomes as one with its undefined, subterranean motion'. Eros and Language mesh at every point. Intercourse and discourse, copula and copulation, are sub-classes of the dominant fact of communication'. As a learned and dedicated etymologist, Dr Kalyanaraman finds the deadest word in the South Asian Region to have been once a brilliant picture. We are delighted to learn at his feet that every language is indeed fossil poetry. (To be continued...)

(The writer is a retired IAS officer) e-mail the writer at vsundaram (AT) newstodaynet (DOT) com

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