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Sanskrit Research *
THE appearance of this Anglo-Sanskrit Quarterly "devoted to research
work in all fields of Indian Antiquity" is a welcome sign of the recent
development towards a . wider culture, a more flexible and strenuous
scholarship and a more original thinking which promises to lift the Indian mind
out of the rut of second-hand provincialism and sterile repetition of
commonplaces into which the vices of its school and university education had
betrayed it and to equip it for the important contribution we may expect it to
make to the world's increasing stock of knowledge. There has been a
considerable expansion in this country, both in English and the vernaculars, of
that ordinary periodical literature which caters for the popular mind and
supplies it with snippets of knowledge, facile information and ready but not
always very valuable opinions on all sorts of subjects. But there has been
hitherto little or nothing corresponding to those more serious publications
common in every European country which appeal to a more limited audience but
succeed in popularising within those limits a more serious and original
thinking and a more thorough knowledge in each branch of human enquiry.
Attempts have been made but, outside the field of religion and philosophy, they
have usually foundered in their inception for want of adequate support; they
have not found, as they would have found elsewhere, an interested circle of
readers. Now, however, there ought to be a sufficient number of cultivated
minds interested and competent in Sanskrit scholarship and the research into
Indian antiquity to ensure an adequate support and an increasing usefulness
for this new Quarterly. We regret that this review comes out very belated as it had to be held over last month for want of space. Page-290
and its sound editing and the value and interest of its. contents promise well
for its future. There are especially two very solid articles, one by Mr. Tilak
on "A Missing Verse in the Sankhya Karikas," and another by Professor
R.D. Ranade of the Ferguson College headed "Greek and Sanskrit: a
Comparative Study", but there is no article without its interest and value.
I note that in this number all the contributors, with one exception, are either
from Maharashtra or the Madras Presidency. It is to be hoped that the editor
will be able to secure the co-operation of Sanskrit scholars in the north so
that this Review may become an All- India organ of Indian research. Page-291
more indirectly from an interesting and carefully reasoned article by Mr. Y.
Subbarao on the question of the originality of Shan- kara's philosophy. Mr.
Subbarao seeks to establish his point that it was no new system of thought
which Shankara created, but only the restatement perhaps in a more developed
form of a very ancient school of Vedantic interpretation. Certainly, it cannot
be supposed that Shankara invented a new philosophy out of his own brain; he
believed himself to be establishing against attack the real sense of the
Vedantic philosophy founded on the original texts of its canon and supported by
the best tradition. Nor does any greater thinker really invent a system
new-born from his own intellect; what he does is to take up the material
available to him in the past history of thought, to choose, select, reject; to
present new light on old ideas, to develop latent suggestions, to bring into
prominence what was before less prominent or not so trenchant and definite, to
give a fresh, striking and illuminating sense to old terms, to combine what was
before not at all or else ill combined; in doing so he creates; his philosophy,
though not new in its materials, is new in the whole effect it produces and the
more powerful light that in certain directions it conveys to the thinking mind.
The question is whether Shankara's system was not new in this sense and, though
the previous material still subsisting is insufficient to decide the question,
it must, I think, be answered provisionally in the affirmative. Adwaitavada undoubtedly existed before, but it was the form Shankara gave it which made it a
clear, well-thought-out and powerfully trenchant philosophy and put his name at
the head of Indian metaphysicians. Page-292
in the actual fact of things, as different laws and generalisations are
arranged in Science, each positive in its own field and each having its proper
relation to the others. The perfection of this method is to be found in the Upanishads
and the Gita; and that is the reason why all attempts to interpret these great
works by the methods of logical debate and the rigorous exclusions dear to the
analytic metaphysician always fail even in the strongest hands; they raise
questions about the sense of these works which cannot be conclusively solved,
but must necessarily lead to eternal debate, because the method is wrong and
the original work itself never intended to cause or countenance such
discussions. Only a synthetic method of interpretation can explain a synthetic
and intuitive philosophy. Page-293 Prof. Ranade's article on Greek and Sanskrit carries us into another field,
that of Comparative Philology. His object is in a brief scope to establish the
identical origin of Greek and Sanskrit in that which is most essential in the
growth of a language, its grammatical forms and syntactical peculiarities. He
has had to allow himself only a very small space for so large and important a
subject, but within these narrow limits he has done his work with great
thoroughness and, subject to a few minor reservations, with a minute accuracy.
It is to be regretted that by printing the Greek words in their proper
character instead of in Roman type Mr. Ranade has made this interesting essay
unintelligible to all but a very few Indian readers. He lays down the principle
that the words of each language should be printed in its own type and that
anyone who wishes to study Comparative Philology must take the trouble to
familiarise himself with the original alphabets. This is a counsel of
perfection which is not practicable in India, nor indeed on any large scale in
Europe either. If for instance a scholar were dealing with the philology of the
Aryan languages and had to cite largely verbal forms both from the European
tongues and from Sanskrit and its Indian descendants he would be compelled on
this principle to require at least nine different types from the Press to which
he entrusted his work. No Press would be able to meet the demand and very few
even of his learned readers but would be baftled by the variety. Mr. Ranade
himself gives us German words and a German sentence, but not in the Gothic
character which alphabetical purism would demand. Page-294 but expressed them by the same characters, I do not think this can be correct.
The distribution of dentals and linguals in the various languages is one of the
most curious phenomena in the history of linguistic phonetics and deserves a
closer inquiry than has been accorded to it. The Latin and Celtic languages
reject the lingual and use only the dental; English on the other hand prefers
the linguals, though it uses occasionally the dental t, th and d, all
of which it represents by the, as in with, thin, though, - a
desperately clumsy device thoroughly in keeping with the chaotic wildness of
English orthography. Everyone in India knows the difficulty an Englishman finds
in pronouncing the Indian dentals; he turns them resolutely into linguals. On
the contrary a Frenchman who has not educated himself into the right English
pronunciation, will turn the English lingual into a dental; he will say feasth
instead of feast, noth instead of not, and pronounce do as
if it were the English though. A similar peculiarity is one of the chief
features of the brogue, the Irish mispronunciation of English speech; for the
natural Irish tongue cannot manage the hard lingual sound in such words as Peter
and shoulder, it mollifies them into true dentals. I have noticed
the same peculiarity in the pronunciation of a Spanish actress playing in
English on a London stage; otherwise perfect, it produced a strange impression
by its invariable transformation of the harder English into the softer Latin
sound. Now Greek must certainly have belonged to the Latin-Celtic group in this
phonetic peculiarity; otherwise the difference would have been too striking to
escape the sensitive ear of the ancient poets and scholars. It seems to me
therefore that in the comparative scheme of the two alphabets the Sanskrit
linguals should be marked as absent in the Greek and, not as Mr. Ranade represents
them, correspondent equally with the dentals to the Greek tau, theta, and
delta. Page-295 variation of the Greek language and it is misleading to study it by itself. As a matter of fact, this â and this ê both represent the same original sound which must have been the feminine termination in â; only the Doric dialect prefers always the original â, the Ionic modifies it into ê, and the Attic standing between the Doric and the Ionic belts makes a compromise. In the Attic when this feminine â is preceded by a vowel it remains unmodified, as also usually when it is preceded by r, but if it is preceded by a consonant it becomes ê; thus philiâ, choôrâ, but tîmê, kîmê. Ionic will say philiê and not philiâ; Doric tîmâ and not tîmê. This is enough to negative Mr. Ranade's identification of this Attic e with the Sanskrit feminine î. Certainly there are cases in which Sanskrit uses this î termination where Attic has the ê, as in ca turthī and tetartê; but this simply means that the Greek has rejected the Sanskrit deviation into the î form and kept to the more regular a which here too will appear in its pure form in the Doric.¹
In the comparison of tenses Mr. Ranade makes the rather curious assertion that
the Sanskrit Conditional does not occur in any other language except perhaps
German; but surely if the German "wurden getodet worden sein" corresponds
to the Sans- krit abhavisyat, the French conditionals e.g. auraient
été tués and the English "would have been killed" ought equally
to be considered as parallel syntactical constructions; they have the same
sense and with a slight difference the same form as the German. Page-296
Virgil describes the sea as velivolum, sail-flying, i.e. with sails
flying over it like the wings of birds through the air, but the usage
was too contrary to the Latin genius to succeed. Not only did the Greek
compound prepositions with its verbs, but it compounded nouns and verbs
together. Thus from nau-archos, ship-ruler, Le. admiral, they made nauarchein,
to be an admiral; nor did they hesitate before such forms as paidopoiein,
to beget children, paidotribein, to train boys, mnêsikakein, to
remember wrongs, neottotropheisthai, to be brought up like the young of
a bird. In fact with the exception of nominal dvandvas the Greek
illustrates all the main varieties of the Sanskrit compound. For it is capable
of such compounds as pseudo-martus, a false witness, pseudo-christos,
a false Christ, chauno-politês, a silly city; as andro-phonos, man-killing,
paid-oletôr, a destroyer of one's children, phusi-zoos, life-producing,
koruth-aiolos, helmet-glan- cing, lao-kataratos, cursed by the
people, thumo-leon, heart-lion, as anabadên and katabadên answering
to the Sanskrit avyayibhāva; as oxu-thumos, sharp-passioned, oxu-schoinos,
having sharp reeds, polu-teknos, having many children, io-stephanos,
violet-crowned. The language indeed pullulates with compounds. It is true
that they are usually composed of two members only, but compounds of three
members are found, as tris-kako-daimôn, thrice-evil-fated and
Aristophanes even perpetrates such forms as glischr-antilog-exepitriptos and
sphragid-onuch-argo-kometes. Page-297 or even common language does not prove common ethnic origin. The French and
Spaniards are not Latins nor the Irish of Dublin and Munster Anglo-Saxons. From
the 'possible causes of linguistic similarity which the writer has given he
has omitted one, conquest and cultural pressure. According to the theory of the
Italian ethnologist, Sergi, all the Mediterranean races of Northern Africa and
Southern Europe belong to one "Mediterranean" stock ancient and
highly civilised which was conquered by Aryan savages and this accounts for
their "Aryan" languages. It is the same theory that now prevails in a
different form with regard to the Aryan conquest of a highly civilised
Dravidian India. Philology can bring no sufficient argument to contradict it. Page-298 lisations and, above all, substituted a sounder though not yet entirely sound
critical method for the fantastic licence of the old unscientific philology
which, once it left the sure ground of grammar, was capable of anything and
everything however absurd or impossible. But much has to be learned and a great
deal more unlearned before we can measure ourselves with the physical scientist
or deserve his approval. It is here that much is to be hoped from the Indian
intellect which is more accustomed than the European to move with a penetrating
subtlety and accuracy in the things of the mind. But to justify the hope it must
first get rid on one side of its attachment to the methods of the Pundit and his
subservience to traditional authority and on the other not give itself bound
hand and foot to the method of the European scholar or imitate too
freely that swiftly leaping ingenious mind of his which gives you in a trice a
Scythian or a Persian Buddha, identifies conclusively Murghab and Maurya,
Mayasura and Ahura Mazda and generally constructs with magical rapidity the
wrong animal out of the wrong bone. We have to combine the laboriousness of the
Pundit, the slow and patient conscientiousness of the physical scientist
abhorrent of a too facile conclusion and the subtlety of the psychologist in
order to deserve the same success in these other sciences and to lift them
beyond the shifting field of conjecture. Page-299 |