Friday, June 12, 2015

Sanskrit Immortal

http://swarajyamag.com/columns/verses-which-produce-magic-when-re-read/

After explaining some chitrakaavya, the author Suhas Mahesh writes:

The Rāmāyaṇa is atleast 2500 years old. The hanumannāṭaka came more than 1500 years after it. And more than a millennium later came Rāma Śāstrī. And half a century later came Bacchu Subbarāyagupta. This literary chain may not seem unusual at first glance, yet it is an extraordinary thing to happen in a language. Languages come with lifetimes of less than a millennium. Old English is as intelligible to me as Hebrew. Reading Geoffrey Chaucer is like wading through quicksand. Time will ensure libraries move Shakespeare from the literature section to history section. But frozen in time by the spell of Pāṇini, only Classical Sanskrit will remain untouched. A few hundred years from now, a young boy (or girl), having taught himself Sanskrit, may decide to write a work to top Rāma Śāstrī. The poet to top Kālidasa may well be born a thousand years from now. My own descendants may spend a sunday afternoon, sipping soylent, and laughing at their ancestor’s metrical misadventures. How absurd it is to label such a language dead! Immortal is more like it.

Comments (4)

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Icelandic is virtually unchanged since the settlement times whereas Norwegian today very different (Icelandic is essentially Old Norwegian). Icelanders can - and do - read their oldest sagas today in much the same way they were read/recited when they were first written. I think this is an instance where physical insulation preserved a language.
Sanskrit may be immortal, but it is frozen. Therein lies the crux of the matter. In fact the examples cited by the author, as well as the conclusions he draws from these, prove this point.
2 replies · active 511 weeks ago
Frozen is a relative term - Newton's Principia has been translated into Sanskrit.
I'll give you a more appropriate (appropriate wrt the article you cite) example. Old Tamil literature (ca. 2nd C. E.) has been translated to Sanskrit by a little known Tamil and Sanskrit scholar (Sri. Sriramadesikan). These are certainly attempts to melt the language but despite all this, Sanskrit literary tradition hasn't gone beyond kāvya (of the style exemplified by Kālidāsa). Contrast this with Tamil and you'll see why I call Sanskrit frozen.

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