tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40706436896659617122024-03-27T17:44:10.913-07:00India arts & literatureநா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-72723140948901975222020-06-18T17:46:00.001-07:002020-06-19T02:58:53.909-07:00ellis-inscription<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">எல்லீசன் கல்வெட்டு</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">-------------------------------</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">பாரெலா
நிழற்று பரியரிக் குடையோன்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>வாரியுஞ் சிறுக வருபடைக் கடலோன்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">ஆர்கடலதிர
வார்த்திடுங் கப்பலோன்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">மரக்கல
வாழ்வின் மற்றொப்பிலாதோன்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">தனிப்பெருங்
கடற்குத் தானே நாயகன்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">தீவுகள்
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<![endif]--><span style="color: magenta; font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">புரப்போன்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>தன்னடி நிழலிற் றங்கு பல்லுயிர்க்குந்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">தாயிலு
மினியன் றந்தையிற் சிறந்தோன்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>நயநெறி நீங்கா நாட்டார் மொழிகேட்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">டுயர்செங்
கோலும் வழாமை யுள்ளோன்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: magenta; font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">மெய்மறை</span><span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">
யொழுக்கம் வீடுறா தளிப்போன் </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>பிரிதன்னிய சுகோத்திய <span style="color: magenta;">விபானியமென்னு</span>
</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">மும்முடி
தரித்து முடிவி லாத</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>திக்கனைத் துந்தனிச் சக்கர நடாத்தி</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">யொருவழிப்
பட்ட வொருமை யாளன்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">வீர
சிங்கா தனத்து வீற்றிருந் தருளிய</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>சோர்சென் னுமூன்றா மரசற்கு 57ஆம் ஆண்டில்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">காலமுங்
கருவியுங் கருமமுஞ் சூழ்ந்து</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">வென்றியோடு
பொருள்புகழ் மேன்மேற் பெற்று</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>கும்பினியார் கீழ்ப்பட்ட கனம்பொ ருந்திய</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">யூவெலயத்
தென்பவ னாண்ட வனாக</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">சேர
சோழ பாண்டி யாந்திரங்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>கலிங்க துளுவ கன்னாட கேரளம்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">பணிக்கொடு
துரைத்தனம் பண்ணுநாளில்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">சயங்கொண்ட
தொண்டிய சாணுறு நாடெனும்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>ஆழியில் இழைத்த வழகுறு மாமணி</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">குணகடன்
முதலாக குட கடலளவு</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">நெடுநிலம்
தாழ நிமிர்ந்திடு சென்னப்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>பட்டணத்து எல்லீசன் என்பவன் யானே</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">பண்டார
காரிய பாரம் சுமக்கையில்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>புலவர்கள் பெருமான் மயிலையம் பதியான்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">தெய்வப்
புலமைத் திருவள் ளுவனார்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">திருக்குறள்
தன்னில் திருவுளம் பற்றிய்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“இருபுனலும் <span style="color: magenta;">வாய்ந்த</span>
மலையும் வருபுனலும் </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">வல்லரணும்
நாட்டிற் குறுப்பு”</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">என்பதின்
பொருளை என்னுள் ஆய்ந்து</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: magenta; font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">ஸ்வஸ்திஶ்ரீ ஶாலிவாஹந ஶகாப்த ௵ 1740ச் செல்லாநின்ற இங்க்லிஸ் ௵
1818ம் ஆண்டில் ப்ரபவாதி<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>௵-ம்க்கு மேற்<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>செல்லாநின்ற பஹுதாந்ய ௵-த்தில் வார திதி நக்ஷத்ர
யோக கரணம் பார்த்து ஶுப திநத்தி லிதனோடி ருபத்தேழு துரவு கண்டு புண்ணியாஹவாசநம் பண்ணுவித்தேன்</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "vijaya" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">1818</span></div>
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<![endif]-->நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-36645814713860216762018-07-29T20:18:00.003-07:002018-07-29T23:04:38.752-07:00ko-balachandran-ias<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-13187162718459311112011-05-20T17:22:00.000-07:002011-05-23T19:43:21.221-07:00Dravidian Languages written in Grantha scriptTamil is written in the following scripts: Tamil, Arabic, Tamil Grantha and Roman.<br />It can also transliterated into Devanagari script in Unicode.<br /><br />A 1289 AD example of Tamil being written in Grantha script:<br />[Begin Quote]<br />Curiously enough we find a copper-plate grant containing an inscription having Sanskrit and Tamil sections both written in the Grantha script [11]. The date of the record falls in 1289 AD. <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Tamil portion is entirely transliterated in Grantha script following only the written form</span> and *not* the form of pronunciation.<br /><br />[11] Ep. Ind., XXXVII, pp. 175 ff<br />**<br />[End Quote]<br />(from pg. 243. “Convertibility of surds and sonants”—historical evidence,<br />Dr. K. G. Krishnan (Dept. of Epigraphy, Mysore, India)- Indo-Iranian Journal, 1972).<br /><br />The Grantha script is what gave rise to both the modern Tamil and Malayalam scripts.<br />The earlier (e.g., 18-19th centuries) Grantha script has minor font variations,<br />one on the East coast (Tamil Nadu) and another on the West coast (Kerala).<br /><br />Florian Coulmas, Writing systems: an introduction to their linguistic analysis,<br />Cambridge University Press, 2003, Page 150<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgDTCdrQMcUEbHahYh2Bcq2RWn53hlpk9ke1Wa4KsdQlJFVd4KuYiSNSCMvZncAjiSRbZ0ZnKoXxf9-E81bIR6GW0mGK3FEi250hGqdZK4k1RI1a0gaqXZhsRVA5Hd-XWcSQb6RBuVnok/s1600/Tamil.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 450px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgDTCdrQMcUEbHahYh2Bcq2RWn53hlpk9ke1Wa4KsdQlJFVd4KuYiSNSCMvZncAjiSRbZ0ZnKoXxf9-E81bIR6GW0mGK3FEi250hGqdZK4k1RI1a0gaqXZhsRVA5Hd-XWcSQb6RBuVnok/s400/Tamil.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5608958476390681362" /></a><br /><br clear="left" /><br /><br />Stanford B. Steever, The Dravidian languages, pg. 45, London: Taylor & Francis, 1998<br /><br />" Another line of development is reflected in the Chera and Pallava scripts of South India, dating from fifth to eighth centuries CE. This eventually took the form of the Grantha script (from a Sanskrit word meaning 'book'), which predominated especially in the Madras area. <span style="font-weight:bold;">A Western variety of Grantha is the ancestor of the modern Malayalam system, and an eastern variety of Grantha was formerly used to write Tamil.</span>"<br /><br />Isaac Taylor (1829-1901), The alphabet: an account of the origin and development<br />of letters. Vol. 2, page 356,<br /><br />"From this lapidary alphabet two scripts were developed, a cursive and literary script. The first is represented by the Tamil, <span style="font-weight:bold;">while the other has developed into the Grantha or 'book' alphabet used by the Tamil Brahmans for the Sanskrit transcriptions of their sacred books. From it are derived two vernacular alphabets which are used on the Malabar coast; one is the Tulu Grantha (line 23), and the other the Malayalam, </span>from which several characters were borrowed by the Christians of St. Thomas in order to supplement the Syriac (Karshuni) alphabet which they obtained from the Nestorian missionaries (see vol. i., p. 293.)<br /> The great Tamil alphabet occupies the extreme south of India."<br /><br />Student's Brittanica India, 5 volumes, Dale Hoiberg and Indu Ramchandani,<br />pg. 349 has the entry on Malayalam language.<br /><br />Of particular interest is the fact that Malayalam is also written using Tamil Grantha script.<br /><br />pg. 349, Malayalam language:<br />"The earliest record of the language is an inscription dated to AD c. 830. An early extensive influx of Sanskrit words influenced the Malayalam script (derived from the Grantha script, itself derived from Brahmi): it has letters to represent all the Sanskrit sounds, besides the Dravidian sounds. The language also uses a script called Kolezhuttu (Rod script), which is derived from the Tamil writing system. <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Tamil Grantha script is used as well</span>."<br /><br /><strong>Dravidian letters in Grantha script - history</strong><br /><br />Some social factors that Dravidian letters came to be written inside Grantha script are described by prof. S. N. Sadasivan that may be of interest.<br /><br />Dr. S. N. Sadasivan, A social history of India,<br />A. P. H. Publishing Co., N. Delhi, 2002, pg. 604<br /><br />" Malayalam rose from the status of a dialect to an independent language in the 9th century. The first script of Malayalam, as a dialect, was Vattezuttu (circular<br />or spherical writing) of Njanamonam which was the contribution of Buddhists. Between the 3rd century AD and the 9th century, Vattezuttu was the only alphabet and even in the early part of the 19th century, it was used for official records. By the 15th century, another script came into vogue, the Kolezuttu (long script) which however could not replace the Vattezuttu nor could it become popular. A third group of letters the Grantha-lipi (book script) was said to have been introduced at the instance of the Btrhamins because they wanted to dissociate from the Buddhist Vattezuttu and the later Kolezuttu obviously of non-Brahmin origin.<br /><br /> However by the 16th century the non-Brahmins, the Sudras and the Ezhavas in particular, avidly learned the Grantha lipi and used it for extensive writing. Modern Malayalam script is the reformed Grantha letters popularized by Tunchat<br />Ezhuttaccan."<br /><br />A. C. Burnell, Elements of South Indian Paleography, 1874. page 37, “The origin of this Tamil alphabet is apparent at first sight; it is a brahmanical adaptation of the Grantha letters corresponding to the old VaTTezuttu, from which, however, the last four signs (LLL, LL, RR and NNN) have been retained.”<br /><br />Tamil Grantha is a script capable of writing both Dravidian (Tamil, Malayalam, ...) and Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit, Prakrit, ...) languages. For the Grantha being used for early Malayalam - a Dravidian language -, old Latin book (1772) Alphabetum grandonico-malabaricum sive samscrudonicum. Clemente, di Gesù; Giovanni Cristoforo Amaduzzi, 1772 Latin Book xxviii, 100 p. viii fold. pl. 19 cm.<br /><br />P. Visalakshy, The Grantha script, Dravidian Linguistics Association, St. Xavier's College, University of Kerala, 2003.<br /><br />Page 68:<br /><br />" Considering the shape of letters, Grantha script can be classified into two varieties, the square and the round, The square variety was more popular among the Hindus and the round variety among the Jains of Arcot and Chennai regions. <span style="font-weight:bold;">The famous work 'Alphabetum Grondonico Malabaricum' printed in 1772 in the Polyglot Press, Rome is in the Grantha script and the letters of this work are of the square variety. </span>Depending upon the geographical variations, the Grantha script can be broadly classified into four types: the Pallava, the Cola, the Pandya and the Tulu-Malayalam."<br /><br />For Grantha being used for writing Tamil, T. P. Meenakshisundaram's, J. R. Marr,<br />J. Filliozat references.நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-81471098356315610362011-05-16T03:38:00.001-07:002011-05-20T05:53:21.818-07:00PuLLi, a diacritic in GranthaPuLLi, a dot is a very old diacritic in Tamil Grantha script. Its use as a <span style="font-weight:bold;">reducer diacritic</span> for reducing vowel-length or inherent vowel /a/ from akshara (syllable) is defined in many Tamil grammar books across centuries for the last 2000+ years. This posting is to documentation the PuLLi (dot) diacritic in Grantha. This ancient <span style="font-style:italic;">PuLLi</span> diacritic for generating short e and o vowels can be contrasted with the situation in Devanagari script where various NEW solutions are tried - for example, European tilde or breve signs are imported today. But in Tamil Grantha, this is NOT the case. A. C. Burnell, Elements of South Indian Paleography, 1874. page 37, “The origin of this Tamil alphabet is apparent at first sight; it is a brahmanical adaptation of the Grantha letters corresponding to the old VaTTezuttu, from which, however, the last four signs (LLL, LL, RR and NNN) have been retained.”<br /><br />An example of PuLLi diacritic on Grantha letters in print:<br /><br />Govt. of India proposal on Grantha (L2/10-426) has a Nukta combining sign, which is an import from Persia, at U+1133C which is to help make Grantha letters write English letters, Z, W and F in proper transliteration. Nukta is brand new for Grantha, and not found at all in old books and manuscripts. Also the proposal has the native and much more ancient puLLi diacritic for short E and O vowels. The puLLi “dot” diacritic has been applied on Grantha letters in print long ago. For example, see the book, T. S. Naraya Sastry, Bhoja Charitram (Mylapore, Madras, 1900) (available at Google books also):<br /><br />(p. xiii)<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGWn91D5OlzB_A3svhjEe-IdKhTYwMbznrbfKBa66EU-CmLzisDxhc-6uJ_Q0ewipDQM0q9hUboLYt026KO87R9hPD4Gv8tZPGIlWF2xlc5qKurW1Ug3GbfydJpqNe98xunLIv-vTpkeo/s1600/110341.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 294px; height: 30px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGWn91D5OlzB_A3svhjEe-IdKhTYwMbznrbfKBa66EU-CmLzisDxhc-6uJ_Q0ewipDQM0q9hUboLYt026KO87R9hPD4Gv8tZPGIlWF2xlc5qKurW1Ug3GbfydJpqNe98xunLIv-vTpkeo/s400/110341.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607262272537893570" /></a><br /><br clear="left" /><br />śṛṇudhvam gadatō mē 'dya<br /><br />(p. xiv)<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7cxtmpHTeDocNGbwXeShsC1xzMJud487283rOfUqcUccvprzz_8oRgNwuMToeac9St938uu4BIyxYiPLnius3hiLD1kgPeibMIA9piR2y90bBa9rZzrsZc2zIS_RlR44c2tCQhZLc9lY/s1600/110342.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 43px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7cxtmpHTeDocNGbwXeShsC1xzMJud487283rOfUqcUccvprzz_8oRgNwuMToeac9St938uu4BIyxYiPLnius3hiLD1kgPeibMIA9piR2y90bBa9rZzrsZc2zIS_RlR44c2tCQhZLc9lY/s400/110342.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607262196819093602" /></a><br /><br clear="left" /><br />vyāghravat vyagara karmakṛt ||<br /><br />(p. xiii)<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL6TtFJ5fBE53LcbxCDSCgo4u6yLzUeTWlmxNz1wvDF9OpqPt0J3dit5BO0IeDtMot2ZZEg3qqFbgc7qhHwpmls7FS5tX02mPW01F1xstAo1Fl3J4_afBkbfvqXiyjCQBAbbi-Kl_F8PM/s1600/110343.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 47px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL6TtFJ5fBE53LcbxCDSCgo4u6yLzUeTWlmxNz1wvDF9OpqPt0J3dit5BO0IeDtMot2ZZEg3qqFbgc7qhHwpmls7FS5tX02mPW01F1xstAo1Fl3J4_afBkbfvqXiyjCQBAbbi-Kl_F8PM/s400/110343.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607262109660729362" /></a><br /><br clear="left" /><br />asabhyaiḥ prāviśan niśi |<br /><br />Normally, the PuLLi diacritic will be missing in South India, as creating a hole in palm leafs will destroy the writing material sooner. Hence it is normally left out, but is employed in print. <br /><br />For long, Tamil letters have been added in Brahmi scripts to write Dravidian properly. This is acknowledged in Unicode encoding, for example, Brahmi encoding in Unicode allots separate code points for Tamil/Dravidian letters. In addition to the “vowel reducer” diacritic, Tamil puLLi to generate short /e/ and /o/ vowels in Brahmi in Unicode encoding, S. Baums and A. Glass added the Tamil letters in Brahmi code chart in Unicode (pg. 8-9, L2/07-342):<br /><br />“For the representation of sounds particular to Dravidian, the makers of Old Tamil Brahmi added four new consonant signs to the repertoire of Brahmi: LLL, LL, RR and<br />NNN. The second of these, LL, is phonetically identical (a retroflex lateral) to the LL that somewhat later appears in north-Indian Brahmi for the writing of Sanskrit, and that also occurs in the Bhattiprolu inscriptions. Moreover, both the Tamil Brahmi and the Bhattiprolu LL are graphically derived from the regular letter l, the former by adding a hook to the lower right of l, the latter by mirroring l horizontally (while the north-Indian LL is derived from the letter DD). Old Tamil, Bhattiprolu and north-Indian LL should therefore all be encoded as 11031. Additional code points are provided for LLL, RR and NNN in the positions 11072 to 11074.”<br /><br />“A special device was introduced for the marking of vowelless consonants, used both for Sanskrit and Tamil. In Sanskrit, this sign is called virama and is first attested in manuscripts of the first century CE. In Tamil, it is called puLLi and is attested in inscriptions from the second century CE (Mahadevan 2003, p. 198).” (pg. 4).<br /><br />“In the second century BCE, as Brahmi spread southwards, speakers of Old Tamil became acquainted with it and adapted it to the writing of their own language.” (pg. 7).<br /><br />“PuLLi takes the form of a dot above or in the upper part of the akSara. In addition to this normal virama function, puLLi is also used with the vowels e and o in order to mark them as short: in contrast to Sanskrit and most Middle-Indo-Aryan dialects, the Dravidian languages have short as well as long e and o phonemes.” In the Brahmi encoding, puLLi function and its shape “dot” to reduce long /e/ and /o/ to short vowels is allowed in Unicode (S. Baums and A. Glass, L2/07-342, pg. 8, L2/07-342).<br /><br />A 13th century example of Tamil written in Grantha orthography.<br /><br />" Curiously enough we find a copper-plate grant containing an inscription having Sanskrit and Tamil sections both written in the Grantha script [11]. The date of the record falls in 1289 AD. The Tamil portion is entirely transliterated in Grantha script following only the written form and *not* the form of pronunciation<br />*." <br /><br />[11] Ep. Ind., XXXVII, pp. 175 ff<br />**<br /> (pg. 243. “Convertibility of surds and sonants”—historical evidence, K. G. Krishnan - Indo-Iranian Journal, 1972)<br /><br /><br />Table giving Visual Representation of short E and O and the corresponding vowel signs<br />in Grantha, Devanagari and Tamil scripts:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW5xQmA8GCGw9ydgDfWcRJW6pL_YV1Bc4rXkW7bbGsIbHtWOydyyzsBEuDIq8m9fS83MR9QwrzcbkBG03QWiSCtU82uD4osfrP4txLFpxsUkRI1DSStIejFi23c-glpcO0wtvC9QTaoqM/s1600/11011eo.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 600px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW5xQmA8GCGw9ydgDfWcRJW6pL_YV1Bc4rXkW7bbGsIbHtWOydyyzsBEuDIq8m9fS83MR9QwrzcbkBG03QWiSCtU82uD4osfrP4txLFpxsUkRI1DSStIejFi23c-glpcO0wtvC9QTaoqM/s400/11011eo.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607261992243078530" /></a> <br clear="left" /> It should be noted that Tamil E and O differ from the older Grantha E and O because of the reform introduced by a Jesuit priest from Italy. "The famous Jesuit Beschi (1704-1774) is the author of a great improvement in Tamil orthography – the distinction between long and short e & o.” (pg. 37A. C. Burnell, Elements of South Indian Paleography, 1874). <br /><br />Even after Beschi in mid-18th century, PuLLi diacritic for short E and O vowels<br />and vowel signs continue to be used. For example,<br />Ancient and Modern Alphabets of the Popular Hindu Alphabets of the Southern<br />Peninsula of India, Capt Henry Harkness, 1837, Royal Asiatic Society, pp. 1 & 2.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Tsol0k8yJJdoJAQWWVhyBL_Gwqh8FSPecpehbfP99TQalMfqxwL6TAoI0QtiPOi1O4BYvE933pfhdXXenN5iRku07ZBxPvpTwXnfU3fE0zdtXHWc5Ku6ke2_dcdD8haQOD_pgobd1hI/s1600/120.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 60px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Tsol0k8yJJdoJAQWWVhyBL_Gwqh8FSPecpehbfP99TQalMfqxwL6TAoI0QtiPOi1O4BYvE933pfhdXXenN5iRku07ZBxPvpTwXnfU3fE0zdtXHWc5Ku6ke2_dcdD8haQOD_pgobd1hI/s400/120.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607369403347719090" /></a> <br clear="left" /><br /><br />Grantha has 2 fonts in Unicode blocks: James Kass (PUA) & Elmar Kniprath (Bengali). Both of them have short E and O vowels and matra signs with PuLLi dot diacritic. See for example, Kniprath's font writing south Indian place names:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWewUxGSQrmT70LOD4Kl8XotnUQFLaXMON05BMmXQQpN6_tCW5uY-5z5e-nuIkX0LnnbhhlFHPKiD-fKHeWLuLMpxefGOvuI68uYuR0kZHwcreJYuUmDHLvdiTAdz6GP2Ryd5ljRgK2gE/s1600/121.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 58px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWewUxGSQrmT70LOD4Kl8XotnUQFLaXMON05BMmXQQpN6_tCW5uY-5z5e-nuIkX0LnnbhhlFHPKiD-fKHeWLuLMpxefGOvuI68uYuR0kZHwcreJYuUmDHLvdiTAdz6GP2Ryd5ljRgK2gE/s400/121.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607369092093752946" /></a>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-41770584349036457992011-05-15T14:45:00.001-07:002011-05-19T20:24:47.639-07:00llla<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7kQkPx_eGlocv8_o-A3VChgnaUmAR6IXrhbazpHv-ch-rxx10gNF_gAmYJWCxK25d5C111VtX5O41J7PmxBZodl_oacjCZq429D1oCiSBpb9GmtW2_hig-2n7SzM1J6ZpHm9PIQPhOBk/s1600/Jaiminiiya-prayoga-vivaraNa+in+grantha%252C+p.+145.jpeg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7kQkPx_eGlocv8_o-A3VChgnaUmAR6IXrhbazpHv-ch-rxx10gNF_gAmYJWCxK25d5C111VtX5O41J7PmxBZodl_oacjCZq429D1oCiSBpb9GmtW2_hig-2n7SzM1J6ZpHm9PIQPhOBk/s400/Jaiminiiya-prayoga-vivaraNa+in+grantha%252C+p.+145.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607062876354160642" /></a><br /><br clear="left" /><br /><br />Transliteration:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikaKhbVvQAEII9qAr9YUexoJbsnoceMHIesR32aslYqN1oxAQG8CO16vayw8deXOWaXLyzQlcx5xoY_xhY7OhJR5yT2w0NJcaKUqrlvNOBKZYHnkEu8NXR7j3b8joZ5tgpqkb6mCn2H3Q/s1600/JaiminIyaprayogavivaraNa+p+145.jpeg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikaKhbVvQAEII9qAr9YUexoJbsnoceMHIesR32aslYqN1oxAQG8CO16vayw8deXOWaXLyzQlcx5xoY_xhY7OhJR5yT2w0NJcaKUqrlvNOBKZYHnkEu8NXR7j3b8joZ5tgpqkb6mCn2H3Q/s400/JaiminIyaprayogavivaraNa+p+145.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5608631265646107826" /></a><br /><br clear="left" /><br /><br />This is a scan of page 145 of the Jaiminiiya-prayoga-vivaraNa by A. Rangasvaami Ayyangaar, printed in grantha and Tamil scripts at Kumbhakonam in 1923. Here you see a Jaiminiiya Saamaveda saaman printed in grantha. The entire text on this page is in Sanskrit and grantha, but because in the Jaiminiiya branch of Saamaveda surviving only in South India, the Sanskrit word iDaa is rendered iZaa, it is necessary to use the corresponding Tamil-Malayalam letter ழ to express this. You see it in the middle of the third line from the bottom on this page - Asko Parpola, University of Helsinki.<br /><br />This is the east coast variety of Grantha script. In west coast variety, the letter LLLA and is Chillu LLL is extensively employed.<br />[<span style="font-weight:bold;">will add pictures</span>]<br /><br />See Grantha script as applied to a Dravidian language (Malayalam):<br /><br />Alphabetum grandonico-malabaricum sive samscrudonicum.<br />Clemente, di Gesù (1731-1782); Giovanni Cristoforo Amaduzzi(1740-1792),<br /> 1772, Latin Book xxviii, 100 p. viii fold. pl. 19 cm.<br />Publication: Romae, typis Sac. congregationis de propag. fide,<br />Year: 1772<br /><br />Tamil is written in Grantha script (1289 CE) onwards:<br />[Begin Quote]<br /><br />" Curiously enough we find a copper-plate grant containing an inscription<br />having Sanskrit and Tamil sections both written in the Grantha script [11].<br />The date of the record falls in 1289 AD. The Tamil portion is entirely<br />transliterated in Grantha script following only the written form and<br />*not*the form of pronunciation<br />*." *<br />**<br />[11] Ep. Ind., XXXVII, pp. 175 ff<br />**<br />[End Quote]நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-37776476584411342952010-12-16T11:35:00.000-08:002010-12-16T11:36:03.851-08:00Tirukkural<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/naga_ganesan/5266053353/" title="kural by naga_ganesan, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5207/5266053353_f5406147dd.jpg" width="408" height="500" alt="kural" /></a>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-56046011553033215252010-12-13T10:56:00.001-08:002010-12-13T11:10:20.101-08:00Grantha code chartThe following is the Grantha Code chart recommended by Government of India for encoding in Unicode.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/naga_ganesan/5258628150/" title="goi_grantha by naga_ganesan, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5130/5258628150_72e4f174c6_z.jpg" width="453" height="640" alt="goi_grantha" /></a>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-28264216203232003102010-08-14T11:11:00.000-07:002010-08-20T04:46:54.390-07:00parpola<span style="font-weight:bold;">ΠΔANΔAIH AND SĪTĀ:<br />ON THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE SANSKRIT EPICS</span><br /><br />ASKO PARPOLA<br />University Of Helsinki<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#3333FF;">The </span><span style="font-style:italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#3333FF;">Mahābhārata (MBh)</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#3333FF;"> and the </span><span style="font-style:italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#3333FF;">Rāmāyaṇa (R)</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#3333FF;"> reflect the exploits of the "Pāṇḍavas" following the arrival and dispersal of the "Megalithic culture" c. 800-400 B.C. The Vedic (</span><span style="font-style:italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#3333FF;">Yādava</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#3333FF;">) trio of the two Aśvins and Uṣas, integrated with agricultural and pastoral deities, became the Vaiṣṇava trio.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">THE <span style="font-style:italic;">MAHĀBHĀRATA</span> AND THE MEGALITHS</span><br /><br />THE ṚGVEDA WAS MOSTLY COMPOSED in the Punjab c. 1500-1200 B.C. The focus of the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> is in the upper Ganges Valley, c. 900-700 B.C. (Buitenen 1973: xxiv). In Vālmīki's <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span>, the hero's domicile is in the middle Ganges Valley, and the old core is dated to c. 750-500 B.C. (Goldman 1984: I, 23) or c. 500-300 B.C. (Brockington 1998: 379). The texts reflect a gradual eastward move of the cultural center of the Indo-Aryan speakers (cf. Brockington 1998: 198).<br /><br />King Janamejaya Pārikṣita's horse sacrifice is glorified in <span style="font-style:italic;">AB</span> 8,21,3 = <span style="font-style:italic;">ŚB</span> 13,5,4,2 = <span style="font-style:italic;">ŚŚS</span> 16,9,1, one of the rare samples of "proto-epic" verses recited in Vedic royal rituals (cf. Weber 1891; Horsch 1966). According to its own testimony (1,40ff.), the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> was first recited at King Janamejaya's snake sacrifice (<span style="font-style:italic;">sarpasattra</span>), in which snakes were victims thrown into fire. In the Vedic <span style="font-style:italic;">sarpasattra</span>, kings and princes of the snakes in human form officiated as priests, and Janamejaya was one of the two adhvaryus, and the Brahman priest was Dhṛtarāṣṭra Airāvata (<span style="font-style:italic;">PB</span> 25,15; <span style="font-style:italic;">BaudhŚS</span> 17,18). In the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span>, Dhṛtarāṣṭra is not only a Kuru king, but also an ancestor of the snakes sacrificed at the <span style="font-style:italic;">sarpasattra</span> (1,52,13). The <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> thus both preserves and distorts Middle Vedic traditions connected with Janamejaya and Parikṣit, whose descendants are referred to in <span style="font-style:italic;">BĀU</span> 3,3,1-2 as a vanished dynasty (Weber 1852: 121, 177; 1891: 774; Buitenen 1973: I, xxivf.; Shulman 1980: 120f.; Minkowski 1989; Brockington 1998: 6).<br /><br />The culture distinguished by the use of iron, horse, and Painted Grey Ware (PGW) (c. 1000-350 B.C.) is found lowest at all major sites associated with the main story of the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span>. It thus offers a suitable archaeological correlate to the earliest layers of the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> (cf. Lal 1981; 1992; Buitenen 1973: I, lf.; Erdosy 1995: 79ff.; Brockington 1998: 133, 159-62). I have suggested that the early PGW culture with few and small towns (c. 1000- 700 B.C.) represents the Middle Vedic culture and its Kuru kingdom, and the late PGW culture with many more towns including Mathurā (c. 700-350 B.C.) the Pāṇḍava period (Parpola 1984: 453ff.).<br /><br />King Pāṇḍu and the five Pāṇḍavas are never once mentioned in any Vedic text (Weber 1853: 402f.; Hopkins 1901: 376, 385, 396; Horsch 1966: 284; Brockington 1998: 6). The Pāṇḍavas, therefore, have arrived on the scene only after the completion of Vedic literature. They could crush the Kurus by making a marriage alliance with the Kurus' eastern neighbors, the Pañcālas. To consolidate their rule, the victorious Pāṇḍavas let themselves be grafted onto the Kuru genealogy and be represented as cousins of their former foes (Lassen 1847: I, 589-713; Weber 1852: 130-33; 1853: 402-4; Schroeder 1887: 476-82; Hopkins 1889: 2-13; 1901: 376).<br /><br />The war was over and the epic in existence by c. 400-350 B.C.: Pāṇini refers to the joint worship of Vāsudeva and Arjuna (4,3,98), and mentions also Yudhiṣṭhira (8,3, 95), Hāstinapura (6,2,101), Andhaka-Vṛṣṇayaḥ (6,2,34), and <span style="font-style:italic;">Mahābhārata</span> (6,2,38) (Weber 1852: 176; Hopkins 1901: 385, 390f.; Jaiswal 1981: 64f.; Brockington 1998: 257).<br /><br />Apart from the absence of their mention in Vedic texts, there are other indications pointing to the foreign, and specifically Iranian, origin of the Pāṇḍavas (cf. Parpola 1984). Their polyandric marriage, which shocked the people present (<span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> 1,197,27-29; Hopkins 1889: 298f.), can be compared to the customs of the Iranian Massagetae (Herodotus 1,216). Hanging their dead in trees (<span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> 4,5,27-29; Brockington 1998: 227) resembles the Iranian mode of exposure of the corpse to birds.<br /><br />Foreign, northerly origin is suggested by their pale skin color, which the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh </span>(1,100,17-18) connects with the name of Pāṇḍu, literally 'pale'; the name Arjuna likewise means 'white' (Lassen 1847: I, 634, 641-43). Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">pāṇḍu</span>-, <span style="font-style:italic;">pāṇḍura</span>-, <span style="font-style:italic;">pāṇḍara</span>- 'white, whitish, yellowish, pale', attested since c. 800 B.C. (SB, SA), are<br />loanwords going back to the same Dravidian root as Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">phala</span>- 'fruit' (cf. Tamil <span style="font-style:italic;">paḻam</span> 'ripe fruit') and <span style="font-style:italic;">paṇḍita</span>- 'learned' (differently Mayrhofer 1996: II, 70f.,<br />201f.), namely <span style="font-style:italic;">paḻ</span>- / <span style="font-style:italic;">paṇḍ</span>- 'to ripen, mature, arrive at perfection (as in knowledge, piety), change color by age, (fruit) to become yellow, (hair) to become grey, to become pale (as the body by disease [esp. leukoderma])' (cf. DEDR 4004; Parpola 1984: 455).<br /><br />This appellation probably originated in Gujarat and Maharashtra, where there is considerable evidence of a strong Dravidian substratum (cf. Parpola 1994: 170ff.). The Pāṇḍavas' hiding in Virāṭanagara( Bairāṭ near Jaipur), their alliance with Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva, and the location of their first kingdom in the wooded southern half of Kurukṣetra suggest that they probably entered the subcontinent from the west, via Sindh, Gujarat, and Rajasthan. The <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> (2,23-29) and early northern Buddhist texts (cf. Weber 1853: 403) speak of the Pāṇḍavas as marauders over wide areas, also in north India.<br /><br />If the Pāṇḍavas were foreigners of Iranian affinity coming to India c. 800-400 B.C., do they have any counterpart in the archaeological record? In my opinion (cf. Parpola 1984), a good match is the "Megalithic" culture, first attested c. 800 B.C. at sites such as Mahurjhari and Khapa in Vidarbha in NE Maharashtra. These oldest graves are simple stone-circles, in which people were buried with weapons and horses; the horse-furniture especially has parallels in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and western Iran. The circular huts with wooden posts and a fireplace are similar to the yurts used by the nomads of Central and Inner Asian steppes.<br /><br />After their arrival in western India, the carriers of the Megalithic culture adopted the Black-and-Red Ware pottery (of local Chalcolithic origin) and during the following several centuries spread over wide areas, mainly southwards to the Deccan, south India, and Sri Lanka. In many regions, folklore associates the megaliths with the Pāṇḍavas. Numerous iron tridents suggest a Śaiva religion. Martial traditions of Megalithic origin still continue in the Deccan, where horsemen accompanied by<br />dogs worship Śaiva deities with tridents in yurt-like shrines (Sontheimer 1989: 26ff.). In Tamil Nadu the Megalithic culture continued till the second century A.D.<br />and is reflected in the Old Tamil heroic poetry. (Cf. Deo 1973; 1984; Leshnik 1974; 1975; Allchin & Allchin 1982: 344f.; McIntosh 1985; Ghosh 1989: , 110-30 and 243-51; Maloney 1975: 6ff.; Parpola 1984: 458f.)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">THE RĀMĀYAṆA AND THE MEGALITHS</span><br /><br />Most notable among the attempts to correlate archaeological cultures with the <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span> (cf. Brockington 1998: 398- 400) is that with the early Northern Black Polished Ware (NBPW). This was suggested by B. B. Lal after excavating sites identified as being <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span>'s Ayodhyā, Nandigrāma, Śṛṅgaverapura, and Bharadvāja's āśrama. George Erdosy (1995: 100-105) in his assessment of all radiocarbon dates places the early NBPW at 550-400 B.C., which nearly agrees with Brockington's date for the first phase of the <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span>, 500-300 B.C.<br /><br />Christian Lassen (1847: I, 535) proposed that the <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span> "contains the legend of the first attempt of the Āryans to<br />extend their power southwards by warring expeditions." Albrecht Weber (1871: 3-5) was inclined to accept this view, though it was clear to him (p. 29f.) that the poem<br />was composed in north India and that its author did not have any exact knowledge of the southern parts of the subcontinent. Present-day research agrees on this relative<br />ignorance of the south, which has led many scholars to locate Laṅkā somewhere in Madhya Pradesh; while John Brockington (1998: 420, 423) opts for this alternative, Robert Goldman (1985: 28) finds it unlikely, noting that "the poet knew of an island kingdom, whether real or mythical, said to lie some distance off the coast of the Indian mainland." Indeed, as early as the second or third century A.D., an Old Tamil poem (<span style="font-style:italic;">Akanāṉūṟu</span> 70) refers to Kōṭi (= Dhanuṣkōṭi, the tip of mainland opposite to Adam's Bridge in Ceylon) as the place from which the victorious Rāma crossed over to Laṅkā (cf. Hart 1975: 61f.).<br /><br />The archaeology of early historical Sri Lanka, so far largely ignored in this connection, has become much clearer than before only recently. Robin Coningham (1995: 159-69) gives a detailed analysis of the stratigraphy of Anurādhapura and a rapid survey of other sites (170ff.). The oldest, "Mesolithic" period is evidenced<br />by locally manufactured stone tools. In the second, "Iron Age" period the habitation area of Anurādhapura was c. 18 hectares with circular huts indicated by postholes.<br />People had "typical Black and Red burnished ware," iron, and cattle. Radiocarbon-based dates are c. 600-450 B.C., but the period may have started as early<br />as c. 800 B.C. In the "Early Historic 1" period (c. 450- 350 B.C.), the site and the circular huts are larger, and there are strong similarities with South Indian Megalithic burials. The pottery is still dominated by Black and Red burnished ware. Horse bones are found, and indications of a major expansion of trade and manufacturing of conch shell, iron ore, amethyst, and quartz. In the "Early Historic 2" period (c. 350-275 B.C.), the site is more than 66 hectares and surrounded by a defensive wall. Finds include mother of pearl, cowrie and conch shells, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, and carnelian from Gujarat, five Brahmi (!) inscriptions on potsherds, and, towards the end, coins stamped with a single arched hill or caitya. The "Early Historic 3 and 4" periods (c. 275-225 and 225-150 B.C.) have also yielded typically Hellenistic objects.<br /><br />Widespread evidence covering the entire island suggests that Sri Lanka was inhabited only by tribes of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers until c. 800-600 B.C., when agriculture and cattle-raising were introduced by an Iron Age culture characterized by "Megalithic" burials and Black-and-Red Ware. It is so similar to the Iron Age Megalithic culture of the Indian mainland that its spread must be ascribed to actual movements of people. But where exactly did these settlers come from? It is sensible<br />to seek an answer from the legends in the chronicles of Sri Lanka (cf. Coningham 1995: 156-59).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">COLONIZATION OF SRI LANKA</span><br /><br />The legend of the colonization of Sri Lanka is related in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Dīpavaṃsa</span> (<span style="font-style:italic;">Dīp</span>, chs. 9-11) and with slight variation in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Mahāvaṃsa</span> (<span style="font-style:italic;">Mhv</span>, chs. 6-10), written c. A.D. 400 and 500 respectively, but based on older records (cf. Geiger 1912: ixff.; Hinüber 1996: 87-91; Lamotte 1958: 129-35). This legend derives the Siṃhalas from Gujarat, which is most reasonable on the basis of linguistic evidence, for the best experts classify Sinhalese with Gujarati and Marathi (cf. Lamotte 1958: 132; Masica 1991: 451-49). Pāli, too, is closest to Aśoka's inscriptions at Gīrnār in Gujarat, and is generally considered nowadays to have originated in western India (cf. Hinüber 1986: 20). Gujarat and Maharashtra are also precisely the areas where the Megalithic culture seems to have spread first.<br /><br />At first seven hundred Siṃhalas led by Prince Vijaya came to Sri Lanka from Sīhapura (Siṃhapurai)n Lāḷa (Lāṭa in southern Gujarat). "Prince Vijaya was daring and uneducated; he committed most wicked and fearful things, plundering the people." He was therefore expelled by his father, King Sīhabāhu. Vijaya and his men sailed down the west coast, stopping at the cities of Bhārukaccha (Broach in Gujarat) and Suppāra (Śūrpāraka = Sopāra near Mumbai). In both places they were offered hospitality and honors, but during their months-long sojourns Vijaya and his men exasperated the inhabitants with their "cruel, savage, terrible and most dreadful deeds" which included "drinking, theft, adultery, falsehood, and slander." Finally they arrived at the island of Laṅkā. This happened when the Buddha reached the parinirvāṇa. In nine months Vijaya and his men destroyed the host of the Yakkhas who had earlier occupied the island. Vijaya founded Tambapaṇṇi, the first town in the island of Laṅkā. After having ruled thirty-eight years, Vijaya sent a message to his brother Sumitta in Sīhapura, asking a relative to take over the rule of Laṅkā after his death.<br /><br />Vijaya is usually dated to the years 1-38 from the Buddha's parinirvāṇa or c. 486-448 B.C., Paṇḍu-Vāsudeva to 38-39/448-447 B.C., and so on (thus Lamotte 1958: 134). However, Laṅkā is said to have been kingless for one year (<span style="font-style:italic;">Mhv</span>, ch. 8), and Paṇḍu-Vāsudeva came from Siṃhapura on a separate mission. The Vijaya story may be just an attempt to fill the earlier history with a vague memory of the first immigration much earlier: it seems to me that the regular dynastic record was started only with the arrival of Paṇḍu-Vāsudeva, whereafter it was continuous (with regard to the oldest period, Geiger [1912: xxf.] felt "a certain distrust of the tradition and traditional chronology from the very fact that Vijaya's arrival in Ceylon is dated on the day of the Buddha's death"). Indeed Lassen (1852: II, 96f.) has suggested that Vijaya does not actually refer to any specific person but to an event, the "conquest" of Sri Lanka. In any case, the statement that Vijaya found the island occupied by yakṣas only cannot be reconciled<br />with both the archaeological and the historical chronology, if the yakṣas denote small-sized ancestors of the later Veḍḍas, the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Like the<br />"cruel and savage" Vijaya, the Rāvaṇa of the epics may symbolize the early rulers of the island.<br /><br />The <span style="font-style:italic;">Mhv</span> (chs. 8ff.) records some events soon after Paṇḍu-Vāsudeva had arrived and married Bhadda-Kaccānā that could have given rise to the theme of the <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span>: it was predicted that the son of the queen's daughter, the lovely Cittā, would destroy his maternal uncles and usurp the power. Princess Cittā was therefore kept as a prisoner in the palace, in an apartment built on a single pillar, accessible only through the dormitory of the king, and the entrance was guarded by a female servant inside<br />and by one hundred armed men outside. Bhadda-Kaccānā's mother sent her seven sons (one called Rāma according to the commentary) from India to Laṅkā to see their sister, and one of them, prince Dīghāyu, had a son who conceived an ardent passion for Cittā.<br /><br />Weber (1871: 3-5) has already suggested that Rāvaṇa probably hails from north India, as he is described as worshipping Brahmanical divinities, and his father is Sage Pulastya, ancestor of a Brahmanical clan and a son of the Brahmanical God of Creation, Prajāpati (<span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> 3,258,11). Moreover, Hanuman sees in Rāvaṇa's palace in Laṅkā noble horses from countries in the northern Indus Valley, Āraṭṭa, Kamboja, and Vālhīka (Weber 1871: 29f.). In this paper, I cannot pursue the study of Rāvaṇa much further, but will add a few observations. The term used by the Sri Lankan tradition of the previous inhabitants, <span style="font-style:italic;">yakkha/yakṣa</span>, is of course of North Indian origin and tells something of the religion of the earliest immigrants. Most probably it was Vijaya who introduced the impressive yakṣa cult of exorcism and sorcery that is still alive in Sri Lanka (Kapferer 1991, 1997). Rāvaṇa himself is a magician, and propitiates Prajāpati with asceticism and human sacrifices for the sake of boons (<span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> 3,259,15ff.).<br /><br />The yakṣiṇī Kuveṇī, with whom Vijaya had a liaison, helped him to victory over the yakṣas; Sinhalese myths identify her with Goddess Kālī (cf. Kapferer 1991: 167). In order to obtain victory in battle, Rāvaṇa's son Indrajit sacrifices at a terrible-looking banyan tree connected with Goddess Nikumbhilā, alias Bhadra-Kālī (<span style="font-style:italic;">R</span> 6,71,13-22; 6,74,2-4; 7,25,2ff.). This has a parallel in the human sacrifices to a banyan tree for the sake of victory that the <span style="font-style:italic;">Dhonasākha Jātaka</span> (no. 353) reports from Taxila in northern Indus Valley (Parpola 1994: 259).<br /><br />The Purāṇas associate Rāvaṇa and his brother Kubera with the Himalayas. When people migrate, they often transfer the name of their old domicile to their new habitat.<br />Siṃhapura, Vijaya's home town in Gujarat, has a namesake, Siṃhapura, in the Indus Valley, conquered by the Pāṇḍavas (<span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> 2,24,19); according to Xuan-Zang, this Siṃhapura was c. 200 km SE of Takṣaśilā (Beal<br />1884: I, 143). In the next verse (2,24,20), the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> mentions the Cola as a people crushed by the Pandavas, and<br />people called Cola are otherwise known only from Tamil Nadu in south India (Parpola 1984: 452). Moreover, Vijaya's brother Sumitta, King of Siṃhapura, married a princess of the Madra country in upper Indus Valley (cf. also Lassen 1852: II, 102, n. 4).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">PĀṆḌYAS OF SOUTHERN MADHURĀ</span><br /><br />The second Siṃhala king was called Paṇḍu-Vāsudeva. Paṇḍu(ka) figures in names of other Sinhalese kings as well, and associates them with the Pāṇḍavas of the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> (thus also Lassen 1852: II, 102f.), whose father Pāṇḍu is called Paṇḍu (<span style="font-style:italic;">Cullavagga</span> 64,43) or Paṇḍurājā (<span style="font-style:italic;">Jātaka</span> V, 426) in Pāli texts. Paṇḍu-Vāsudeva's father-in-law, who ruled in a kingdom on the Ganges river, was likewise called Paṇḍu. He belonged to the Śakya clan, being a relative of the Buddha. Śakya is derived from Śaka, one of the principal names of Iranian steppe nomads. Its association with the name Paṇḍu is an additional hint of the Iranian origin of the Pāṇḍavas.<br /><br />The beginning of the second phase (c. 450-350 B.C.) of the Megalithic culture of Sri Lanka coincides almost exactly with the traditional dates for Paṇḍu-Vāsudeva's rule. This phase is said to resemble greatly the Megalithic culture of South India. These archaeological parallels are mirrored in the chronicles. According to <span style="font-style:italic;">Mhv</span> (ch. 7), a fierce demoness (<span style="font-style:italic;">yakkhinī</span>) called Kuveṇī or Kuvaṇṇā had fallen in love with Vijaya and helped the invader to kill the Yakkhas who lived in their cities of Laṅkāpura and Sirīsavatthu. They had children. But when his companions wanted to perform the royal consecration for Vijaya, he said he would accept the proposal only if he obtained a queen of high rank. The companions sent a delegation with jewels and other presents to Southern Madhurā (<span style="font-style:italic;">dakkhina-madhurā</span>); the king ruling there, called Paṇḍu and Paṇḍava, decided to send his daughter Vijayā in marriage to Vijaya and seven hundred daughters of his nobility to Vijaya's retinue of seven hundred men. After marrying Paṇḍava's daughter, Vijaya rejected Kuveṇī, sending her off from his house but promising to maintain her with a thousand bali offerings.<br /><br />Southern Madhurā is modern Madurai in Tamil Nadu, the capital of the Pāṇḍya kings, whose dynastic name is irregularly derived from Pāṇḍu (Pat. on Vārtt. 3 on Pāṇ. 4,1,168). The Sri Lankan kings kept contact with this city also later on (cf. Malalasekera 1937: II, 439). Megasthenes, writing c. 300 B.C., refers to the Pāṇḍya country when speaking of the Indian Heracles:<br /><br />this Heracles ... had only one daughter. Her name was Pandaea [<span style="font-style:italic;">Pandaiē</span>], and the country in which she was born, the government of which Heracles entrusted to her, was called Pandaea after the girl.... Some other Indians tell of Heracles that, after he had traversed every land and sea, and purged them of all evil monsters, he found in the sea a new form of womanly ornament... the sea <span style="font-style:italic;">margarita</span> [pearl] as it is called in the Indian tongue. Heracles was in fact so taken with the beauty of the ornament that he collected this pearl from every sea and brought it to India to adorn his daughter ... among the Indians too the pearl is worth three times its weight in refined gold. (Arrian, <span style="font-style:italic;">Indica</span> 8,6-13, trans. Brunt 1983: 329-31)<br /><br />The <span style="font-style:italic;">Arthaśāstra</span> (2,11) mentions as sources of pearls several places along the coasts of southernmost India and northern Sri Lanka, among them Pāṇḍya-kavāṭa and Tāmraparṇī. Tāmraparṇī is the name of the chief river<br />of the southernmost (Tirunelveli) district of Tamil Nadu, at the mouth of which was the Pāṇḍya port town of Koṟkai famed in Old Tamil literature for its pearl fishery (cf. Subrahmanian 1966: 329). Tāmraparṇī is also the name of the first Sinhalese capital on the north coast of Sri Lanka, called Tambapaṇṇi in <span style="font-style:italic;">Mhv</span> 7,38-42 and Taprobane by Onesicritus, the admiral of Alexander the Great, who learned it as the name of the whole island in 325 B.C. in the Indus Valley. (The Anurādhapura excavations have confirmed the contact to Indus Valley at this time.) Vijaya's contacts would have been with Koṟkai, before the capital was moved to Madhurā inland (Maloney 1970: 604-6; Parpola 1984: 450).<br /><br />The Pāṇḍya capital is called "southern Madhurā" to distinguish it from "northern Madhurā," i.e., Mathurā, the famed domicile of Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva, after which the Pāṇḍya Madhurā obviously was named (cf. Dessigane et al. 1960, I: xiv; Sircar 1971: 27 n. 1; Hardy 1983: 156). This is suggested also by the name of the second Siṃhala king coming from Gujarat, Paṇḍu-Vāsudeva. It seems to me that it was this second wave of Paṇḍu princes coming by sea to Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu who brought with them the Vaiṣṇava religion to the south. This is suggested also by the legend of the God Uppalavaṇṇa (= Sanskrit Utpalavarṇa 'having the color of blue lotus') being appointed by the Buddha as the guardian deity of the island and taking the immigrants under his<br />protection, even if the <span style="font-style:italic;">Mhv</span> (ch. 7) associates this with Vijaya (cf. Lassen 1852: II, 98ff.). According to Champakalakshmi (1981: 34), the earliest form of Vaiṣṇava religion in south India is the Pañcavīra cult, i.e., the worship of the five Vṛṣṇi or Yādava heroes, in particular Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva and his elder brother Bala-Rāma, worshipped both independently and together in Tamil Nadu in the early centuries of the Christian era (p. 35). Such a migration of the Yādavas is known from the northern Sanskrit sources too: Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva moved from Mathurā to Gujarat, where he founded the coastal<br />city of Dvāraka or Dvārāvatī. Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">dvāra</span> 'door' corresponds to Tamil <span style="font-style:italic;">kavāṭam / kapāṭam</span> 'fold of a door', found in the names Pāṇḍya-kavāṭa, one of the pearl sources in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Arthaśāstra</span> (2,11,2), as well as Kapāṭapuram, legendary seat of one of the ancient Tamil literary academies (Maloney 1970: 612f.; Parpola 1984: 453). According to the Old Tamil tradition, Sage Agastya brought the eighteen Vēḷir chiefs and the rulers of the Aruvāḷa country from Dvārakā. The Āy rulers of the eighth-ninth century south Travancore likewise traced their descent from the Yādavas (Champakalakshmi 1981: 34).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">NORTHERN MADHURĀ AND BALA-RĀMA</span><br /><br />This Heracles is chiefly honoured by the Surasenians, an Indian tribe, with two great cities, Methora and Clisobora [Kleisóbora]; the navigable river Iomanes flows through their territory. Megasthene says that the garb this Heracles wore was like that of the Theban Heracles by the account of the Indians themselves; he also had a great many sons in this country, for this Heracles too wedded many wives, but he had only one daughter. Her name was Pandaea....<br />(Arrian, <span style="font-style:italic;">Indica</span> 8,5-7, trans. Brunt 1983: 327-29)<br /><br />Practically all scholars have identified the Indian Heracles with Kṛṣṇa worshipped by Śūrasenas in Mathurā on the Yamunā river. A singular exception is James Tod, who in 1835 identified Heracles with Bala-Deva, the god of strength (<span style="font-style:italic;">bala</span>). Strength is a distinctive characteristic of Greek Heracles, and there are other reasons as well that make me think Tod was right. Textual and iconographic evidence from c. 400 B.C. onwards show that Bala-Rāma was in early Viṣṇuism a very important deity, especially in the Mathurā area (see Sircar 1971: 16ff.; Jaiswal 1981: 52ff.; cf. Brockington 1998: 261f., 266f.). Andreas Bigger (1998) has criticized this "received" view, but his own deconstruction of Bala-Rāma,<br />based on a text-level analysis of the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span>, is not always convincing and rather contradicted by the Old Tamil poems<br />of the first centuries A.D. (not considered by Bigger):<br /><br />In Puṟ. 56, Krishna is invoked for his fame, Balarāma for his strength. Krishna is described as having a body like blue sapphire, having a bird (presumably the <span style="font-style:italic;">garuḍa</span>) on his flag, and being accompanied by Balarāma, who has a body the color of a conch, a plow for his weapon, and a palmyra for his banner. (Hart 1975: 57)<br /><br />Mathurā is called <span style="font-style:italic;">Madhurā</span> 'sweet' not only in Pāli sources but also by Patañjali in his <span style="font-style:italic;">Mahābhāṣya</span> c. 150 B.C. (cf. Weber 1873: 380f.). The form Madhurā figures in the<span style="font-style:italic;"> MBh</span> too, where the name is explained as coming from the demon Madhu, who lived in Madhu-vana on the Yamunā river but was slain by Kṛṣṇa, "the killer of Madhu." The "demoniac" god earlier worshipped at Madhurā seems to have been a snake deity connected<br />with plowing and identified with Śiva (see further below), whose names listed in the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> include Madhu and who was addicted to drinking wine (<span style="font-style:italic;">madhu</span>). His cult was then absorbed into that of Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva by transferring all the attributes of this earlier local god to Kṛṣṇa's "elder brother" Bala-Rāma, who is, among other things, a great wine-drinker. Demon Madhu (with Kaiṭabha: cf. Pāli <span style="font-style:italic;">keṭubha</span> 'Brahmin ritualist') is said to have robbed from Brahmā the Vedas regained by Viṣṇu; a Vedic tradition therefore prevailed at Mathurā before Kṛṣṇaism.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">THE VAIṢṆAVA TRIO</span><br /><br />In the Veda, <span style="font-style:italic;">madhu</span> is specifically associated with the Aśvins (cf. Macdonell 1897: 49f., 52; Zeller 1990: 119). These divine charioteers, twin sons of the Sky (<span style="font-style:italic;">divó nápātā</span>), probably represent (white) day and (black) night (as was suggested by Max Miller, cf. Zeller 1990: 7f.). In<span style="font-style:italic;"> ṚV</span> 3,55,11, day and night are spoken of as twin sisters (yamyā) who have assumed different colors, one shining bright (<span style="font-style:italic;">táyor anyád rocate</span>), the other black <span style="font-style:italic;">(kṛṣṇám anyát</span>); the Aśvins, too, are twins and are identified with day and night (<span style="font-style:italic;">MS</span> 3,4,4 ahorātré vā aśvinā). The Aśvins drive around the world in a triple chariot accompanied by the fair goddess of Dawn<br />(Uṣas), daughter of the Sky or Sun (Sūre / Sūro duhitā, Sūryā), their sister and wife (cf. Zeller 1990: 100ff.). This trio has a counterpart in the divine horsemen of the<br />Greeks, Kastor and Poludeúkēs (originally Poluleúkēs 'much shining'), who are sons of the sky god Zeus and brothers of Helen, as well as in the Lithuanian twin gods<br />expressly identified with the morning and evening star wooing the daughter of the sun (cf. Zeller 1990: 8, 97f.).<br /><br />Many of the Aśvin hymns of the <span style="font-style:italic;">ṚV</span> belong to the Kāṇva family of poets that was associated with the early Vedic tribes of Yadu and Turvaśa, from whom the Yādavas are descended. It therefore appears very likely, as has been proposed by Sen (1976: 124-27), that the trio of Aśvins and their sister / wife is the model of the early Vaiṣṇava trio consisting of two brothers connected with the colors white and black and their sister / wife. Chariotry can be added to the common characteristics mentioned by Sen. In the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span>, the 'black' Vāsudeva is the charioteer of the 'white' car-fighter Arjuna; their joint worship is mentioned by Pāṇini (4,3,98) c. 400-350 B.C. I suspect that the name of the Siṃhala king Paṇḍu-Vāsudeva means 'devotee of Paṇḍu ('the white one' = Arjuna or Bala-Rāma) and Vāsudeva'. The two brothers Vāsudeva and Bala-Rāma and their sister (called variously Ekānaṃśā, (Su)Bhadrā, or Añjanā) were a popular trio in early Vaiṣṇava iconography and still in Puri (cf. Jaiswal 1981: 68f.; Brockington 1998: 341; Yokochi 1999: 74). In the MBh (1,211-12), Arjuna marries Vāsudeva's sister Subhadrā; but in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Skanda-Purāṇa</span>, Subhadrā is both the sister and wife of Vāsudeva. A whole chapter of the Old Tamil epic <span style="font-style:italic;">Cilappatikāram</span> describes the pastoral dance performed by Kṛṣṇa, his beloved Piṉṉai, and Balarāma at Dvārak (cf. Champakalakshmi 1981: 47). Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa, and Sītā, too, are usually depicted as a trio in the iconography (cf. Ramachandra Rao 1992: VI, 26-28), and in the Dasaratha Jātaka, Sītā is a sister of the two brothers, yet married by Rāma (cf. Weber 1871: 1; Jaiswal 1981: 142).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Παυδαίη AND SĪTĀ</span><br /><br />Oskar von Hinüber (in Wirth and Hinüber 1985: 1110) has suggested that Greek Pandaíē may correspond to Sanskrit Pāṇḍeyā 'daughter of Paṇḍu'. In Megasthenes' account, Heracles is both the father and husband of Pandaíē:<br /><br />In this country where Heracles' daughter was queen, the girls are marriageable at seven years, and the men do not live longer than forty years. There is a story about this among the Indians, that Heracles, whose daughter was born to him late in life, realizing that his own end was near, and having no man of his own worth to whom he might give his daughter [<span style="font-style:italic;">ouk ékhonta hótōi andri ekdōi tēn paida heōutoiu epaksiōi</span>], copulated with her himself when she was seven, so that their progeny might be left behind as Indian kings. Thus Heracles made her marriageable, and thenceforward the whole of this line which began with Pandaea inherited this very same privilege from Heracles. (Arrian, <span style="font-style:italic;">Indica</span> 9, 1-3, trans. Brunt 1983: 331)<br /><br />When doing research on the Sāvitrī legend, I stumbled upon a Sanskrit parallel to this account. (For the following, see Parpola 1998; 2000.) Princess Sāvitrī's father,<br />King Aśvapati of Madra, fails to marry off his daughter in time, and therefore sends her to search for and choose a husband on her own. The texts do not directly indicate that the king had had an incestuous relationships with Princess Sāvitrī, but they do quote in this context a Smṛti stating that if a girl sees her first menses in her father's house, the father incurs a great sin. According to <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> 3,277,32, Aśvapati asks Sāvitrī to find a husband "equal to herself" (sadṛśam ātmanaḥ) as no wooer is forthcoming, but according to the <span style="font-style:italic;">Skanda</span>-<span style="font-style:italic;">Purāṇa</span> (7,166,16), Aśvapati says that however much he looks, he cannot find for his daughter a bridegroom who in worth is equal to himself (vicārayan na paśyāmi varaṃ tulyam ihātmanaḥ).<br /><br />In the Sāvitrī legend, the human couple (Princess Sāvitrī and Prince Satyavat) corresponds to the divine couple (Goddess Sāvitrī and God Brahmā). It was through the grace of Goddess Sāvitrī and her husband that the princess was born, and both the human and the divine Sāvitrī along with their husbands are to be worshipped in the ritual of <span style="font-style:italic;">vaṭa-sāvitrī-vrata</span> that is associated with the legend. Even the fate of the human couple has its counterpart on the divine level. In accordance with the prophecy of Sage Nārada, the husband (Satyavat alias Citrāśiva, the young "alter ego" of Sāvitrī's father Aśvapati) dies after one year has passed from his wedding, with his head on the lap of Princess Sāvitrī. Sāvitrī as a faithful wife, Satī, follows her husband to death when Yama comes to fetch him, and with her loyalty gains his life back.<br /><br />Parallel to this, the <span style="font-style:italic;">Skanda-Purāṇa</span> (3,1,40) tells how the creator god Brahmā alias Prajāpati has sex with his own daughter Vāc and is therefore killed by Śiva, but Brahmā's wives Sarasvatī and Gāyatrī pacify Śiva and make him join Brahmā's severed head with the body. This myth is directly based on a Vedic myth most explicitly told in <span style="font-style:italic;">AB</span> 3,33: Prajāpati is guilty of incest with his daughter Vāc and is killed by Rudra in punishment. Vāc 'speech, voice, sound' is another name of Goddess Sāvitrī, known best as the holiest stanza of the Veda composed in the Gāyatrī meter: its recitations at sunrise and sunset, and (later) at noon, are considered to manifest the Goddesses Gāyatrī, Sāvitrī, and Sarasvatī.<br /><br />Prajāpati thus had an incestuous relationship with his daughter Vāc, who is explicitly identified with the goddess of Dawn (Uṣas or Sūryā or Sāvitrī) and had to die in punishment for this sin. Pandaίē's incestuous father Heracles also died soon after the copulation. Pāṇḍu, the father of the Pāṇḍavas, after he had killed a mating deer, was cursed to die if he ever copulated again, which came to pass when he had intercourse with his wife Mādrī. Mādrī was a princess of the Madra country, and ascended the funeral pyre of Pāṇḍu, resolute as the goddess Dhṛti. In both respects Mādrī resembles another princess of the Madra country, namely Sāvitrī, who is the prototype of a Satī, and the human counterpart of Goddess Sāvitrī, the wife-daughter of Brahmā / Prajāpati. We have seen that the female member of the early Vaiṣṇava trio (Kṛṣṇa's sister Subhadrā, Rāma's wife Sītā) seems to continue the Goddess of Dawn (Suryā / Sāvitrī) in the trio that she forms with the two Aśvins. Not only Sāvitrī but this entire earlier trio appears to have been worshipped in the Madra country, because Nakula (clever like Kṛṣṇa) and Sahadeva (whose name is a synonym of Baladeva), the Pāṇḍavas sired by the Aśvins, had Mādrī as their mother. Mādrī's brother Śalya, King of Madra, had Goddess Sītā in his banner, and <span style="font-style:italic;">TB</span> 2,3,10 mentions Sītā Sāvitrī as the daughter of Prajāpati. All this suggests that Pandaίē, Uṣas / Sūryā / Sāvitrī, and Sītā are each other's aliases.<br /><br />FURROW AND PLOW<br /><br />Albrecht Weber considered Rāma's spouse Sītā to be at least partly mythical. An agricultural goddess Sītā, the personified furrow, is known from the <span style="font-style:italic;">Ṛgveda</span> (4,57,6-7), and her worship is described in detail in PGS 2,17; according to the <span style="font-style:italic;">GGS</span> (4,4,27-29), she was to be worshipped at plowing. It makes sense that the husband of 'furrow' is the god of plowing. Weber therefore kept asking already one hundred fifty years ago, has the hero of the <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span> developed from Rāma Halabhṛt, i.e., was he originally just a personification of an agricultural divinity like Sītā? (Weber 1850: 175; 1871: 7ff.). Bala-Rāma's distinctive iconographic emblems, the plow (<span style="font-style:italic;">lāṅgāla, hala, phāla</span>) and pestle for pounding grain (muṣala), definitely mark him as primarily an agrarian deity. The agricultural connection is also plain from his alternative name Saṃkarṣaṇa, which is derived from the activity of plowing (<span style="font-style:italic;">kṛṣi</span>). Weber's hypothesis is supported by the fact that Bala-Rāma (this name is not found in the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span>) is actually 143 times called just Rāma in the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> (cf. Bigger 1998: 9).<br /><br />The plow is instrumental in placing the seed in the womb of the earth, and plowing thus symbolizes sexual intercourse. But the plow also creates the furrow, thus representing its generator. In <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span> 1,66,14-15, Sītā emerges out of the furrow when Janaka the king of Mithilā is plowing a field, and is given the name Sītā and raised as his daughter by Janaka:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">atha me kṛṣataḥ kṣetraṃ lāṅgalād utthitā tatah<br />kṣetraṃ śodhayatā labdhā nāmnā sīteti viśrutā<br />bhūtalād utthitā sā tu vardhamānā mamātmajā<br />vīryaśulketi me kanyā sthāpiteyam ayonijā</span><br /><br />In the <span style="font-style:italic;">Uttarakāṇḍa</span> (R 7,88,9-14), Sītā finally returns to her mother Earth: the goddess comes to fetch her and the two disappear underground. In the <span style="font-style:italic;">Uttararāmacarita</span>, Janaka is called <span style="font-style:italic;">sīradhvaja</span>, 'having the plough in his banner' (Weber 1871: 8).<br /><br />Janaka's name denotes 'progenitor, father'. It is one of the names used in the Purāṇas of the Hindu creator god Brahmā, and Brahmā directly continues Vedic Prajāpati, whom <span style="font-style:italic;">TB</span> 2,3,10 mentions as the father of Sītā Sāvitrī. On the other hand, as noted above, the plow and the field plowed (or the furrow) form a couple, so that Prajāpati is also Sītā Sāvitrī's husband through incest. In the <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span>, a plow-god seems to be both Sītā's father (Janaka) and husband (Rāma = Bala-Rāma).<br /><br />KINGS JANAKA AND AŚVAPATI<br /><br />But in the <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span>, Janaka is the king of Mithilā and not a god; the above quoted passages clearly belong to a late layer (cf. Brockington 1998: 379ff.) and do not reflect Vālmiki's Sītā, but the popular conceptions current at that time (cf. Bulcke 1952). Even so, the king was responsible<br />for the fertility and welfare of his country and represented a god, a specific god in each country. King Janaka of Videha, who is often mentioned in Middle<br />Vedic texts, may or may not be identical with the <span style="font-style:italic;">R</span>'s Janaka. The Purāṇnas know a Janaka dynasty that ruled in Mithilā-Videha after the <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> war but before the Buddha (Horsch 1966: 382, 386f.). Janaka's Videha was no longer an independent kingdom by the sixth century B.C. (Brockington 1998: 421). In <span style="font-style:italic;">ŚB</span> 10,6,1,1 and <span style="font-style:italic;">ChU</span> 7,11, King Janaka of Videha is mentioned along with Aśvapati, the king of Kekaya. This suggests a connection, since Sāvitrī's father Aśvapati is the king of Madra,<br />and the Madra and the Kekaya or Kaikeya peoples are often mentioned together in the epic, and the Madra king Śalya had Goddess Sītā in his banner.<br /><br />Rāma's brother Bharata brings to his father Daśaratha, the king of Kosala, enormous dogs as presents from Daśaratha's brother-in-law, Aśvapati, the king of the<br />Kekayas. The dogs had been grown in the palace, equalled the tiger in strength and fought with their teeth (<span style="font-style:italic;">R</span> 2,64,21 <span style="font-style:italic;">antaḥpure 'tisaṃvṛddhān vyāghraviryabalānvitān / daṃṣṭṛāyudhān mahākāyān śunaś copāyanaṃ dadau </span>). The Greek authors report a gift of similar dogs to Alexander from King Sopeithes:<br /><br />Writers narrate also of the excellent qualities of the dogs in the country of Sopeithes. They say, at any rate, that Alexander received one hundred and fifty dogs from Sopeithes; and that, to prove them, two were let loose to attack a lion, and, when they were being overpowered, two others were let loose upon him, and that then, the match having now become equal, Sopeithes bade someone to take one of the dogs by the leg and pull him away, and if the dog did not yield to cut off his leg; and that Alexander would not consent to cutting off the dog's leg at first, but consented when Sopeithes said that he would give him four instead; and that the dog suffered the cutting off of the leg by slow amputation before he let go his grip. (Strabo 15,1,31 p. 700, trans. Jones 1931: II, 55, Loeb ed.)<br /><br />Lassen (1847: I, 300; 1852: II, 161) identified the Greek name Sopeithes with Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">Aśvapati</span> (and Prakrit *<span style="font-style:italic;">Assapati</span>) and concluded that, like <span style="font-style:italic;">Pōros</span> [= Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">Paurava</span>] and <span style="font-style:italic;">Taxilēs</span>, it was the inherited royal title of the Kekaya king rather than his proper name. Quintus Curtius Rufus (8,12,4) explicitly states that Taxiles was a hereditary title of the kings of Taxila [= Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">Takṣaśilā-</span>]: <span style="font-style:italic;">sumpsit ... more gentis suae nomen quod patris fuerat; Taxilen appellavere populares, sequente nomine imperium in quemcumque transiret</span>.<br /><br />-<span style="font-style:italic;">peίthēs</span> most probably renders Indo-Aryan <span style="font-style:italic;">-pati-ḥ</span>, transformed by contamination with similarly sounding Greek or Macedonian names, such as Peίthōn, one of Alexander's generals. <span style="font-style:italic;">Sō</span>- for Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">aśva</span>- or Prakrit <span style="font-style:italic;">assa</span>- 'horse' is more difficult to explain. Sylvain Lévi derives Sōpeίthēs from the unattested Sanskrit word *<span style="font-style:italic;">Saubhūti</span> 'king of Saubhūta' (cf. Gaṇap. on Pāṇ. 4,2,75) (cf. Karttunen 1997: 35, 53). Because this king is associated with dogs in both Greek and Sanskrit sources, the first part <span style="font-style:italic;">Sō</span>- of Sōpeίthēs could rather render Gāndhārī *<span style="font-style:italic;">so</span>- (cf. Hinüber 1986: 78 Gāndhārī <span style="font-style:italic;">monaso</span> = Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">mānaso</span>) for Pāli <span style="font-style:italic;">sā</span>- 'dog' (in a compound: <span style="font-style:italic;">sā-cakka</span>-) from Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">śvā</span> (sg. nom.), śvan- 'dog'; cf. also Pāli <span style="font-style:italic;">so-pāka</span> = Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">śva-pāka</span>- 'dog-cooker', 'dog-eater'. <span style="font-style:italic;">Svapati</span> 'Lord of the dogs' is known from <span style="font-style:italic;">VS</span> 16,28 as an epithet of Rudra, the Vedic god of hunters and robbers. In Sanskrit, <span style="font-style:italic;">śvapati</span> can after <span style="font-style:italic;">-o / -e</span> in sandhi be interpreted as <span style="font-style:italic;">aśvapati</span>. Both meanings, however, make sense: Prajāpati, whom Aśvapati represents, is the lord of the horse, especially the sacrificial horse; and both the horse and the dog are connected with Rudra / Bhairava and related folk deities, for example in Maharashtra (Sontheimer 1989).<br /><br />MĪNĀKṢĪ OF MADURAI<br /><br />Queen Pandaίē of Megasthenes has been compared with the guardian Goddess of the Pāṇḍya capital Madurai, Mīnākṣī. In the local <span style="font-style:italic;">Tiruviḷaiyāṭaṟ-Purāṇam</span> (shorter version from the twelfth, longer from the sixteenth century), she is the daughter of a Pāṇḍya king of Madurai and his queen, who was the daughter of a Coḷa king called Śūrasena. Childless, they performed a Vedic sacrifice to obtain a son, but received from the sacrificial fire a girl. (The birth of Princess Sāvitrī to King Aśvapati in the Indus Valley was similar.) The girl had three breasts, and a voice from heaven told that she should be educated in military arts like a prince, and that she would conquer the whole world. The third breast would disappear when she met her future husband. All this happened, and finally when fighting at Mount Kailāsa, she met God Śiva and the third breast disappeared. After their marriage, Śiva ruled Madurai as King Sundara-Pāṇḍyan.<br /><br />Here the spouse of Mīnākṣī is called Sundareśvaran 'Beautiful Lord' and considered to be Śiva. However, there is in Madurai a local form of Viṣṇu called in Tamil Aḻakar 'Beautiful Lord'. Aḻakar is the brother of Mīnākṣī, who gives the bride away to the groom. The Aḻakarmalai temple with a standing form of Viṣṇu dates to pre-Pallavan times, and is one of the oldest in Tamil Nadu (Champakalakshmi 1981: 50). Especially in a city called Madhurā, Aḻakar could have been both the brother and the husband of the Goddess in ancient times, as was the case with Rāma and Sītā according to the <span style="font-style:italic;">Daśaratha-Jātaka</span>. Both Sundara and Aḻakar might render Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">rāma</span>, which in classical Sanskrit means 'pleasing, charming, handsome, lovely, beautiful'. Iconographic manuals prescribe that Rāma is to be depicted as beautiful (<span style="font-style:italic;">sundara</span>), others that both Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa are to be exceedingly handsome (<span style="font-style:italic;">atīva rūpa sampannau</span>) (Ramachandra Rao 1992: VI, 26, 28). According to <span style="font-style:italic;">BhP</span> 10,2,13, Bala-Rāma was called Rāma because he charmed people (with his beauty) (<span style="font-style:italic;">rāmeti lokaramaṇād</span>).<br /><br />Vijaya's Sri Lankan yakkhinī wife Kuveṇī or Kuvaṇṇā likewise had three breasts, and she had also been told that one of them would vanish when she saw her future husband, which happened when she saw Vijaya (Shulman 1980: 204f., quoting Davy 1821: 293-95). As Shulman has pointed out, the Tamil word <span style="font-style:italic;">kaṇ</span> included in Mīnākṣī's vernacular name Aṅ-kayaṟ-kaṇṇ-ammaiyār 'Lady of the beautiful carp-eyes', means both 'eye' and 'breast-nipple'. In the <span style="font-style:italic;">Śrīvidyārṇava-Tantra</span>, Sītā is three-eyed and wears the crescent of the moon on her head; she has four arms holding a noose, a goad, a bow, and an arrow (Ramachandra Rao 1992: VI, 269). Sītā Sāvitrī is an aspect of the warrior goddess Durgā, as is sometimes made explicit in texts (see Parpola 1992, 1998, 1999). In the case of Mīnākṣī, this relationship with Durgā is clear from her local legend. This legend must be old, for in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Mhv</span> (c. A.D. 500), the daughter of King Paṇḍu of Southern Madhurā is called Vijayā, which designates her as the Goddess of Victory.<br /><br />The legend of a three-breasted princess recurs even at Nāgapaṭṭinam in Tamil Nadu: here this 'Lady of the long dark eyes' (Karun-taṭaṅ-kaṇṇi) is the daughter of Ādi-Śeṣa, King of the snakes, an ardent worshipper of Śiva. Of her, too, it was prophesied that the third breast would disappear as soon as she saw the king who would wed her, in some variants a Nāgarāja (cf. Shulman 1980: 205). Shulman (1980: 200-211) has discussed her relationship with Mīnākṣī and with Kaṇṇaki, the heroine of Cilappatikāram who destroys the city of Madurai with one of her breasts, all multiforms of the three-eyed warrior goddess Durgā-Kālī. At Madurai, too, the bridegroom appears to have been the local Śiva-related snake god, called in Tamil Āla-vāy (Sanskrit Hālaāya) (cf. Shulman 1980: 123ff., 206).<br /><br />BALA-RĀMA HAS REPLACED RUDRA-ŚIVA<br /><br />Bala-Rāma incarnates a snake deity connected with fertility and the subterranean regions, called Śeṣa 'remainder' (the name seems to refer to the seed grain left over for next sowing) or Ananta 'endless'. Serpent Śeṣa drinks palm-wine, and has the palmyra palm (Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">tāla</span>, a loanword from Dravidian) and the wine cup as his iconographic attributes. In this regard he is like Bala-Rāma, who in turn has the three-bend (<span style="font-style:italic;">tri-bhaṅga</span>) pose associated with snake deities (cf. Ramachandra Rao 1991: IV, 121-25). Buddhist Sanskrit texts know Pāṇḍuka, Pāṇḍuraka, Paṇḍulaka, and Paṇḍaraka as names of a nāga king, one of the guardians of the great treasures.<br /><br />The Mathurā region is considered to be "the stronghold of Saṃkarṣaṇa-Baladeva worship" (Jaiswal 1981: 60). The identity of Bala-Rāma is likely to have been pasted onto the earlier local divinity there. The myth of Kṛṣṇa's subduing the snake Kāliya living in the Yamunā river and driving him away from his home has been explained to symbolize the replacement of a snake cult earlier prevalent at Mathurā with the cult of Kṛṣṇa. The excavations at Sonkh have confirmed that snake worship still prevailed to a remarkable degree at Mathurā around the beginning of the Christian era. The only major shrine discovered is an apsidal Nāga temple. The associated finds comprise images and panels representing serpent deities and inscriptions referring to their cult. Nāga, Nāga Bhūmo, and Nāgarāja Dadhikarṇṇa are mentioned by name (cf. Hartel 1993: 413-60).<br /><br />Although Saṃkarṣaṇa appears as a Vaiṣṇavite divinity in the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas, there are traces of his close connection with the cult of Rudra-Śiva also. The Pañcarātra Samhitās often identify Saṃkarṣaṇa with Rudra-Śiva. The Brahmāṇḍa <br />Purāṇa states that Rudra was known as Halāyudha. The Viṣṇu Purāṇa speaks of Saṃkarṣaṇa-Rudra, who comes out of the mouth of the serpent Śeṣa at the end of every aeon .. . Śiva also is intimately associated with the nāgas. (Jaiswal 1981: 54)<br /><br />In Bengal Śiva is worshipped as Lāṅgaleśvara( cf. Smith 1999), and the most important phallic god of Hinduism could really be expected to be the god of plowing and generation. Megasthenes' account of the worship of Dionysos in India underlines Śiva's connection with agriculture and the plow c. 300 B.C.:<br /><br />The Indians, he [Megasthenes] says, were originally nomads ... until Dionysus reached India. But when he arrived and became master of India, he founded cities, gave them laws, bestowed wine on the Indians as on the Greeks, and taught them to sow their land, giving them seed. (...) Dionysus first yoked oxen to the plough and made most of the Indians agriculturalists instead of nomads, and equipped them also with the arms of warfare.... (Arrian, <span style="font-style:italic;">Indica</span> 7, 2-7, trans. Brunt 1983: 325-27)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">CONCLUSION</span><br /><br />In conclusion, I offer the following provisional reconstruction as a first approximation of the historical background that led to the creation of the earliest versions of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Mahābhārata</span> and the <span style="font-style:italic;">Rāmāyaṇa</span>. This is of course open to improvement and modification in the light of other evidence.<br /><br />From 800 B.c. onwards, groups of Iranian-speaking, pastoralist and marauding horsemen started arriving from the steppes of Eurasia and Central Asia in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Their main route to South Asia seems to have been via the Indus Valley to Gujarat, Rajasthan, and northern Maharashtra. These Iranians brought with them their own traditions, such as polyandric marriage, circular yurt-like houses, and funeral customs including exposure and megalithic burial. The newcomers were so fair-skinned that the local population called them 'pale' (<span style="font-style:italic;">pāṇḍu</span>), using a word taken over from Dravidian languages then still spoken in these regions besides Indo-Aryan. While they adopted the local Black-and-Red Ware pottery, the invaders essentially continued living as before in Central India and the Deccan, spreading also further south and adopting there the local Dravidian speech. Around 600 B.C., some megalithic raiders became maritime in Gujarat and colonized the coasts of Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu.<br /><br />Meanwhile some megalithic Pāṇḍus turned towards the culturally more advanced northern India. Through marital and other alliances they eventually gathered such a force that one group, the Pāṇḍavas, took over the rule even in the mightiest kingdom of north India. Another successful group was the family to which the Buddha belonged: the Śākyas, too, were Pāṇḍus, ultimately of Śaka origin, as their name reveals. In north<br />India, the Pāṇḍus quickly adopted the earlier local culture and language. Their newly won positions were legitimated with fabricated genealogies that made them a branch of the earlier ruling family, and with the performance of royal rituals. The propaganda was disseminated by professional bards, leading to the creation of the Mahābhārata.<br /><br />The alliance of the Pāṇḍavas and the Yādava chief Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva during the <span style="font-style:italic;">Mahābhārata</span> wars led to the birth of a new Vaiṣṇava religion, at the center of which was at first a trio that succeeded another with Vedic and older Indo-European roots (the Aśvins and their sister): two heroic brothers (the 'strong' white elder brother Arjuna / Baladeva and the black younger brother Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva) and their sister, whom the elder brother marries. This trio amalgamates the earlier cult of another trio worshipped from the upper Indus Valley (Madra, Kekaya, Bāhlīka) through Gujarat (Prabhāsa) and Rajasthan (Puṣkara, Mālavā) to Prayāga at the confluence of Yamunā and Gangā and eastwards up to Gayā (cf. Parpola 1998: 217ff.), evidently including Mathurā.<br /><br />The earlier trio thus absorbed into Vaiṣṇavism consisted of the incestuous couple of father (Prajāpati = Brahmā = Janaka = Aśvapati) and daughter (Vāc = Uṣas = Sāvitrī = Sītā = Vijayā = Durgā) and the dying and resurrected young prince-husband (Satyāvat = Kumara = Rudra = Śiva) to whom the father married off his daughter (an alter ego of the father). These agricultural divinities were represented by the king and the queen and by such fertility symbols as the plow and furrow, pestle and mortar, and snake and earth. In a recurring new year festival, a young hero (representing the king and the dying sun, etc.) was sacrificed after his "sacred marriage" with the queen; wine drinking, feasting with the meat of sacrificial victims, singing, dancing, and sexual orgies were essential elements of this festival (cf. <span style="font-style:italic;">MBh</span> 8 and Parpola 1998).<br /><br />As a result of the amalgamation, Arjuna / Baladeva was transformed into (Bala-)Rāma and his wife-sister into Sītā. Around 450 B.C. the new Vaiṣṇava religion was taken from Mathurā via Dvāraka by sea to Sri Laṅkā (by Paṇḍu-Vāsudeva) and to Tamil Nadu (where southern Madhurā became the new Pāṇḍya capital). Rumors about the princess held captive in the royal palace of Sri Lanka (<span style="font-style:italic;">Mhv</span> ch. 9) reached Ayodhyā soon hereafter, and Vālmīki composed his epic in which the local royalties played the roles of Janaka (the father of Sītā), (Bala)Rāma, and Sītā, and Rāma's younger brother (Lakṣmaṇa thus replacing Kṛṣṇa of the early Vaiṣṇava trio).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">REFERENCES</span><br /><br />Allchin, F R. 1995. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia</span>. With contributions from George Erdosy, R. A. E. Coningham, D. K. Chakrabarti, and Bridget Allchin. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.<br /><br />Allchin, Bridget, and Raymond Allchin. 1982. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan.</span> Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. 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Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-6796847360928568182010-05-12T18:51:00.000-07:002010-05-12T18:56:20.397-07:00indic-sms-hindi-tamil<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4HXsnOZu5F3WT0IL86pRT0LwEzzYVLYnPlv7DD8B6tXYoXYgRXIhyphenhyphenjGXboT0h7hvGcwFv-8ZXonwwf8OwN6NLI6H4XcZGE_HyjqrvlJRFohdhNNDeYmPp-gkblpN7acM_48S-XnO5Bz8/s1600/14_Page_1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 600px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4HXsnOZu5F3WT0IL86pRT0LwEzzYVLYnPlv7DD8B6tXYoXYgRXIhyphenhyphenjGXboT0h7hvGcwFv-8ZXonwwf8OwN6NLI6H4XcZGE_HyjqrvlJRFohdhNNDeYmPp-gkblpN7acM_48S-XnO5Bz8/s800/14_Page_1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5470566707525129394" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh379ZV_4sJKgo21H9SrcgSNnnnLP2hqr0OnVBbsPn0inA13e2Zpr16e8xfgduxN0uejgyv3QE4upozyXIdqY9ccD_3iSSPjkafNN9m9aVkPf086NjId1351JX4YWY-mhBOmlaP_3BlR30/s1600/14_Page_2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 600px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh379ZV_4sJKgo21H9SrcgSNnnnLP2hqr0OnVBbsPn0inA13e2Zpr16e8xfgduxN0uejgyv3QE4upozyXIdqY9ccD_3iSSPjkafNN9m9aVkPf086NjId1351JX4YWY-mhBOmlaP_3BlR30/s800/14_Page_2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5470566811758119410" /></a>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-30591364955434914792010-03-17T04:07:00.000-07:002010-03-22T05:08:50.364-07:00indian-stamp-caldwell<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6Nb0KVaWiAYanTTk0mJTpzDngi5Uw_bJS3h99pjC482yD1IaWBAHYn8nsUCjiw0CUz4XFztYtlvHgAaKitJ2chAZd2JudSVDXgWq4yYe3bpm8B67Y4V0E-NSgHVvjjkLU2_hvS3c9dJw/s1600-h/Caldwell_close1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 340px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6Nb0KVaWiAYanTTk0mJTpzDngi5Uw_bJS3h99pjC482yD1IaWBAHYn8nsUCjiw0CUz4XFztYtlvHgAaKitJ2chAZd2JudSVDXgWq4yYe3bpm8B67Y4V0E-NSgHVvjjkLU2_hvS3c9dJw/s400/Caldwell_close1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449557830164149362" /></a> இந்திய அரசாங்கம் திராவிட மொழிகளின் ஒப்பிலக்கணம் தந்த ராபெர்ட் கால்ட்வெல் பாதிரியாரின் தபால்தலையை மே 7, 2010 அன்று வெளியிடுவதாக அறிவித்துள்ளது. அதற்கு முன்னரே திராவிட மொழிக் குடும்பக் கோட்பாடு அளித்தவர் ஃபரான்சிஸ் வைட் எல்லிஸ் ஆவார். எல்லிஸ் சிறுவயதில் நஞ்சுணவை உண்டு மாய்ந்ததால், நூல் எழுதவில்லை. 1856-ல் எல்லிஸ் தொடங்கிய பணியைக் கால்டுவெல் பாதிரியார் (மே 7, 1814 - ஆகஸ்ட் 28, 1891) தனிநூலாகச் செப்பமுடன் எழுதி வெளியிட்டார்.<br /><br />திசையன்விளை அருகுள்ள இடையன்குடி என்ற வெப்பம் மிகுந்த ஊரில் 50 வருடங்கள் வாழ்ந்து கால்டுவெல் ஐயர் கிறிஸ்து சமயத்தைப் பரப்பினார். அந்தக் கிறித்துவ மிஷனரி தொண்டூழியம் பற்றிய விரிவான திரைப்படம்:<br /><embed id=VideoPlayback src=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4149665308378492194&hl=en&fs=true style=width:400px;height:326px allowFullScreen=true allowScriptAccess=always type=application/x-shockwave-flash> </embed><br /><br />Bishop Robert Caldwell, A Comparative grammar of the Dravidian on South Indian Family of Languages - 1856. முதன்முதலாய் திராவிடர், திராவிட மொழிகள் எனத் தென்னிந்திய மொழிக்குடும்பத்தையும், அம்மொழிகள் பேசுவோரையும் குறிப்பிட்டவர் கால்டுவெல்லே.<br /><br />கால்டுவெல் 19-ம் நூற்றாண்டில் த்ரவிட என்பது திரமிட என்றாகி அது பின்னர் த்ரமிள ஆகத் திரிந்து பின்னர் தமிள, தமிழ் என்று ஆனது என்றார். 100 ஆண்டு சென்றபின்னர் இதனை மறுத்து, தமிழ் என்பதே திரமிடம், திராவிடம் என்றானது என்று மொழியியல் அறிஞர் சுவெலபில் போன்றோர் எழுதினர். திராவிடம் என்பது தமிழைக் குறிக்கும் பெயரே என்பதைக் கால்டுவெல் கூறுகிறார். தமிழை மட்டும் குறிக்க தமிழ் என்னும் சொல்லையும், தமிழையும் அதன் கிளை மொழிகளான தெலுங்கு, கன்னடம், மலையாளம், போன்றவற்றையும் குறிக்க ‘திராவிடம்’ என்னும் சொல்லையும் தான் பயன்படுத்துவதாகத் தெளிவாகக் குறிப்பிடுகிறார்.(மேலது பக். 8). தமிழ் என்ற சொல்லுக்கான சமஸ்கிருதச் சொல் ‘திராவிட’ என்றும், அச்சொல் திராவிடர் என்று அழைக்கப்படும் மக்கள் வாழும் நாட்டையும், அவர்களது மொழியையும் குறிக்கும் என்றும் கால்டுவெல் குறித்தார். (மேலது பக். 12, கவிதாசரண் வெளியீட்டில் உள்ள பக்க எண்கள்).<br /><br />மேலும் ஆராய,<br /><br />Y. V. Kumaradoss,<br />Robert Caldwell, a scholar-missionary in colonial South India <br />Delhi : ISPCK, 2007<br /><br />ரா. பி. சேதுப்பிள்ளை, கால்டுவெல் ஐயர் சரிதம்,<br />1936: ஹிலால் பிரஸ், நெல்லை<br />1964: பழனியப்பா பிரதர்ஸ்<br /><br />Minatcicuntaram, Ka., <br />Contribution of European scholars to Tamil <br />University of Madras, 1974 (Tamil translation: 2003).<br /><br />எல்லீசன் என்றொரு அறிஞன் - ஆ.இரா. வேங்கடாசலபதி<br /><a href="http://www.kalachuvadu.com/issue-89/varalaru.asp">http://www.kalachuvadu.com/issue-89/varalaru.asp</a><br /><br />கால்டுவெல் என்ற மனிதர் - தொ. பரமசிவன் <br /><a href="http://www.keetru.com/maatruveli/nov08/tho_paramasivan.php">http://www.keetru.com/maatruveli/nov08/tho_paramasivan.php</a><br /><br />கால்டுவெல்: பின்காலனிய வாசிப்பு - அ. மங்கை<br /><a href="http://www.keetru.com/maatruveli/nov08/a_mangai.php">http://www.keetru.com/maatruveli/nov08/a_mangai.php</a><br /><br />கால்டுவெல் என்னும் சிக்கல் - எம். வேதசகாய குமார்<br /><a href="http://www.keetru.com/maatruveli/nov08/vedhasakayakumar.php">http://www.keetru.com/maatruveli/nov08/vedhasakayakumar.php</a><br /><br />கால்டுவெல்லின் திராவிடம்: ஒரு வாசிப்பு -வ. கீதா<br /><a href="http://www.keetru.com/maatruveli/nov08/Va_Geetha.php">http://www.keetru.com/maatruveli/nov08/Va_Geetha.php</a><br /><br />M.S.S. Pandian, Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present, Delhi, 2007.<br /><br /><a href="http://muelangovan.blogspot.com/2007/04/1814-1891.html">http://muelangovan.blogspot.com/2007/04/1814-1891.html</a><br /><br />2009 கிறிஸ்துமஸ் தினத்தன்று முதல்வர் கருணாநிதி தமிழைச் செம்மொழி ஆக்கும் திருப்பணியைத் துவக்கிய கால்டுவெல்லையும், பின்னர் கரந்தைத் தமிழ்ச் சங்கம் மேற்கொண்ட நடவடிக்கைகளையும் பற்றி முரசொலியில் எழுதியுள்ளார்.<br /><br />அறிக்கை:<br /><br />தமிழ்மொழி செம்மொழியென முதல் குரல் கொடுத்த தமிழர் பரிதிமாற் கலைஞர் என்றால்; தமிழ்மொழி செம்மொழியென்று முதலில் சொன்ன வெளிநாட்டவர் அறிஞர் ராபர்ட் கால்டுவெல் ஆவார்.<br /><br />பரிதிமாற் கலைஞர் தமிழ்மொழி செம்மொழியென 1887-ம் ஆண்டு குரல் கொடுத்ததற்கு 30 ஆண்டுகளுக்கு முன்பே, 1856-ம் ஆண்டு அறிஞர் கால்டுவெல், தாம் எழுதிய "திராவிட மொழிகளின் ஒப்பிலக்கணம் என்ற ஒப்புவமை காண்பித்திட இயலாத, உயர்பெரும் நூலில், "திராவிட மொழிகள் அனைத்திலும், உயர் தனிச் செம்மொழியாய் நிலைபெற்று விளங்கும் தமிழ், தன்னிடையே இடம் பெற்றிருக்கும் சமஸ்கிருதச் சொற்களை அறவே ஒழித்துவிட்டு உயிர் வாழ்வதோடு அவற்றின் துணையை ஒருசிறிதும் வேண்டாமல் வளம் பெற்று வளர்வதும் இயலும்.<br /><br />செந்தமிழ் என்றும் தனித்தமிழ் என்றும் சிறப்பிக்கப் பெறுவதும், பெரும்பாலும் அம்மொழி இலக்கியங்கள் அனைத்தையும் எழுதப் பயன்படுவதுமாகிய பழந்தமிழ் அல்லது இயல்தமிழ், மிக மிகக் குறைந்த சமஸ்கிருதத் தொடர்பையே பெற்றுள்ளது.<br /><br />சமஸ்கிருதச் சொற்களையும், எழுத்துக்களையும் மேற்கொள்வதை வெறுத்து ஒதுக்கிவிட்டு; பழந்திராவிட தனிச்சிறப்பு வாய்ந்த மூலங்கள், சொல்லுருவங்கள், ஒலி முறைகளை மட்டும் மேற்கொள்வதில் காட்டும் ஆர்வத்தையும் விழிப்புணர்ச்சியையும் விடாமல் மேற்கொண்டிருப்பதினாலேயே அச்செந்தமிழ், தன் மொழியின் உரைநடை, பேச்சு நடைகளோடு சிறப்பாக வேறுபடுகிறது என்று தமிழ்மொழி செம்மொழியே எனச் சான்றாதாரங்களோடு நிரூபித்துக் காட்டினார்.<br /><br />அறிஞர் கால்டுவெல்லின் ஆழ்ந்த ஆராய்ச்சி அடிப்படையிலான நூல்கள் தமிழகத்தில் பிராமணர் அல்லாதார் இயக்கத்திற்கு ஊக்கமளிப்பதாக அமைந்தன. தமிழ், தமிழர்தம் நாகரிகம், பண்பாடு ஆகியவற்றில் அவர் கொண்டிருந்த பற்றின் அடிப்படையிலேதான், அண்ணா இரண்டாம் உலகத்தமிழ் மாநாட்டின்போது, அவரது திருவுருவச் சிலையைச் சென்னை மெரினா கடற்கரையில் நிறுவிடச் செய்தார்.<br /><br />தென்னிந்தியத் திருச்சபையினர் வழங்கிய ராபர்ட் கால்டுவெல் திருவுருவச்சிலை, 2.1.1968 அன்று, அன்றைய தமிழக மேலவைத் தலைவர் எம்.ஏ.மாணிக்கவேலர் தலைமையில், பன்மொழிப் புலவர் கா.அப்பாத்துரையாரால் திறந்து வைக்கப்பட்டது.<br /><br />தமிழ்மொழி செம்மொழியேயென அறுதியிட்டு உறுதியாக சைவ சித்தாந்த மகா சமாஜம் 1918-ம் ஆண்டிலேயே நிறைவேற்றிய தீர்மானம் தமிழ் ஆர்வலர்களாலும், அன்பர்களாலும் மிகுந்த மகிழ்ச்சியோடும், நிறைவோடும் நினைவு கூரத்தக்கதாகும்.<br /><br />பச்சையப்பன் கல்லூரியில் நடைபெற்ற இந்தக் கூட்டத்தைப் பற்றி, தனித்தமிழ் அறிஞர் மறைமலையடிகளார் 12.3.1918-ந் தேதி பற்றிய தமது நாட்குறிப்பில், "தமிழைச் செம்மொழியாக ஏற்றுக் கொள்ளவேண்டும் என்று அரசாங்கத்திற்கு விண்ணப்பம் விடுப்பதற்குப் பச்சையப்பன் கல்லூரியில் 15-ம் நாள் (15.3.1918) நடக்கவிருக்கும் கூட்டத்தில் என்னை உரையாற்றுமாறு, கா.சுப்பிரமணிய பிள்ளை எம்.ஏ., எம்.எல்., வேண்டினார்'' என்று குறிப்பிட்டுள்ளார்.<br /><br />தஞ்சை-கரந்தைத் தமிழ்ச் சங்கம், செம்மொழி வரலாற்றிற்கு வழங்கியுள்ள மிகச்சிறப்பான பங்களிப்பு போற்றத்தக்கது மட்டுமல்ல; புவியில் வாழும் நாள்வரை தமிழர்களால் மறக்கவொண்ணாததுமாகும். த.வே.ராதாகிருஷ்ணப் பிள்ளை உள்ளிட்ட தமிழ் ஆர்வமும், தமிழ்ப் பயிற்சியும் உடையோர் சிலரால் 1911-ம் ஆண்டு தோற்றுவிக்கப்பட்ட கரந்தைத் தமிழ்ச் சங்கம்; தொடங்கிய காலம் முதல் தமது வாழ்நாள் இறுதிவரை அதன் தலைவராக இருந்து அரும்பணியாற்றியவர் தமிழறிஞர் த.வே.உமாமகேசுவரம் பிள்ளை ஆவார். அதனால் தான், 18.2.2006 அன்று சென்னை அண்ணா அறிவாலயத்தில் - கலைஞர் அரங்கில் நடைபெற்ற தமிழவேள் உமாமகேசுவரனார் அஞ்சல்தலை வெளியீட்டு விழாவில் நான் உரையாற்றியபோது:<br /><br />"உமாமகேசுவரனார் பெயர் இன்று மற்ற அறிஞர்களைவிட அதிகமாக நினைவுக்கு வரவேண்டிய காலகட்டம் இது. காரணம் தமிழ்ச் செம்மொழி என்று எண்ணினால், பரிதிமாற் கலைஞருக்கு அடுத்து, நம் நினைவுக்கு வருகிற பெயர் தமிழவேள் உமாமகேசுவரனாரின் பெயர்தான். அவர்தான் கரந்தைத் தமிழ்ச் சங்கத்தில் தமிழ், செம்மொழியாக ஆக்கப்படவேண்டும் என்ற தீர்மானத்தை இயற்றியவர். இல்லையேல், தமிழ் செம்மொழியாவதற்கு எந்த ஆதாரத்தை வைத்து நாம் மத்தியிலே இருக்கின்ற அரசோடு பேச முடிந்தது?'' - என்று கரந்தை உமாமகேசுவரனாரின் அருமை பெருமைகளுக்கு அணி செய்தது எனது நினைவில் அழுத்தமாக அச்சியற்றப் பெற்றிருக்கிறது.<br /><br />தஞ்சை - கரந்தைத் தமிழ்ச் சங்கத்தின் ஏழு-எட்டாம் ஆண்டுகளுக்கான விழா, 24.5.1919 மற்றும் 25.5.1919 ஆகிய நாட்களில் திருக்கோவிலூர் ஆதீனம், திருப்பாதிரிப்புலியூர் திருஞானியார் மடத்தின் தலைவர் சிவசண்முக மெய்ஞ்ஞான சிவாச்சார்ய சுவாமிகள் தலைமையில், தமிழவேள் த.வே.உமாமகேசுவரம் பிள்ளை, தமிழறிஞர் வேங்கடசாமி நாட்டார், டி.என்.குருமூர்த்திப் பிள்ளை, டி.கூரத்தாழ்வார் முதலியார் ஆகியோர் முன்னிலையில் நடைபெற்றது.<br /><br />அவ்விழாவில், "தமிழ்மொழியானது தொன்மையும், சீர்மையும், செம்மையும் வாய்ந்து விளங்குகின்ற ஓர் உயர்தனிச் செம்மொழியென உறுதிப்பட பலதிறத்தாராலும் ஏற்றுக் கொள்ளப்படுவதால், சென்னைப் பல்கலைக் கழகத்தார் தாம் இதுகாறும் கொண்டிருந்த கொள்கையை மாற்றித் தமிழ்மொழி, ஓர் உயர்தனிச் செம்மொழியே என்பதை ஒப்புக் கொண்டு, இத்தென்னாட்டுப் பல்கலைக்கழகத்தில் அதற்கு முறைப்படி முதலிடமும், உரிமைகளும் கொடுக்க வேண்டும்'' என்று வற்புறுத்தித் தீர்மானம் இயற்றப்பட்டது.<br /><br />22.9.1923 மற்றும் 23.9.1923 ஆகிய நாட்களில் தமிழ் வள்ளல் சா.ராம.மு.சித. பெத்தாச்சி செட்டியார் தலைமையில் நடைபெற்ற கரந்தைத் தமிழ்ச் சங்கத்தின் பன்னிரெண்டாவது ஆண்டு விழாவில், "உலகத்து உயர்தனிச் செம்மொழிகளில், முதல் மொழியெனக் கருதப்படுவதற்குரித் தான எல்லா இலக்கணமும் தமிழ் மொழி உடையதாயிருப்பதால், அதனை அத்தகை மொழியாக ஆட்சியாளர் கருதி ஐ.சி.எஸ். பட்டத்திற்கு அதனை ஒரு பாடமாக ஏற்றுக் கொள்ள வேண்டுமென்று இந்திய அரசியலாரை வற்புறுத்திக் கேட்டுக் கொள்ளப்படுகிறது'' எனும் தீர்மானம் இயற்றப்பட்டது.<br /><br />1938-ம் ஆண்டு ஏப்ரல் மாதம் 15, 16, 17 ஆகிய நாட்களில் நடைபெற்ற கரந்தைத் தமிழ்ச் சங்கத்தின் வெள்ளி விழாவிற்குத் தலைமையேற்ற திருப்பாதிரிப்புலியூர் ஞானியார் அடிகள் தனது உரையில், "இத்தகைய பெருமையும், இனிமையும் உடைய தமிழை உயர்தனிச் செம்மொழி என்ற நிலையில் அரசியலார் போற்றாதிருப்பது கவலத்தக்க தாகும்'' என்று தனது ஆழ்ந்த வருத்தத்தை வெளியிட்டார்.<br /><br />இவ்வாறு கரந்தைத் தமிழ்ச் சங்கம் தமிழவேள் உமாமகேசுவரனார் தலைமையில் தொடக்கக் கட்டத்தில்; தமிழ், செம்மொழியென அரசியல் நிலையில் அங்கீகரிக்கப்பட்டு உரிய முறையில் சிறப்பு செய்யப்படவேண்டும் என்பதற்கு ஆற்றிய பணி அளவிடமுடியாததாகும். செம்மொழி வரலாற்றில் கரந்தைத் தமிழ்ச் சங்கம் ஆற்றல் மிக்கதோர் அத்தியாயமாக இடம் பெற்றுள்ளது என்று கூறியுள்ளார் கருணாநிதி.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">கிறித்துமசு வாழ்த்துச் செய்தி (24. டிச. 2009):</span><br /><br />சென்னை, டிச.24 பொறுமையைப் போதித்த இயேசு நாதரின் அடிச்சுவட்டில் வாழும் கிறித்தவ சமுதாய மக்களுக்குத் தனது உளமார்ந்த கிறிஸ்துமஸ் திருநாள் நல்வாழ்த்துகளைத் தெரிவித்து மகிழ்வதாக முதலமைச்சர் கருணாநிதி குறிப்பிட்டுள்ளார்.<br /><br />முதலமைச்சர் கருணாநிதி விடுத்துள்ள கிறிஸ்துமஸ் வாழ்த்துச் செய்தி:<br /><br />இயேசு பெருமான் பிறந்த திருநாள் ஆண்டுதோறும் டிசம்பர் திங்கள் 25 ஆம் நாள் கிறிஸ்துமஸ் திருநாளாகக் கிறித்தவ சமுதாய மக்களால் மிகுந்த மகிழ்ச்சியோடு கொண்டாடப்படுகிறது.<br /><br />உலகத் தமிழ்ச் செம்மொழி மாநாடு, வரும் ஜூன் திங்கள் 23 ஆம் நாள் முதல் 27 ஆம் நாள் வரை 5 நாள்கள் கோவையில் கொண்டாடப்படும் என அறிவிக்கப்பட்டு, ஆயத்தப் பணிகள் நடைபெற்றுவரும் வேளையில், கிறித்தவ சமயத்தைப் பரப்பிடும் நோக்கில் ஐரோப்பிய நாடுகளிலிருந்து தமிழகம் வந்த குருமார்கள் பலர் ஆற்றிய தமிழ் வளர்ச்சிப் பணிகள் நினைவில் எழுகின்றன. அவ்வகையில், 1606இல் இத்தாலி நாட்டிலிருந்து வந்து, தமிழ்த் துறவியாக வாழ்ந்து, `தத்துவ போதகர்’ எனத் தம் பெயரையே மாற்றிக் கொண்டு தொண்டாற்றி, தமிழ் உரைநடையைச் செப்பம் செய்த இராபர்ட் டி. நொபிலி!<br /><br />அதே இத்தாலியிலிருந்து 1700இல் வந்து, கிறித்துவத் தொண்டுகளுடன் தமிழ் வளர்ச்சிப் பணிகளாக, “தேம்பாவணி,” “சதுரகராதி” முதலிய நூல்கள் பல படைத்த வீரமாமுனிவர்! 1709இல் ஜெர்மன் நாட்டிலிருந்து வந்து, தரங்கம்பாடியில் முதன்முதல் அச்சுக்கூடம் நிறுவி, பொறையாறில் இந்தியாவிலேயே முதன் முதலாகக் காகித ஆலையையும் நிறுவி, தமிழ் - இலத்தீன் அகராதி, பைபிள் தமிழ் மொழிபெயர்ப்பு முதலான தமிழ் நூல்கள் பல கண்ட சீகன் பால்க்!<br /><br />இங்கிலாந்து நாட்டிலிருந்து, 1839இல் தமிழகம் வந்து சமயப் பணிகளாற்றி, திருக்குறள், திருவாசகம், நாலடியார் ஆகியவற்றை ஆங்கிலத்தில் மொழி பெயர்த்ததுடன், இங்கிலாந்து திரும்பிச் சென்ற பின் அங்கு ஆக்ஸ்போர்டு பல்கலைக் கழகத் தமிழ்ப் பேராசிரியராகப் பணியாற்றி மேனாட்டினருக்குத் தமிழின் சிறப்பைப் புலப்படுத்தி, தமிழ் மொழி மீது கொண்ட காதலால், “நான் ஒரு தமிழ் மாணவன்” எனத் தம் கல்லறையில் எழுதச் செய்த ஜி.யூ. போப்!<br /><br />அயர்லாந்து நாட்டில் பிறந்து 1889இல் தமிழகம் வந்து, நெல்லைச் சீமையில் தங்கி, “திருநெல்வேலி சரித்திரம்” என்னும் ஆங்கில நூலுடன், திராவிட மொழிகளை ஆய்ந்து, “திராவிட மொழிகளின் ஒப்பிலக்கணம்” எனும் அரிய நூலைப் படைத்துத் தமிழ்மொழியின் மேன்மையை மேதினியில் நிலைநாட்டிய மேதை கால்டுவெல் போன்றோர் தமிழ்மொழி வளர்ச்சிக்கு ஆற்றிய அளப்பரிய தொண்டுகளெல்லாம் வரலாற்றில் நின்று நமக்கு எழுச்சியூட்டுகின்றன.<br /><br />அக்கிறித்தவப் பெருமக்களை நன்றியோடு நினைவுகூர்ந்து, மண்ணில் மனிதநேயம் தழைக்க, “அடுத்தவனை நேசி; உன் எதிரியிடமும் அன்பு காட்டு; உன்னைச் சபிப்பவர்களை ஆசீர்வாதம் செய்; உன்னை வெறுப்பவர்களுக்கும் உதவி செய்; உன்னை அவமதிப்பவர்களையும் போற்று;” எனப் பொறுமையைப் போதித்த இயேசு நாதரின் அடிச்சுவட்டில் வாழும் கிறித்தவ சமுதாய மக்களுக்குத் தமிழக அரசின் சார்பில் எனது உளமார்ந்த கிறிஸ்துமஸ் திருநாள் நல்வாழ்த்துகளைத் தெரிவித்து மகிழ்கிறேன்!<br /><br />இவ்வாறு முதலமைச்சர் கருணாநிதி கூறியுள்ளார்.நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-29219812088524337582010-03-01T10:13:00.000-08:002010-03-02T15:29:25.441-08:00Indian traditions & the Western imagination<div>Indian traditions & the Western imagination</div><div>Sen, Amartya</div><div>Daedalus, 10-01-2005,</div><div>vol. 134, no. 4.<br /><br />This essay is concerned with Western images of Indian intellectual traditions and the interactions between those representations and a contemporary "internal" understanding of Indian culture.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">1</span> I focus particularly on the elementary diversities that characterize Indian society and its intellectual traditions, as well as on the biases that result from paying inadequate attention to them. In an obvious way, this applies to seeing India as a "mainly Hindu" country (as Western newspapers often describe India, as do the newly powerful Hindu political parties within India) ; this "mainly Hindu" country is also the third-largest Muslim country in the world (with nearly no million Muslims).<br /><br />Less conspicuously, the contrast applies also to Indian intellectual traditions. This home of endless spirituality has perhaps the largest atheistic and materialist literature of all the ancient civilizations. To be sure, this accounting of the amount of unorthodox writing may be a little misleading, since Indian traditions are characterized by some prolixity. For example, the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, which is often compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, is in fact seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. One of the more striking Bengali verses I remember from my childhood is a lamentation about the tragedy of death in a nineteenth-century poem : "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be. / Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to respond.</span>" But even this extreme fondness for speech is associated with an enormous heterogeneity of programs and preoccupations. Irreducible diversity is perhaps the most important feature of Indian intellectual traditions.<br /><br />The self-images (or "internal identities") of Indians have been extremely affected by colonialism over the past centuries and are much influenced - both collaterally and dialectically - by the impact of outside imagery (what we may call "external identity"). However, the direction of the influence of Western images on internal Indian identities is not altogether straightforward. In recent years, separatist resistance to Western cultural hegemony has led to the creation of significant intellectual movements in many postcolonial societies not least in India. This has particularly drawn attention to the important fact that the self-identity of postcolonial societies is deeply affected by the power of the colonial cultures and their forms of thought and classification. Those who prefer to pursue a more "indigenous" approach often opt for a characterization of Indian culture and society that is rather self-consciously "distant" from Western traditions. There is much interest in "recovering" a distinctly Indian focus in Indian culture.<br /><br />I would argue that this stance does not take adequate note of the dialectical aspects of the relationship between India and the West and, in particular, tends to disregard the fact that the external images of India in the West have often tended to emphasize (rather than downplay) the differences - real or imagined between India and the West. Indeed, I propose that there are reasons why there has been a considerable Western inclination in the direction of "distancing" Indian culture from the mainstream of Western traditions. The contemporary reinterpretations of India (including the specifically "Hindu" renditions), which emphasize Indian particularism, join forces in this respect with the "external" imaging of India (in accentuating the distinctiveness of Indian culture). Indeed, it can be argued that there is much in common between James Mill's imperialist history of India and the Hindu nationalist picturing of India's past, even though the former image is that of a grotesquely primitive culture whereas the latter representation is dazzlingly glorious.<br /><br />The special characteristics of the Western approaches to India have encouraged a disposition to focus particularly on the religious and spiritual elements in Indian culture. There has also been a tendency to emphasize the contrast between what is taken to be "Western rationality" and the cultivation of what "Westerners" would see as "irrational" in Indian intellectual traditions. While Western critics may find "antirationalism" to be defective and crude, and Indian cultural separatists may find it cogent and penetrating (and perhaps even "rational" in some deeper sense), they nevertheless agree on the existence of a simple and sharp contrast between the two heritages. The issue that has to be scrutinized is whether such a bipolar contrast is at all present in that form.<br /><br />I will discuss these questions and argue that focusing on India's "specialness" misses, in important ways, crucial aspects of Indian culture and traditions. The deep-seated heterogeneity of Indian traditions is neglected in these homogenized interpretations (even though the interpretations themselves are of different kinds). My focus will be particularly on images of Indian intellectual traditions, rather than on its creative arts and other features of social life. After distinguishing between three of the dominant approaches in Western interpretations of Indian intellectual traditions, I will consider what may appear to be the overall consequence of these approaches in Western images of India and its impact on both external and internal identities.<br /><br /></div><div><i>Western Approaches to India: Three Categories</i></div><div><br />A dissimilarity of perceptions has been an important characteristic of Western interpretations of India, and several different and competing conceptions of that large and complex culture have been influential in the West. The diverse interpretations of India in the West have tended to work to a considerable extent in the same direction (that of accentuating India's spirituality) and have reinforced each other in their effects on internal identities of Indians. But this is not because the distinct approaches to India are not fundamentally different; they certainly are very disparate. The similarity lies more in their impact - given the special circumstances and the dialectical processes - than in their content.<br /><br />The analysis to be pursued here would undoubtedly invite comparison and contrast with Edward Said's justly famous analysis of 'Orientalism." Said analyzes the construction of the "Orient" in Western imagination. As he puts it, "The Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">2</span> This essay has a much narrower focus than Said's, viz. India, but there is clearly an overlap of subject matter since India is a part of the "Orient." The main difference is at the thematic level. Said focuses on uniformity and consistency in a particularly influential Western characterization of the Orient, whereas I shall be dealing with several contrasting and conflicting Western approaches to understanding India.<br /><br />Said explains that his work "deals principally not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient. "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">3</span> I would argue that unless one chooses to focus on the evolution of a specific " conceptual tradition (as Said, in effect, does), "internal consistency" is precisely the thing that is terribly hard to find in the variety of Western conceptions of India. There are several fundamentally contrary ideas and images of India, and they have quite distinct roles in the Western understanding of the country and also in influencing self-perceptions of Indians.<br /><br />Attempts from outside India to understand and interpret the country's traditions can be, I would argue, put into at least three distinct categories, which I shall call exotidst approaches, magisterial approaches, and curatorial approaches.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">4</span> The first (exotidst) category concentrates on the wondrous aspects of India. The focus here is on what is different, what is strange in the country that, as Hegel put it, "has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans."<br /><br />The second (magisterial) category strongly relates to the exercise of imperial power and sees India as a subject territory from the point of view of its British governors. This outlook assimilates a sense of superiority and guardianhood needed to deal with a country that James Mill defined as "that great scene of British action." While a great many British observers did not fall into this category (and some non-British ones did), it is hard to dissociate this category from the task of governing the Raj.<br /><br />The third (curatorial) category is the most catholic of the three and includes various attempts at noting, classifying, and exhibiting diverse aspects of Indian culture. Unlike the exoticist approaches, a curatorial approach does not look only for the strange (even though the "different" must have more "exhibit value"), and unlike the magisterial approaches, it is not weighed down by the impact of the ruler's priorities (even though the magisterial connection would be hard to avoid altogether when the author is also a member of the ruling imperial elite, as they sometimes were). For these reasons, there is more freedom from preconceptions in this third category. On the other hand, the curatorial approaches have perspectives of their own, with a general interest in seeing the object - in this case, India - as very special and extraordinarily interesting.<br /><br />Other categories can be proposed that are not covered by any of the three. Also, the established approaches can be reclassified according to some other organizing principle. I am not claiming any grand definitive status of this way of seeing the more prominent Western approaches to India. However, for the purpose of this essay, I believe this threefold categorization is useful.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Curiosity, Power, and Curatorial Approaches</i><br /><br />I shall begin by considering the curatorial approaches. But first I must deal with a methodological issue, in particular, the prevalent doubts in contemporary social theory about the status of intellectual curiosity as a motivation for knowledge. In particular, there is much skepticism about the possibility of any approach to learning that is innocent of power. That skepticism is justified to some extent since the motivational issues underlying any investigation may well relate to power relations, even when that connection is not immediately visible.<br /><br />Yet people seek knowledge for many different reasons, and curiosity about unfamiliar things is certainly among the possible reasons. It need not be seen as a figment of the deluded scientist's imagination, nor as a tactical excuse for some other, ulterior preoccupation. Nor does the pervasive relevance of different types of motivation have the effect of making all the different observational findings equally arbitrary. There are real lines to be drawn between inferences dominated by rigid preconceptions (for example, in the "magisterial" approaches, to be discussed presently) and those that are not so dominated.<br /><br />There is an interesting methodological history here. The fact that knowledge is often associated with power is a recognition that had often received far too little attention in traditional social theories of knowledge. But in recent social studies, the remedying of that methodological neglect has been so comprehensive that we are now in some danger of ignoring other motivations altogether that may not link directly with the seeking of power. While it is true that any useful knowledge gives its possessor some power in one form or another, this may not be the most remarkable aspect of that knowledge, nor the primary reason for which this knowledge is sought. Indeed, the process of learning can accommodate considerable motivational variations without becoming a functionalist enterprise of some grosser kind. An epistemic methodology that sees the pursuit of knowledge as entirely congruent with the search for power is a great deal more cunning than wise. It can needlessly undermine the value of knowledge in satisfying curiosity and interest ; it significantly weakens one of the profound characteristics of human beings.<br /><br />The curatorial approach relates to systematic curiosity. People are interested in other cultures and different lands, and investigations of a country and its traditions have been vigorously pursued throughout human history. Indeed, the development of civilization would have been very different had this not been the case. The exact motivation for these investigations can vary, but the inquiries need not be hopelessly bound by some overarching motivational constraint (such as those associated with the exoticist or magisterial approaches). Rather, the pursuit may be driven primarily by intellectual interests and concerns. This is not to deny that the effects of these investigative pursuits may go well beyond the motivating interests and concerns, nor that there could be mixed motivations of various kinds, in which power relations play a collateral role. But to deny the role of curiosity and interest as powerful motivational features in their own right would be to miss something rather important. For the curatorial approaches, that connection is quite central.<br /><br /></div><div><i>Curatorial Approaches in Early Arabic and European Studies</i></div><div><br />A fine example of a curatorial approach to understanding India can be found in Alberuni's Ta'rikh al-hind (The History of India), written in Arabic in the early eleventh century.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">5</span> Alberuni, who was born in Central Asia in A.D. 973, first came to India accompanying the marauding troops of Mahmud of Ghazni. He became very involved with India and mastered Sanskrit; studied Indian texts on mathematics, natural sciences, literature, philosophy, and religion ; conversed with as many experts as he could find; and investigated social conventions and practices. His book on India presents a remarkable account of the intellectual traditions and social customs of early eleventh-century India.<br /><br />Even though Alberuni's was almost certainly the most impressive of these investigations, there are a great many examples of serious Arabic studies of Indian intellectual traditions around that time.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">6 </span>Brahmagupta's pioneering Sanskrit treatise on astronomy had first been translated into Arabic in the eighth century (Alberuni retranslated it three centuries later), and several works on medicine, science, and philosophy had an Arabic rendering by the ninth century. It was through the Arabs that the Indian decimal system and numerals reached Europe, as did Indian writings in mathematics, science, and literature.<br /><br />In the concluding chapter of his book on India, Alberuni describes the motivation behind his work thus : "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">We think now that what we have related in this book will be sufficient for any one who wants to converse with [the Indians], and to discuss with them questions of religion, science, or literature, on the very basis of their own civilization.</span>"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">7</span> He is particularly aware of the difficulties of achieving an understanding of a foreign land and people, and specifically warns the reader about it :<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">... in all manners and usages, [the Indians] differ from us to such a degree as to frighten their children with us, with our dress, and our ways and customs, and as to declare us to be devil's breed, and our doings as the very opposite of all that is good and proper. By the bye, we must confess, in order to be just, that a similar depreciation of foreigners not only prevails among us and [the Indians], but is common to all nations towards each other. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">8</span></span><br /><br />While Arab scholarship on India provides plentiful examples of curatorial approaches in the external depiction of India, they are not, of course, unique in this respect. Chinese travelers Fa Hsien and Hsuan Tsang, who spent many years in India in the fifth and seventh centuries A.D. respectively, provided extensive accounts of what they saw. While they had gone to India for Buddhist studies, their reports cover a variety of Indian subjects, described with much care and interest.<br /><br />Quite a few of the early European studies of India must also be put in this general category. A good example is the Italian Jesuit Roberto Nobili, who went to south India in the early seventeenth century, and whose remarkable scholarship in Sanskrit and Tamil permitted him to produce quite authoritative books on Indian intellectual discussions, in Latin as well as in Tamil. Another Jesuit, Father Pons from France, produced a grammar of Sanskrit in Latin in the early eighteenth century and also sent a collection of original manuscripts to Europe (happily for him, the Bombay customs authorities were not yet in existence then).<br /><br />However, the real eruption of European interest in India took place a bit later, in direct response to British - rather than Italian or French - scholarship on India. A towering figure in this intellectual transmission is the redoubtable William Jones, the legal scholar and officer of the East India Company, who went to India in 1783 and by the following year had established the Asiatic Society of Bengal with the active patronage of Warren Hastings. In collaboration with scholars such as Charles Wilkins and Thomas Colebrooke, Jones and the Asiatic Society did a remarkable job in translating a number of Indian classics - religious documents (such as the Gita) as well as legal treatises (particularly, Manusmriti) and literary works (such as Kalidasa's Sakuntda').<br /><br />Jones was quite obsessed with India and declared his ambition "to know India better than any other European ever knew it. " His description of his selected fields of study included the following modest list: ...<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"> the Laws of the Hindus and the Mohamedans, Modern Politics and Geography of Hindustan, Best Mode of Governing Bengal, Arithmetic and Geometry, and Mixed Sciences of the Asiaticks, Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery, and Anatomy of the Indians, Natural Productions of India, Poetry, Rhetoric, and Morality of Asia, Music of the Eastern Nations, Trade, Manufacture, Agriculture, and Commerce of India.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">9</span></span><br /><br />One can find many other examples of dedicated scholarship among British officers in the East India Company, and there can be little doubt that the Western perceptions of India were profoundly influenced by these investigations. Not surprisingly, the focus here is quite often on those things that are distinctive in India. The specialists on India pointed to the uncommon aspects of Indian culture and its intellectual traditions, which were obviously more interesting given the perspective and motivation of the observers.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">10</span> As a result, the curatorial approaches could not escape being somewhat slanted in their focus. I shall come back to this issue later.<br /><br /></div><div><i>The Magisterial Burden</i></div><div><br />I turn now to the second category, the magisterial approaches. The task of ruling a foreign country is not an easy one when its subjects are seen as equals. In this context, it is quite remarkable that the early British administrators in India, even the controversial Warren Hastings, were as respectful of the Indian traditions as they clearly were. The empire was still in its infancy and was being gradually acquired, rather tentatively (if not in a fit of absentmindedness).<br /><br />A good example of a magisterial approach to India is the classic book on India written by James Mill, published in 1817, on the strength of which he was appointed as an official of the East India Company. Mill's History of British India played a major role in introducing the British governors of India to a particular characterization of the country. Mill disputed and dismissed practically every claim ever made on behalf of Indian culture and its intellectual traditions, concluding that it was totally primitive and rude. This diagnosis fit well with Mill's general attitude, which supported the idea of bringing a rather barbaric nation under the benign and reformist administration of the British Empire. Consistent with his beliefs, Mill was an expansionist in dealing with the remaining independent states in the subcontinent. The obvious policy to pursue, he explained, was "to make war on those states and subdue them."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">11</span><br /><br />Mill chastised early British administrators (like William Jones) for having taken "Hindus to be a people of high civilization, while they have in reality made but a few of the earliest steps in the progress to civilization."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">12</span> At the end of a comprehensive attack on all fronts, he came to the conclusion that the Indian civilization was on a par with other inferior ones known to Mill - "very nearly the same with that of the Chinese, the Persians, and the Arabians" ; he also put in this category, for good measure, "subordinate nations, the Japanese, Cochinchinese, Siamese, Burmans, and even Malays and Tibetans. "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">13</span><br /><br />How well informed was Mill in dealing with his subject matter? Mill wrote his book without ever having visited India. He knew no Sanskrit, nor any Persian or Arabic, had practically no knowledge of any of the modern Indian languages, and thus his reading of Indian material was of necessity most limited. There is another feature of Mill that clearly influenced his investigations, to wit, his inclination to distrust anything stated by native scholars, since they appeared to him to be liars. "Our ancestors," says Mill, "though tough, were sincere ; but under the glossing exterior of the Hindu, lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">14</span><br /><br />Perhaps some examples of Mill's treatment of particular claims of achievement may be useful to illustrate the nature of his extremely influential approach. The invention of the decimal system with place values and the placed use of zero, now used everywhere, as well as the so-called Arabic numerals are generally known to be Indian developments. In fact, Alberuni had already mentioned this in his eleventh-century book on India,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">15 </span>and many European as well as Arab scholars had written on this subject.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">16</span> Mill dismisses the claim altogether on the grounds that "the invention of numerical characters must have been very ancient" and "whether the signs used by the Hindus are so peculiar as to render it probable that they invented them, or whether it is still more probable that they borrowed them, are questions which, for the purpose of ascertaining their progress in civilization, are not worth resolving."<br /><br />Mill proceeds then to explain that the Arabic numerals "are really hieroglyphics" and that the claim on behalf of the Indians and the Arabs reflects the confounding of "the origin of cyphers or numerical characters" with "that of hieroglyphic writing."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">17</span> At one level Mill's rather elementary error lies in not knowing what a decimal or a place-value system is, but his ignorant smugness cannot be understood except in terms of his implicit unwillingness to believe that a very sophisticated invention could have been managed by such primitive people.<br /><br />Another interesting example concerns Mill's reaction to Indian astronomy and specifically the argument for a rotating earth and a model of gravitational attraction (proposed by Aryabhata, who was born in A.D. 476, and investigated by, among others, Varahamihira and Brahmagupta in the sixth and seventh centuries). These works were well known in the Arab world; as was mentioned earlier, Brahmagupta's book was translated into Arabic in the eighth century and retranslated by Alberuni in the eleventh. William Jones had been told about these works in India, and he in turn reported that statement. Mill expresses total astonishment at Jones's gullibility.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">18</span> After ridiculing the absurdity of this attribution and commenting on the "pretensions and interests" of Jones's Indian informants, Mill concludes that it was "extremely natural that Sir William Jones, whose pundits had become acquainted with the ideas of European philosophers respecting the system of the universe, should hear from them that those ideas were contained in their own books."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">19</span><br /><br />For purposes of comparison it is useful to examine Alberuni's discussion of the same issue nearly eight hundred years earlier, concerning the postulation of a rotating earth and gravitational attraction in the still-earlier writings of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta:<br /><br />Brahmagupta says in another place of the same book: "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">The followers of Aryabhata maintain that the earth is moving and heaven resting. People have tried to refute them by saying that, if such were the case, stones and trees would fall from the earth." But Brahmagupta does not agree with them, and says that that would not necessarily follow from their theory, apparently because he thought that all heavy things are attracted towards the center of the earth</span>.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">20</span><br /><br />Alberuni himself proceeded to dispute this model, raised a technical question about one of Brahmagupta's mathematical calculations, referred to a different book of his own arguing against the proposed view, and pointed out that the relative character of movements makes this issue less central than one might first think: "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">The rotation of the earth does in no way impair the value of astronomy, as all appearances of an astronomic character can quite as well be explained according to this theory as to the other.</span>"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">21</span> Here, as elsewhere, while arguing against an opponent's views, Alberuni tries to present such views with great involvement and care. The contrast between Alberuni's curatorial approach and James Mill's magisterial pronouncements could not be sharper.<br /><br />There are plenty of other examples of "magisterial" readings of India in Mill's history. This is of some practical importance, since the book was extremely influential in the British administration and widely praised. It was described by Macaulay as "on the whole the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since that of Gibbon."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">22</span> Macaulay's own approach and inclinations echoed James Mill's:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic.... I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia</span>.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">23</span><br /><br />This view of the poverty of Indian intellectual traditions played a major part in educational reform in British India, as is readily seen from the 1835 "Minute on Indian Education, " written by Macaulay himself (the quoted remark is actually taken from that document). The priorities in Indian education were determined, henceforth, by a different emphasis - by the need, as Macaulay argued, for a class of English-educated Indians who could "be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">24</span><br /><br />The impact of the magisterial views of India was not confined only to Britain and India. Modern documents in the same tradition have been influential elsewhere, including in the United States. In a series of long conversations on India and China conducted by Harold Isaacs in 1958 with 181 Americans academics, professionals in mass media, government officials, missionaries and church officials, and officials of foundations, voluntary social-service groups, and political organizations - Isaacs found that the two most widely read literary sources on India were Rudyard Kipling and Katherine Mayo, the author of the extremely derogatory Mother India.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">25</span> Of these, Kipling's writings would be more readily recognized as having something of the "magisterial" approach to them. Lloyd Rudolph describes Mayo's Mother India thus:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">First published in 1927, Mother India was written in the context of official and unofficial British efforts to generate support in America for British rule in India. It added contemporary and lurid detail to the image of Hindu India as irredeemably and hopelessly impoverished, degraded, depraved, and corrupt. Mayo's Mother India echoed not only the views of men like Alexander Duff, Charles Grant, and Iohn Stuart Mill but also those of Theodore Roosevelt, who glorified in bearing the white man's burden in Asia and celebrated the accomplishments of imperialism.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">26</span></span><br /><br />Mahatma Gandhi, while describing Mayo's book as "a drain inspector's report," had added that every Indian should read it and seemed to imply, as Ashis Nandy notes, that it is possible "to put her criticism to internal use" (as an overstern drain inspector's report certainly can be).<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">27</span> Gandhi himself was severely attacked in the book, but given his campaign against caste and untouchability, he might have actually welcomed even her exaggerations because of its usefully lurid portrayal of caste inequities. But while Gandhi may have been right to value external criticism as a way of inducing people to be self-critical, the impact of the "magisterial approach" certainly gives American perceptions of India a very clear slant.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">28</span><br /><br /></div><div><i>Exoticist Readings of India</i></div><div><br />I turn now to the "exoticist" approaches to India. Interest in India has often been stimulated by the observation of exotic ideas and views there. Arrian's and Strabo's accounts of Alexander the Great's spirited conversations with various sages of northwest India may or may not be authentic, but ancient Greek literature is full of uncommon happenings and thoughts attributed to India.<br /><br />Megasthenes's Indika, describing India in the early third century B.C., can claim to be the first outsider's book on India; it created much Greek interest, as can be seen from the plentiful references to it, for example, in the writings of Diodorus, Strabo, and Arrian. Megasthenes had ample opportunity to observe India since, as the envoy of Seleucus Nicator to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, he spent nearly a decade (between 302 and 291 B.C.) in Pataliputra (the site of modern Patna), the capital city of the Mauryan empire. But his superlatively admiring book is also so full of accounts of fantastic objects and achievements in India that it is hard to be sure what is imagined and what is really being observed.<br /><br />There are various other accounts of exotic Indian travels by ancient Greeks. The biography of Apollonius of Tiyana by Flavius Philostratus in the third century A.D. is a good example. In his search for what was out of the ordinary, Apollonius was, we are assured, richly rewarded in India : "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">I have seen men living upon the earth and not upon it ; defended without walls, having nothing, and yet possessing all things.</span> "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">29</span> How such contradictory things can be seen by the same person from the same observational position may not be obvious, but the bewitching charm of all this for the seeker of the exotic can hardly be doubted.<br /><br />Exotic interests in India can be seen again and again, from its early history to the present day. From Alexander listening to the gymnosophists' lectures to contemporary devotees hearing the sermons of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Shri Rajneesh, there is a crowded lineage. Perhaps the most important example of intellectual exoticism related to India can be seen in the European philosophical discussions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, among the Romantics in particular.<br /><br />Important figures in the Romantic movement, including the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, and others, were profoundly influenced by rather magnified readings of Indian culture. From Herder, the German philosopher and a critic of the rationalism of the European Enlightenment, we get the magnificent news that "the Hindus are the gentlest branch of humanity" and that "moderation and calm, a soft feeling and a silent depth of the soul characterize their work and their pleasure, their morals and mythology, their arts."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">30</span> Frederich Schlegel not only pioneered studies of Indo-European linguistics (later pur- > sued particularly by Max Muller) but also brought India fully into his critique of the contemporary West. While in the West "man himself has almost become a machine" and "cannot sink any deeper," Schlegel recommended learning from the Orient, especially India. He ; also guaranteed that "the Persian and German languages and cultures, as well as the Greek and the old Roman, may all be traced back to the Indian."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">31</span> To this list, Schopenhauer added the New Testament, informing us that, in contrast with the Old, the New Testament "must somehow be of Indian origin : this is attested by its completely Indian ethics, which transforms morals into asceticism, its pessimism, and its avatar (i.e., the person of Christ)."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">32</span><br /><br />Not surprisingly, many of the early enthusiasts were soon disappointed in not finding in Indian thought what they had themselves put there, and many of them went into a phase of withdrawal and criticism. Some of the stalwarts, Schlegel in particular, recanted vigorously. Others, including Hegel, outlined fairly negative views of Indian traditions and presented loud denials of the claim of preeminence of Indian culture - a claim that was of distinctly European origin. When Samuel Coleridge asked: "What are / These potentates of inmost Ind?"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">33</span> he was really asking a question about Europe, rather than about India.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">34</span><br /><br />In addition to veridical weakness, the exoticist approach to India has an inescapable fragility and transience that can be seen again and again. A wonderful thing is imagined about India and sent into a high orbit, and then it is brought crashing down. All this need not be such a tragedy when the act of launching is done by (or with the active cooperation of ) the putative star. Not many would weep, for example, for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi when the Beatles stopped lionizing him and left suddenly; in answer to the Maharishi's question of why were they leaving, John Lennon said, "You are the cosmic one; you ought to know. "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">35</span><br /><br />But it is a different matter altogether when both the boom and the bust are thrust upon the victim. One of the most discouraging episodes in literary reception occurred early in this century, when Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and others led a chorus of adoration at the lyrical spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore's poetry but followed it soon afterwards with a thorough disregard and firm denunciation. Tagore was a Bengali poet of tremendous creativity and range (even though his poetry does not translate easily - not even the spiritual ones that were so applauded) and also a great storyteller, novelist, and essayist; he remains a dominant literary figure in Bangladesh and India. The versatile and innovative writer that the Bengalis know well is not the sermonizing spiritual guru put together in London ; nor did he fit any better the caricature of "Stupendranath Begorr" to be found in Bernard Shaw's "A Glimpse of the Domesticity of Franklyn Barnabas."<br /><br /></div><div><i>Interactions and Reinforcements</i></div><div><br />These different approaches have had very diverse impacts on the understanding of Indian intellectual traditions in the West. The exoticist and magisterial approaches have bemused and befuddled that understanding even as they have drawn attention to India in the West. The curatorial approaches have been less guilty of this, and indeed historically have played a major part in bringing out and drawing attention to the different aspects of Indian culture, including its nonmystical and nonexotic features. Nevertheless, given the nature of the curatorial enterprise, the focus inevitably leans towards that which is different in India, rather than what is similar to the West. In emphasizing the distinctiveness of India, even the curatorial approaches have sometimes contributed to the accentuation of contrasts rather than commonalities with Western traditions, though not in the rather extreme form found in the exoticist and magisterial approaches.<br /><br />The magisterial approaches played quite a vigorous role in the running of the British Empire. Even though the Raj is dead and gone, the impact of the associated images survives, not least in the United States (as discussed earlier). To some extent, the magisterial authors also reacted against the admiration of India that can be seen in the writings of curatorial observers of India. For example, both Mill and Macaulay were vigorously critical of the writings of authors such as William Jones, and there are some important dialectics here. The respectful curatorial approaches painted a picture of Indian intellectual traditions that was much too favorable for the imperial culture of the nineteenth century, and contributed to the vehemence of the magisterial denunciations of those traditions. By the time Mill and Macaulay were writing, the British Indian empire was well established as a lasting and extensive enterprise, and the "irresponsibility" of admiring the native intellectual traditions - permissible in the previous century for early servants of the East India Company - was hard to sustain as the favored reading of India in the consolidated empire.<br /><br />Turning to the exoticist approaches, the outbursts of fascinated wonder bring India into Western awareness in big tides of bewildering attention. But then they ebb, leaving only a trickle of hardened exoticists holding forth. There may well be, after a while, another tide. In describing the rise and decline of Rabindranath Tagore in London's literary circles, E. M. Forster remarked that London was a city of "boom and bust," but that description applies more generally (that is, not confined only to literary circles in London) to the Western appreciation of exotic aspects of Eastern cultures.<br /><br />The tides, while they last, can be hard work though. I remember feeling quite sad for a dejected racist whom I saw, some years ago, near the Aldwych station in London, viewing with disgust a thousand posters pasted everywhere carrying pictures of the obese - and holy physique of Guru Maharajji (then a great rage in London). Our dedicated racist was busy writing "fat wog" diligently under each of the pictures. In a short while that particular wog would be gone, but I do not doubt that the "disgusted of Aldwych" would scribble "lean wog" or "medium-sized wog" under other posters now.<br /><br />It might be thought that since the exoticist approaches give credit where it may not be due and the magisterial approaches withhold credit where it may well be due, the two might neutralize each other nicely. But they work in very asymmetrical ways. Magisterial critiques tend to blast the rationalist and humanist aspects of India with the greatest force (this is as true of James Mill as of Katharine Mayo), whereas exoticist admirations tend to build up the mystical and extrarational aspects with particular care (this has been so from Apollonius of Tyana down to the Hare Krishna activists of today). The result of the two taken together is to wrest the understanding of Indian culture forcefully away from its rationalist aspects. Indian traditions in mathematics, logic, science, medicine, linguistics, or epistemology may be well known to the Western specialist, but they play little part in the general Western understanding of India.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">36</span> Mysticism and exoticism, in contrast, have a more hallowed position in that understanding.<br /><br /></div><div><i>The Dialectics of Internal and External Identity</i></div><div><br />Western perceptions and characterizations of India have had considerable influence on the self-perceptions of Indians themselves. This is clearly connected to India's colonial past and continued deference to what is valued in the West.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">37</span> However, the relationship need not take the form of simple acceptance it sometimes includes strategic responses to the variety of Western perceptions of India that suit the interests of internal imaging. We have to distinguish between some distinct aspects of the influence that Western images have had on Indian internal identities.<br /><br />First, the European exoticists' interpretations and praise found in India a veritable army of appreciative listeners, who were particularly welcoming given the badly damaged self-confidence resulting from colonial domination. The admiring statements were quoted again and again, and the negative remarks by the same authors (Herder, Schlegel, Goethe, and others) were systematically overlooked.<br /><br />In his Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru comments on this phenomenon:<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">There is a tendency on the part of Indian writers, to which I have also partly succumbed, to give selected extracts and quotations from the writings of European scholars in praise of old Indian literature and philosophy. It would be equally easy, indeed much easier, to give other extracts giving an exactly opposite viewpoint.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">38</span><br /><br />In the process of accepting the exoticist praise, the Indian interpretation of the past has extensively focused on the objects of exoticist praise, concentrating more on the mystical and the antirationalist, for which many in the West have such admiration.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">39</span><br /><br />Second, the process fit into the politics of elitist nationalism in colonial India and fed the craving for a strong intellectual ground to stand on to confront the imperial rulers. Partha Chatterjee discusses the emergence of this attitude very well:</div><div><br /></div><div>.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">..anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains - the material and the spiritual. The material is the domain of the "outside," of the economy and of statecraft, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proved its superiority and the East had succumbed. In this domain, then, Western superiority had to be acknowledged and its accomplishments carefully studied and replicated. The spiritual, on the other hand, is an "inner" domain bearing the "essential" marks of cultural identity. The greater one's success in imitating Western skills in the material domain, therefore, the greater the need to preserve the distinctiveness of one's spiritual culture. This formula is, I think, a fundamental feature of anticolonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">40 </span></span></div><div><br /></div><div>There was indeed such an attempt to present what was perceived to be the "strong aspects" of Indian culture, distinguished from the domain, as Chatterjee puts it, "where the West had proved its superiority and the East had succumbed." </div><div><br /></div><div>Chatterjee's analysis can be supplemented by taking further note of the dialectics of the relationship between Indian internal identity and its external images. The diagnosis of strength in that nonmaterialist domain was as much helped by the exoticist admiration for Indian spirituality as the acceptance of India's weakness in the domain of science, technology, and mathematics was reinforced by the magisterial dismissals of India's materialist and rationalist traditions. The emphases on internal identity that emerged in colonial India bear powerful marks of dialectical encounters with Western perceptions. </div><div><br /></div><div>Third, as the focus has shifted in recent decades from elitist colonial history to the role of the nonelite, the concentration on the intellectual traditions of the elite has weakened. Here we run into one of the most exciting developments in historiography in India. There has been a significant shift of attention from the elite to the underdogs in the writing of colonial history, focusing more on the rural masses and the exploited plebeians- a broad group often identified by the capacious term "subalterns."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">41</span> The move is entirely appropriate in its context (in fact, much overdue), and in understanding colonial history, this is a very important corrective. </div><div><br /></div><div>While this shift in focus rejects the emphasis on elitist intellectual traditions in general (both of the materialist and the nonmaterialist kind), it is in many ways easier to relate the religious and spiritual traditions of the elite to the practices and beliefs of the nonelite. The cutting edge of science and mathematics is inevitably related to formal education and preparation. In this context, the immense backwardness of India in mass education (an inheritance from the British period but not much remedied yet) compounds the dissociation of elite science and mathematics from the lives of the nonelite. Acceptance of the achievements of Indian spirituality tends to look less "alienated" from the masses than the achievements in fields that demand more exacting formal education. Thus, the exoticists' praise of India is more easily accepted by those who are particularly careful not to see India in elitist terms. </div><div><br /></div><div>The fact remains, however, that illiteracy is a deprivation. The issue of interclass justice cannot be a matter only of recognizing the real role of the subalterns in history (for example, in anticolonial national movements), important though it is. It is also a matter of remedying the immense inequalities in educational and other opportunities that severely limit, even today, the actual lives of the subalterns. </div><div><br /></div><div>Interestingly enough, even by the eleventh century, the seriousness of this loss was noted by Alberuni himself (one of the major curatorial authors whose work was referred to earlier). Alberuni spoke of the real deprivation of "those castes who are not allowed to occupy themselves with science. "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">42</span> This substantive deprivation remains largely unremedied even today (except in particular regions such as Kerala), with half of the adult population of India (and nearly twothirds of the adult women) still remaining illiterate.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">43</span> In understanding the nature of Indian cultures and traditions, focusing mainly on the achievements - rather than deprivations - of the Indian subaltern can yield a deceptive contrast. </div><div><br /></div><div>This shift in emphasis has also, to some extent, pushed the interpretation of India's past away from those achievements that require considerable formal training. While this move makes sense in some contexts, a comparison of a self-consciously nonelitist history of India with the typically classical understanding of the intellectual heritage of the West produces a false contrast between the respective intellectual traditions. In comparing Western thoughts and creations with those in India, the appropriate counterpoints of Aristotelian or Stoic or Euclidian analyses are not the traditional beliefs of the Indian rural masses or of the local wise men but the comparably analytical writings of, say, Kautilya or Nagarjuna or Aryabhata. "Socrates meets the Indian peasant" is not a good way to contrast the respective intellectual traditions.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Concluding Remarks</i></div><div><br /></div><div> The internal identities of Indians draw on different parts of India's diverse traditions. The observational leanings of Western approaches have had quite a major impact - positively and negatively - on what contributes to the Indian self-image that emerged in the colonial period and survives today. The relationship has several dialectical aspects, connected to the sensitivity towards selective admirations and dismissals from the cosmopolitan West as well as to the mechanics of colonial confrontations. </div><div><br /></div><div>The differences between the curatorial, magisterial, and exoticist approaches to Western understanding of Indian intellectual traditions lie, to a great extent, in the varying observational positions from which India has been examined and its overall images drawn. The dependence on perspective is not a special characteristic of the imaging of India alone. It is, in fact, a pervasive general feature in description and identification.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">44</span> "What is India really like?" is a good question for a foreign tourist's handbook precisely because the description there may sensibly be presented from the particular position of being a foreign tourist in India. But there are other positions, other contexts, other concerns. </div><div><br /></div><div>The three approaches investigated here have produced quite distinct views of Indian intellectual history, but their overall impact has been to exaggerate the nonmaterial and arcane aspects of Indian traditions compared to its more rationalistic and analytical elements. While the curatorial approaches have been less guilty of this, their focus on what is really different in India has, to some extent, also contributed to it. But the bulk of the contribution has come from the exotidst admiration of India (particularly of its spiritual wonders) and the magisterial dismissals (particularly of its claims in mathematics, science, and analytical pursuits). </div><div><br /></div><div>The nature of these slanted emphases has tended to undermine an adequately pluralist understanding of Indian intellectual traditions. While India has inherited a vast religious literature, a large wealth of mystical poetry, grand speculation on transcendental issues, and so on, there is also a huge - and often pioneering - literature, stretching over two and a half millennia, on mathematics, logic, epistemology, astronomy, physiology, linguistics, phonetics, economics, political science, and psychology, among other subjects concerned with the here and now.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">45</span><br /><br />Even on religious subjects, the only world religion that is firmly agnostic (Buddhism) is of Indian origin, and, furthermore, the atheistic schools of Carvaka and Lokayata have generated extensive arguments that have been seriously studied by Indian religious scholars themselves.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">46</span> Heterodoxy runs throughout the early documents, and even the ancient epic Ramayana, which is often cited by contemporary Hindu activists as the holy book of the divine Rama's life, contains dissenting characters. For example, Rama is lectured to by a worldly pundit called Javali on the folly of his religious beliefs: "O Rama, be wise, there exists no world but this, that is certain! Enjoy that which is present and cast behind thee that which is unpleasant. "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">47</span><br /><br />What is in dispute here is not the recognition of mysticism and religious initiatives in India, which are certainly plentiful, but the overlooking of all the other intellectual activities that are also abundantly present. In fact, despite the grave sobriety of Indian religious preoccupations, it would not be erroneous to say that India is a country of fun and games in which chess was probably invented, badminton originated, polo emerged, and the ancient Kamasutra told people how to have joy in sex. Indeed, Georges Ifrah quotes a medieval Arab poet from Baghdad called al-Sabhadi, who said that there were "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">three things on which the Indian nation prided itself: its method of reckoning, the game of chess, and the book titled Kalila wa Dimna [a collection of legends and fables].</span> "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">48</span> This is not altogether a different list from Voltaire's catalog of the important things to come from India "our numbers, our backgammon, our chess, our first principles of geometry, and the fables which have become our own. "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC33CC;">49</span> These selections would not fit the cultivated Western images of Indian historical traditions, which are typically taken to be pontifically serious and uncompromisingly spiritual.<br /><br />Nor would it fit the way many Indians perceive themselves and their intellectual past, especially those who take a "separatist" position on the nature of Indian culture. I have tried to discuss how that disparity has come about and how it is sustained. I have also tried to speculate about how the selective alienation of India from a very substantial part of its past has been nourished by the asymmetrical relationship between India and the West. It is, oddly enough, the rationalist part of India's tradition that has been affected most by this alienation. The impact of the West on internal identities in India has to be seen in fundamentally dialectical terms.<br /><br />FOOTNOTE</div><div>1 This essay draws on an earlier article entitled "India and the West," The New Republic (June 7, !993). For helpful discussions, I am grateful to Akeel Bilgrami, Sugata Bose, Barun De, Jean Drèze, Ayesha Jalal, Dharrna Kumar, V. K. Ramachandran, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Emma Rothschild, Lloyd Rudolph, Suzanne Rudolph, Ashutosh Varshney, Myron Weiner, and Nur Yalman.</div><div><br /></div><div>2 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York : Random House, 1978 ; Vintage Books, 1979), 5; italics added.</div><div><br /></div><div>3 Ibid., 5.</div><div><br /></div><div>4 In the earlier article "India and the West" on which this essay draws, the third category was called "investigative" rather than "curatorial" ; the latter is more specific and I believe somewhat more appropriate.</div><div><br /></div><div>5 See Alberuni'sIndia, trans. E. C. Sachau, ed. A. T. Embree (New York: Norton, 1971).</div><div><br /></div><div>6 See Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (New York : State University of New York Press, 1988), chap. 2.</div><div><br /></div><div>7 Alberuni's India, pt. II, chap. LXXX, 246. The same Arabic word was commonly used for "Hindu" and "Indian" in Alberuni's time. While the English translator had chosen to use "Hindus" here, I have replaced it with "Indians" in view of the context (to wit, Alberuni's observations on the inhabitants of India). This is an issue of some interest in the context of the main theme of this essay, since the language used here in the English translation to refer to the inhabitants of India implicitly involves a circumscribed ascription.</div><div><br /></div><div>8 Alberuni's India, pt. I, chap, I, 20.</div><div><br /></div><div>9 William Jones, "Objects of Enquiry During My Residence in Asia," included in The Collected Works of Sir William Jones, 13 vols. (London : J. Stockdale, 1807 ; republished, New York : New York University Press, 1993).</div><div><br /></div><div>10 I have discussed the "positional" nature of objectivity, depending on the placing of the observer and analyst vis-à-vis the objects being studied, in "Positional Objectivity," Philosophy and Public Affairs (1993), and "On Interpreting India's Past," in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, eds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development : State and Politics in India (Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1997).</div><div><br /></div><div>11 Quoted in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians andlndia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 2.50.</div><div><br /></div><div>12 James Mill, The History of British India (London, 1817 ; republished, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1975), 225 - 226.</div><div><br /></div><div>13 Ibid., 248.</div><div><br /></div><div>14 Ibid., 247.</div><div><br /></div><div>15 Alberuni'sIndia, pt. I, chap. XVI, 174-175.</div><div><br /></div><div>16 For a modern account of the complex history of this mathematical development, see George Ifrah, From One to Zero (New York : Viking, 1985).</div><div><br /></div><div>17 Mill, The History of British India, 219-220.</div><div><br /></div><div>18 Mill found in Jones's beliefs about early Indian mathematics and astronomy "evidence of the fond credulity with which the state of society among the Hindus was for a time regarded," and he was particularly amused that Jones had made these attributions "with an air of belief." Mill, The History of British India, 223 - 224. On the substantive side, Mill amalgamates the distinct claims regarding 1) the principle of attraction, 2.) the daily rotation of the earth, and 3) the movement of the earth around the sun. Aryabhata and Brahmagupta's concern were mainly with the first two, on which specific assertions were made, unlike on the third.</div><div><br /></div><div>19 Mill, The History of British India, 223 - 224.</div><div><br /></div><div>20 Alberuni's India, pt. I, chap. XXVI, 276-277.</div><div><br /></div><div>21 Ibid., 277.</div><div><br /></div><div>22 Quoted in John Clive's introduction to James Mill, The History of British India (republished, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1975), viii.</div><div><br /></div><div>23 T. B. Macaulay, "Indian Education : Minute of the 2nd February, .1835" ; reproduced in G. M. Young, ed., Macaulay : Prose and Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1952), 722..</div><div><br /></div><div>24 Ibid., 729.</div><div><br /></div><div>25 See Harold Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1958); republished as Images of Asia : American Views of India and China (New York : Capricorn Books, 1958). See also the discussion of this issue in the "Introduction" in Sulochana Glazer and Nathan Glazer, eds., Conflicting Images: India and the United Slates (Glen Dale, Md. : Riverdale, 1990).</div><div><br /></div><div>26 Lloyd I. Rudolph, "Gandhi in the Mind of America," in Glazer and Glazer, eds., Conflicting Images, 166.</div><div><br /></div><div>27 Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias : Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1987), 8.</div><div><br /></div><div>28 On this, see Glazer and Glazer, eds., Conflicting Images. The influence of magisterial readings on American imaging of India has been somewhat countered in recent years by the political interest in Gandhi's life and ideas, a variety of sensitive writings on India (from Erik Erikson to John Kenneth Galbraith), and the Western success of several Indian novelists in English.</div><div><br /></div><div>29 Quoted in John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi and New York : Oxford University Press, 1987), 95.</div><div><br /></div><div>30 J. G. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte: Samtliche Werke, translated by Halbfass, India and Europe, 70.</div><div><br /></div><div>31 Translations by Halbfass, India and Europe, 74 - 75. Halbfass provides an extensive study of these European interpretations of Indian thought and the reactions and counterreactions to them.</div><div><br /></div><div>32 A. Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena translated by Halbfass, India and Europe, 112.</div><div><br /></div><div>33 See John H. Muirhead, Coleridge as a Philosopher (London: G. Alien & Unwin, Ltd., 1930), 283 - 284, and Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination, chap. 6.</div><div><br /></div><div>34 The nature of exoticist reading has typically had a strongly "Hindu" character. This was, in some ways, present even in William Jones's curatorial investigations (though he was himself a scholar in Arabic and Persian as well), but he was to some extent redressing the relative neglect of Sanskrit classics in the previous periods (even though the version of the Upanishads that Jones first read was the Persian translation prepared by the Moghul prince Dara Shikoh, Emperor Akbar's great-grandson). The European Romantics, on the other hand, tended to identify India with variants of Hindu religious thought.</div><div><br /></div><div>35 William Davis, The Rich (London : Sidgwick and Jackson, 1982), 99.</div><div><br /></div><div>36 On this issue, see Bimal Matilal, Perceptions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). See also Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).</div><div><br /></div><div>37 On this issue in general, and on the hold of "a predominantly third-person perspective" in self-perception, see Akeel Bilgrami, "What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity," Critical Inquiry 18 (4) (1992).</div><div><br /></div><div>38 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet Press, 1946; centenary edition, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 158.</div><div><br /></div><div>39 While the constitution of independent India has been self-consciously secular, the tendency to see India as a land of the Hindus remains quite strong. The confrontation between "secularists" and "communitarians" has been an important feature of contemporary India, and the identification of Indian culture in mainly Hindu terms plays a part in this. While it is certainly possible to be both secular and communitarian (as Rajeev Bhargava has noted in "Giving Secularism Its Due," Economic and Political Weekly, July 9, 1994), the contemporary divisions in India tend to make the religious and communal identities largely work against India's secular commitments (as Bhargava also notes). I have tried to scrutinize these issues in my paper "Secularism and Its Discontents," in Kaushik Basu and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., Unravelling the Nation : Sectarian Conflict and India's secular Identity (Delhi: Penguin, 1996). See also the other papers in that collection, and the essays included in Bose and Jalal, eds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development : State and Politics in India.</div><div><br /></div><div>40 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6.</div><div><br /></div><div>41 The most effective move in that direction came under the leadership of Ranajit Guha; see his introductory essay in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1982). See also the collection of "subaltern" essays edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).</div><div><br /></div><div>42 Alberuni's India, chap. II, 32.</div><div><br /></div><div>43 Indeed, in conceptualizing "the good life" even from the perspective of the deprived underdog, it would be a mistake to ignore altogether the intellectual achievements of the elite, since part of the deprivation of the exploited lies precisely in being denied participation in these achievements. While Marx might have exaggerated a little in his eloquence about "the idiocy of the village life," there is nevertheless a substantial point here in identifying the nature of social deprivation. There is, in fact, no basic contradiction in choosing the subaltern perspective of history and taking systematic note of the scholarly accomplishments of the elite.</div><div><br /></div><div>44 I have tried to discuss this general issue in "Description as Choice," Oxford Economic Papers 32 (1980) (reprinted in Choice, Welfare and Measurement [Oxford: Blackwell; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982]), and in "Positional Objectivity," Philosophy and Public Affairs (1993).</div><div><br /></div><div>45 This contrast is discussed in my joint paper with Martha Nussbaum, "Internal Criticism and Indian Rationalist Traditions," in Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).</div><div><br /></div><div>46 For example, the fourteenth-century book Sarvadarsanasamgraha (Collection of All Philosophies) by Madhava Acarya (himself a good Vaishnavite Hindu) devotes the first chapter of the book to a serious presentation of the arguments of the atheistic schools.</div><div><br /></div><div>47 English translation from H. P. Shastri, The Ramayana of Valmiki (London : Shanti Sadan, 1959), 389.</div><div><br /></div><div>48 Ifrah, From One to Zero, 434.</div><div><br /></div><div>49 Voltaire, Les ouevres completes, vol. 124; translated by Halbfass, India and Europe, 59.</div><div>AUTHOR_AFFILIATION</div><div>Amartya Sen, recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 1981. Sen is Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, positions he held at the time of this essay's appearance in the Spring 1997 issue of "Dædalus. " He also served as Master of Trinity College in Cambridge, U.K., between 1998 and 2004.</div><div><br /></div>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-86820013204309025392010-03-01T10:02:00.000-08:002010-03-01T10:13:05.893-08:00India and the WestIndia and the West<br />By: Sen, Amartya,<br />New Republic, 00286583, 6/7/1993, Vol. 208, Issue 23<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Our distortions and their consequences</span><br /><br />I<br /><br />In a letter to his mother, dated January 9, 1913, E. M. Forster describes his experience of climbing the minaret of a mosque in Banaras, accompanied by a train of local children. When they came down, they asked for bakshis, or tips, "reprimanding each other for their bad breeding as they did so." Forster reports the negotiations thus:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">To the boy who had helped me not to bump my head I gave one<br />anna. He said it was little. I said it was enough and he<br />agreed. The other boy had carried Murray and so I gave him<br />two, but he too said it was little…. I asked his<br />name. He answered "Baldeo." I told him that was my servant's<br />name too, and he was so struck that he forgot about the money<br />and engaged in social talk. At the end he said, "Presence, two<br />annas are not much, can I have four?" "O Baldeo, two are<br />plenty." "Plenty, did you say? O very well," and he went<br />like a dear.</span><br /><br />Not all international encounters go as smoothly as that. What is chiefly at work in this report is Forster's inclination, of which there is plenty of other evidence, to like what he sees in India (except, of course, the British). Yet the experiences that he describes and summarizes can be interpreted and seen quite differently. Thus, in recounting what are, at one level, rather similar experiences in India, John King Fairbank, the great American expert on China (and generally known to be a kind person), assesses the situation very differently. "One never disputes a fee with them; they all salute and take it…. With Chinese coolies … if you pay too much, they try for more, if not enough, they protest vigorously." When at last Fairbank returns to China from India, he is happy to confirm that the Chinese "are vigorous and smiling, the greatest contrast to the lassitude and repression of the Indians." Fairbank retains the memory of pliant Indians as "timorous cowering creatures, too delicate to fight like the Chinese."<br /><br />The point in question is not whether Forster's and Fairbank's experiences of Indian docility in this type of money-making are typical now, or were typical when they made their respective observations. Nor am I particularly concerned with the contrast between Chinese and Indian traits. The relevant issue here is the disparate perceptions of essentially similar sequences of events by two observers with different backgrounds and predispositions.<br /><br />Dissimilarity of perceptions has been an important characteristic of Western understanding of India, and several different and competing conceptions of that large and complex culture have been influential in the West. The diversity is of interest on its own, but its importance is much enhanced by the impact that the Western conceptions have on the self-perceptions of the Indians themselves. This interrelationship is partly the result of India's colonial history, but the influence of foreign interpretations on the self-perception of indigenous peoples is also a general feature of contemporary cultural interdependence. It applies with particular force to societies that have ended up being more dependent, for historical reasons, on ideas that flourish in the metropolis of the modern world.<br /><br />The influence of self-perception can be particularly important when a country is in the process of redefining itself. This is the case in India now. The movement to see India more in Hindu religious terms is a cultural correlate of the political developments that have put India in such turmoil in recent years. The interest in cultural understanding is thus intensified by its contemporary political relevance. I shall argue that the diverse interpretations of India in the West have, for a variety of reasons to be discussed, tended to work in the same direction, and have reinforced each other in their impact on the self-perceptions of Indians. And the overall effect of this process has been unfortunately to undermine the more rationalist and less religious parts of Indian intellectual traditions; and this has a direct bearing on what we see in India today.<br /><br />In his justly famous analysis of the construction of the "Orient" in the Western imagination, Edward Said has written that "the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West." Said explains that his own work "deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency in a particularly influential Western characterization of the Orient." I would argue, however, that unless one chooses to focus on the evolution of a specific conceptual tradition (as Said in effect does), "internal consistency" is precisely what is hard to find in the variety of Western conceptions of, in this instance, India. For there are several fundamentally contrary ideas and images of India, and they have quite distinct roles in the Western understanding of the country, and also in influencing the manner in which Indians see themselves.<div><br />II<br /><br />Attempts from outside India to understand and to interpret the country's traditions can be put into at least three distinct categories, which I shall call the exoticist, the magisterial and the investigative. The exoticist approach concentrates on the wondrous aspects of India. The focus here is on what is different, what is strange in a country that, as Hegel put it, "has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans." The magisterial approach deals with notions of India as an imperial territory from the point of view of its governors. This outlook assimilates a sense of superiority and guardian hood needed to deal with a country that James Mill defined as "that great scene of British action." This, of course, is primarily a British phenomenon, but a great many British observers did not fall into this category, and some non-British ones did. The investigative approach is the most catholic of all, and covers various attempts to understand Indian culture and tradition from outside, without looking only for the strange and without being weighed down by the magisterial burden.<br /><br />I begin with the investigative approach. People are interested in other cultures and different lands, and investigations across the boundaries of country and tradition have been vigorously pursued throughout human history. The development of human civilization would have been very different had that not been the case. Of course, the exact motivation for these investigations can vary; curiosity is not the only impulse. Yet the investigations need not be as thoroughly constrained as they are under the exoticist or magisterial straitjackets.<br /><br />In contemporary theories of history and literature, there is some skepticism as to the possibility of any approach to learning that is innocent of power, or unaffected by the characteristic interests of the observer. To some extent, such skepticism is justified. The motivation for the investigation and the nature of the observations would indeed depend on the role and the position of the observer vis-à-vis the object of investigation. But this conditionality does not have the effect of making all the different observational findings equally arbitrary. There are real lines to be drawn between inferences dominated by rigid preconceptions and those that are not so dominated. The process of learning can accommodate considerable motivational variations without becoming worthless as an epistemic enterprise.<br /><br />An excellent example of investigative approaches to understanding India can be found in Alberuni's Arabic Ta'rikh al-hind, or History of India, written in the early eleventh century. Alberuni was born in Central Asia in 973 A.D., and first came to India with the marauding troops of Mahmud of Ghazni. He became very involved with India, proceeded to master Sanskrit, studied Indian texts on mathematics, natural sciences, literature, philosophy and religion, conversed with as many experts as he could and also observed social conventions and practices. His book presents a remarkable account of the intellectual traditions and social customs of India at the time.<br /><br />Alberuni's was almost certainly the most impressive of such investigations, but there are a great many examples of serious Arabic studies of Indian intellectual traditions around that time. Brahmagupta's pioneering Sanskrit treatise on astronomy had been first translated into Arabic in the eighth century (Alberuni retranslated it three centuries later); several works on medicine, science and philosophy had Arabic rendering by the ninth century; and so on. It was through the Arabs, of course, that the Indian decimal system reached Europe, as did Indian writings in mathematics, science and literature in general.<br /><br />In the concluding chapter of his book, Alberuni describes the motivation of his work this way:<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><br />We think now that what we have related in this book will<br />be sufficient for anyone who wants to converse with the<br />Hindus, and to discuss with them questions or religion,<br />science or literature, on the very basis of their<br />own civilization.</span><br /><br />He is particularly aware of the difficulties of achieving an understanding of a foreign land and people, and specifically warns the reader about it:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">In all manners and usages. [the Indians] differ from us to such<br />a degree as to frighten their children with us. with our dress,<br />and our ways and customs, and as to declare us to be the<br />devil's breed, and our doings as the very opposite of all that<br />is good and proper. By the bye, we must confess, in order to<br />be just, that a similar deprecation of foreigners not only<br />prevails among us and the Indians, but is common to all<br />nations toward each other.</span><br /><br />While Arab scholarship on India provides plentiful examples of what I am calling the investigative approach, it is not unique in this respect. Quite a lot of early European studies of India must be put in this general category. A good example is the work of the Italian Jesuit Roberto Nobili, who went to south India in the early seventeenth century, and whose remarkable scholarship in Sanskrit and Tamil permitted him to produce quite authoritative books on Indian intellectual discussions, in Latin as well as in Tamil. Another Jesuit, Father Pons from France, produced a grammar of Sanskrit in Latin in the early eighteenth century, and also sent a collection of Indian manuscripts to Europe. (Happily, they did not have to deal with the Bombay customs authorities in those days.)<br /><br />Still, the real eruption of European interest in India took place a bit later, in direct response to British — rather than Italian or French — scholarship on India. A towering figure in this intellectual transmission was the redoubtable William Jones, the legal scholar and officer of the East India Company, who went to India in 1783 and by the following year had established the Asiatic Society of Bengal, with the active patronage of Warren Hastings. In collaboration with scholars such as Charles Wilkins and Thomas Colebrooke, Jones and the Asiatic Society did a remarkable job in translating a number of Indian classics — religious documents (such as the Bhagavadgītā) as well as legal treatises (particularly, Manusmriti) and literary works (such as Kalidāsā's Sákuntalā).<br /><br />Jones's ambition was, he explained to a friend, "to know India better than any other European ever knew it," and his own description of his chosen fields of study included the following modest list:<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><br />… the Laws of the Hindus and the Mohamedans, Modern<br />Politics and Geography of Hindustan, Best Mode of Governing<br />Bengal, Arithmetic and Geometry, and Mixed Sciences of<br />the Asiaticks, Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery, and Anatomy of<br />the Indians. Natural Productions of India, Poetry, Rhetoric,<br />and Morality of Asia, Music of the Eastern Nations,<br />Trade, Manufacture, Agriculture, and Commerce of India.</span><br /><br />One can find many other examples of dedicated scholarship among British officers in the East India Company, and there can be little doubt that the Western perceptions of India were profoundly influenced by such investigations. Western scholarship in Indian studies has continued at a high level right to the present time. Although Europeans (British, French, German, Russian and others) have been more occupied with the subcontinent than Americans have, in recent years there has been more interest in the United States as well, and a community of distinguished scholars with expertise on India has clearly emerged.<div><br />III<br /><br />I turn now to the second category, the magisterial approach. The task of ruling a foreign country does not go easily with seeing the subjects as equal. It is quite remarkable that the early British administrators in India, even the controversial Hastings, were as respectful of the Indian traditions as in fact they were. The empire was, of course, still in its infancy and was being acquired rather gradually and tentatively (if not quite in a fit of absent-mindedness).<br /><br />A good example of a magisterial approach to India is the classic book on India written by James Mill, published in 1817, on the strength of which he was appointed as an official of the East India Company. Mill's History of British India played a major role in introducing the British governors of India to a certain characterization of the country. Mill disputed and dismissed practically every claim ever made on behalf of Indian culture. He concluded that it was totally primitive and rude. This diagnosis fitted well with Mill's general position in favor of bringing a rather barbaric nation under the benign and reformist administration of the British empire. Consistent with his beliefs, Mill was also an expansionist in dealing with the remaining independent states in the subcontinent: the obvious policy to pursue, he explained, was "to make war on those states and subdue them."<br /><br />Mill chastised early British administrators (such as Jones) for having taken "Hindus to be a people of high civilization, while they have in reality made but a few of the earliest steps in the progress to civilization." At the end of a comprehensive attack on all fronts, he came to the conclusion that the Indian civilization was at par with other inferior ones known to Mill — "very nearly the same with that of the Chinese, the Persian and the Arabians," and he also put in this category, for good measure, "subordinate nations, the Japanese, Cochin-Chinese, Siamese, Burmans and even Malays and Tibetans."<br /><br />How well-informed was Mill about his subject? He wrote his book without ever having visited India. It was also hard for him to "be there authorially" (to use one of Clifford Geertz's concepts), and this was not only because he had not been there personally. He knew no Sanskrit, no Persian and no Arabic; he had practically no knowledge of any of the modern Indian languages; and so his reading of Indian material was most limited. Moreover, there was his inclination to distrust anything stated by native scholars, since they appeared to him to be liars. "Our ancestors," said Mill, "though rough, were sincere; but under the glossing exterior of the Hindu lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy."<br /><br />Perhaps some examples of Mill's treatment of particular claims of achievements may be useful to illustrate the nature of his extremely influential approach. The invention of the decimal system with place value and a zero, now used everywhere, as well as the so-called Arabic numerals are generally known to be Indian developments. Alberuni had mentioned them in his eleventh-century book on India, and many European as well as Arab scholars had written on the subject. But Mill dismisses the Indian claim to priority altogether, on the ground that "the invention of numerical characters must have been very ancient" and "whether the signs used by the Hindus are so peculiar as to render it probable that they invented them, or whether it is still more probable that they borrowed them, are questions which, for the purpose of ascertaining their progress in civilization, are not worth resolving." He proceeds then to explain that the Arabic numerals "are really hieroglyphics," and that the claim on behalf of the Indians and the Arabs reflects the confounding of "the origins of ciphers or numerical characters" with "that of hieroglyphic writing." Mill's rather elementary error lies in not knowing what exactly a decimal or place-value system is (or does), but his ill-informed smugness cannot be understood except in terms of his implicit unwillingness to believe that a really sophisticated invention could have been managed by such a primitive people.<br /><br />Another interesting example is Mill's reaction to Indian astronomy and its prescient argument for a heliocentric view of the planetary system, with a rotating Earth and a model of gravitational attraction. Such a view was proposed by Aryabhata, who was born in 476 A.D., and investigated by, among others, Varahamihira and Brahmagupta in the sixth and seventh centuries. Their works were well-known in the Arab world. Jones had been told about these works in India, and he reported what he learned. But Mill expresses total astonishment at Jones's gullibility. "As evidence of the fond credulity with which the state of society among the Hindus was for a time regarded, I ought to mention the statement of Sir W. Jones, who gravely, and with an air of belief, informs us, that he had heard of a philosopher 'whose work was said to contain a system of the universe, founded on the principle of attraction and the central position of the sun.'" After ridiculing the absurdity of this attribution and commenting on the "pretensions and interests" of Jones's Indian informants, Mill concludes that it was "extremely natural that Sir William Jones, whose pundits had become acquainted with the ideas of European philosophers respecting the system of the universe, should hear from them that those ideas were the contained in their own books."<br /><br />For the purpose of comparison, it is useful to examine Alberuni's eleventh-century discussion of the same issue, involving heliocentrism and the role of gravitational attraction in Indian science:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">Brahmagupta says in another place of the same book: "The<br />followers of Aryabhata maintain that the Earth is moving and<br />heaven resting. People have tried to refute them by saying<br />that, if such were the case, stones and trees would fall from<br />the earth." But Brahmagupta does not agree with them, and says<br />that that would not necessarily follow from their theory,<br />apparently because he thought that all heavy things are attracted<br />toward the center of the earth.</span><br /><br />Alberuni himself proceeded to dispute this heliocentric view, raised a technical question about one of Brahmagupta's mathematical calculations, referred to a different book of his own arguing against heliocentrism and pointed out that the relativist character of movements makes this issue less central than one might first think: "the rotation of the Earth does in no way impair the value of astronomy, as all appearances of an astronomic character can quite as well be explained according to this theory as to the other." Here, as elsewhere, while arguing against an opponent's views, Alberuni tries to present them as clearly as possible. The contrast with Mill could not be sharper.<br /><br />There are plenty of other examples of "magisterial" readings of India in Mill's history. This had some practical importance, since the book was extremely influential in British administration and widely praised. It was described by Macaulay as "on the whole the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since that of Gibbon." Macaulay's own approach and inclinations fitted in well with Mill's:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic…. I am<br />quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of<br />the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them<br />who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library<br />was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.<br /></span><br />This view of the poverty of Indian intellectual traditions played a major part in educational reform in British India, as was readily seen from the "Minute on Indian Education," written in 1835 by Macaulay himself. (The remark quoted above occurs in that "Minute.") The priorities in Indian education were determined, henceforth, by a different emphasis: by the need, as Macaulay argued, for a class of English-educated Indians who could "be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern."<br /><br />That policy has indeed had many achievements, but a shared knowledge of Indian classics is not among them. And leaving the classics only for specialists has some rather serious consequences for Indian education. For one thing, it makes the population more vulnerable to fraudulent and sectarian claims about Indian additions. The thoroughly ahistorical and intolerant readings of the nature of "real India" by the newly powerful Hindu extremists, who cite nonexistent records and annals, and confound epic stories with scriptural texts, have been facilitated to some extent by the neglect of serious classical education in modern India.<br /><br />The impact of the magisterial view of India was not confined only to Britain and India. Modern documents in the same tradition have been influential elsewhere, including in the United States. In a series of long conversations with 181 American intellectuals on India and China, conducted by Harold Isaacs in 1958, it was found that the two most widely read literary sources on India were Rudyard Kipling and Katherine Mayo. Of these, Kipling's writings would be more readily recognized as having something of the "magisterial" approach to them. Mayo was the author of the massively derogatory Mother India, which has been described by Lloyd Rudolph in this way:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">First published in 1927, Mother India was written in the<br />context of official and unofficial British efforts to generate<br />support in America for British rule in India. It added<br />contemporary and lurid detail to the image of Hindu India<br />as irredeemably and hopelessly impoverished, degraded, depraved<br />and corrupt. Mayo's Mother India echoed not only the view of<br />men like Alexander Duff, Charles Grant and John Stuart Mill but<br />also those of Theodore Roosevelt, who glorified in bearing the<br />white man's burden in Asia and celebrated the accomplishments<br />of imperialism.</span><br /><br />Mahatma Gandhi, while describing Mayo's book as "a drain inspector's report," added that every Indian should read it, and seemed to imply, as Ashis Nandy notes, that it is possible "to put her criticism to internal use" (as an over-stern drain inspector's report certainly may be). Gandhi himself was severely attacked in Mayo's book, though given his campaign against caste and untouchability, he might have welcomed even her exaggerations in the depiction of caste inequities. But American reliance on thoroughly distorted products of the "magisterial" approach must surely be detrimental to international understanding. Even though the influence of magisterial readings on American images of India has been somewhat countered in recent years by the political interest in Gandhi's life and ideas, and by the writings of Erik Erikson and John Kenneth Galbraith, it is still hard to break through the barrier of distorted preconceptions about India (as Nathan and Sulochana Glazer have discussed in their recent book, Conflicting Images).<br />IV<br /><br />I turn now to the "exoticist" approach to India. Interest in India has often been stimulated by the observation of exotic ideas and views there. Arrian's and Strabo's accounts of Alexander the Great's spirited conversation with various sages, including the naked gymnosophists of northwest India, may or may not be authentic, but ancient Greek literature is full of uncommon happenings and thoughts attributed to India.<br /><br />Megasthenes' Indika, describing India of the early third century B.C., can claim to be the first outsider's book on India, and it certainly did excite much Greek interest, as can be seen from plentiful references to it, for example, in the writings of Diodorus, Strabo and Arrian. Megasthenes had ample opportunity to observe India; as envoy of Seleucus Nicator to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, he spent nearly a decade, between 302 and 291 B.C., in Pataliputra (the site of modern Patna), the capital city of the Mauryan empire. But his superlatively admiring book is also so full of accounts of fantastic objects and achievements in India that it is hard to be sure what is imagined and what is observed.<br /><br />There are various other accounts of exotic Indian travels by ancient Greeks. The biography of Apollonius of Tiyana by Flavius Philostratus in the third century A.D. is a good example. Apollonius was most keen on a departure from what he saw around him. In his search for the out of the ordinary, he was, we understand, richly rewarded in India: "I have seen men living upon the earth and not upon it; defended without walls, having nothing and yet possessing all things."<br /><br />From Alexander listening to the gymnosophists' lectures to contemporary devotees hearing the sermons of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Shri Rajneesh, there is a crowded lineage. Perhaps the most important example of intellectual exoticism related to India can be seen in the European philosophical discussions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, among the Romantics in particular. The leaders of the Romantic movement, the Schlegel brothers, Schelling and others, were profoundly influenced by rather magnified readings of Indian culture.<br /><br />From Herder, the critic of the rationalism of European Enlightenment, we get the magnificent news that "the Hindus are the gentlest branch of humanity," and that "moderation and calm, a soft feeling and a silent depth of the soul characterize their work and their pleasure, their morals and mythology, their arts." Frederich Schlegel not only pioneered studies of Indo-European linguistics (later pursued particularly by Max Müller), but also brought India fully into his critique of the contemporary West. While in the West "man himself has almost become a machine" and "cannot sink any deeper," Schlegel recommended learning from the Orient, especially India. He also guaranteed that "the Persian and German languages and cultures, as well as the Greek and the old Roman, may all be traced back to the Indian." To this list, Schopenhauer added the New Testament, which, in contrast to the Old, "must somehow be of Indian origin: this is attested by its completely Indian ethics, which transforms morals into asceticism, its pessimism and its avatar (i.e., the person of Christ)."<br /><br />Not surprisingly, many of the early enthusiasts were soon disappointed in not finding in Indian thought what they had themselves put there, and many of them went into a phase of denial and criticism. Some of the stalwarts, Schlegel in particular, recanted vigorously. Others, including Hegel, outlined fairly negative views of Indian traditions, along with presenting loud denials of the preeminence of Indian culture — a claim that was of distinctly European origin. When Coleridge asked, "What are these potentates of inmost Ind?" he was really asking a question about Europe, not India.<br /><br />In addition to veridical weakness, the exoticist approach to India has an inescapable fragility that can be seen again and again. A wonderful thing is imagined about India and sent into a high orbit, and then it is brought crashing down. All this need not be such a tragedy when the act of launching is done by (or with the cooperation of) the putative star. Not many wept, for example, for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi when the Beatles stopped lionizing him and left suddenly. When asked by the Maharishi why they were leaving, John Lennon had to say: "You are the cosmic one. You ought to know."<br /><br />But it is a different matter altogether when the boom and the bust are thrust upon the victim. One of the most discouraging episodes in literary reception occurred early in this century, when Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats and others led the chorus of adoration of the lyrical spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore's poetry, which was soon followed by thorough disregard or firm denunciation. Tagore was a Bengali poet of tremendous creativity and range (though his poetry does not translate easily, not even the spiritual poems that were so applauded). He was also a great storyteller, novelist and essayist, and he remains a dominant literary Figure in Bangladesh and India. The versatile and innovative writer whom Bengalis know well is not the sermonizing spiritual guru invented in London; nor did he fit any better the caricature of "Stupendranath Begorr" and his family that we find later in Shaw's "A Glimpse of the Domesticity of Franklyn Barnabas."<br />V<br /><br />The different approaches have shaped the understanding of Indian intellectual traditions in the West in quite different ways. The exoticist and magisterial approaches have bemused and befuddled that understanding, even as they have drawn attention to India in the West. The exoticist outbursts bring India into many people's awareness in big tides of bewildered attention, but then they ebb, leaving not much behind. The tides, though, can be hard work, while they last. I remember feeling rather sad for the dejected racist I saw some years ago near the Aldwych station in London, viewing with disgust a thousand posters pasted everywhere carrying pictures of the obese — and the holy — physique of Guru Maharajji, then a great rage in London. Our dedicated racist was busy writing diligently under each of the pictures: "fat wog." In a short while that particular wog would have gone, but I don't doubt that the "disgusted of Aldwych" may have to chalk up "lean wog" under other pictures now.<br /><br />It might be thought that since the exoticist approaches give credit where it may not be due, and the magisterial approaches withhold credit where it may well be due, the two might neutralize each other. But in fact they have very asymmetrical effects. Magisterial criticisms tend to blast the rationalist and humanist aspects of India with greatest force (this is as true of Mill as of Mayo), whereas exoticist admirations tend to build up the mystical and extra rational aspects with particular care (this has been so from Apollonius of Tyana to the Hare Krishna activists of today). The result of the two taken together is to bias forcefully the understanding of Indian culture away from its rationalist aspects. Indian traditions in mathematics, logic, science, medicine, linguistics or epistemology may be well known to the Western specialist, but they play little part in the general Western understanding of India. Mysticism and exoticism, by contrast, have a more hallowed position in that understanding.<br /><br />Western perceptions and characterizations of India have considerable influence on the self-perceptions of Indians themselves. This is certainly connected with India's colonial past, and with its continued deference to what is valued in the West. But the relationship is not just a matter of docile submission. It sometimes includes vigorous resistance and protest. Still, even the negative responses make the offending Western conceptions deeply influential in a dialectical way.<br /><br />The European exoticists' interpretation and praise of India found a large welcoming audience in colonial India, and to some extent it even had a political role in the nationalist movements for independence from Britain. The ecstatic appreciations were quoted again and again, and the negative remarks by the same authors (Herder, Schlegel, Goethe and others) were frequently enough systematically overlooked. In his Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru comments on this phenomenon:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">There is a tendency on the part of Indian writers, to which I<br />have also partly succumbed, to give selected extracts and<br />quotations from the writings of European scholars in praise of<br />old Indian literature and philosophy. It would be equally easy,<br />indeed much easier, to give other extracts giving an exactly<br />opposite viewpoint.<br /></span><br />In the process of accepting the exoticist praise, the Indian interpretation of the past has tended to move in the direction of the objects of exoticist praise, focusing more on the mystical and the anti-rationalist. That process was fed also by negative critiques of Indian culture, coming particularly from magisterial views. In responding to those critiques (this was important for Indian nationalism), it was too easy to cite appreciation from other Europeans, and this gave the exoticist championing of the specialties of the East further prominence.<br /><br />All this has helped to undermine an adequately pluralist understanding of the nature of Indian intellectual traditions within India itself. There is no single Indian tradition. It is a question of balance. While India has inherited from its past a vast religious literature, a wealth of mystical poetry, grand speculation on transcendental issues and so on, there is also a huge and often pioneering literature, stretching over two-and-a-half millennia, on mathematics, logic, epistemology, astronomy, physiology, linguistics, phonetics, economics, political science and psychology, among other subjects concerned with the here and now.<br /><br />Indeed, even on religious subjects, the only world religion that is firmly agnostic, that is, Buddhism, happens to be of Indian origin; and the atheistic schools of Cārvāka and Lokāyata have generated extensive arguments that have been seriously studied by Indian religious scholars themselves. Thus the fourteenth-century book Sarvadarśansamgraha (Collection of All Philosophies) by Mādhava Ācārya (himself a good Vaishnavite Hindu) devotes its first chapter to a serious presentation of the arguments of the atheistic schools.<br /><br />What I am disputing is not the importance of mysticism and religious initiatives in India, which are certainly plentifully there, but the overlooking of all the other intellectual activities that are also abundantly present in that thoroughly plural culture. The picture of India overwhelmed by religious preoccupations is a portrait of grave sobriety, but if it were said that India is a country of fun and games in which chess was invented, badminton originated, polo emerged and the ancient Kāmasūtra told people how to have joy in sex, that too would not be an erroneous account, though it would be an unlikely account to be given today.<br /><br />How does the influence that Western understandings of India have on the self-perceptions of Indians affect the nature of the politics of contemporary India? It would, of course, be absurd to think of Indian politics in primarily exogenous terms, but there are some linkages. First, the nature of exoticist reading has typically had a strongly "Hindu" character. This was present, in a way, even in William Jones's pioneering investigations, except that he was to some extent redressing the relative neglect of Sanskrit classics in the preceding Muslim regimes (even though the version of the Upanishads that Jones first read was the Persian translation prepared by the Moghul prince Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal). The European Romantics tended to identify India with variants of Hindu religious thought. Their impact on Indian perception has been to strengthen that alleged identity of India with Hinduism, making it a little easier for the Hindu political activists of today to argue for a specifically Hindu view of India.<br /><br />Second, as I suggested earlier, the magisterial dismissals (by Mill, Macaulay and others) of the value of the Sanskrit classics contributed to something of a dissociation of modern Indian education from its classical roots. One of the interesting features of the contemporary revival of Hindu extremism is its utterly ahistorical nature, which permits reinventions of the past to suit the demands of political expediency. The confounding of epic stories with scriptural texts in magnifying the role of Ayodhya in Hindu religious thought is one example. Modern reconstructions of the past would have to be more restrained if there had been more widespread knowledge of the real classical traditions of India.<br /><br />Third, the newly popular Hindu politics of recent years makes much use of obscurantism, linked to the increasing force of anti-rationalist thought in general. The strengthening of the mystical parts of the Indian traditions at the cost of the rationalist parts owes something, again, to the impact of exoticist praise and magisterial denunciation.<br /><br />Georges Ifrah, the historian of mathematics, quotes a medieval Arab poet from Baghdad called al-Sabhadi, who said that there were "three things on which the Indian nation prided itself: its method of reckoning, the game of chess and the book titled Kalila wa Dimna [a collection of legends and fables]." This is not altogether a different list from Voltaire's cataloging of the important things to come from India: "our numbers, our backgammon, our chess, our first principles of geometry and the fables which have become our own." These selections would not fit the common Western image of India today. Nor would they fit the way many Indians perceive themselves and their intellectual past. The selective alienation of India from a very substantial part of its own past has been nourished by the asymmetric relation between India and the West And it is the rationalist part of India's tradition that has been most affected by this alienation.<br /><br />~~~~~~~~<br /><br />By Amartya Sen<br /><br />AMARTYA SEN is Lamont University Professor at Harvard University and the author of Inequality Re-examined (Harvard University Press).</div></div>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-65737684441991923322010-01-30T04:31:00.001-08:002010-01-30T04:31:54.083-08:00tic2010<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGzv64IaTNIFwOeNCh9HB0JxXIjs5fueI6Vs5TfB00FEPLoAGPatRlWYMqVEWYmP4PLjKbXYXFEi3HQvTP5cng3A_bU-WL9ok-aCQGiSL3iQ-tDJEliHiDswy0x493PR0RrijWXdPlris/s1600-h/TI2010-Logo-Final_2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 650px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGzv64IaTNIFwOeNCh9HB0JxXIjs5fueI6Vs5TfB00FEPLoAGPatRlWYMqVEWYmP4PLjKbXYXFEi3HQvTP5cng3A_bU-WL9ok-aCQGiSL3iQ-tDJEliHiDswy0x493PR0RrijWXdPlris/s400/TI2010-Logo-Final_2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432509544296464130" /></a>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-58002029236913140492009-09-23T18:29:00.000-07:002009-09-24T13:59:23.224-07:00malayalam-ttta-nnnaCorrect glyphs for Malayalam letters, ttta and nnna<br />(from A. R. Rajaraja Varma, Kerala Paniniyam):<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKxkOF4orrY1yaxxNdxTdyX6FxhZYwsxCYSgSP9hyphenhyphen39AM8GCYyonZivgqNEeiA-ClZwqrn4WhECKWkgpoX8jkw3rHxfn1ZDoI_2ev4WmOgGcQ_JcSXIx1YP8Yl9liZUwHg96cMQaGA97M/s1600-h/ttta.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 600px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKxkOF4orrY1yaxxNdxTdyX6FxhZYwsxCYSgSP9hyphenhyphen39AM8GCYyonZivgqNEeiA-ClZwqrn4WhECKWkgpoX8jkw3rHxfn1ZDoI_2ev4WmOgGcQ_JcSXIx1YP8Yl9liZUwHg96cMQaGA97M/s400/ttta.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384840480017413058" /></a><br clear="left" /><br /><br />This note is about Malayalam letter alveolar t (U+0D3A). A. R. Rajarajavarma placed the Grantha letter TTA for Malayalam letter TTTA as can be seen from:<br /><a href="http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html">http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html</a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4-4zuCUtPLvpBc_kHD5BBFWwio2wkvylhSq2rwCPK-PHogd8VvocjiHWQcqxFUtpv3qZLNT5cCOtsVU2bmq31N_rf72firHN85bNR_i02wBp4wiDD29Ie92IiJFSNzpu-6OxTmAo6NUI/s1600-h/malayalam_ttta.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 600px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4-4zuCUtPLvpBc_kHD5BBFWwio2wkvylhSq2rwCPK-PHogd8VvocjiHWQcqxFUtpv3qZLNT5cCOtsVU2bmq31N_rf72firHN85bNR_i02wBp4wiDD29Ie92IiJFSNzpu-6OxTmAo6NUI/s400/malayalam_ttta.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5385137941821655938" /></a><br clear="left" /><br /><br />I notice that the glyph shape for Malayalam Letter TTTA is <span style="font-style:italic;">wrong<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span> in document N3494<br /><a href="http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3494.pdf">http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3494.pdf</a><br /><br />This error in N3494 is due to Thomas Pedersen's PDF showing wrong glyph for Malayalam letter TTTA in page 2 of<br /><a href="http://transliteration.eki.ee/pdf/Malayalam.pdf">http://transliteration.eki.ee/pdf/Malayalam.pdf</a><br />In the U+0D3A spot, Tamil letter TTI (டி) is given as the glyph which is NOT correct.<br /><br />The correct shape of TTTA at U+0D3A is given in Rajaraja Varma, A. R. 1917. Keralapanineeyam. Reprinted 2003. Kottayam: DC Books.<br /><br />Please use this correct shape for U+0D3A, as can be checked in the paragraph in the book by A. R. Rajarajavarma, on page 2 of N3494.<br /><br />Malayalam NNNA and TTTA in Unicode code chart is years away. Please correct the glyph of TTTA (U+0D3A) to what is shown here.<br /><br />Thanks,<br />N. Ganesanநா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-11921790502768608872009-09-13T12:13:00.000-07:002009-09-13T12:15:48.373-07:00aththaan<div id="swfplayer"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.hummaa.com/static_content/flash/playerv4.swf" style="" id="mp3Player" name="mp3Player" quality="high" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="false" wmode="opaque" flashvars="autostart=true&file=http://www.hummaa.com/player/playeroutput.php?req=aWQ9MzgyMzgmcGx0eXBlPXNvbmcmcGxydHlwZT1sYyZwYXJhbT0xMzkzMQ==" width="665" height="32"></div> </embed>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-16730788240282681182009-08-06T19:59:00.001-07:002009-08-16T18:26:04.580-07:00Tamil-uyirmey-tableதமிழ் எழுத்துக்களின் நெடுங்கணக்கு: <br /><br /><style type="text/css">.nobrtable br { display: none }</style> <div class="nobrtable"><br /><table border=”1” cellspacing=”2” cellpadding=”2” text-align:center > <tbody><br /><tr><br /><td align="center" > ஃ</td> <br /><td align="center" > அ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஆ</td><br /><td align="center" > இ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஈ</td><br /><td align="center" > உ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஊ</td><br /><td align="center" > எ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஏ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஐ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஒ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஓ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஔ</td><br /></tr> <tr><br /><td align="center" > க்</td> <br /><td align="center" > க</td><br /><td align="center" > கா</td><br /><td align="center" > கி</td><br /><td align="center" > கீ</td><br /><td align="center" > கృ</td><br /><td align="center" > கூ</td><br /><td align="center" > கெ</td><br /><td align="center" > கே</td><br /><td align="center" > கை</td><br /><td align="center" > கொ</td><br /><td align="center" > கோ</td><br /><td align="center" > கௌ</td><br /></tr> <tr><br /><td align="center" > ங்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ங</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙா</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙி</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙீ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙృ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙூ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙெ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙே</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙை</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙொ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙோ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஙௌ</td><br /></tr> <tr><br /><td align="center" > ச்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ச</td><br /><td align="center" > சா</td><br /><td align="center" > சி</td><br /><td align="center" > சீ</td><br /><td align="center" > சృ</td><br /><td align="center" > சூ</td><br /><td align="center" > செ</td><br /><td align="center" > சே</td><br /><td align="center" > சை</td><br /><td align="center" > சொ</td><br /><td align="center" > சோ</td><br /><td align="center" > சௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ஞ்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ஞ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞா</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞி</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞீ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞృ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞூ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞெ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞே</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞை</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞொ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞோ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஞௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ட்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ட</td><br /><td align="center" > டா</td><br /><td align="center" > டி</td><br /><td align="center" > டீ</td><br /><td align="center" > டృ</td><br /><td align="center" > டூ </td><br /><td align="center" > டெ</td><br /><td align="center" > டே</td><br /><td align="center" > டை</td><br /><td align="center" > டொ</td><br /><td align="center" > டோ</td><br /><td align="center" > டௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ண்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ண</td><br /><td align="center" > ணா</td><br /><td align="center" > ணி</td><br /><td align="center" > ணீ</td><br /><td align="center" > ணృ</td><br /><td align="center" > ணூ</td><br /><td align="center" > ணெ</td><br /><td align="center" > ணே</td><br /><td align="center" > ணை</td><br /><td align="center" > ணொ</td><br /><td align="center" > ணோ</td><br /><td align="center" > ணௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > த்</td> <br /><td align="center" > த</td><br /><td align="center" > தா</td><br /><td align="center" > தி</td><br /><td align="center" > தீ</td><br /><td align="center" > தృ</td><br /><td align="center" > தூ</td><br /><td align="center" > தெ</td><br /><td align="center" > தே</td><br /><td align="center" > தை</td><br /><td align="center" > தொ</td><br /><td align="center" > தோ</td><br /><td align="center" > தௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ந்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ந</td><br /><td align="center" > நா</td><br /><td align="center" > நி</td><br /><td align="center" > நீ</td><br /><td align="center" > நృ</td><br /><td align="center" > நூ</td><br /><td align="center" > நெ</td><br /><td align="center" > நே</td><br /><td align="center" > நை</td><br /><td align="center" > நொ</td><br /><td align="center" > நோ</td><br /><td align="center" > நௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ப்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ப</td><br /><td align="center" > பா</td><br /><td align="center" > பி</td><br /><td align="center" > பீ</td><br /><td align="center" > பృ</td><br /><td align="center" > பூ</td><br /><td align="center" > பெ</td><br /><td align="center" > பே</td><br /><td align="center" > பை</td><br /><td align="center" > பொ</td><br /><td align="center" > போ</td><br /><td align="center" > பௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ம்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ம</td><br /><td align="center" > மா</td><br /><td align="center" > மி</td><br /><td align="center" > மீ</td><br /><td align="center" > மృ</td><br /><td align="center" > மூ</td><br /><td align="center" > மெ</td><br /><td align="center" > மே</td><br /><td align="center" > மை</td><br /><td align="center" > மொ</td><br /><td align="center" > மோ</td><br /><td align="center" > மௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ய்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ய</td><br /><td align="center" > யா</td><br /><td align="center" > யி</td><br /><td align="center" > யீ</td><br /><td align="center" > யృ</td><br /><td align="center" > யூ</td><br /><td align="center" > யெ</td><br /><td align="center" > யே</td><br /><td align="center" > யை</td><br /><td align="center" > யொ</td><br /><td align="center" > யோ</td><br /><td align="center" > யௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ர்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ர</td><br /><td align="center" > ரா</td><br /><td align="center" > ரி</td><br /><td align="center" > ரீ</td><br /><td align="center" > ரృ</td><br /><td align="center" > ரூ</td><br /><td align="center" > ரெ</td><br /><td align="center" > ரே</td><br /><td align="center" > ரை</td><br /><td align="center" > ரொ</td><br /><td align="center" > ரோ</td><br /><td align="center" > ரௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ல்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ல</td><br /><td align="center" > லா</td><br /><td align="center" > லி</td><br /><td align="center" > லீ</td><br /><td align="center" > லృ</td><br /><td align="center" > லூ</td><br /><td align="center" > லெ</td><br /><td align="center" > லே</td><br /><td align="center" > லை</td><br /><td align="center" > லொ</td><br /><td align="center" > லோ</td><br /><td align="center" > லௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > வ்</td> <br /><td align="center" > வ</td><br /><td align="center" > வா</td><br /><td align="center" > வி</td><br /><td align="center" > வீ</td><br /><td align="center" > வృ</td><br /><td align="center" > வூ</td><br /><td align="center" > வெ</td><br /><td align="center" > வே</td><br /><td align="center" > வை</td><br /><td align="center" > வொ</td><br /><td align="center" > வோ</td><br /><td align="center" > வௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ழ்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ழ</td><br /><td align="center" > ழா</td><br /><td align="center" > ழி</td><br /><td align="center" > ழீ</td><br /><td align="center" > ழృ</td><br /><td align="center" > ழூ</td><br /><td align="center" > ழெ</td><br /><td align="center" > ழே</td><br /><td align="center" > ழை</td><br /><td align="center" > ழொ</td><br /><td align="center" > ழோ</td><br /><td align="center" > ழௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ள்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ள</td><br /><td align="center" > ளா</td><br /><td align="center" > ளி</td><br /><td align="center" > ளீ</td><br /><td align="center" > ளృ</td><br /><td align="center" > ளூ</td><br /><td align="center" > ளெ</td><br /><td align="center" > ளே</td><br /><td align="center" > ளை</td><br /><td align="center" > ளொ</td><br /><td align="center" > ளோ</td><br /><td align="center" > ளௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ற்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ற</td><br /><td align="center" > றா</td><br /><td align="center" > றி</td><br /><td align="center" > றீ</td><br /><td align="center" > றృ</td><br /><td align="center" > றூ</td><br /><td align="center" > றெ</td><br /><td align="center" > றே</td><br /><td align="center" > றை</td><br /><td align="center" > றொ</td><br /><td align="center" > றோ</td><br /><td align="center" > றௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ன்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ன</td><br /><td align="center" > னா</td><br /><td align="center" > னி</td><br /><td align="center" > னீ</td><br /><td align="center" > னృ</td><br /><td align="center" > னூ</td><br /><td align="center" > னெ</td><br /><td align="center" > னே</td><br /><td align="center" > னை</td><br /><td align="center" > னொ</td><br /><td align="center" > னோ</td><br /><td align="center" > னௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > </td> <br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > </td> <br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /><td align="center" > </td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ஜ்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ஜ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜா</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜி</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜீ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜృ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜூ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜெ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜே</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜை</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜொ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜோ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஜௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ஷ்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ஷ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷா</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷி</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷீ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷృ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷூ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷெ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷே</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷை</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷொ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷோ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஷௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ஸ்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ஸ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸா</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸி</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸீ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸృ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸூ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸெ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸே</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸை</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸொ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸோ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஸௌ</td><br /></tr><tr><br /><td align="center" > ஹ்</td> <br /><td align="center" > ஹ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹா</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹி</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹி</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹృ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹூ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹெ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹே</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹை</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹொ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹோ</td><br /><td align="center" > ஹௌ</td><br /></tr><br /></tbody><br /></table><br /></div><br />[ஃபையர்பாக்ஸ் அல்லது குரோம் (கூகுள்) உலாவியில் ஒழுங்காய்த் தெரியும். இண்டெர்னெட் எக்ஸ்ப்லோர் உபயோகித்தால் புள்ளிவட்டம் சேர்ந்து தெரியலாம்.]<br /><br />சீர்மை வடிவத் தமிழ்:<br /><a href="http://nganesan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cheermai.html">http://nganesan.blogspot.com/2009/08/cheermai.html</a>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-37362020598126745552009-06-04T16:33:00.001-07:002009-06-04T16:46:13.540-07:00testசெந்தமிழ் நாடெனும்போதினிலே - எம் எஸ் சுப்புலட்சுமி<br /><br /><div id="swfplayer"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.hummaa.com/static_content/flash/playerv4.swf" style="" id="mp3Player" name="mp3Player" quality="high" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="false" wmode="opaque" flashvars="autostart=true&file=http://www.hummaa.com/player/playeroutput.php?req=aWQ9MTA3MDAyJnBsdHlwZT1zb25nJnBscnR5cGU9bGMmcGFyYW09MzQ4NTE=" width="665" height="32"></div> </embed>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-73287664531681488262009-04-16T03:26:00.000-07:002009-04-16T03:29:00.236-07:00test<embed id="VideoPlayback" src="http://video.google.co.uk/googleplayer.swf?docid=-6588419071760471274&hl=en&fs=true" style="width:500px;height:407px" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> </embed>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-91941428153528347822009-02-24T14:37:00.000-08:002010-04-03T14:18:23.268-07:00Tamil in IDNIn the year 2005 CE, Indic IDN being considered was Unicode 3.0. But now, Unicode 5.2 is the current version, and the following Tamil letters need implementation in IDN.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">(a) Tamil letter, SHA (U+0BB6)</span><br />------------------------------------------<br /><br />The Tamil letter, SHA (U+0BB6) should be included in IDN.<br /><br />Shrii, as in Tamil Lexicon and in Unicode table must be defined with U+0BB6 <br /><br />(SHA) letter in IDN registry.<br /><a href="http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamedSequences.txt">http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamedSequences.txt</a><br /><br />TAMIL SYLLABLE SHRII ஸ்ரீ = <0BB6 0BCD 0BB0 0BC0>. This Shrii (ஸ்ரீ) conjunct glyph should only be generated with letter SHA (0BB6).<br /><br />The sequence <0BB8 0BCD 0BB0 0BC0> with letter SA (0BB8) should be shown as ஸ்ரீ visually in IDN. That is, <0BB8 0BCD 0BB0 0BC0> = ஸ்ரீ (and, not as shrii conjunct visually).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">(b) Tamil OM sign (U+0BD0)</span><br />----------------------------------------<br /><br />If Devanagari OM sign (U+0950) is allowed for IDN, Tamil OM sign (U+0BD0) is needed in IDN also.<br /><br />For blocking any confusability problems, the letter ம் should be blocked after Tamil OM sign (U+0BDO). Note that when Om is written as a sequence of two letters, i.e., <OO, MA, VIRAMA>, the letter ம் will always be present. So, the blockage of ம் following U+0BD0 will distinguish between OM sign and the word, Om as a sequence of 2 letters.<br /><br />This is similar to situation in Devanagari script. And if Devanagari OM sign is allowed, Tamil OM sign should be allowed in IDN also. While Grantha loan conjunct, Shrii (Section (a)) will be allowed, Tamil OM sign is important in the native religions of India.<br /><br />Also, note a graphic variant of Tamil OM sign contains Vel "spear" also. It is very popular form among Tamils not just in India but also in Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka. If you add that glyph (with vel) as a requirement for Tamil OM sign for IDN, it will be easy to distinguish visually even in a small-screen PDA. If samples of the vel-inlclusive OM sign glyph is needed, please let us know.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">(c) Display of Non-Conjunct K-SSA in Tamil IDN</span><br />----------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />Tamil script has evolved K-SSA as non-conjunct form. The Unicode Standard (TUS 5.2) recommends the use of non-conjunct K-SSA using ZWNJ (U+200C) joiner. This will make the understandability and clarity of the URL in Tamil script much better.<br /><br />Popular Tamil editors such as NHM writer, <br /><a href="http://software.nhm.in/products/writer">http://software.nhm.in/products/writer</a> <br />produce nonconjunct forms of ksh: <br />க்ஷ் க்ஷ க்ஷா க்ஷி க்ஷீ க்ஷு க்ஷூ க்ஷெ க்ஷே க்ஷை க்ஷொ க்ஷோ க்ஷௌ <br /><br /><a href="http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/">http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/ </a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Section 9.6 Tamil, page 325. </span><br />"The situation is quite different for Tamil because the script uses very few consonant conjuncts. An orthographic cluster consisting of multiple consonants (represented by <C1, U+0BCD tamil sign virama, C2, ...>) is normally displayed with explicit viramas (which are called pulli in Tamil). The conjuncts kssa and shra are traditionally displayed by conjunct ligatures, as illustrated for kssa in Figure 9-13, <span style="font-weight:bold;">but nowadays tend to be displayed using an explicit pulli as well.</span> <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Figure 9-13. Kssa Ligature in Tamil <br />க + pulli (U+0BCD) + ஷ ⇒ க்ஷ ksha <br />To explicitly display a pulli for such sequences, zero width non-joiner can be inserted after the pulli in the sequence of characters.</span>" <br /><br />The conjunct <span style="font-style:italic;">kssa</span> should not be allowed in IDN, and always ZWNJ be present in the <span style="font-style:italic;">k-ssa</span> series to make them non-conjunct.<br /><br />N. Ganesanநா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-65718157363760220872008-12-04T12:55:00.000-08:002009-05-02T05:50:55.746-07:00THE SOUND PATTERN of SANSKRIT IN ASIATHE SOUND PATTERN of SANSKRIT IN ASIA<br />An Unheralded Contribution by Indian Brahmans and Buddhist Monks<br /><br /><a href="http://fritsstaal.googlepages.com">Frits Staal</a>, University of California, Berkeley<br /><br />C o n t e n t s<br /><br /><a href="#A_Vedic_Discovery"> 1. A Vedic Discovery </a><br /><br /><a href="#Indic_Scripts">2. Indic Scripts of Asia </a><br /><br /><a href="#South_Southeast">3. South, Southeast and Central Asia </a><br /><br /><a href="#East_Asia">4. East Asia </a><br /><br /><a href="#Arabic">5. Arabic </a><br /><br /><a href="#Siddham"> 6. Siddham </a><br /><br /><a href="#Conclusions">7. Conclusions </a><br /><br /><a href="#Acknowledgements">Acknowledgements </a><br /><br /><a href="#Select_Bibliography">Select Bibliography </a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Lecture given during the Inaugural Session of the International Conference on“Sanskrit in Asia” to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Her Royal Highness Princess Mahachakri Sirindhorn at Silpakorn University,Bangkok, June 23, 2005.<br /><br />Subsequently published in Sanskrit Studies Central Journal. Journal of the Sanskrit Studies Centre, Silpakorn University, 2 (2006) 193-200.</span><br /> <br />*******************************<br />Your Royal Highness, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen<br /><a name="A_Vedic_Discovery"> <br /><strong>1. A Vedic Discovery </strong> </a><br /><br />It is a great privilege for me to be present here and discuss Sanskrit in Asia on this special occasion. I am sure I speak for all of us who participate in this conference and other visitors, when I say that we are grateful to Your Royal Highness who is not only taking time from more pressing duties, but who is also concerned with many languages other than Sanskrit. I believe they include in alphabetic order Chinese, English, French, German, Khmer, Latin and Pali, not to mention Thai, which comes modestly at the end of this list because I have followed the order of letters of the English ABC. I shall begin my own inquiry with late Vedic, which is close to Classical Sanskrit and comes even later than Sanskrit and Thai because “V” comes after “S” and “T” in all the Near Eastern and European alphabets that I shall oppose to the sound pattern of Sanskrit. For I believe with Plato that if we look at two opposites, side by side, and rub them against each other, “we may cause justice to blaze out as from the two kindling sticks” (<span style="font-style:italic;">Republic</span> IV 435 a 1-2) – the Greek equivalent of <span style="font-style:italic;">agnimanthana</span> in the Vedic fire ritual.<br /><br />Classical Indian linguists adopted a synchronistic perspective because they did not regard language as subject to change. We now know that language evolves in a manner that is not altogether different from the evolution of the species. Roughly speaking, Old-Khmer evolved into Cambodian, Latin into Italian and French and Sanskrit into Hindi and Marathi. The Vedic language went through three stages which are known as Early, Middle and Late Vedic. Throughout the long period of their evolution, from about 1700 to 500 BCE, Vedic Indians spoke Vedic by definition, composed Vedic verse and prose, and transmitted these compositions to future generations through recitation. It was an exclusively oral tradition.<br /><br />Toward the end of the Vedic period and at the western extremity of Vedic India, in Kośala or Videha, – not far in time and place from the Buddha’s birth – reciters of the Veda made a major discovery (Figure 1). They found that the consonants of a language are produced by constricting the vocal tract at a particular point along its stationary portion -- the palate or upper lip. If we move from the larynx or throat to the lips, we pronounce <span style="font-style:italic;">ka, ca, ṭa, ta, pa</span>. Each of these syllables may be unvoiced or voiced, provided with more or less breath, which may be made to pass through the nasal cavity as well. Thus we produce, in the case of <span style="font-style:italic;">ka</span>, the sequence <span style="font-style:italic;">ka, kha, ga, gha, ṅa</span>; and similarly for the other four consonantal stops. The two directions are combined in the two-dimensional square or varga that is depicted here. In order to complete the picture, a few other syllables have to be added along with semi-vowels and vowels. <br /><br />The Vedic system of the sounds of language exhibits and embodies what is nowadays called phonetics, but is close to phonology which studies features of those same sounds as parts of a system. The system exhibits what I refer to as the sound pattern of Vedic, Sanskrit or language. I do not imply that it is the same for all languages, but most of the sounds of human speech may be accommodated in some such scheme. During the Late Vedic period, the Vedic scheme was expounded in the śikṣâ, the Prātiśākhya and other compositions.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtUjeZmgnCnK_UXcpC22ww9PmZpRXe1pqyNm9qJPMI2F-nzXC6gelf9U65WUH-6uliuh-yasV6k14WRBkrPALfHM5oXAbsqQ_q7RLEtZTlOXJt6yff9YIt68OduT-iBgO_sg6fMzU197Y/s1600-h/s1-full.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 260px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtUjeZmgnCnK_UXcpC22ww9PmZpRXe1pqyNm9qJPMI2F-nzXC6gelf9U65WUH-6uliuh-yasV6k14WRBkrPALfHM5oXAbsqQ_q7RLEtZTlOXJt6yff9YIt68OduT-iBgO_sg6fMzU197Y/s400/s1-full.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276046128100037042" /></a><br /><br />Figure 1. The Vedic System of the Sounds of Language<br /><br />As far as I know, the Vedic discovery of the sound pattern of language was made only once. Modern linguistics uses distinctive features, but they would not exist if the sound pattern of language had not been discovered earlier; by two-and-a-half millennia, as it happens. One intermediary was Pāṇini who composed his grammar one or two centuries after the Vedic discovery. His grammar incorporated it, but his system was different. The reason is not that the Vedic pattern is different from that of Sanskrit. There are differences between the two and Pāṇini referred to some of them by rules that are marked <span style="font-style:italic;">chandasi</span>, “in the Veda.” But Pāṇini composed an entirely new type of grammar for the spoken language of his day, thereby laying the foundation for Classical Sanskrit. It inspired not only many other grammars for Sanskrit, Prakrit and other languages, including Jaina and Buddhist works, but the great tradition of Sanskrit grammarians from Patañjali to Nâgojîbhaṭṭa as well as modern linguistics. It is Nâgojîbhaṭṭa who ended his <span style="font-style:italic;">Paribhâṣenduśekhara</span> with what became a famous saying: “grammarians rejoice over the saving of half a syllable as over the birth of a son” (<span style="font-style:italic;">ardhamâtrâlâghavena putrotsavaṃ manyante vaiyâkaraṇâḥ</span>).<br /><br />The Vedic system of sounds that preceded Pāṇini is nothing new to you. Every literate Indian knows it, and I would venture to guess that, among literate people, more than 50% understand it in Southeast Asia, less than 50% in East Asia, and perhaps a handful of linguists if you look west of South Asia. You may be surprised by my guess, but please note that I have in the mean time shifted my language and refer now to <span style="font-style:italic;">literate</span> people which is something the Vedic Indians were not. <br /><br />Looking back we detect a paradox. The discovery of the sound pattern of Sanskrit was not made despite the absence of writing, but <span style="font-style:italic;">because</span> of it. The reason is simple: the discoverers were not hampered by any written alphabet. Writing was invented or introduced later. The resulting syllabaries were naturally arranged in accordance with the earlier and superior, but orally-based system. That system was rational, because it reflected the places of articulation in their natural order; and practical, especially for languages in which syllables consist of a consonant followed by a vowel. Japanese is such a language and Sanskrit to some extent. So are many of the languages of the Near East and of Europe but their alphabets are neither rational, nor practical. They blocked insight into the nature of language and served as obstacles to the development of linguistics.<br /><br />Literacy takes us to another instructive contrast that is socio-economic. We have, on the one hand, the difficult grammar of Pāṇini, a work of genius that rightly became famous but was studied by a small elite of specialists, in India, other Asian countries, Europe and the Americas. There is, on the other hand, the Vedic system, a discovery that had a much wider appeal which is due to its rationality and practicality both. It was beneficial to priests of the court and the temple, Buddhist monks, astrologers-cum-astronomers and many others whose writing skills were used in turn by royalty and other rulers, land owners, bookkeepers, artisans, etc., thus affecting larger segments of society. It appealed moreover to practical people who liked to work with a writing system that was not just prestigious but natural and effective – at least in principle and initially, before some of the writing systems began to exhibit labyrinthine qualities. <br /><br />The languages and inscriptions of South East Asia support these socio-economic generalities. The Sanskrit inscriptions from Cambodia contain words that are not found in Sanskrit dictionaries. One of them is <span style="font-style:italic;">lekhin</span> which refers to a scribe or secretary. We also find <span style="font-style:italic;">abhyantaralekhin</span>, “personal secretary” or, as Kamaleswar Bhattacharya translates it, “secrétaire intime.” The Sanskrit root is <span style="font-style:italic;">likh</span>, “scratch” or “write,” and in Indic Sanskrit we come across derivatives such as <span style="font-style:italic;">lekha</span>- “document,” <span style="font-style:italic;">lekhaka</span>- “writer,” <span style="font-style:italic;">lekhana</span> “writing,” etc.; but not<span style="font-style:italic;"> lekhin</span>. In Old-Javanese, similar derivatives are at least apparent. Thus we have <span style="font-style:italic;">lekita</span> which means “written evidence” and is used in a court of law. It also refers to “by-laws of the village.” It may come from Sanskrit <span style="font-style:italic;">lekhita</span> “written” or “caused to be written,” but may be connected with Javanese <span style="font-style:italic;">lukita</span> which means “thought expressed in words” or “literary composition” and may in turn be related to another term that is certainly native: <span style="font-style:italic;">lukis</span> “drawn with a pen.” All this evidence suggests that the introduction of Sanskrit had something to do with writing.<br /><br />Why are such simple facts not mentioned by specialists in writing systems? Because students of scripts generally confine themselves to the <span style="font-style:italic;">shapes</span> of letters and characters. It is well known that Indic shapes were adapted in Central and Southeast Asia. But that is only the least interesting part of the story as is demonstrated by the fact, that the Indian system spread much further than the Indic shapes. The sound pattern of Sanskrit was adopted and adapted in a large part of Asia - including Central Asia, Korea, Japan and, momentarily, in a grammar of Arabic composed in Iran. I refer to <span style="font-style:italic;">adoption</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">adaptation </span>because, in most cases, the Indic system was not imitated slavishly but adapted creatively to new languages and language structures.<br /><br />Since our present enquiry is not concerned with shapes but with order, epigraphy - another topic to which our guest of honor has devoted years of study – is of limited assistance. The same holds for palaeography in the narrower sense. A typical example, de Casparis’ <span style="font-style:italic;">Indonesian Palaeography</span>, subtitled <span style="font-style:italic;">A History of Writing in Indonesia</span>, is still the basic manual on the shapes of the characters but does not refer to their order even once. I hope that epigraphists in Thailand, where that rare and valuable discipline still flourishes, will look for order and take it into account when they find it.<br /><br /><a name="Indic_Scripts"><br /><strong>2. Indic Scripts of Asia</strong> </a><br /><br />Figure 2 provides a geographical overview of the Indic Scripts of Asia. It shows at a glance that the Indian system together with the shapes of its syllables is confined to South and Southeast Asia. The Indian system without the shapes was adopted and adapted in Central Asia, Korea and Japan. Occasional uses of the system are found in China and in Southwest Asia or the Near East<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggaU87NnfVPvcLjEcXxj_lTbZJNnTRoWtalO4V4wc99cAtRlKY6xZW_9p-_NZpJtotUbWbhbo2HFc6T9MvLl5jX2Gpu5zpcrqjfSYlogigFHpm5EksLkBheG6f4Y6nOmJymPXnaxW9Ncs/s1600-h/s2-full.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 366px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggaU87NnfVPvcLjEcXxj_lTbZJNnTRoWtalO4V4wc99cAtRlKY6xZW_9p-_NZpJtotUbWbhbo2HFc6T9MvLl5jX2Gpu5zpcrqjfSYlogigFHpm5EksLkBheG6f4Y6nOmJymPXnaxW9Ncs/s400/s2-full.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276046414540953778" /></a><br /><br />Figure 2. Indic Scripts of Asia<br /><br /><a name="South_Southeast"><br /><strong>3. South, Southeast and Central Asia </strong> </a><br /><br />I start this brief overview with a mystery: the script of Kharoshthi, probably the earliest Indic script, which was used in northwest India and spread to Central Asia from about the fourth century BCE to the third century CE. The order of syllables starts with <span style="font-style:italic;">a ra pa ca na la da ba èa ṣa</span> . . . That order is unexplained and the script is called <span style="font-style:italic;">Arapacana</span> after the first five syllables. It possesses clearly Indic features: each syllable ends in a short –<span style="font-style:italic;">a </span>and diacritic signs are added when that short –<span style="font-style:italic;">a</span> is replaced by another vowel. The order of vowels, however, is not Indic but Aramaic: <span style="font-style:italic;">a e i o u </span> and not <span style="font-style:italic;">a i u e o</span>. That order is also adopted by diacritics attached to consonants from top to bottom when changing a into <span style="font-style:italic;">e, i, o</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">u</span>.<br /><br />The other early Indic script is Brahmi. It is the paradigm of the Vedic system. It influenced, directly or indirectly, via Pallava or other medieval Indian scripts, all the scripts of South and Southeast Asia that include (again in <span style="font-style:italic;">alphabetic</span> order) Balinese, Bengali, Burmese, Devanagari, Grantha, Gujrati, Gupta, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Nepali, Oriya, Pallava, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu and Thai.<br /><br />The evidence for these influences is constituted by the scripts themselves. Textual evidence for how the transmission occurred is less common. The same applies to the evidence for Indian numerals. But there is circumstantial evidence, in both cases. It is probable, for example, that one of the Indian brahmans who transmitted the Vedic paradigm to Cambodia, was the South Indian who belonged, according to a seventh century Cambodian inscription, to the Yajurvedic school of <span style="font-style:italic;">Taittirîya</span>. The reason is that among the Prâtiśâkhya compositions that explain the Vedic system, only the <span style="font-style:italic;">Taittirîya Prâtiśâkhya</span> depicts the Vedic square (<span style="font-style:italic;">varga</span>) of <span style="font-style:italic;">Figure 1 </span>in full.<br /><br />I have excluded Javanese from the above enumeration because the order of its syllables illustrates a different kind of principle from the Vedic and alphabetic both: <span style="font-style:italic;">hana caraka, data sawala, padha jayanya, maga bathanga.</span> This list is Indic in form, and Old Javanese (Kawi) retains the Indic device of writing consonant clusters by putting one consonant symbol below another. But the creators do not seem to have liked or understood the rationale behind the Indic order. What they construed instead is a mnemonic jingle that includes one occurrence of each of twenty of the twenty-two consonantal syllables of the Javanese script. It has a meaning: “There were two emissaries, they began to fight, their valor was equal, they both fell dead.” <br /><br />The chief Central Asian varieties are Khotanese, Tibetan and ‘Phags-pa. The latter script was created from the Tibetan by the lama of that name for the Mongol Emperor Qubilai or “Kubla Khan” as an international script for his Asian Empire. Other Central Asian scripts, such as Bactrian or Sogdian, do not concern us here because they were not Indic but Aramaic in shape and order both.<br /><br />The numbers of South, Southeast and Central Asian scripts that adopted the Indic order is large. An attractive estimate occurs in the tenth chapter of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Lalitavistara</span>, called <span style="font-style:italic;">Lipiśâlâsaṃdarśanaparivarta</span>, “the revolution of displays of the mansions of writing.” It lists 64 different scripts that were mastered by the Bodhisattva. The title of the chapter is reminiscent of the Buddha’s own <span style="font-style:italic;">dharmacakrapravartana</span>. It emphasizes instructively that the carriers of the sound pattern of Sanskrit to other Asian regions were not only Indian Brahmans but also, and in increasing numbers, Buddhist monks. It is explained at least in part by the geographical facts with which I started: the discovery of the sound pattern of language by Vedic reciters occurred close in place and time to the areas where early Buddhism flourished. It was a feature of civilization that Buddhists carried across Asia.<br /><br /><a name="East_Asia"><br /><strong>4. East Asia </strong> </a><br /><br />The Chinese system of writing is so different from Vedic orality and all that it entailed, that Indians had nothing to contribute. It caused confusion since Chinese Buddhists believed that each Indic shape was independent and had its own meaning, like many Chinese characters. There were a few exceptions. Hsieh Ling-yün (384-433 CE), poet and calligrapher, assisted by Hui-ju, a Buddhist monk, composed a Sanskrit glossary in Chinese transliteration in the Indian order. After the ninth century, rhyme tables were composed for each tone in that same order.<br /><br />The <span style="font-style:italic;">Hiragana</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Katakana</span> syllabaries of Japan adopted strokes from Chinese characters, but reflect the Indic system which was gradually adapted to the sounds of Japanese. An example from the Heian period is <span style="font-style:italic;">pa pi pu pe po</span>, which became subsequently <span style="font-style:italic;">fa fi fu fe fo</span>, and has now reached the form <span style="font-style:italic;">ha hi fu he ho</span>. It is a classic illustration of the difference between creative adaptation and slavish imitation. But it did not please everyone and a poem was composed in which all but one of the syllables were used once. Their order is not phonetic but semantic. It is called <span style="font-style:italic;">Iroha</span> after the first syllables: <span style="font-style:italic;">iro ha nioedo chirinuru wo waga </span>…and has been attributed to the famous philosopher and calligrapher Kûkai or Kôbôdaishi to whom we will return. In English translation, it says: “Colorful flowers are fragrant but they must fall. Who in this world will live forever? Today cross over the deep mountains of life’s illusions; and there will be no more shallow dreaming, no more drunkenness.” It sounds better than the mnemonic device used for Javanese but belongs to the same category.<br /><br />The Korean <span style="font-style:italic;">Han-gul</span> is the world’s most perfect script. Even the shapes of its syllables reflect the shapes of the mouth when producing sounds – as does, in English and other European languages, only the shape of the letter “o,” which may be seen as a picture of the rounding of the mouth. The perfection of the Korean order is due to the Indic but is fully adapted to the sound pattern of Korean. <span style="font-style:italic;">Han-gul</span> was developed in 1444 CE by a committee of scholars, including Buddhist monks, appointed by the Emperor of Korea. The committee report starts with the basic insight: “The sounds of our country’s language are different from those of China.”<br /><br /><a name="Arabic"><br /><strong>5. Arabic</strong> </a><br /><br />The case of Arabic deserves a separate lecture by an expert but I shall try to summarize its most salient features. The order of letters in the standard alphabet is based on their shapes (<span style="font-style:italic;">Figure 3</span>). But al-Khalīl bin Aḥmad, teacher of śibawayhi, author of the most famous grammar of Arabic, introduced in the eighth century a new list in which he had re-arranged the letters, starting in the back of the mouth with the <span style="font-style:italic;">‘Ain</span> followed by <span style="font-style:italic;">ḥâ, Hâ, Khâ, Ghain, Qâf, Kâf, </span>etc. (same <span style="font-style:italic;">Figure 3</span>). It is referred to as the <span style="font-style:italic;">Kitâb al-‘Ayn</span>. Al-Khalīl was probably born in Basra, but he wrote his grammar in Khorasan, the easternmost part of Iran which is the gateway to India.<br /><br />Al-Khalīl’s Arabic grammar was not adopted by the Arab world. There has been much controversy about the question whether it was inspired by the Indic paradigm. Scholars have argued that Arabic is very different from Sanskrit (it is), that there is no evidence<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKerVPPlLy6FzMoryd81pe31hw4BkowqPSOFgYEocYS_2CdwB1u-ZzJE0hOa2RYl36-oKM_LlzMFmOh39oOcU_CGePxO_XbycS7ri6Yb6Fy6KJi813EOwyle-c-V09R7JIYf-DmBM5OmU/s1600-h/neareast-large.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 263px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKerVPPlLy6FzMoryd81pe31hw4BkowqPSOFgYEocYS_2CdwB1u-ZzJE0hOa2RYl36-oKM_LlzMFmOh39oOcU_CGePxO_XbycS7ri6Yb6Fy6KJi813EOwyle-c-V09R7JIYf-DmBM5OmU/s400/neareast-large.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276046973481000018" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9ii8SNn3hevLWSlc27pomwEDv-FaD4b3GrxyhqGXAoyl5oBbu5n4ksWIKKQPZuLPZxC8i0hflAAsu9YRUR2wZTCt-l8350IN58jmH3MX6LbCnOi4KTxLJvgo53-dPzGtOtjMjUP_HArU/s1600-h/sequence-full.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 246px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9ii8SNn3hevLWSlc27pomwEDv-FaD4b3GrxyhqGXAoyl5oBbu5n4ksWIKKQPZuLPZxC8i0hflAAsu9YRUR2wZTCt-l8350IN58jmH3MX6LbCnOi4KTxLJvgo53-dPzGtOtjMjUP_HArU/s400/sequence-full.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276047309456788386" /></a><br /><br />Figure 3. The Standard Arabic Alphabet and the Indian “Alphabet” of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Kitâb al-‘Ayn</span><br /><br />that al-Khalīl studied the <span style="font-style:italic;">Prâtiśâkhya</span> literature or other Sanskrit treatises (true because he didn’t), that borrowing of an alien system without any of the details on which it rests is almost unknown (?), that there were no contacts between Arab and Indian scholars at the time of al-Khalīl (not true because there were such contacts in mathematics), and so on. The argument, in brief, is based upon the assumption that borrowing must be what I have called slavish imitation.<br /><br />Having listened to me so far, you may already be inclined to conclude, that al-Khalīl’s grammar was inspired by the Indian paradigm. But we need a reason or, at least, a more accurate account. Morris Halle (personal communication) provides precise evidence of the influence of the Vedic discovery on al-Khalīl’s grammar. Al-Khalīl’s order of consonants is basically a linearization of the two-dimensional array of <span style="font-style:italic;">Figure 1</span>. Unless he knew the Vedic order, he would have no reason to deviate from the traditional order of Arabic consonants as depicted on the top of <span style="font-style:italic;">Figure 3</span>. He furthermore extended the system by adding the rear wall of the pharynx as a point of constriction. Put in more general terms, it means this. In linguistics, as in mathematics, ideas that are part of an oral tradition may be picked up by a brilliant scientist, who does not study a text, let alone slavishly, but understands the subject. Al-Khalīl was such a man. He went as far as performing experiments, for instance, by putting his fingers in his mouth. The ancient Indians may have done it too. But superior qualities of the subject and the student are not enough. The Indic system did not enter the Near East or Europe because of prejudice, narrow-mindedness and plain ignorance.<br /><br /><a name="Siddham"><br /><strong>6. Siddham</strong> </a><br /><br />It would not be good to end my lecture on a negative note and so I have kept the auspicious syllabary of <span style="font-style:italic;">Siddham</span> for last. It will show that I have omitted from our discussion a large area of patterned sound, that of <span style="font-style:italic;">mantras</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">dharaṇîs</span>. The Siddham syllabary was construed, in the Indic order, for the expression of these sacred syllables and their export to East Asia. The number that was exported from India, sometimes in exchange for other goods, probably exceeds that of any other commodity, although no attention seems to have been paid to it by economic historians. Seekers, however, sought solace in these treasures that were of easier access than the Sanskrit language itself, which famous Chinese pilgrims had gone to India to learn, but which was never studied seriously in China proper. <br /><br />To illustrate the export of the Siddham, we return once more to the Japanese Buddhist monk Kûkai or Kôbôdaishi, who was born in the eighth century. Kûkai went to China and studied the Siddham script with Prajña, a monk from Kashmir who was translating Tantric texts. After his return to Japan, Kûkai built a monastery at Koyasan which became the center of the Shingon sect. He taught his pupils <span style="font-style:italic;">mantras</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">dharaṇîs</span> and how to write them in the Siddham script. <span style="font-style:italic;">Figure 4 </span>depicts a scroll from Koyasan with the Siddham character A.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdSnqSzwmfrGJ7Hmw6mf7FMoenvPSu6CR_iGyJQ0ZKJqsHDR9RWPD3o8kh13sr_zw85wmDEWtmtDcp9Uu1tEAM3KioeKyWO7k9VzwE00R3XxMPsyHVGEaiY46XTSWvJKFZqZIFbmxhhzI/s1600-h/orange-full.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdSnqSzwmfrGJ7Hmw6mf7FMoenvPSu6CR_iGyJQ0ZKJqsHDR9RWPD3o8kh13sr_zw85wmDEWtmtDcp9Uu1tEAM3KioeKyWO7k9VzwE00R3XxMPsyHVGEaiY46XTSWvJKFZqZIFbmxhhzI/s400/orange-full.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276047577074716706" /></a><br /><br />Figure 4. Siddham “A” from Koyasan<br /><br /><a name="Conclusions"><br /><strong>7. Conclusions</strong> </a><br /><br />I derive five conclusions from our brief discussion. The first is that the sound pattern of Sanskrit was adopted and adapted by many writing systems of Asia. The exporters were Indian brahmans and Buddhist monks. The second is that the pattern that underlies the system was not always understood. The third is that those Asian writing systems are applications of a theory of language, just as airplanes are applications of the laws of aerodynamics. The fourth, closely connected, is that a writing system is only as good as the theory upon which it is based. (Since the accuracy of theories is measured in degrees, absence of any theory points to probability zero.) My fifth and final conclusion is hypothetical in character. If the sound pattern of Sanskrit had also reached the Near East and Europe, there would not be so many clumsy alphabets around and the modern world would have the benefit of rational and practical Indic syllabaries in addition to rational and practical Indic numerals. <br /><br /><a name="Acknowledgements"><br /> <strong>ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS</strong> </a><br /><br />I am deeply grateful to Dr. Samniang Leurmsai of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Sanskrit Studies Centre</span>, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, for inviting me to speak in the inaugural session on June 23, 2005, of the International Conference on “Sanskrit in Asia” to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the Birth of Her Royal Highness Princess Mahachakri Sirindhorn.<br /><br />When preparing this paper, I saw that Richard Salomon was about to address the 215th meeting of the <span style="font-style:italic;">American Oriental Society</span> at Philadelphia of March 20, 2005, on “On Alphabetical Order in India, and Elsewhere.” I was unable to attend that meeting but I wrote to Richard and he very kindly sent me a draft of his paper. It became obvious that both of us shared an interest in the <span style="font-style:italic;">order </span>of characters, and not only in their <span style="font-style:italic;">shapes</span> like many other students of scripts. It turned out also that both of us made use of the 1996 manual on <span style="font-style:italic;">The World’s Writing Systems (WWS)</span> by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (see <span style="font-style:italic;">Select Bibliography</span> below), to which Richard had already contributed the section on Brahmi and Kharosthi. I have learned much from Richard Salomon’s contributions and our subsequent correspondence. Our contributions are in some respects complementary but the reader will note that there are differences between our approaches. My own approach reflects the wider context of Staal 2005.<br /><br />WWS itself calls for additional comment. It is learned and informative. It has been widely praised, especially from the point of view of Semitic Linguistics (Kaye 2003). However, its adherence to the <span style="font-style:italic;">International Phonetic Alphabet </span>is baffling to the intended wide audience and obscured further by the idiosyncratic terminologies of both editors and the careless use of many other technical and semi-technical terms that are nowhere explained. Even the concept of “syllabary” is regarded as a kind of alphabet; as in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Oxford Dictionary</span>, which declares that a syllabary serves “the purpose of an alphabet”. It is not and does not and these verdicts are simply cultural constructs.<br /><br />Truly fatal to the subject of WWS is its atomistic approach which, in many of its sections, obliterates the intimate relationships that exist between the scripts they deal with. The contributions by Christopher Court, Leonard van der Kuijp and Richard Salomon’s own are free from this defect, and William Bright recognizes that “the traditional order of symbols in the Indian scripts is based primarily on articulatory phonetics, as originally developed for Sanskrit by the ancient pandits” (page 384). But the 113 pages on South and Southeast Asia in this tome of 922 pages, the only ones that study a writing system that is rational and practical, are seriously misleading, not on the whole but as a whole. That has, furthermore, a curious implication. If we omit some pages from the South and South East Asian section that do not reflect the Indic system, and add a few on Korean and Japanese that do, we are left with some 800 pages that are expressly devoted to the description of irrationalities and impracticalities that are a disgrace to <span style="font-style:italic;">homo sapiens</span> though not the only one.<br /><br />I can summarize my comments best by quoting from my own paper its fourth conclusion. The editors seem to ignore the fact that their phonetic approach, which mirrors the Indic system, lacks its fundamental insight: “a writing system is only as good as the theory upon which it is based.”<br /><br />Linguists will have noted that the expression “sound pattern” evokes Morris Halle’s “Sound Pattern of Russian” of 1959 and Chomsky and Halle’s “Sound Pattern of English” of 1968. What was meant there is clearly explained in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Preface </span>to the second book: “we are not, in this work, concerned exclusively or even primarily with the facts of English as such. We are interested in these facts for the light they shed on linguistic theory (on what, in an earlier period, would have been called <span style="font-style:italic;">universal grammar</span>) and for what they suggest about the nature of mental processes in general.” That Chomsky and Halle’s book is inspired by the Indic tradition is clear from its final rule, which is identical with the final rule of Pāṇini's grammar: “a a.”<br /><br />In later publications, Noam Chomsky did not shy away from the expression “universal grammar.” My present contribution is different from all these important works. It is only a brief discussion, but it is concerned with applications, history and practicalities as well as theory. I have tried to show how the Vedic discovery is based on a theory of language that may be used in discussing the contributions of Sanskrit to Asian societies and to civilization. These are ambitious efforts and some of the few steps I have taken may have been unsteady. I hope that readers will render assistance in discussing, confirming, refuting or amending what I have written.<br /><br />Staal 2005 is concerned with the theory and development of language, natural as well as artificial. It lists the publications on Arabic and Japanese that I have used for the present paper also. Here I like again to express my indebtedness for guidance and references to Professors Oscar von Hinüber, Richard C. Martin, Kees Versteegh, W.J. Boot and Michio Yano. Special thanks go to Professor Morris Halle of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Massachusetts Institute of Technology</span> for a significant correction and important observation mentioned in the body of the text. My final acknowledgments go to Edward M. Stadum and Peter Vandemoortele for their help with the illustrations and powerpoints that were part of the presentation.<br /><br /><tt><br /><a name="Select_Bibliography"><br /><strong>SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY</strong> </a><br /><br />Allen, W.S. (1953), Phonetics in Ancient India. London etc.: Oxford University Press.<br /><br />Alpert, Harvey P., ed. (1989), Understanding Mantras. Albany: State University of New York Press.<br /><br />Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1961), Les religions brahmaniques dans l’ancien Cambodge, d’apres l’épigraphie et l’iconographie, Paris: Ecole française d’extreme orient XLIX.<br /><br />Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1964), “Recherches sur le vocabulaire des inscriptions sanskrites du Cambodge,” Bulletin de l’école française d’extreme-orient 102/1:1-72.<br /><br />Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1966), “Supplément aux recherches sur le vocabulaire des inscriptions sanskrites du Cambodge,” Bulletin de l’école française d’extreme-orient 103/1:273-77.<br /><br />Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1997), “The Religions of Ancient Cambodia,” in: Sculpture of Angkor and Ancient Cambodia. New York: Thames and Hudson, 34-52.<br /><br />Brough, John, (1977) “The Arapacana Syllabary in the old Lalitavistara,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 40:85-95. Republished in Hara and Wright, eds., 450-60.<br /><br />Casparis, J.G. de (1975), Indonesian Palaeography. A History of Writing in Indonesia from the Beginnings to c. A.D. 1500. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Handbuch der Orientalistik II, 4, 1.<br /><br />Casparis, J.G. de and I.W. Mabbett (1992, 1999), “Religion and Popular Beliefs of South East Asia before c. 1500,” in: Tarling, ed., 276-339.<br /><br />Chomsky, Noam and Morris Halle (1968), The Sound Pattern of English. New York etc.: Harper and Row. Studies in Language.<br /><br />Coedes, G. (1964), Les états hindouisés d’Indochine et d’Indonésie. Paris: E. de Boccard.<br /><br />Court, Christopher (1996), “Introduction” and “The Spread of Brahmi Script into Southeast Asia,” in: Daniels and Bright, eds., 443-49.<br /><br />Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright, eds., (1996) The World’s Writing Systems. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.<br /><br />Deshpande, Madhav M. (1997), śaunakîyâ caturâdhyâyikâ. A Prâtiśâkya of the śaunakîya Atharvaveda. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Harvard Oriental Series,Vol. 52.<br /><br />Faddegon, Barend (1948), “The Semitic and Sanskrit Alphabets,” in: Orientalia Neerlandica. A Volume of Oriental Studies. Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff: 261-72.<br /><br />Filliozat, Jean (1947). “Paléographie” in: Renou and Filliozat, L’Inde Classique, Vol.2, 665-712.<br /><br />Flood, Gavin, ed. (2003), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism. Oxford: Blackwell.<br /><br />Gonda, J. (1952), Sanskrit in Indonesia, Nagpur: International Academy of Indian Culture. Sarasvati Vihara Series Vol. 28.<br /><br />Granoff, Phyllis, Frits Staal and Michio Yano, eds. (2005), The Emergence of Artificial Languages. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Asian Contributions to the Formation of Modern Science I. International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden University, September 20-21, 2002. Journal of Indian Philosophy.<br /><br />Gulik, R.H. van (1980), Siddham. An Essay on the History of Sanskrit Studies in China and Japan. Delhi: Åata-Piøaka Series, Vol. 247.<br /><br />Hall, Kenneth R. (1992, 199), “Economic History or Early Southeast Asia,” in: Tarling, ed., 183-275.<br /><br />Halle, M. (1959), The Sound Pattern of Russian. The Hague: Mouton.<br /><br />Hara, Minoru and J.C. Wright, eds. (1996), John Brough: Collected Papers. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.<br /><br />Hino, Shoun and Toshihiro Wada (2004), Three Mountains and Seven Rivers. Prof. Musashi Tachikawa’s Felicitation Volume. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.<br /><br />Kaye, Alan S. (2003), “Semitic Linguistics in the New Millennium.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 123.4: 819-34.<br /><br />Krom, N.J. (1923), “Geschiedenis van Java in den Hindoe-tijd,” in: Inleiding tot de Hindoe-Javaansche Kunst, Vol. I, Chapter 2: 43-86.<br /><br />Kuijp, Leonard W.J. van der (1996), “The Tibetan Script and Derivatives,” in: Daniels and Bright, eds., 431-41.<br /><br />Penrose, Roger (1997 etc.), The Large, the Small and the Human Mind. Cambridge: University Press.<br /><br />Renou Louis (1960), “La forme et l’arrangement interne des Prātiśākhya,” Journal asiatique 1-40.<br /><br />Renou, Louis and Jean Filliozat (1947), L’Inde Classique. Manuel des études indiennes. Vol.1, Paris: Payot. Vol. 2, Paris: Imprimerie nationale, Hanoi: Ecole française d’extreme orient. <br /><br />Salomon, Richard G. (1996), “Brahmi and Kharoshthi,” in: Daniels and Bright, eds., 373-383.<br /><br />Salomon, Richard G. (2005), “On Alphabetical Order in India, and Elsewhere.” Draft for Plenary Session on Scripts and Writing, 215th meeting of the American Oriental Society, Philadelphia PA, March 20.<br /><br />Staal, J.F. (1972), “Early Accounts (Hsuan Tsang, I Tsing, Fa Tsang, al-Bîrûnî, Târanâtha)” in: Staal, J.F., ed., 4-26.<br /><br />Staal, J.F., ed., (1972), A Reader on the Sanskrit Grammarians. MIT: Cambridge and London. Studies in Linguistics, Vol. 1.<br /><br />Staal, Frits (1989), “Vedic Mantras,” in Alpert, ed., 48-95.<br /><br />Staal, Frits (1989, 1993), Rules without Meaning. Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences. New York etc.: Peter Lang. Reprint 1996: Ritual and Mantras: Rules without Meaning. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.<br /><br />Staal, Frits (1995), Mantras between Fire and Water. Reflections on a Balinese Rite. With an Appendix by Dick van der Meij. Amsterdam etc.: North Holland. Verhandelingen Afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel 166, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.<br /><br />Staal, Frits (1998), Review of Hara and Wright, eds. (1996), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61:25-26.<br /><br />Staal, Frits (2003), “The Indian Sciences: Introduction” and “The Science of Language,” in: Flood, ed., 345-59.<br /><br />Staal, Frits (2004), “Three Mountains and Seven Rivers.” in: Hino and Wada, eds., 3-24.<br /><br />Staal, Frits (2005), “Artificial Languages across Sciences and Civilizations” in: Granoff, Staal and Yano, eds. <br /><br />Tarling, Nicholas, ed. (1992, 1999), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Vol.I: From Early Times to c. 1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<br /><br />Thieme, Paul (1935), Pāṇini and the Veda. Studies in the Early History of Linguistic Science in India. Allahabad: Globe Press.<br /><br />Thieme, Paul (1982-83), “Meaning and Form in the ‘Grammar’ of Pāṇini,” Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 8/9: 3-34.<br /><br />Varma, Sidheshwar (1961), Critical Studies in the Phonetic Observations of Indian Grammarians. London: Royal Asiatic Society. Delhi: Munshi Ram Manohar Lal. <br /><br />Zürcher, E. (1959), The Buddhist Conquest of China. The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China. Leiden: E.J. Brill. </tt><br /><br /><font color="#6666ff">PS: My thanks are due to Prof. Frits Staal who granted permission to reproduce his paper in Unicode. If you need Indic Unicode for your browser to display all Roman letters with diacritics necessary for Indic transliteration, there are many one of which is James Kass' <a href="http://www.code2000.net/code2001.htm">Code2001</a> font (James updated it in April 2008). ~ NG </font>நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-15232719661645193592008-11-27T17:11:00.000-08:002008-11-30T05:09:23.108-08:00Is this Indus bovine an ox?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDvGE8CCLMT2GZzLw4cXYV7gbNNIA73Zz6xSOvWengekadKN-yAc9tm2KaCjqM74iH2u2sOBM6w1XexKpU_K5cfoEifVUVPKz4DZMAFpziB9kQmcn0HRjaTPg6sN77nXphWNksPvy8xuc/s1600-h/37.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 280px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDvGE8CCLMT2GZzLw4cXYV7gbNNIA73Zz6xSOvWengekadKN-yAc9tm2KaCjqM74iH2u2sOBM6w1XexKpU_K5cfoEifVUVPKz4DZMAFpziB9kQmcn0HRjaTPg6sN77nXphWNksPvy8xuc/s400/37.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273512846531243362" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.harappa.com/figurines/37.html">http://www.harappa.com/figurines/37.html</a><br />The bovine animal (toy?) in this page is said to be a "Water buffalo figurine from Harappa." Let us call this Figure [A].<br /><br />However, comparing with other Indus humpless ox/bull figures make the buffalo ID questionable. Figure [A] rather seems like an ox figurine, with its head raised when a rope is pulled by a cart man or while ploughing. Very similar to this is the bullock cart (<span style="font-style:italic;">not a buffalo cart</span>) shown in <a href="http://www.harappa.com/figurines/2.html">http://www.harappa.com/figurines/2.html</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqp_MdK9ioyv0q-OXHW00A1KtQ9mmG4fsXoRhh6Um9KbKnWzTvN_yCxHha3pGpPUxDx1CWevoGsEdiU_dA5ilffZOtcKJvtt0mHwzcQsPr8EcV3z1N5Q7HxgSUJaeKhlS56jA_ZDeu5Mk/s1600-h/2.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 280px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqp_MdK9ioyv0q-OXHW00A1KtQ9mmG4fsXoRhh6Um9KbKnWzTvN_yCxHha3pGpPUxDx1CWevoGsEdiU_dA5ilffZOtcKJvtt0mHwzcQsPr8EcV3z1N5Q7HxgSUJaeKhlS56jA_ZDeu5Mk/s400/2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274420374052879026" /></a><br /><br />Considering water buffalos in Indus seals, the semi-circular curves of Indian buffalo horns are very noticeable. And, these type of horns are lacking from Figure [A] and the bullock cart shown above.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj39rzVzHMbcvB7RQ5Wxt2uf37F7eJ4cU2TSrAZaW3EgfgIaTyPsKv5hdBtgbORsoF83QGT2T0R8Tf5T7RDRmNDvzkkIH1OWuGY-tH4Yck0pj_a_szG-VBtzsnVLPMXc1f_LkL2nzbi4Nc/s1600-h/water-buffalo-seal.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj39rzVzHMbcvB7RQ5Wxt2uf37F7eJ4cU2TSrAZaW3EgfgIaTyPsKv5hdBtgbORsoF83QGT2T0R8Tf5T7RDRmNDvzkkIH1OWuGY-tH4Yck0pj_a_szG-VBtzsnVLPMXc1f_LkL2nzbi4Nc/s400/water-buffalo-seal.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274423134838031954" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxTCypgG5TPw1bX1pBvOoMIoz3kpzA6wPOtPQ8MzLKXdgy-Wi1Drjsa16HxK4KUotDjPojqA4YM1438yQ5ohw_lB5hNBV3ORweu7H9cfIlJYrtI31YJu-U0_s8-Dwa1fUhr9x-ONDgVIM/s1600-h/protoindian2_8.gif"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxTCypgG5TPw1bX1pBvOoMIoz3kpzA6wPOtPQ8MzLKXdgy-Wi1Drjsa16HxK4KUotDjPojqA4YM1438yQ5ohw_lB5hNBV3ORweu7H9cfIlJYrtI31YJu-U0_s8-Dwa1fUhr9x-ONDgVIM/s400/protoindian2_8.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274423040906584674" /></a><br /><br />The cross-span of the Indus buffalo horns is wider than the span of ox horns, and buffalo horns start out in a much more flatter fashion than those of Figure [A] or the cart bullock. For example, look at the Indus water buffalo figurine at the lower row which is at the left most side to the viewer. Again, the Figure [A] horns are not compatible with these buffalo horns.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMxNql7hwmvqR0Xe5aIN9-bx6fg7yrVUP0McsiNmeEiRRAeLgskTg2rcdjwowtzxAKa_X3bjAfdLSduSr8VKfUiR_HtjYJ1RH6pZAh6wFUIOf52e8sYi8NjnTjZcrPJERxWBMfVMYzuBU/s1600-h/2_2_06_01.gif"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 364px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMxNql7hwmvqR0Xe5aIN9-bx6fg7yrVUP0McsiNmeEiRRAeLgskTg2rcdjwowtzxAKa_X3bjAfdLSduSr8VKfUiR_HtjYJ1RH6pZAh6wFUIOf52e8sYi8NjnTjZcrPJERxWBMfVMYzuBU/s400/2_2_06_01.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274430745403661154" /></a><br /><br />Real Indian buffalos:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbNCA9iQKwDCGPiVaJ5QHqxxBxIOuYUp72tB9dn-5HG7UOpOn_CszBluPXhVxpi5f1KFfk-xmzR2IjrWODqavli5JgUuvlf1EZssGQupd5norNjD3cCHnB2rNbu5JWxbRsDn-I5y1Ga40/s1600-h/biodiversity2_5fhimalaya.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbNCA9iQKwDCGPiVaJ5QHqxxBxIOuYUp72tB9dn-5HG7UOpOn_CszBluPXhVxpi5f1KFfk-xmzR2IjrWODqavli5JgUuvlf1EZssGQupd5norNjD3cCHnB2rNbu5JWxbRsDn-I5y1Ga40/s400/biodiversity2_5fhimalaya.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274432185685363618" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC3RdkBqpB6lRFhlXUsfnJ_tCb1scRpIH8ALXxZfb7UBYuboA9JbAoqzUb4Y8CrYgDzpCtpVRvui_ju7_rsl2QD_hSe571FwSfyI-Dp_LRFzaFBSJQ629nIaKnpEWLko2XD9qpoWfRQJk/s1600-h/p_1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 220px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC3RdkBqpB6lRFhlXUsfnJ_tCb1scRpIH8ALXxZfb7UBYuboA9JbAoqzUb4Y8CrYgDzpCtpVRvui_ju7_rsl2QD_hSe571FwSfyI-Dp_LRFzaFBSJQ629nIaKnpEWLko2XD9qpoWfRQJk/s400/p_1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5274432030008346402" /></a><br /><br /><br /><hr size="3" /> <br /><br />Let's take a look at the seven pictures of Indus (unhumped, or zebu with hump) bull/ox figurines. The horns of Figure [A] bovine look closer to these ox horn characteristics.<br /><br />(1) <a href="http://www.harappa.com/indus/56.html">http://www.harappa.com/indus/56.html</a><br />(2) <a href="http://www.harappa.com/figurines/34.html">http://www.harappa.com/figurines/34.html</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmWYgSugINbUu9PpxfJvOWDGHskuXpazwA0FarEYRXW8EAHMOJTdDlK9MefIf7EsBt-uJxd0ZS69qOPtSlgPbAxq-_6HCWKSM0P1mA32HcCIFzhunM92OcWAsR2tlE7D3sF7AZmKrJNZg/s1600-h/Indusbull.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmWYgSugINbUu9PpxfJvOWDGHskuXpazwA0FarEYRXW8EAHMOJTdDlK9MefIf7EsBt-uJxd0ZS69qOPtSlgPbAxq-_6HCWKSM0P1mA32HcCIFzhunM92OcWAsR2tlE7D3sF7AZmKrJNZg/s400/Indusbull.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273513244575220882" /></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxRhPsMV6vDTGXedT49OpnbqQhO5OGhg-yJoYg9CECPWHfw1n__HdjvuRfC1hqo_-ePDuVZ51l7NKVvG2kuucRg6qeg9Xp3fTCVlZOYcZ1-hkyKsP4hsSzgF2w2dmQXgzDTX7Ly1JMUFA/s1600-h/34.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxRhPsMV6vDTGXedT49OpnbqQhO5OGhg-yJoYg9CECPWHfw1n__HdjvuRfC1hqo_-ePDuVZ51l7NKVvG2kuucRg6qeg9Xp3fTCVlZOYcZ1-hkyKsP4hsSzgF2w2dmQXgzDTX7Ly1JMUFA/s400/34.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273513374474781506" /></a><br /><br /><br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />(4) <a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2280/2198648115_d186d6d484.jpg">http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2280/2198648115_d186d6d484.jpg</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwWXrXvH4u90z0OPdqrQyU4qjGuoUfh9eiantJVPS83WhvJmy73-ctC_ztU5JIDqvQfLIflzuFEqIKBCCKPPwuzIX28bAEfmFKqFvIciZZQgPBnAKVlVuFnJklbOjZiVhCxKyz1opWJs4/s1600-h/c.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwWXrXvH4u90z0OPdqrQyU4qjGuoUfh9eiantJVPS83WhvJmy73-ctC_ztU5JIDqvQfLIflzuFEqIKBCCKPPwuzIX28bAEfmFKqFvIciZZQgPBnAKVlVuFnJklbOjZiVhCxKyz1opWJs4/s400/c.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273515248098423074" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRTJCb6beilVznGHzeJktvmB0LvTpiRlasc3E1LByTl_aLfo1Cy179Z30u7MFNDXo3Ww4ZznlBttXdUre4QY8ecKnkWMlV0OIXccR1IoNK3SjNjGy-BIxkGuYqNTOJ84TCMjTAZoHUvRI/s1600-h/2198648115_d186d6d484.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRTJCb6beilVznGHzeJktvmB0LvTpiRlasc3E1LByTl_aLfo1Cy179Z30u7MFNDXo3Ww4ZznlBttXdUre4QY8ecKnkWMlV0OIXccR1IoNK3SjNjGy-BIxkGuYqNTOJ84TCMjTAZoHUvRI/s400/2198648115_d186d6d484.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273515450132180082" /></a><br /><br /><br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />(5, 6 & 7) <a href="http://www.argainc.com/Argainc/10c1.asp?cod=4000152">http://www.argainc.com/Argainc/10c1.asp?cod=4000152</a><br />Indus Valley (Harappa) bull 2800 B.C. cm. 16 x 28 (in. 6.3 x 11.4)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9xmPJUi0Y1je3r-sFd5er7csTh35Lep32yES3uuwdyJRYM5tixzAY9Z4-3in4dJ0CYQ-sad0pakrcnskOeDTTjB7yLil3yDfngRLpMg9n3LkNxVrW2uku0VV0waG9g7tCc3X6IqWzvMo/s1600-h/btoro2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9xmPJUi0Y1je3r-sFd5er7csTh35Lep32yES3uuwdyJRYM5tixzAY9Z4-3in4dJ0CYQ-sad0pakrcnskOeDTTjB7yLil3yDfngRLpMg9n3LkNxVrW2uku0VV0waG9g7tCc3X6IqWzvMo/s400/btoro2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273516286023528402" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCmQGRi-xCf-_O-PBH9vw3iVastF6wW0ZMFaCt4ChrgrN-aaZsX3xmiZLurHVh7vTjkZY8Ez-2bZpEqGf4XKInALtAx5LzjavhnAU9dYKRLQj0D2XkwYkhGtJyuiQXBsKY4cQlmgZHa-A/s1600-h/btoro4.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCmQGRi-xCf-_O-PBH9vw3iVastF6wW0ZMFaCt4ChrgrN-aaZsX3xmiZLurHVh7vTjkZY8Ez-2bZpEqGf4XKInALtAx5LzjavhnAU9dYKRLQj0D2XkwYkhGtJyuiQXBsKY4cQlmgZHa-A/s400/btoro4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273516495791708658" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcn_lkLBgsZCg1a1NDT9U0_3iMH1Gf_usBBb5ZNDZUL09d6wlKTO5SicOfLsXya4W-QmhztihQeCCc8ADeAK-mYihBQw-CmkWKf3xfWfOSg4VmO6CGY5SmDIM_q3422mmq-nqmOaiS98U/s1600-h/btoro3.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcn_lkLBgsZCg1a1NDT9U0_3iMH1Gf_usBBb5ZNDZUL09d6wlKTO5SicOfLsXya4W-QmhztihQeCCc8ADeAK-mYihBQw-CmkWKf3xfWfOSg4VmO6CGY5SmDIM_q3422mmq-nqmOaiS98U/s400/btoro3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273516415268214130" /></a><br /><br /><br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /><br /><br /><hr size="3" /> <br />In the other direction, buffalos have been taken to be a zebu bull. Let us look at an example. The elliptical (almost semi-curcular) curve of the buffalo horns are quite different from those of the zebu bovines shown above. <a href="http://www.hindu.com/2008/01/13/stories/2008011355961800.htm">http://www.hindu.com/2008/01/13/stories/2008011355961800.htm<br /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Jallikattu,” which is bull-baiting or bull fighting, is an ancient Dravidian tradition that was practised about 4,000 years ago during the Indus Valley civilisation. <br /><br />A well-preserved seal found at Mohenjodaro in the 1930s attests to this, according to Iravatham Mahadevan, a specialist in Indus and Brahmi scripts. </span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXgEeK7bx2uqONTUohRTKZn_ZHlsHeToWv4WVFbh_qYsV6V5LrZyHL-mm8y_J1XHTqzWB-UoY5Fpzc3mmvE-dMQooLW1W9wVjXeAwA1o3JliYPcBcKNjfV8p-vNWMJC3G_z7e4SC8GXQM/s1600-h/2008011355961801.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 340px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXgEeK7bx2uqONTUohRTKZn_ZHlsHeToWv4WVFbh_qYsV6V5LrZyHL-mm8y_J1XHTqzWB-UoY5Fpzc3mmvE-dMQooLW1W9wVjXeAwA1o3JliYPcBcKNjfV8p-vNWMJC3G_z7e4SC8GXQM/s400/2008011355961801.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273661514593672642" /></a><br /><br />The animal in the Indus seal from Mohenjo Daro (M-312 in Corpus of Indus seals and inscriptions) given in the article by T. S. Subramanian ("Bull-baiting of yore", The Hindu, January 13, 2008) is most likely a water buffalo, not a taurus bull. Further Alf Hiltebeitel ("The Indus Valley 'Proto-Siva', Reexamined through Reflections on the Goddess, the Buffalo, and the Symbolism of Vaahanas." Anthropos 73:5-6 (1978):767-97 ) thinks the animal involved is a wild buffalo. pg. 772, "Finally it is likely that the horns are not only those of the buffalo but of the wild buffalo. Other Indus Valley seals show the animal in "truculent" poses, one buffalo in particular (Mackay, no. 510) having "thrown" five human figures about him. The upward curve of the horns which characterises the buffalo on all these seals portrays the animal at his most aggressive potential."<br /><br />N. Ganesan<br /><br />Photo Credits: Thanks and due credits are given to those make these pictures available in the web for scholarly research. The referring URL links are provided inside this post near the pictures.நா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070643689665961712.post-71469140234858402092008-03-07T15:53:00.000-08:002008-03-09T10:39:31.197-07:00Indian Paintings - the lesser known traditionsAt the Museum of Fine Arts Houston <br />March 7-9, 2008<br /><a href="http://www.samskritihouston.org/">http://www.samskritihouston.org/</a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWRLFF2tNqA4g9Q9ycymKV3sBqF9iAvj50romaQNjZWUbfvUjwOvaa2s2HMBjFolbfP6e0F1JeSxzHrXH1N3jyM17zTlAxnPa18VyNRBLkRZ44NVi74r_n3au1P90kxh13bOgG6lQo0XY/s1600-h/23.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWRLFF2tNqA4g9Q9ycymKV3sBqF9iAvj50romaQNjZWUbfvUjwOvaa2s2HMBjFolbfP6e0F1JeSxzHrXH1N3jyM17zTlAxnPa18VyNRBLkRZ44NVi74r_n3au1P90kxh13bOgG6lQo0XY/s1600/23.jpg" width="760" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175153050078199394" /></a><br /><br />Indian Painting: the lesser known traditions <br />Dr. Anna Dallapiccola <br /><br />The last few decades have seen a flourishing of outstanding scholarship in the areas of courtly painting such as Mughal, Rajasthani, Pahari and Deccani. India, however, has an astonishing wealth of diverse painting tradition. These have not been as widely studied as they deserve, but have generally been considered and classified as ‘folk’. Thus they have tended to be neglected by mainstream scholarship. The aim of this Conference is to bring together scholars who have devoted much of their attention to such lesser known traditions. These are now beginning to be recognized as of pivotal importance for our understanding of the social setting in which they have evolved and play an important factor in the development of post-Independence Indian painting. The Conference has been convened to bring together original scholarly research into wide areas of ‘lesser known’ tradition of Indian painting. It focuses mainly on the narrative painting of two cultural areas of India: Eastern and Southern India. The introductory key-note lecture will address the long debated issue of the changes which have affected the ritual-bound visual culture, such as the patua scroll painting and other expression of folk and tribal artistic production, now that these have entered the sphere of established ‘art’ exhibited in <br />museums and galleries, detached from their traditional context and purpose. Two contributions will explore the rich heritage of story telling in Bengal, one discussing in detail 19th century material, and the other presenting works of the late 20th century dealing with contemporary issues such as politics, public health, education etc. A third paper will show how traditional ‘folk’ art subjects have influenced the work of Jamini Roy, one of the most influential 20th century painters. The South Indian group of papers will consider paintings on paper and cloth, and murals. Paper manuscripts from 17th and 18th century, of the epics and other literary works in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, will be discussed here for the first time. These will be followed by a study of a group of large painted textiles (kalamkaris) from 19th century Andhra. Finally, a 20th century painted scroll from Telangana will offer the opportunity to analyze the relationship between oral and painted narrative. The section on murals will introduce the paintings on the walls of the Sri Varadarajasvami temple, one of the three most important Vaishnava temples in Southern India, at Kanchipuram. This will be followed by a survey of 18th and 19th century mural painting in Karnataka, discussing both religious and courtly imagery. In conclusion, a new interpretation of the famous Ramayana murals in the Mattancheri Palace at Kochi will highlight the perception of kingship and authority in 16th century Kerala. <br /><br />Conference at a glance • <br />Welcome reception/ banquet on Friday March 7, 2008. Madras Pavilion, Sugarland, Tx. <br />• Conference opens on March 8, 2008 at 10.00 a.m. at Museum of Fine Arts Houston. <br />• Day 1 of the conference lunch at the beautiful sculpture garden across from museum. <br />• Reception at the end of day 1 at Mfah lobby to honor the delegates of the conference. <br />• Cultural program at Kaplan Theater, Jewish Community Center, 7:00 p.m., March 8,08 <br />• Display of books on Indian paintings and display of paintings by commissioned artists <br />• Opportunity to buy newly created, original art work<br /><br />All are welcome!<br />N. Ganesanநா. கணேசன்http://www.blogger.com/profile/09050453844961160504noreply@blogger.com0