The Sounds of Sanskrit

What did the modern mind think when it awakened? When it encountered the wonders of the cosmos, our world, and this life? What questions did it ask? Or unmoved by the grandeur of the universe, did this awakened mind raise a hairy arm, expose a stinking armpit, and utter the memorable words, "gimme a beer"? We can never know. It happened such a long time ago, and there is no tradition that has survived. Neither the unwritten thoughts of our ancestors nor their unwritten speech. We can only guess. But we can listen to their sounds and the oldest oral traditions.  And we can guess. And so I guess. Do pardon me if I have hit, only to have missed.

Why do I even ask such impossible questions? And why attempt to answer? Because I was watching the yoga section of the recent Commonwealth Games opening ceremony held in Delhi. It was Patanjali's Yoga, set to an invocation of the master of Yoga, the sage Patanjali. A story of the integration of mind, body, and soul, by our ancestors. In confronting a world that was perhaps bewildering and frightening.

Those impossible yogic poses by young men and women, some no more than boys and girls, was bewitching enough. But what captivated me was the chanting. I listened to the throbbing rhythmic chanting of Sanskrit verse, the earliest sounds produced by our ancestors. And I listened spellbound. Indians are a truly weird people. I should know, being one myself. A Brahmin, inbred, perched on top of a distasteful and often brutal caste hierarchy that has survived from antiquity, virtually unchanged into modern times. Liturgical chanting was a Brahmin preserve. They clung to knowledge because it is power. It opened the doors to the divine. The earliest sounds I can remember are the chanting of Sanskrit verse in countless temples. My father dragged me around quite a lot, in a hapless and doomed quest for the salvation of my wretched soul. And so the chanting of Sanskrit verse always stirs a primitive rush of feelings, one that goes back to my ontogeny, and reflects the phylogeny of my species.

Sanskrit is a language of antiquity. Like Latin it is a liturgical language. When the West encountered it in the late 18th Century, the fact that was most astonishing was the Indian treatment of linguistics, in particular phonology. The West had nothing like it, not even in the Greeks. Western linguistics had a lot to catch up on. But the simple matter of the thing is that the early Indians were a scared lot, like people elsewhere. They stared at the skies and tried to comprehend life, and perhaps the purpose of it. Like others elsewhere, they developed speech and language, and found utterance for their wonders of the cosmos. They spoke in Sanskrit. Then they codified the grammar, the pronunciation, the morphology of words, and syntax, so that it was forever frozen. They were afraid that if they said their prayers wrong, mispronouncing the words, altering the syntax just a little bit, they would invoke the wrath of our numerous Gods. And there are quite a good number of Hindu Gods. Perhaps a billion or so. Female, male, carnal, ascetic, loquacious, silent, monstrous, angry, happy, half-human, half-animal, and so on. Pagan? Quite.

There is always a God somewhere ready to take umbrage at their awful pronunciation of the sacred words, ready to hurl bolts of lightning and unleash a pestilence. And so the result of their superstitions was one of India's most wonderful scientific achievements. It is the codification of language and speech in all its aspects. Their prayers were handed down from generation to generation in the most rigidly codified manner known to human beings. It allowed no deviation from the spoken word. Words had to be repeated generation after generation, preserved exactly, in cadence and phonemic utterance. We are talking of nearly three thousand years.

You have to understand that language, particularly speech and pronunciation, is highly malleable. It can change across two generations. If you listen to John F. Kennedy's speeches and the use of American English from the early 1960's you will understand what I mean. And it changes rapidly not just with time, but also across space. The English speak a quite different form of English, enunciating words in very different ways from Americans. Language and speech, unique human gifts, are ever-changing across space and time. To defy this natural process of change is to defy our changing selves.

How do you keep language constant so that it never changes? The Indians tried to do this. Panini is the pre-eminent Sanskrit grammarian of all time. Around the 5th Century BC, he sat down and codified Sanskrit so that it would never change. He did it orally because Sanskrit was not a written language. The Brahmi script came much later. There were other Indian grammarians who added to it. But India never gives credit to individuals. It gives credit to streams of thought, to additions, to commentaries, and to commentaries on commentaries, stripped off individuality. Indians are immensely raucous and argumentative. And there are quite a lot of them. There is just not enough space to recognize all of them. So, the individual is quite unimportant. But we do know that Panini dominated them all.

Nothing is known of Panini or his life. Except that he came from somewhere in modern Pakistan. I have tried to imagine him, skinny with bulging eyes, hyper-energetic, working like a maniac. Precise and pedantic. Or perhaps portly, relaxed, and contemplative. Loquacious and vague in words, but clear in thought. All such personalities are allowed. We are Indian after all. Precise and imprecise at the same time. Organized and categorical, and disorganized and indefinite. But it does not matter. Given India's disregard for individuals he must have stood out so much that he could not be ignored. If hagiography was not permitted, at least the transmission of his name was possible.

Noam Chomsky the MIT linguist, perhaps the greatest intellect of our times and one who revolutionized modern linguistics as we know it, acknowledges Panini as the forerunner of modern linguistics. What we do know is that Panini created a text, Asthadhyayi or "Eight Chapters", which codified the liturgical Sanskrit of those times, and provided the most concise description of any language. And I do mean the most concise. No other grammar is as concise. He had to make it concise because Sanskrit did not have a script, and he had to take care that it was capable of oral transmission. He did so using aphorisms, tersely stated to facilitate memorization. It is said to be among the monuments of human achievement, ranked with Euclid's treatment of Geometry, and Newton's Principia. In it he prescribed the rules of Sanskrit grammar, and more importantly, he prescribed their rules of pronunciation. How words should be uttered. Forever and without change.

The formal treatment in the Ashtadhyayi was independently discovered in modern times by computer grammarians. The terse aphorisms employed by Panini will be familiar to us because they are the formal rules of computer grammar. It is the basis of computer language. It is called the Backus-Naur form. And so it is, that we recognize the Ashtadhyayi to be the forerunner of modern theoretical linguistics and computer grammar. But Panini had been there much before. Around the time of Siddhartha Gautama, The Buddha. Nearly twenty five hundred years ago. Panini had hit upon the most concise rules for generative grammar, modern and yet antique. He stated how Sanskrit should be spoken for all of time. Thus it is that out of fear comes outstanding creativity. This is the human spirit, the foundations of our behavior.

When you listen to Sanskrit chanting, particularly the chanting of the Vedas, India's oldest sacred texts that go back four millenia, you hear the sounds of human beings awed by the cosmos. Fearful, superstitious, you hear their voice. And yet it is sophisticated, because such thinking is invariant across time. For they went beyond the mysteries of the cosmos. They explored problems in philosophy, psychology, and mathematics. Hence, the Vedas and hence the Yogasutras and hence the Ashtadhyayi. Hence our meditations. They found utterance in their rhythmic chants, preserved so that they may be ever unchanged, ever pleasing to the Gods, transmitted to recent times unchanged. I hear that chanting, without meter, but with discernible rhythm. It throbs and resonates within the soul. Precise rules of statement, memorized from time immemorial. They invoke the divine, laying bare our wonder of the unknown, and the wonder that is our unknowing self. An exploration of that which is without, and that which is within.

And lapsed Hindu that I am, a hard-boiled atheist, forever critical of modern India, I listen to the voice of my ancestors. For India is timeless and immortal. We are fire-worshippers, and we worship the Sun God, Surya, the most primitive forms of worship. We are a people who trace a direct line back to antiquity, more so than any other people in this world. And so I always respond to the voice of my ancestors. I hear the primordial sound Om, I hear their sophisticated sounds in the chanting of the Vedas, their transmittance to modern Indian classical and Bollywood music. I hear the unique melodic structure of the Indian raga that always stirs my soul, I hear the drums of India, and I go into a trance.

The sounds of Sanskrit, uttered with cadence and rhythm, are primordial sounds. Atavistic, primeval, they are raw. They are repeated, with phonemes repeated, with words broken and repeated backwards, and then rejoined to be repeated yet again, in strict order. There are well-defined rules in their utterance, and they aid memorization. From blind rote comes beauty of sound, the beauty of mathematical rules. The sounds of the Vedas are unforgettable and they stir the soul. From them emerge a pulsating rhythm that is musical. Indeed, the Sama Vedas gave rise to Indian classical music.

And so I remember my ancestors. I who also love Bach, Josquin des Prez, the Latin Mass, the finest of Western musical and intellectual traditions, listen to the voice of my past. In listening to that voice, I am reminded that I can trace a unique line back to antiquity, virtually unchanged. And I am comforted that I am part of that line of human evolution. I am at home, at ease. I own all of that from which I have come. 

The sounds of Sanskrit chanting are the earliest known sounds of the modern human. In listening to them I am ever reminded of my roots. Of my ancestors. But I am also reminded how far we human beings have come since then. I am reminded that there are other cultures, other traditions, that have also carried their thoughts forward. They have left their words in stone and paper, where we left ours in voice.