Lectures on the Ancient History of India Read online

  We thus see that the Dravidian tongue was once spoken in North India but was superseded by the Aryan, when the Aryans penetrated and established themselves there. It, therefore, becomes extremely curious how in Southern India the Aryan speech was not able to supplant the Dravidian. But here a question arises: Is it a fact that even in that part of the country no Aryan tongue was ever known or spoken by the aborigine, after the Aryans came and were settled here? I take my stand on epigraphic records as they alone can afford irrefragible evidence on the subject. Let us first take the province whose vernacular at present is Telugu. The earliest inscriptions found here are those of Aśoka. Evidently I mean the version of his Fourteen Bock Edicts engraved at Jaugaḍā in the Ganjām District, the extreme north-east part of the Madras Presidency. But I am afraid I cannot lay much stress upon it, because though Telugu is no doubt spoken in this district, Uṛiyā is not unknown here, at any rate in the northern portion of it. And it is a well-known fact that in a province where the ranges of any two languages or dialects meet, the boundary which divides one from the other is never permanently fixed, but is always changing. I shall not, therefore, refer here to the Fourteen Rock Edicts discovered in the Ganjām District, but shall come down a little southwards and select that district where none hut a Dravidian language is spoken—I mean the Kistnā District. Here no less than three Buddhist stūpas have been discovered, along with a number of inscriptions. The earliest of these is that at Bhaṭṭiproḷu, the next is the celebrated one at Amrāvatī, and the third is that at Jagayyapeta. The inscriptions connected with these monuments are short donative records, specifying each the name and social status of the donor along with the nature of his gift. An examination of these records shows that people of various classes and statuses participated in this series of religious benefactions. We will here leave aside the big folk, such as those who belonged to the warrior or merchant class, and who, it might be contended, were the Aryan conquerors. We will also leave aside the monks and nuns, because their original social status is never mentioned in Buddhist inscriptional records. We have thus left for our consideration the people who are called herañika or goldsmiths, and, above all, the chammakāras or leather-workers. These at any rate cannot he reasonably supposed to form part of the Aryan people who were settled in the Kistnā District, and yet we find that their names are clearly Aryan, showing that they imbibed the Aryan civilisation even to the extent of adopting their names. Thus, we have a goldsmith of the name of Sidhatha or Siddhārtha, two leather-workers (father and son) of the name of Vidhika or Vṛiddhika and Nāga.47 All these unmistakably are Aryan names, but this string of names does not stop here. We have yet to make mention of another individual who is named Kanha or Kṛishṇa. This too is an Aryan name, but the individual, it is worthy of note, calls himself Damila,48 which is exactly the same as Tamiḷ or Sanskrit Draviḍa. And, in fact, this is the earliest word so far found signifying the Dravidian race. We thus see that as the result of the Aryan settlement in the Kistnā District, the local people were so steeped in Aryan civilisation that they went even to the length of taking Aryan proper names to themselves. But could they understand or speak the Aryan tongue? Do the inscriptions found in the Kistnā District throw any light on this point? Yes, they do, because the language of these records is Pāli,49 and Pāli we know is an Aryan speech. This clearly proves that an Aryan tongue was spoken in the Kistnā District from at least 150 B.C. to 200 A.D.—the period to which the inscriptions belong. I am aware it is possible to argue that this Aryan language was spoken only by the Aryans who were settled there, and not necessarily by the people in general, and, above all, the lower classes. This argument is not convincing, because it is inconceivable that earlier Buddhism, whose one aim was to be in direct touch with the masses, and which must have obtained almost all its converts of this district from all sorts and conditions of the indigenous people including the lowest classes, could adopt an Aryan tongue unless it was at least as well known to and actually spoken by the people in general as their home tongue. This inference is confirmed by the fact that three copies of what are called Aśoka’s Minor Rock Edicts have been found in the Chitaldrug District of the Mysore State,50 i.e. in the very heart of what is now the Canarese-speaking province. One of these edicts enumerates the different virtues that constitute what Aśoka meant by dhaṁma, and the other exhorts all people especially those of low position to put forth strenuous endeavour after the highest life. All the inscriptions of Aśoka, especially these Edicts, had a very practical object in view. They were intended to be understood and pondered over by people of all classes, and as the language of these epigraphic records is Pāli, the conclusion is irresistible that though perhaps it was not the home tongue, it could be spoken, at least well understood, by all people including the lower classes. But this is not all. We have get incontestable evidence that up to the 4th century A.D., Pāli was also the official language of the kings even in those provinces where Dravidian languages are now supreme. At least one stone inscription and five copper-plate charters have been found in these provinces, ranging from the second to the fourth or fifth century A.D. The stone inscription was found at Maḷavaḷḷi in Shimogā District, Mysore State.51 It registers some grant to the god Maḷapaḷi by Viṇhukaḍa Chuṭukalānaṁda52 Sātakarṇi of the Kadamba dynasty53 who calls himself king of Vaijayantī, and records the renewal of the same grant by his son. Vaijayantī, we know, is Banavāsī in the North Kanara District, Bombay Presidency. at Banavāsī, too, we have found an inscription of the queen of this king. Both Banavāsī and Maḷavaḷḷi are situated in the Canarese-speaking country, and yet we find that the official language here is Pāli. The same conclusion is proved with reference to the Tamiḷ-speaking country by the five copper-plate grants referred to above. Of these five three belong to the Pallava dynasty reigning at Kāñchīpura, one to a king called Jayavarman, and one to Vijayadevavarman.54 The very fact that every one of these is a title deed and has been drawn up in Pāli shows that this Aryan language must have been known to officials of even the lowest rank and also to literate and even semi-literate people. One of the three Pallava charters, e.g., issues instructions, for the maintenance of the grant therein registered, not only to rājakumāra or royal princes, senāpāti or generals, and so forth, but also to the free-holders of various villages (gāmāgāma-bhojaka), guards (ārakhādhikata) and even cowherds (go-vallava) who were employed in the king’s service. The princes55 and generals may perhaps be presumed to be of the Aryan stock and consequently speaking an Aryan tongue, but the free-holders of the various villages, guards and cowherds, at any rate, must be supposed to be of non-Aryan race. And when instructions are issued to them by a charter couched in Pāli, the conclusion is inevitable that this Aryan tongue, at least up to the fourth century A.D., was spoken and understood by all classes of people in a country of which the capital was Kāñchīpura or Conjeveram and which was and is now a centre of the Tamiḷ language and literature.

  Just now I have many a time remarked that Pāli might not have been the home tongue of the people but was well understood by them. Perhaps some of you would like to know what I exactly mean by this. I shall explain myself by giving an instance. We know that there are many Cauarese-speaking districts which were conquered and held by the Marāṭhās. Some of them still belong to the Marāṭhās Chiefs. If you go to any one of these districts, you will find that although the indigenous people speak Canarese at home and among themselves, Marāṭhī is understood by many of them and even by some of the lower classes. This is the result of the Marāṭhās domination extending over only two centuries, and has happened notwithstanding the fact that the Canarese people have their own art and literature. As the Pāli inscriptions referred to above show, the Aryans had established themselves in Southern India for at least seven centuries. It is, therefore, no wonder that the Aryan tongue could be spoken, at any rate well understood, by the original Dravidians even to the lowest classes, as is clearly evidenced, I think, atleast by the
inscriptions of Aśoka and those connected with Buddhist stūpas. We must not, however, lose sight of the fact that the Aryan language for some reason or another had not become the home tongue of these Dravidians. Evidence in support of this conclusion, curiously enough, is forthcoming from an extraneous and unforeseen quarter. A papyrus of the second century A.D. was discovered in 1903 at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, containing a Greek farce by an unknown author.56 The farce is concerned with a Greek lady named Charition, who has been stranded on the coast of a country bordering the Indian Ocean. The king of this country addresses his retinue as “Chiefs of the Indians.” In some places the same king and his countrymen use their own language especially when Charition has wine served to them to make them drunk. Many stray words have been traced, but so far only two sentences have been read, and these leave no doubt whatever as to their language having been Canarese. One of the sentences referred to his bēre Koñcha madhu pātrakke hāki, which means “having poured a little wine into the cup separately.” The other sentence is pānam bēretti Kaṭṭi madhuvaṁ ber ettuvenu, which means “having taken up the cup separately and having covered (it), I shall take wine separately. From the fact that the Indian language employed in the papyrus is Canarese, it follows that the scene of Charition’s adventures is one of the numerous small ports on the western coast of India between Kārwār and Mangalore and that Canarese was at least imperfectly understood in that part of Egypt where the farce was composed and acted, for if the Greek audience in Egypt did not understand even a bit of Canarese, the scene of the drinking bout would be denuded of all its humour and would be entirely out of place. There were commercial relations of an intimate nature between Egypt and the west coast of India in the early centuries of the Christian era, and it is not strange if some people of Egypt understood Canarese. To come to our point, the papyrus clearly shows that, in the second century A.D., Canarese was spoken in Southern India even by princes, who most probably were Dravidian by extraction. The Canarese, however, which they spoke, was not pure Canarese, but was strongly tinctured with Aryan words. I have quoted two Catiarese sentences from the Greek farce, and you will have seen that they contain the words pātra (cup), pānaṁ (drink) and madhu (wine), which are genuine Aryan vocables as they are to be found in the Vedas. The very fact that even in respect of ordinary affair’s relating to drinking we find them using, not words of their home language as we would naturally expect them to do, but words from Aryan vocabulary, indicates what hold the Aryan speech had on their tongue.

  Nevertheless it must be confessed that even seven centuries of Aryan domination in South India was not enough for the eradication of the Dravidian languages. It would be exceedingly interesting to investigate the circumstances which precluded the Aryan tongue here from supplanting the aboriginal one. Such an inquiry, I am afraid, is irrelevant here. And I, therefore, leave it to the Dravidian scholars to tackle this most interesting but also most bewildering problem.57

  Though the causes that led to the preservation and survival of the Dravidian languages are not known at present, this much is certain, as I have shown above, that up till 400 A.D, at any rate, an Aryan tongue was spoken and known to the people in general just in those provinces where the Dravidian languages now the only vernaculars. If such was the case, we can easily understand why in Ceylon to the present day we have an Indo-Aryan vernacular. For we have seen that the tide of the Aryan colonisation did not stop till it reached Ceylon. Naturally, therefore, not only the Aryan civilisation but also the Aryan speech was implanted from South India into this country, where, however, as in North India, it succeeded in completely superseding the tongue originally spoken there. This satisfactorily answers, I think, the question about the origin of Pāli in which the Buddhist scriptures of ceylon have been written. The Island was converted to Buddhism about the middle of the third century B.C. by the preaching of Mahinda, a son of the great Buddhist Emperor Aśoka. Naturally, therefore, the scriptures which Mahinda brought with him from his father’s capital must have been in Māgadhī, the dialect of the Magadha country. As a matter of fact, however, the language of these scriptures, as we have them now, is anything but Māgadhī, though, of course, a few Magadhisms are here and there traceable. This discrepancy has been variously explained by scholars. Prof. Kern holds that Pāli was never spoken and was an artificial language altogether—a view which no scholar endorses at present. Prof. Oldenberg boldly rejects the Sinhalese tradition that Mahinda brought the sacred texts to Ceylon. He compares the Pāli language to that of the cave inscriptions in Mahārāshṭra and of the epigraph of king Khāravela in Hāthigumphā in Orissa, i.e. old Kaliṅga, says that they are essentially the same dialect and comes to the conclusion that the Ti-piṭaka was brought to the Island from the peninsula of South India, either from Mahārāshṭra or Kaliṅga, with the natural spread Buddhism southwards.58 I am afraid, I cannot agree with Prof Oldenberg in his first conculation. On the contrary, I agree with Prof. Rhys Davids that the Sinhalese tradition that Buddhism was introduced into Ceylon by Mahinda is well-founded and must be accepted as true. On the other hand, Prof. Oldenberg has, I think, correctly pointed out that Pāli of Buddhist scriptures is widely divergent from Māgadhī but is essentially the same as the dialect of the old inscriptions found in Mahārāshṭra or Kaliṅga. The truth of the matter is that the Aryans, who colonised Mahārāshṭra and Kaliṅga,59 spoke practically the same dialect, as is evidenced by inscriptions, and that when they went still farther southwards and occupied Ceylon, they naturally introduced their own dialect there, as is also evidenced by the incriptions discovered in the Island. I have told you before that the Aryan colonisation of Ceylon was complete long prior to the advent of the Mauryas, and we must, therefore, suppose that this dialect was already being spoken when Mahinda came and introduced Buddhism. Now we have a passage in the Chullavagga60 of the Vinaya-piṭaka, in which Buddha distinctly ordains that his word was to be conveyed by different Bhikshus in their different dialects. The Māgadhī of the sacred texts brought by Mahinda must thus have been replaced by Pāli, the dialect of Ceylon, and we can perfectly understand how in this gradual replacement a few Magadhisms of the original may here and here have escaped this weeding-out, especially as Māgadhī and Pāli were not two divergent languages but only two dialects of one and the same language.

  1Rig-Veda X.61.8.

  2Vii 34. 9.

  3Vii. 17-18; also in Śāṅkhāyana-śrauta-Sūtra, xv. 26

  4Vs. 976-7.

  5Ibid, Vs. 1011-3.