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People Of The Grammar
Anil Menon
In his essay, Is There An Indian Way Of Thinking, the late A. K. Ramanujan credits the linguist Frits Staal with the insight that the ancient Indians were as obsessed with linguistics as the Greeks were with geometry.
"...And grammar is the central model of thinking in many Hindu texts. As Frits Staal has said, what Euclid is to the European thought, the grammarian Panini is to the Indian. Even the Kama Sutra is literally a grammar of love — which declines and conjugates men and women as one would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, moods and aspects."
It's a neat idea. Neat because it explains many aspects of the Indian worldview, both ancient and modern: the context-sensitive nature of our ethics, the mania for taxonomy (for e.g., Bharata's Natyashastra lists 108 different hand-foot sequences or karanas), the centuries long discussion on whether there were eight fundamental rasas (savors) or nine, and the use of verse for practically every endevour (for e.g., Rama Krishna Deva's algebra problem).
In a world where preservation of knowledge is as important as its production (if not more), memory becomes of paramount important. But an oral tradition uses memory very differently. Memory is not just a storehouse, in the same way the internet is not just an encyclopedia; in an oral tradition, memory becomes a kind of virtual person, joining conversations, correcting errors, acting as a mentor, and surviving death by constant renewal. In an oral tradition, the people fade, the memory remains. Books were unimportant to the ancient Indians because, in a sense, they were the books. It's an idea echoed in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
Today it's hard to get a sense of the kind of mnemonic feats the ancient Indians were capable of. Two examples may be cited.
In the 70s and 80s, Staal showed how the ancient Indians devised elaborate cryptographic schemes (Kramapatha) to ensure that nothing in the main Vedas — RigVeda and SamaVeda — was lost during oral transmission. And it wasn't. As the British discovered to their astonishment, different groups of Brahmins across the country were still chanting the very same verses, almost 3500 years later.
Or consider the incredible Ashtavadhanam where 8 Sanskrit scholars — rappers really — pose memory tests and poetry composition challenges to the central Avadhani, all the while attempting to disrupt his concentration with irregular chimes of bells (yes, bells) and irrelevant questions from a dude who's dedicated his life to that singular purpose. Eminem would pee his pants.
The Greek obsession with geometry led to a world where generalization became synomymous with abstraction. The ancient Indians took a different tack, as unique as that of the Greeks and perhaps as powerful. They categorized rather than generalized, and the richer the categorization, the closer they felt to understanding something. It should come as no surprise that it's a view closer to the biologist than to the physicist.
The Koran, in a felicitous turn of phrase, refers to Christians and Hebrews as People Of The Book. Perhaps it makes sense to think of the Indians — south asians — as "People Of The Grammar."
People Of The Grammar
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Aaman
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February 16, 2006
12:15 AM
Interesting thoughts - worth contemplating and categorizing:)
BTW, this was a particularly hard post to find sub-categories for, which does mean we need more categories. Nominations welcome
kaveetaa
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February 16, 2006
12:38 AM
Aaman, off the cuff, I would suggest, Literature, Relationships, Women,Spirituality.
Anil, that was a new vista of thought you have opened up. Ennlightening..BTW having read 'The Complete works of Swami Vivekanada" I wonder how you would categorize those.They are based on our vedas in His inimitable style.
kaveetaa
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February 16, 2006
12:50 AM
Anil,clarifying further, I ask this coz as you must be aware, all of Vivekanadas works are extempore oral speeches he addressed in his lifetime. He simplified th ancient texts for the common man and brought it into the purview of the world audience, which I think is immense. All the later "gurus" have done the same by emulating him.
He was the original however in that respect.
Lakshmikanth
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February 16, 2006
01:00 AM
awesome post. Me bit weak in literature, eventhough have read tons (really) of books
Anil Menon
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February 16, 2006
06:28 AM
@Aaman; Thanks. I second Kaveeta's categories. "Literature" could be divided into "classical" "medieval" and "modern". Or simply, "ancient" and "modern" (since the dates of many texts are fuzzy). I also think we should distinguish between the "spirituality" category and Indian philosophy. The Lokayata thinkers, for example, were Indian materialists.
@kaveeta: thanks for the comments. There are lots of strange things about the ancient Indian worldview; today we try to force their ideas into categories that don't really work. The best example I know of this strangeness is Don Handleman and David Shulman's book: "God Inside-Out: Siva's Game of Dice" or A. K. Ramanujan's essay on the nearly 300-plus versions of the Ramayana (in the Jain versions, Rama is the villain).
A lot of Indology scholars have to spend their time explaining the points of difference rather than just studying their topics; in a sense, the points of difference becomes the topic. Vivekananda had to answer questions about how "the" Hinduism "religion" related to other religions when he knew very well that it was more or less an invention of the Europeans. Dr. Kapil Kapoor has a great polemic on this problem: http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/kkp001.html
@Lakshimikanth: thanks for the compliment. It's tough to get hold of classical Indian literature. Motilal Banarsidass has a death grip on most of the Indian translations; doubtless, they'd be a progressive company if this were the 16th century, but alas, it isn't.
Ambar
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February 16, 2006
06:50 AM
A Literature category seems like a good idea. But subdividing it may be adverse.
Vote against 'Spirituality' as a category, as we tend to involve cultural, political and regional issues in such discussions.
Vote against 'Women' as a category, unless we see 'Men' as a category here. Gender based classifications on Desicritics is rather pointless.
Ambar
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February 16, 2006
07:02 AM
Another thread hijack in progress here!
OT, is the emphasis on grammar and structure 'rediscovered' in current day computer science?
Anil Menon
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February 16, 2006
07:25 AM
@Ambar: reference to: "is the emphasis on grammar and structure 'rediscovered' in current day computer science?" Absolutely. Grammars can be used to compute; that is, a Turing machine is formally equivalent to a recursively enumerable grammar. And Sanskrit was used in interesting ways. For example, Dr. Parmananda Singh showed how Hemachandra, in approx. 1150 C.E., listed the so-called Fibonacci sequences via poems with a fixed meter and specific number of syllables; Knuth acknowledged these contributions in his classic, The Art Of Programming.
temporal
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February 16, 2006
04:46 PM
Anil:
this made fascinating reading ... in an oral tradition, memory becomes a kind of virtual person, joining conversations, correcting errors, acting as a mentor, and surviving death by constant renewal...
am currently reading essays and columns by urdu short story writer intezar hussain in which he laments the loss of dastaan goee or the art of story telling which was based centuries of oral traditions
rgds
t
DrPolitics
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February 16, 2006
06:55 PM
When money talks, nobody notices what grammar it uses.
Aaman
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February 16, 2006
07:24 PM
Perhaps, Chomsky Normal Form? (complicated tech joke:) )
Lakshmikanth
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February 16, 2006
07:53 PM
ouch... i took that to be cholesky decomposition (complex math joke :) )... until i did a google on chomsky...
strange that chomsky did something other than being a critic of capitalism.
sorry for the off topic
Aaman
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February 16, 2006
10:51 PM
Not at all off-topic, grammar-wise:)
Aaman
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February 17, 2006
08:00 AM
This post has been categorized as a Desicritics Editors' Pick - thanks for writing it.
Ambar
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February 17, 2006
08:53 AM
Laksmi, Chomsky is supposed to be a closet capitalist.
Anil Menon
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February 17, 2006
09:32 AM
@temporal: I'll have to look up Hussain saab. Urdu writers are some of the coolest dudes on the planet. One of the drawbacks with the oral tradition is that it's mostly a spectator sport. These days people want to participate (as the blog revolution shows, I think), and they don't particularly want to hear the same damn story over and over again. But think about "Car Talk" on NPR; it's a kind of two-way oral storytelling, isn't it?
temporal
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February 17, 2006
10:16 AM
Anil:
have you heard of dr. m u memon and his labour of love annual of urdu studies?
if you go to my blog you will find the link to the annual of urdu studies a veritable treasure trove...search in the past issues...you will find a lot on intezar hussain
...i wrote something on intezar and dastaan goee...let me see if i can find it
rgds
t
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