Vines of Influence
If some languages are seen as Hunters, growing rapidly, then Sanskrit can be seen as a creeping vine, slowly spreading its tendrils across Asia over two thousand years. Outside of India, which still speaks languages descendant from Sanskrit in areas such as the Punjab, Sanskrit was never taken up as a popular language, remaining purely as a medium of learned communication and sacred expression, strongest where the dominant religion had come from India. Sanskrit was never just a spiritual language, despite the West's notions on the matter, being found in literature and work ranging from economics to romantic comedy. It also holds the most elaborate development of the pun known anywhere in the world. The language itself began northwest of the Punjab, modern Pakistan, spreading south along with its people, as well as heading into Tibet. The Aryan people (derived from the word arya, later used to mean gentleman) spread offshoots of their language all over the Indian subcontinent, replacing the native Dravidians entirely in some regions. They also spread to northern regions such as Assam (in modern India) and Nepal, where while recognized languages today, they are not the common tongue. Native Dravidian tongues in southern India such as Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada persist, and some of their words were even borrowed into Sanskrit. Sanskrit spread across to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, primarily and above all as a language of religion and the elite. Although the Buddha's works were mostly written in Pali (which is an offshoot of Prakrit, a relative of Sanskrit) at first, they slowly began to be written more and more in classical Sanskrit, facilitating the spread of the language. Through the Silk Road and Buddhism, Sanskrit spread itself to Tibet and the rest of East Asia, and while not replacing languages, it remained important wherever Buddhism persisted. The last place Buddhism and by extension Sanskrit spread was Mongolia, when it was spread on the backs of Chinese preachers and the desires of Mongolian Khans.
Indian culture is unique in the world for its rigorous analysis of its own language, which it furthermore made the central discipline of its own culture. The Sanskrit word for grammar even comes from the word meaning analysis. Even historical Indian grammarians such as Patanjali stated that the study of grammar was important primarily for the advancement and better understanding of the Vedas, the religious texts of the Hindu faith, a book of hymns. Grammar in the formation of sutras is so complex that a meta language has been formed to be used during the creation of new sutras, making them entirely different from mainstream speech. Despite this love of grammar, writing (especially in relation to the Vedas) is not seen as good. It is often decried, even in other ancient cultures, as it promotes forgetfulness and can cause misinterpretations of text. This lack of text also leads to a vast vocabulary, with many near synonyms. One linguist states that there are fifty synonyms for 'lotus', a favorite concept in Sanskrit poetry. Words tend to have multiple senses. The most straightforward word for lotus, padma, has eleven extra senses in the neuter gender (lotus-like, form of a lotus, etc) and eight more in masculine. This, along with the special characteristic of Sanskrit to use word liaisons often to make sentences into one long stream of syllables, leads to an opportunity for punning on an almost inconceivable scale.
The author believes that the initial role of politics in the spread of Sanskrit was simply through military conquest and dynastic subordination in the Indian subcontinent. However many of these gains, especially in the south, seemed impermanent, because after every great Sanskrit empire fell, the region would relapse back into Dravidian speaking languages. However many of the gains that were made were actually made with Prakrit, which is related to Sanskrit but used much more in day to day life as well as in dedications and prose. However around 150 AD Sanskrit began to eclipse Prakrit even in these areas. In fact, in India there was a constant shift in which dialects and forms were on top, with the language of kings one century being that of peasants the next. Interestingly enough, the language of the Buddha was most likely Maghadhi, an offshoot of Prakrit, not Sanskrit as many would believe. In fact the earliest Buddhist councils were recorded in Maghadhi, and it was even the language of King Ashoka himself. Later the language of Buddhism would be Pali, which formed out of a massive mix of languages, some even western in origin, and was in part a Buddhist Aryan creole. Later on a form of Sanskrit, called Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, formed, which is essentially where the language is written using Prakrit grammar and words, and then styled later to be reminiscent of classical Sanskrit, put overall very different grammatically.
Greeks had interactions with the Indians primarily after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the diplomacy with the Diadochi Seleucids. Most of the influence of Sanskrit on Greek was through the names of products coming from India, such as ginger, which derives its name from a town on the Ganges river. The Greeks detailed the castes and tribes of the Indians, as well as the similarities between Hindi and Greek deities. The Greeks, however, did not analyze Indian culture except for on the superficial scale. The Chinese, one the other hand, came as serious students of Indian culture, primarily Buddhism. Most information is from four Chinese pilgrims, each of whom wrote a memoir of their journeys as well as bringing back Buddhist texts to translate, and each were spread on journeys of about a century apart. They each brought back new information on India. India, for the Chinese, was the home of Buddhist enlightenment.
Sanskrit first appears, as most Indo-European languages do, as the speech of conquering warriors on horseback who establish domination over their neighbors and turn them into serfs and subjects. Evidence can be seen in the importance of horses in ancient Aryan culture, as well as their introduction of chariots and metallic tools. The language, however, has adopted much of the Dravidian features as well, making it distinct from neighboring Indo-European groups. There are other language groups in India, such as the aboriginal languages of Orissa, related to those of Bengal. These languages were distinct at least up to the seventh century AD, and can still be seen in some villages and words in the region today.
Sanskrit also spread first to Sri Lanka, and then to the rest of Southeast Asia, with civilization being associated with Indianization in the region, much like China with Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. It is not clear how the language spread, other than it definitely was not by military conquest. It could be through pirates, priests, merchants, refugees, ambassadors, or maybe even a combination of all of these factors.
Evidence of Indian travels to Southeast Asia is clear, however rather than being done in an effort to conquer or spread their culture, most of it was done out of a desire for precious resources and trade, which is evident in many of the names of regions being related to minerals, such as the old name for Sri Lanka translating to 'copper island', which while not grounded in actual geology, is evidence of why Indians traveled. These traders, however, would bring with them many important concepts. They brought with them literacy, a developed moral code in the form of Hindu sutras, as well as a developed mythology and even a defined relationship between priests and rulers, which in many cultures had yet to develop, often leaving the rulers in a precarious position as to the power of religious figures in regards to them. All this led to an accepting of Indian traders, as well as intermingling and the creation of a generation in Southeast Asia that was raised to read Sanskrit. Along with Sanskrit came the tradition to develop local dialects and alphabets of Sanskrit, and so along with the ten major scripts found in India, nine more scripts of Sanskrit can be found in Southeast Asia, each different from another. The first evidence of an Indianized kingdom comes in the form of Funan (or in Khmer Bnan, meaning 'the mountain'), a kingdom found in modern day southern Cambodia, which was first documented through contact with China in the first century AD. After this, evidence of many Indianized states appear, each attempting to tie itself to India either through its mythology, religion, name, or foundation myth. The names of these kingdoms and their rulers were typically in Sanskrit. One interesting factor is that the languages now classified as Burman and Austro-Asiatic of the region present before Sanskrit were almost the entire opposite of Sanskrit. Sanskrit has long polysyllabic words, with a free word order, and a complicated consonant system, while these languages tended to have short defined words, distinguished by tone, and each in a rigid word order. This shift would have been difficult for the people at the time to grasp. Nevertheless, the quality of the written works in the region hardly differed from that written directly in India. There were also the formation of new Hindi cults, often used to strengthen the legitimacy of a new state by establishing a state-wide distinct religion, such as the God-King cult of Cambodia that lasted 250 years. Indianization only really slowed down in the thirteenth century as Mongols started to raid Southeast Asia, and as the majority of the population started to Indianize, the refined aristocracy found that it could no longer act as the guardian of Sanskrit culture in the region, lest it be compared to the peasantry in the region that was now effectively Indianized. This was furthered by the arrival of tribes from mountains starting to dominate the region, such as the Shan in Burma and the Thai in Siam, as well as the Vietnamese moving into southern Indo-China.
Originally, Sanskrit spread along with Hinduism, however overtime Hinduism was overtaken in the region of Southeast Asia by Buddhism, not through blood so much as through doctrinal disputes and dynastic shifts. While Hinduism's caste system was particularly attractive to the rulers and elites of the area, Buddhism was attractive to the lower classes, so while both faiths spread to the region at the same time, they influenced different groups, however over time the peasant's faith won out. This also led to Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit appearing in Southeast Asia as well. Despite the spread of Buddhism, Pali and Sanskrit remained as purely liturgical languages in many regions. This is especially true in East Asia, where often times Sanskrit was even represented using established characters, due to the deep roots of Chinese characters in the culture. Sanskrit did have an affect on the grammar and structure of writing in the region however, helping establish the order of symbols used in languages such as Japanese. Tibet is a different story, with writing only appearing in the region alongside the arrival of Buddhism, and the Tibetan writing system is very similar to Sanskrit.
With the arrival of the Turks in the region, under first the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughal Empire, a group of people who spoke Turkish, prayed in Arabic, and wrote in Persian supplanted the ruling Indian class. They supplanted Sanskrit as the elite language of the region. Even the dominance of Sanskrit in Southeast Asia ended, as merchants and priests flooded from the Muslim world to convert the region. These regions converted to Islam for one reason or another, many believing the only way to maintain ties to India was to change their faith, and with this Sanskrit fell from grace in the region.
Sanskrit was very attractive to foreigners not just for its ties to Buddhism and India, but also for its fleshed out grammar and systems, as well as it being a language which was used by the elite, an elite that felt justified religiously for their dominance of others. Sanskrit was also established as a quasi-universal language in India, meaning if outsiders learned it, they could tie themselves to all of India easily. It was also established as the language of intellectuals, leading to its constant analysis. It is also a language of oral tradition and prayers. The reason that Buddhism and Hinduism spread so easily was that they asked very little of converts, allowing for converts to easily incorporate their own religions and beliefs into the faith, as did the Mongolians and the Cambodians. The elite who first converted also believed they were opening themselves up to a wider world with more trade possibilities, then forcing their population to convert as well.
The weaknesses of Sanskrit are that it tended to not have a strong defensible center, relying on natural boundaries to stop foreigners, which did not always work. It was a very conservative language not open for change, and it focused more on the abstract than the practical. One issue was that for a long time Sanskrit was not the language of government, with the local language in the capital being used instead. This ended around the time of Ashoka, with the rising popularity in Sanskrit. Another issue was that unlike Rome or China, there was never a lasting empire that lasted longer than half a dozen generations, and those that did form, like Ashoka's Mauryan dynasty, fell quickly, leading to a time of melee between feudal lords before the next empire formed. Even foreign empires were not safe from this cycle. These conquerors would also, like the Mongolians of China, simply adopt the local culture rather than impose their own on the region. Buddhism also lost out in India itself, with the Hindi population overtaking them and seeing them as another cult, with the Buddha being a representation of Vishnu. While the Islamic invaders did have a much better time converting local culture, they by no means eradicated the importance of local languages or of Sanskrit, but rather put themselves beside it. In modern day, Sanskrit is still important among the traditional elite, but has been supplanted as an intellectual language by local languages but primarily English. Now Sanskrit is mostly seen as a trait of Indian religions or cultures, not as a dominate force in the region.
Indian culture is unique in the world for its rigorous analysis of its own language, which it furthermore made the central discipline of its own culture. The Sanskrit word for grammar even comes from the word meaning analysis. Even historical Indian grammarians such as Patanjali stated that the study of grammar was important primarily for the advancement and better understanding of the Vedas, the religious texts of the Hindu faith, a book of hymns. Grammar in the formation of sutras is so complex that a meta language has been formed to be used during the creation of new sutras, making them entirely different from mainstream speech. Despite this love of grammar, writing (especially in relation to the Vedas) is not seen as good. It is often decried, even in other ancient cultures, as it promotes forgetfulness and can cause misinterpretations of text. This lack of text also leads to a vast vocabulary, with many near synonyms. One linguist states that there are fifty synonyms for 'lotus', a favorite concept in Sanskrit poetry. Words tend to have multiple senses. The most straightforward word for lotus, padma, has eleven extra senses in the neuter gender (lotus-like, form of a lotus, etc) and eight more in masculine. This, along with the special characteristic of Sanskrit to use word liaisons often to make sentences into one long stream of syllables, leads to an opportunity for punning on an almost inconceivable scale.
The author believes that the initial role of politics in the spread of Sanskrit was simply through military conquest and dynastic subordination in the Indian subcontinent. However many of these gains, especially in the south, seemed impermanent, because after every great Sanskrit empire fell, the region would relapse back into Dravidian speaking languages. However many of the gains that were made were actually made with Prakrit, which is related to Sanskrit but used much more in day to day life as well as in dedications and prose. However around 150 AD Sanskrit began to eclipse Prakrit even in these areas. In fact, in India there was a constant shift in which dialects and forms were on top, with the language of kings one century being that of peasants the next. Interestingly enough, the language of the Buddha was most likely Maghadhi, an offshoot of Prakrit, not Sanskrit as many would believe. In fact the earliest Buddhist councils were recorded in Maghadhi, and it was even the language of King Ashoka himself. Later the language of Buddhism would be Pali, which formed out of a massive mix of languages, some even western in origin, and was in part a Buddhist Aryan creole. Later on a form of Sanskrit, called Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, formed, which is essentially where the language is written using Prakrit grammar and words, and then styled later to be reminiscent of classical Sanskrit, put overall very different grammatically.
Greeks had interactions with the Indians primarily after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the diplomacy with the Diadochi Seleucids. Most of the influence of Sanskrit on Greek was through the names of products coming from India, such as ginger, which derives its name from a town on the Ganges river. The Greeks detailed the castes and tribes of the Indians, as well as the similarities between Hindi and Greek deities. The Greeks, however, did not analyze Indian culture except for on the superficial scale. The Chinese, one the other hand, came as serious students of Indian culture, primarily Buddhism. Most information is from four Chinese pilgrims, each of whom wrote a memoir of their journeys as well as bringing back Buddhist texts to translate, and each were spread on journeys of about a century apart. They each brought back new information on India. India, for the Chinese, was the home of Buddhist enlightenment.
Sanskrit first appears, as most Indo-European languages do, as the speech of conquering warriors on horseback who establish domination over their neighbors and turn them into serfs and subjects. Evidence can be seen in the importance of horses in ancient Aryan culture, as well as their introduction of chariots and metallic tools. The language, however, has adopted much of the Dravidian features as well, making it distinct from neighboring Indo-European groups. There are other language groups in India, such as the aboriginal languages of Orissa, related to those of Bengal. These languages were distinct at least up to the seventh century AD, and can still be seen in some villages and words in the region today.
Sanskrit also spread first to Sri Lanka, and then to the rest of Southeast Asia, with civilization being associated with Indianization in the region, much like China with Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. It is not clear how the language spread, other than it definitely was not by military conquest. It could be through pirates, priests, merchants, refugees, ambassadors, or maybe even a combination of all of these factors.
Evidence of Indian travels to Southeast Asia is clear, however rather than being done in an effort to conquer or spread their culture, most of it was done out of a desire for precious resources and trade, which is evident in many of the names of regions being related to minerals, such as the old name for Sri Lanka translating to 'copper island', which while not grounded in actual geology, is evidence of why Indians traveled. These traders, however, would bring with them many important concepts. They brought with them literacy, a developed moral code in the form of Hindu sutras, as well as a developed mythology and even a defined relationship between priests and rulers, which in many cultures had yet to develop, often leaving the rulers in a precarious position as to the power of religious figures in regards to them. All this led to an accepting of Indian traders, as well as intermingling and the creation of a generation in Southeast Asia that was raised to read Sanskrit. Along with Sanskrit came the tradition to develop local dialects and alphabets of Sanskrit, and so along with the ten major scripts found in India, nine more scripts of Sanskrit can be found in Southeast Asia, each different from another. The first evidence of an Indianized kingdom comes in the form of Funan (or in Khmer Bnan, meaning 'the mountain'), a kingdom found in modern day southern Cambodia, which was first documented through contact with China in the first century AD. After this, evidence of many Indianized states appear, each attempting to tie itself to India either through its mythology, religion, name, or foundation myth. The names of these kingdoms and their rulers were typically in Sanskrit. One interesting factor is that the languages now classified as Burman and Austro-Asiatic of the region present before Sanskrit were almost the entire opposite of Sanskrit. Sanskrit has long polysyllabic words, with a free word order, and a complicated consonant system, while these languages tended to have short defined words, distinguished by tone, and each in a rigid word order. This shift would have been difficult for the people at the time to grasp. Nevertheless, the quality of the written works in the region hardly differed from that written directly in India. There were also the formation of new Hindi cults, often used to strengthen the legitimacy of a new state by establishing a state-wide distinct religion, such as the God-King cult of Cambodia that lasted 250 years. Indianization only really slowed down in the thirteenth century as Mongols started to raid Southeast Asia, and as the majority of the population started to Indianize, the refined aristocracy found that it could no longer act as the guardian of Sanskrit culture in the region, lest it be compared to the peasantry in the region that was now effectively Indianized. This was furthered by the arrival of tribes from mountains starting to dominate the region, such as the Shan in Burma and the Thai in Siam, as well as the Vietnamese moving into southern Indo-China.
Originally, Sanskrit spread along with Hinduism, however overtime Hinduism was overtaken in the region of Southeast Asia by Buddhism, not through blood so much as through doctrinal disputes and dynastic shifts. While Hinduism's caste system was particularly attractive to the rulers and elites of the area, Buddhism was attractive to the lower classes, so while both faiths spread to the region at the same time, they influenced different groups, however over time the peasant's faith won out. This also led to Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit appearing in Southeast Asia as well. Despite the spread of Buddhism, Pali and Sanskrit remained as purely liturgical languages in many regions. This is especially true in East Asia, where often times Sanskrit was even represented using established characters, due to the deep roots of Chinese characters in the culture. Sanskrit did have an affect on the grammar and structure of writing in the region however, helping establish the order of symbols used in languages such as Japanese. Tibet is a different story, with writing only appearing in the region alongside the arrival of Buddhism, and the Tibetan writing system is very similar to Sanskrit.
With the arrival of the Turks in the region, under first the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughal Empire, a group of people who spoke Turkish, prayed in Arabic, and wrote in Persian supplanted the ruling Indian class. They supplanted Sanskrit as the elite language of the region. Even the dominance of Sanskrit in Southeast Asia ended, as merchants and priests flooded from the Muslim world to convert the region. These regions converted to Islam for one reason or another, many believing the only way to maintain ties to India was to change their faith, and with this Sanskrit fell from grace in the region.
Sanskrit was very attractive to foreigners not just for its ties to Buddhism and India, but also for its fleshed out grammar and systems, as well as it being a language which was used by the elite, an elite that felt justified religiously for their dominance of others. Sanskrit was also established as a quasi-universal language in India, meaning if outsiders learned it, they could tie themselves to all of India easily. It was also established as the language of intellectuals, leading to its constant analysis. It is also a language of oral tradition and prayers. The reason that Buddhism and Hinduism spread so easily was that they asked very little of converts, allowing for converts to easily incorporate their own religions and beliefs into the faith, as did the Mongolians and the Cambodians. The elite who first converted also believed they were opening themselves up to a wider world with more trade possibilities, then forcing their population to convert as well.
The weaknesses of Sanskrit are that it tended to not have a strong defensible center, relying on natural boundaries to stop foreigners, which did not always work. It was a very conservative language not open for change, and it focused more on the abstract than the practical. One issue was that for a long time Sanskrit was not the language of government, with the local language in the capital being used instead. This ended around the time of Ashoka, with the rising popularity in Sanskrit. Another issue was that unlike Rome or China, there was never a lasting empire that lasted longer than half a dozen generations, and those that did form, like Ashoka's Mauryan dynasty, fell quickly, leading to a time of melee between feudal lords before the next empire formed. Even foreign empires were not safe from this cycle. These conquerors would also, like the Mongolians of China, simply adopt the local culture rather than impose their own on the region. Buddhism also lost out in India itself, with the Hindi population overtaking them and seeing them as another cult, with the Buddha being a representation of Vishnu. While the Islamic invaders did have a much better time converting local culture, they by no means eradicated the importance of local languages or of Sanskrit, but rather put themselves beside it. In modern day, Sanskrit is still important among the traditional elite, but has been supplanted as an intellectual language by local languages but primarily English. Now Sanskrit is mostly seen as a trait of Indian religions or cultures, not as a dominate force in the region.