The Problem Of Aryan Origins

Chapter Eleven

THE LINGUISTIC ARGUMENT ABOUT

THE RIGVEDA'S DATE

A linguistic argument apart from the Boghaz-keui documents is also in the field. Perhaps the best statement of it is in the words of B.K. Ghosh. "The language of the Rigveda," he writes in one place, "is certainly no more different from that of the Avestan Gāthās than is Old English from Old High German, and therefore they must be assigned to approximately the same age: and the relation between the language of the Gāthās and that of Old Persian inscriptions of the sixth century B.C. cannot be better visualised than by comparing the former with Gothic and the latter with Old High German. Now, if the inscriptions of the Achaemenid emperors of Irān were composed in Old High German, what would be the date assigned to Ulfila's Bible? Surely something like 1000 B.C. This then would be the approximate date of the Gāthās of the Avesta - with which the Rigveda in its present form must have been more or less contemporaneous."¹ Ghosh goes on to say that the development of the Rigvedic Culture must have taken some time anterior to about 1000 B.C., but the utmost early limit he can envisage is about 1500 B.C.

He arrives at the same conclusion by another route elsewhere: "Under normal circumstances, the age of a language can be approximately determined if a definite date can be ascribed to any point in its known history. From a knowledge of modern English alone, a student of language can easily hazard the statement that Chaucer could not have lived as early as A.D. 1000. For he knows not only that the language is continually changing, but also its approximate rate of change. The language of Bernard Shaw is evidently not that of Byron, and Byron's language differs distinctly

1. "The Aryan Problem", The Vedic Age,

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from that of Samuel Johnson. The rate of change revealed by a comparison of the idioms emanating from the pens of these three writers does suggest an approximate date for Shakespeare's English, and the latter, in its turn, an approximate date for Chaucer's... It is now generally admitted by all that Pānini lived about 400 B.C., and the language described by Pānini is known to us in every detail: it is essentially a literary language from which the author tried to exclude extreme Vedisms, on the one hand, and vulgar bhāsā-forxm, on the other. Now, the difference between Pānini's language and the language of the Rg-Veda is certainly not greater than that between, say, the forms of English used by Chaucer and Bernard Shaw. The conclusion is justified therefore that, whatever the date of the contents of the Rg-Veda, its language can by no means be dated much earlier than 1000 B.C."² As for those "contents", Ghosh is prepared to trace their growth from c. 1500 B.C.

Ghosh's argument, in both its forms, is purely analogical, at the best presumptive and not in the least determinative. There is no genuine proof that the language of the Achaemenid emperors took the same time to develop from that of the Gāthās as Old High German from the language of Ulfila's Gothic Bible. Nor, because the amount of linguistic change between the Rigveda and Pānini is not greater than that between Chaucer and Bernard Shaw, can we mechanically extrapolate to the former the 600 years of the latter. "Languages," says the philologist Simeon Potter, "change at different speeds, and English has certainly changed more quickly than, say, Lithuanian or Icelandic."³ A more striking remark comes from J. Duchesne-Guillemin: "...We know that two neighbouring languages can evolve at different rates: Danish, for instance, developed much more rapidly

2."The Origin of the Indo-Aryans", The Cultural Heritage of India (1958). I, pp. 136-7.

3."The Language Gap", The Times Literary Supplement (London), April 23, 1964, p. 342, col. 3.

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than German, or even Swedish."⁴ So, even if Pānini is dated as by several scholars to 400 B.C. instead of 700 B.C. as by R.G. Bhandarkar,⁵ or still earlier, Ghosh's 1000 B.C. for the Rigveda's composition is hardly legitimate.

Interestingly enough, we have an actual instance where the Chaucer-analogy brings in quite a different time-relationship. There is the Linear B. script which we have mentioned before. Its Greek, dated c. 1400 B.C., is said by Cleator to bear "about as much resemblance to the familiar classical version [c. 550-300 B.C.] of the language as does Chaucerian English to that of the present day".⁶ Not merely 600 years but nearly 900 are now involved.

On the development of languages M. Winternitz uttered the last word years ago: "As regards the kinship of the languages, it is quite impossible to state definite chronological limits within which languages change. Some languages change very rapidly, others remain more or less unaltered for a long period. It is true that hieratic languages, like those of the Vedic hymns and the Avesta, can remain unaltered much longer than spoken languages."⁷

Winternitz refers to A.C. Woolner as rightly commenting on Max Müller's supposition of 1200 B.C. for the Rigveda's beginning: "As far as any philological estimates go, 2000 B.C. remains quite as possible as 1200 B.C. for the earliest mantra."⁸ Winternitz himself, not on linguistic but on other grounds which ignore linguistic estimates like Ghosh's, takes the Rigveda back to 2500 B.C. Linguistic grounds cannot bar even a greater antiquity. Winternitz warns us only

4.Religion of Ancient Iran, English tr. by K.M. JamaspAsa (Bombay,1973), p. 100.

5.Cited by B.C. Law in "North India in the Sixth Century B.C.", The Age of Imperial Unity, edited by R.C. Majumdar and A.D. Pusalker (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1954), p. 2.

6.Lost Languages, p. 158.

7.History of Indian Literature, English tr. by Mrs. S. Ketkar (Calcutta, 1927), I , p. 308.

8.Proceedings and Transactions of the Oriental Conference, I. pp. xvii ff; II, p. 20 ff.

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against thinking with some Indian scholars that languages can stay unchanged as much as to allow figures like 25000 B.C. for the Rigveda in the form in which we have it.⁹ The same holds for the Avesta in its extant version.

Indeed, the development of languages has many features difficult to explain on a superficial glance. We have alluded to the amazing archaisms persisting in Lithuanian today after thousands of years of the language's existence. Special conditions have kept it close to the most primitive Indo-European speech one can reconstruct. Ghosh himself adverts, in a particular context, to its archaicness. He tells us that it looks the oldest at present in the Aryan family of languages despite its being "definitely of later origin than Hittite or Tocharian".¹⁰ Here is a comparative problem which, according to him, has no sure solution and what he essays as an explanation is frankly confessed by him to be "a hypothesis pure and simple and nothing more". Appreciating the numerous complexities in the general language situation, one could regard the dating of the Rigveda or the Avesta to c. 1000 B.C. or even 1500 B.C. as also "a hypothesis pure and simple and nothing more".

Evidently, the linguistic argument a la Ghosh has no weight with certain scholars we have already listed: on the one hand, those who place Zarathustra, author of the Gāthās, in early Achaemenid times, the sixth century B.C. and, on the other, the majority of Parsi savants who choose 2500 B.C. at the earliest and especially some among them who vote for a still earlier date than 5000 or 6000 B.C. in agreement with Xanthos of Lydia (fifth century B.C.), Herodotus and other Greek contemporaries of the Achaemenid emperors.

A.S. Altekar seems to side with Ghosh about the Avesta's chronology and yet differs toto caelo about the Rigveda's, which he starts at 2700 B.C. He points out that the linguistic resemblance between the Rigveda and the Avesta may have

9. Op. cit., p. 310.

10. "The Aryan Problem", The Vedic Age, p. 207.

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come about because the former's "language and vocabulary... were to some extent assimilated to those of the later times", a linguistic assimilation which "is suggested by the Pauranic tradition when it declares that the principal Vedic Sakhas arose primarily on account of differences of reading".¹¹ Altekar may not be justified in refusing to the Avesta an adaptation similar to the Rigveda's, but his theory about the Indian scripture has a plausibility which we may support from that phrase of Sri Aurobindo's about the present Rigvedic collection: "It is even possible that its most ancient hymns are a comparatively modern development or version of a more ancient lyric evangel couched in the freer and more pliable forms of a still earlier human speech."¹²

Thus, even if Ghosh's linguistic argument were valid, the Rigveda could have its origin in hoary antiquity. On various counts, the assigning of a mere 1500 B.C. to the Rigveda's "contents" is absolutely arbitrary.

11.Indian Culture, VI , p. 281. The Siikhas-reference is to Vāyu Purāna,61 , 59.

12.The Secret of the Veda, p. 10.

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