Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

46

Foetus of Language

Recently I was reading a book, The Druids,^ and I came across the following: "Like most world religions, the Celts started with a 'mother goddess' concept. In the case of the Celts, the mother goddess was Danu ('water from heaven') and it is significant that the great river Danube takes its name from her; significant, that is, because it was at the headwaters of the Danube that Celtic civilization is acknowledged to have evolved."²

Danu? That rang a bell.

In Indian tradition the great mother goddess is Aditi ('the infinite'). She has twelve sisters who are the root-mothers of a particular species, like Vinata mother of birds, or Kadru of serpents. Aditi's progenies are called the Adityas, or gods in common parlance. Her sister Danu's progenies are called the Danavas.

That is not all. The author, Peter Ellis, goes on to say that "As the ancient Celts emerged into recorded history and became known to the Classical writers, it is clear that in their society four main classes had developed ... : the intelligentsia, the warriors,

' The Druids, by Peter Beresford Ellis (Constable, London, 1995).

² P. 42.

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the producers of goods and the menial workers. These classes paralleled the Hindu ones of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Sudra."¹

Moreover, all those who have pored over the history of the Celts—Ellis quotes a number of them—are struck by the commonality between the social systems, law systems of the Celts and those of the Hindus. "The extraordinary parallels and similarities between the Celtic and Hindu cultures, occurring in the areas of language, law, religious attitudes² and mythology, music and caste." How come?

I was reminded of the Battle of Ten Kings. A battle fought by King Sudas of Vedic times against ten kings who were, it seems, his kin, all of them descendants of Nahusa of the Lunar dynasty. The defeated kings scattered, some going east, some going west, some north. The king who was driven west was Druhyu, one of the five sons of Yayati. So, thought I, is it not possible that he and his descendants were the original Druids?³ My flight of fancy, I suppose! At any rate, as Ellis says, "Much

¹ P. 28-29.

⁸ Such as the belief in immortality of the soul (p. 52). ^s But the very meaning of the word 'Druid' is variously interpreted. Ellis says that "some leading Celtic etymologists... saw the word as deriving from the word roots dru wid—'oak-knowledge'—the wid, meaning 'to know' or 'to see' ... others opt for 'those whose knowledge is great,' or 'thorough knowledge.' " Veda, of course, means 'knowledge.' 'Vid' is currently used in Indian languages, with the meaning of 'specialized knowledge,' i.e. pakshi-vid, meaning 'an expert in bird knowledge.' I am inclined to think that Druid means: seekers of true knowledge.

'Dru' also aroused my curiosity. Because we have the word daru which means wood.

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work has now been done in demonstrating similarities of grammar construction between the language of the Vedas of Hindu culture and Old Irish."

The above similarities would have been welcomed by Sri Aurobindo, I am sure, had they been available to him in the 1910s. But many more decades were to elapse before the seeds sown by him were to sprout. In his time it was, as he put it, "After the ingenious toils of Roth and Max Muller, as after the erudite diligence of Yaska and Sayana, the Vedic mantras remain for us what they have been for some thousands of years, a darkness of lost light and a sealed mystery." Yet the Veda has been the bedrock of all Hindu creeds. But the trouble was that it ceased to be intelligible to us couched as it was in a vocabulary which resembled classical Sanskrit although much of it differed too. Misunderstanding came easily. Said Sri Aurobindo, "If Indians hardly understand the Vedas at all, the Europeans have systematised a radical misunderstanding of them," he was alluding to the linguists, or philologists as they were then called. "The astonishingly elaborate modern descriptions of Vedic India will turn out [to be] a philological mirage and phantasmagoria."

The task given to Sri Aurobindo by the Master of the Yoga was to dispel the misinterpretation of the Sacred Books. If you turn back a few pages, you will find it stated in his letters which we have quoted. "Sri Krishna has shown me the true meaning of the Vedas, not only so, but he has shown me a new Science of Philology showing the process and origins of human speech so that a new Nirukta can be formed and the new interpretation of the Veda based upon it." Yaska was the author of the original Nirukta, an etymological text, mentioned in the Mahabharata.

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Sri Aurobindo worked on Nirukta over a period of time. The work progressed, a little hesitatingly at first, then more surely. Even on 28 December 1912, when a certain perfection of method was attained, he was left unsatisfied "since possibility still has its play." Possibilities were not acceptable, only the right word would do. Within the week (up to January 4), however, the "Work (nirukta) has emerged from its hesitations 8c is being steadily done; incidentally much that was seen by intuition formerly is being proved by the data." The reader will remember that Sri Aurobindo had also developed the faculty of audition. He heard sentences or even "purely grammatical formula" along with its sense, and it was suggested to him that those were "actual words used in this sense in pre-Vedic Sanskrit."

That is how Sri Aurobindo came to write 77i<? Origins of Aryan Speech. "He knows Latin, he knows Greek!" had exclaimed the French magistrate, and he could have added, "He knows Sanskrit!" That Sri Aurobindo knew perfectly both English and French was common knowledge. Once, when someone expressed surprise at Sri Aurobindo's speaking in French, Mother cut in, "But he spoke very good French! And French had come back to him as a spontaneous memory." The reader may recall that he had learned other European languages like German, Italian and Spanish. Back in India he had learned Bengali enough to produce original works in it, besides having more than a nodding acquaintance with Gujarati, Marathi and Hindusthan (Urdu). Who then better qualified than he to take up such lexicological work? He now turned his attention to Tamil, which he had begun at the Karmayogin Office in Calcutta. All that I knew.

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Yet, as I was turning the pages of his personal 'Records,' I was in for a surprise. So will you. His note of 22 January 1913 reads, "Study will be resumed, but not more than slightly. It will include Tamil & Hebrew." Hebrew?! Well, well...

Returning to Tamil. At Pondicherry he had the help of Subramania Bharati. As was his wont, no sooner did Sri Aurobindo begin learning Tamil than he started reading Bharati's poems. We find in his notes under the date of 31 December 1912: "Bhasa [language]. Bh's Panchali Sapatham¹ taken up; in the first verse yesterday only a few words could be understood without reference to the dictionary & no connected sense has been made out from the sum of the vocables. Today, in the second verse, the difficulties of the Tamil way of writing (sandhi etc.) were overcome by the intuition as well as some of the difficulties of the grammar, but the Bhasashakti [power of language] which used formerly to give correctly the meaning of unknown words has not recovered its habit of action."

But in the rapid development of his sadhana, the supra-intellectual memory became active. Barely ten days later, on 9 January 1913 to be precise, we see: "... Things are now remembered permanently without committing them to heart, which formerly would not have been remembered even for a day if they had been even carefully learned by heart eg the first verse of Bharati's poem, in Tamil, not a line of which was understood without a laborious consultation of the dictionary. Yet although an unknown tongue, although no particular attention was paid

¹ Panchali's Vow. Panchali or Draupadi was the wife of the five Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata.

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to the words or their order everything remains in the mind even after several days. Formerly even a verse of Latin, English, Sanskrit carefully studied & committed to memory, would be lost even in a shorter time."

His command over the Tamil language progressed so quickly that with Bharati's help he translated into English some pieces from Tamil literature. A few lines from the Kural of Tiruvalluvar; two pieces—Hymn of the Golden Age and Love-Mad—by Nammalwar, a poem by the Chera king and saint Kulasekhara Alwar, and three pieces by Andal.

In all his literary works a double action came into play. Sri Aurobindo notes on 7 January 1913, "The only work done in the day was a grammatical commentary on the fifth hymn of the Rigveda. Here as in all the works of Knowledge, there is a double stream of action, the intuition which sees the truth and the speculative reason with its groping judgements, imaginations, memories, inferences which works towards truth through error."

It was, however, the Tamil language which made the way clear for the intuition so that inspiration could flow freely. "The inspiration developed on the connection of Tamil with O. S. [Old Sanskrit] pointing out lost significations, old roots, otherwise undiscoverable derivations."

It was as he was examining the forms, 'vocables,' of the Tamil language "in appearance so foreign to the Sanskritic form and character," that Sri Aurobindo found himself "continually guided by words or by families of words supposed to be pure Tamil in establishing new relations between Sanskrit and its distant sister, Latin, and occasionally, between the Greek and the Sanskrit." Moreover, "Sometimes the Tamil vocable not

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only suggested the connection, but proved the missing link in a family of connected words. And," he avowed, "it was through this Dravidian language that I came first to perceive what seems to me now the true law, origins and, as it were, the embryology of the Aryan tongues." That perception was the key to the discovery of the real connections of the ancient languages. He uncovered "a common mother-root, common word-families, common word-clans, kindred word nations or as we call them, language." Musing on the kinship of Sanskrit and Tamil, he said, "the possibility suggests itself that they may even have been two divergent families derived from one lost primitive tongue."

Thus it came about that his study of Tamil brought Sri Aurobindo a clue to "the very origins and structure of the ancient Sanskrit tongue." As he followed the clue which led him farther and farther, to other clues, he stumbled upon an Ancient Language,' a language older than any known form of Sanskrit. And he "plunged into the far more interesting research of the origins and laws of development of human language itself." The clues came to him from several sources. One was, of course, etheric writing (dkasha-lipi). Truth-audition (Shruti) was another. Intuition and inspiration played their part. Also from script transmitted directly to the hand. In such a manner did he proceed with old languages. He noted down, or should I say, he took down in dictation (?) what he said was from authors of the Dwapara Yuga. Obscure authors, obscure language, but relating to the epic Ramayana. Not as the epic has come down to us, though. Some mysterious writings in unknown languages have been found in Sri Aurobindo's notebooks, one

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of which was an 'Ancient Language' notebook of c. 1911!

It was therefore through a direct access to the lost language that Sri Aurobindo discovered the origins of human tongues. Later he would check his discoveries with outwardly available data.

Always methodical, his first step was to form a kind of science of linguistic embryology, lay out the processes by which language took birth and form: "If the origin and unity of human speech can be found and established, if it can be shown that its development was governed by fixed laws and processes, it is only by going back to its earliest forms that the discovery is to be made and its proofs established." Because "modern speech is largely a fixed and almost artificial form, not precisely a fossil, but an organism proceeding towards arrest and fossilization." Modern tongues have lost their pliancy, which is why he took up the reverse study of "tracing back the finished forms to the embryonic and digging down into the hidden original Foetus of language." An archaeologist of language! The most convenient tool was Sanskrit—helped out by Greek, Latin, Tamil, and occasionally Celtic, Irish, French, Spanish and Italian. In Sanskrit the original type of Aryan structure was fairly well preserved. Surprisingly, "The structure we find is one of extraordinary initial simplicity and also of extraordinarily mathematical and scientific regularity of formation."

This high achiever got to see what practically no one yet got to see. Patterns were revealed to him that generated further research.

As his researches led Sri Aurobindo nearer to the hidden 'Foetus' of language, he discovered that language proceeds in a

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regular natural law, almost paralleling Nature as she "proceeds in the physical world to form a vegetable or an animal genus and its species."

The debate will doubtless continue, but here we are presenting some food for thought: the results of Sri Aurobindo's researches. "My researches," he said, "first convinced me that words, like plants, like animals, are in no sense artificial products, but growths,—living growths of sound with certain seed-sounds as their basis. Out of these seed-sounds develop a small number of primitive root-words with an immense progeny which have their successive generations and arrange themselves in tribes, clans, families, selective groups each having a common stock and a common psychological history."

He lamented that linguists "consistently ignore the patent fact that in prehistoric and preliterary times the vocabularies of primitive languages must have varied from century to century to an extent—of which we with our ideas of language drawn from the classical and modern literary tongues can form little conception.... It is the preservation of common terms and not their disappearance that is the miracle of language."

He called on the linguist to strictly confine himself to the history of words and the association of ideas with the sound forms they represent, and avoid lures which may draw him away "from the great discoveries awaiting mankind on his badly explored tract of knowledge."

Through Nirukta, the use of etymology, through The Origins of Aryan Speech, and his profuse writings on the Veda and the Upanishads, Sri Aurobindo has provided us with the clue and the methodology of exploring and arriving at the real

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connections between the ancient languages, and by the same stroke rediscover "the eternal Truth hidden in the Vedas and the Upanishads." And we see "how the soul of India was born and how arose this great birth-song in which it soared from its earth into the supreme empyrean of the spirit."

That it was Sri Aurobindo's intention to pursue this line of exploration is certain. But other things intervened and he could not complete his investigation. Even then, as my friend Michel Danino—who has mulled over this and allied subjects— pointed out to me, "Though incomplete Sri Aurobindo's conclusions are still far in advance of present-day linguistics." We hope the time has come for the Indian mind to shake off its habit of holding opinions at second and third hand. It is time Indian scholars took up the work from where Sri Aurobindo left off.

Archaeology uses many scientific disciplines. Cannot we have an archaeologist of linguistics?

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