C P Brown: Language and Culture

14. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Language – Indian View

Sanskrit is a Deva Vani and Telugu, which could absorb and digest Sanskrit more than other languages in India, has the same characteristics and potential of Sanskrit. The great Rishis who could receive, retain, reform and rationalise Sanskrit knew how exactly it is to be taught to live through generations conveying the thoughts. It is by these methods alone that literary giants like Kalidasa, or Nannaiya or Thikkana could spread the knowledge to the common and ordinary people through the vehicle of languages through centuries, till 1800 A D. It is the missionary mind with a desire to spread Christianity that created so many dissensions about our past linguistic heritage .CPB did this damage by using his intellect for the vile purpose of ridiculing, attacking and destroying whatever that he could not understand.

Language is a gift of the Gods to the human being. We can say it is a ramification of Consciousness, an effulgence of Consciousness in this Upadhi the human body. It is through the words - and the meanings- Sabda and Artha, the thoughts in the mental world propel the human being towards knowledge of the external seen world and the internal unseen world. Gradually language gets divided defacto into two sets of vocabulary- the language of the Vyavaharika Jagat and the language of the Paramarthika Jagat.

In concrete terms, Politics, Business, Industrial developments, and Sciences etc. need a set of words and a type of mind. On the other hand Philosophy, Poetry, and Arts need another set of words and another type of mind. Both are equally important at any given time for any society, but while the former is of the ephemeral world, the latter is of the Eternal, of perennial values for a Paramarthika society leading it from Darkness to Light.

Vedantins and Poets, even though small in Number are the most essential component of the culture and have always been highly respected even by the Kings .It is not unusual to find that the poets and philosophers were conscious of their role in the society. In the Gita Krishna himself says ‘Kavim Puranam’ emphasising the role of the Drasta.

Language - European’s ignorance

The ancient Greeks studied no language, but their own. Their great epic poems were composed in an ancient, unknown kind of Greek.

It was Indian knowledge that revolutionized European ideas about language. The Rig-Veda, even in the skewed estimates of the Westerners dates about 1200B.C. The proper way of pronouncing the Riks and their correct interpretation became extremely important and the Hindu grammarians extended their interest from the Scriptures to Literature, and even day-to-day spoken languages. The grammar of Panini presented to European Mind, for the first time, a complete and accurate description of a language.

Sanskrit disclosed the possibility of a comparative study of languages and an insight into linguistic structure, taught Europeans to analyse speech-forms the constituent parts, the resemblances.

This knowledge about languages and the Indian approach to the greatest faculty of HUMAN KIND, are beyond the intellectual grasp of the son of a Yorkshire farmer turned evangelist! How can he be expected to understand the highly intellectual creators like Nannaiya or Thikkana? An owl naturally curses the Sun, and so did the Macaulays and Browns of that neo rich industrial world, steeped in ignorance of the WORD – “farther from God and nearer to DUST” as ELIOT says.

CPB could not understand or memorise a few Sutras (what an Indian child does by the age of seven) and therefore denigrated the Pundits, the grammar and literature.

Language consists of a number of intricate elements of the Mind craving for expression. More refined, regulated, recapitulated and accurate these elements are, more the language becomes suited for greater advancement of the human culture and permanency of the civilization. Some of these elements are:
Sound, Modulation, Accents
Nuances Nonverbal
Script Vs Sound, symbols,
Cognition, Accuracy
Memory, (Time frozen in words)
Intricacy of thought
Creativity, (Originality)
Emotions.
Intuition.
Imagination

These are only a few of the elements. ‘Between the emotion and the expression falls a shadow’ says ELIOT as loftier the thought the more difficult the transference. Take away any of the elements, or arbitrarily modify any of them you will damage the very foundations of the language.

The problem with the British, and in fact with all Europeans is their incapability of understanding the importance of sound, the accents, which are the very life of words. Even today in spite of exposure to the highly refined languages of India they have not realised the importance of just one element, Sound and accent.

Culture

Language and Culture are inseparable.

The book Aryacharitram dealt with, the question of roots of a culture showing how language, literature, poets, saints, religion, rituals, values, philosophy all these are the roots of any culture and how they are transmitted from generation to generation through our Epics and Puranas.

Every human being has to contribute in furthering the culture into which he is born. It is like watering, manuring and pruning the trees in a garden with removal of weeds or even cutting off branches attacked by pests and parasites. You cannot dig down the base of a tree on the pretext of finding out the origin of the roots and thus destroy the roots totally. There are always invisible and unknowable factors in a culture in an unknowable symbolism, certain mysticism, which grows over thousands of years. It is this digging down which the European did, trying to segregate the so-called Dravidian – Aryan – aboriginal’ languages and in the process creating a destructive Divide in what was till then a peaceful monolithic culture? Unfortunately we are still continuing this futile pursuit.

Memory is Time frozen in the human mind, and epics are likewise History frozen in the collective thought of the peoples, a Racial Memory. Exactly like human memory is essential for the growth of an individual, the value system from the epics is essential for a Nation to protect itself from the self-destructive tendencies and predators and to grow continually from aeon to aeon.

What is required is to understand the Dharma behind and not drag the epic characters into our present day mental mould. This is what CPB and the missionaries did, asking questions, gaining superficial information, distort, and pump disinformation through their schools, poisoning the young Minds.

Greeks, Romans, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. have all flourished for short periods, but vanished due to non-creation of a philosophical backing to their moulds of Life, Language and Literature. We have therefore to understand that to continue our culture we have to protect our value system, propagate our epics through generations. If we fail in doing this, history will not forgive us. Our Languages alone are the means for such transmission of our culture. Tampering with them or destroying them had been their main aim, be it a Macaulay or a CPB. It was not service that CPB wanted to do; it was downright destruction of Telugu.

Our sacred duty today is therefore to rejuvenate all Indian languages and even dialects.