The Big Elephants in the Room – No One Notices

Yes, there are many elephants in the room and they very surprisingly go unnoticed. I would call this herd of elephants, “Sanskritizing Herd”.

Look at the figure below, which I take it as the current official alphabet of Thamizh (usually spelt in a corrupted form Tamil) in written form. Retroflex your tongue deep enough to get the sound indicated by “zh”.

In none of the letters do we see a horizontal line over it. In none of these, we see a “hook” going bottom right to top left (SE to NW). There are hooks going up to the right and descending starting from the top clockwise, or starting from the bottom and going clockwise to the top, and some with a small swirl at the end. Keep a mental note of these. (Insert photo)After all, we, Thamizh natives had to remember all of these, 247 (12 (consonant) + 18(Vowels) + 12x18(Consonanto-Vowels) + 1(Special letter which is used rarely) letters in all. I do appreciate that English is so easy to read out as written with a few exceptions (I am not talking about which syllable has to be stressed). 

Now look at the photo (a TV screen grab) that shows the purportedly spiritual (Aanmeega) title of the show supposedly carrying the English transliteration of the title, “Kannanai Naan Kandene”, which means that the spiritual leader claims to have “seen” Lord Krishna; without being too specific we may substitute “felt” in the place of “seen”. To translate perhaps more meaningfully, “Hey, Kanna, I have seen you!” with the implication that Lord Kanna was playing hide and seek, his usual game, they say.

A few words about the name of the TV channel that carries this half-hour programme. I would not want to name the channel, yet emphasize that though it is named after Lord Shiva, it carries a number of programmes (say, 30 or 60 minutes each, about Lord Vishnu in his various incarnations, and sometimes about Goddess Kali, too). This is OK, as it is beneath the Gods to fight amongst themselves, just the opposite of what the Lord God expressly prohibited when He gave Moses the Ten Commandments. – “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”.

But, I will tell you something more: There is an elocution competition in Tamizh on this channel (and it is not necessarily on religious/scriptural topics), as an avenue for the contestants to grab at any chance for making it their profession (there are many who have done that, not surprisingly). And, there is another programme that tells you how to make medicines from our “traditional and naturally” available ingredients. There are absolutely no “double blind” tests to gain confidence. The confidence arises out of the mere fact that someone who had gained a level of general acceptability (cooking, medicine) has said this. Hence, this must be true; read what I wrote – I did not say, “Try this concoction and confirm it or otherwise for yourself”. No, it has already been confirmed!

 That was a long digression, but it is necessary (that means, it really is not a digression!). The photograph (again, a TV screen grab) at the beginning of the programme:

 The title is in Thamizh, supposedly. But. it is not. In the alphabet of the language given at the beginning of the post, there are no horizontal lines above any of the letters. Where did they come from (for the uninitiated, the first line/word contains five letters, the second is one word/two letters long, and the third is one word/ four letters long)?

The horizontal lines appeared to have been an effort to show that all these lingua franca of all the languages that existed north of the Deccan plateau, must have been copied from most of the other languages spoken in India (north of the Deccan plateau), and supposedly all are derived from the Language of the Gods, Sanskrit. This is bullshit. There are accredited linguists who claim that Sanskrit derived from, say, market-place Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati ... These languages were what the local people spoke (vernacular) and Sanskrit is, at best, used for liturgical purposes. Though I wanted to add “only”, I resisted it because secular (epics, stories etc.) literature in Sanskrti is beautiful, they say. Yet, the language survives mainly as liturgical.

Man invented languages before he invented God, I claim. Take exception at your own risk

My wife, immediately points out that somewhere in India there is a village/community where everyday language used is Sanskrit. I concede that, but respond, “One swallow does not make a spring” (may be from Aesop fables). As it stands, we have checkmated each other!

Some people also point out that Sanskrit grammar is perfect and is unexceptionable. The people who argue on this point self-own, going even beyond Lauren Boebert (the Colorado politician).

For any language, grammar can be written only after thoughts, very many, (some nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions ...) have to be put in a coherent way, carry heavy meaning and is  understandable by a majority of the population, the laity. Grammar also has to be accommodative to bring life to the language, accommodate the evolutionary changes in the language. One village carrying out its tasks in that village among hundreds of thousands of villages is not very different than “one sparrow”!

The antiquity of the grammar of the language does not come out of the mere claim that it is the Language of the Gods (:’Deva Bhasha”). Just to point out, Lord Muruga (a god not truly recognized in north India) is considered as having given Thamizh to large pockets of people in the state of Tamil Nadu. This is nonsense. My ancestral village is in North Tamil Nadu, after my peregrination across much of India over 23 years, I came back to settle down in Central Tamil Nadu. I tell you, many of the words people here speak were almost Greek and Latin to me. If one claims that Sanskrit has not changed over eons, it is because it was born dead, thanks to liturgy. Sorry for being so brutally honest.

The title of the TV programme as given is in a script that does not exist, for the simple reason it is flexible enough without the inflexible straight line. If one saw the inscriptions on stones in any south Indian temple, one would notice the near perfect horizontal alignment. The, why we need a horizontal line on the top?

Aha, here comes the reason: Sanskrit imposition on Thamizh. Yes, yes, and yes. I guarantee you no Tamizh native can read the corrupted Thamizh script on the screen. None.

I will try and transliterate: “Kann??? Naan kann?d?ne?” That is 15 decipherable letters and six diacritical marks!

Thamizh is not like that. Thank heavens for that.

To revert to the title of the post, the elephants in the room are the strokes (a total of six) given merely to try to impose Sanskrit on Thamizh. We have continuous conversations about Hindi imposition on the states of southern India.

Perhaps it is time to start another one on Sanskrit imposition – targeted, in my opinion at Thamizh Brahmins, a motley group.

Raghuram Ekambaram