Fact check: India wasn't the first place Sanskrit was recorded – it was Syria

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First published on Scroll

After yoga, Narendra Modi has turned his soft power focus to Sanskrit.  The Indian government is enthusiastically participating in the 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok. Not only is it sending 250 Sanskrit scholars and partly funding the event, the conference will see the participation of two senior cabinet ministers: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who inaugurated the conference on Sunday, and Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani, who will attend its closing ceremony on July 2. Inexplicably, Swaraj also announced the creation of the post of Joint Secretary for Sanskrit in the Ministry of External Affairs. How an ancient language, which no one speaks, writes or reads, will help promote India’s affairs abroad remains to be seen.

On the domestic front, though, the uses of Sanskrit are clear: it is a signal of the cultural nationalism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Sanskrit is the liturgical language of Hinduism, so sacred that lower castes (more than 75% of modern Hindus) weren’t even allowed to listen to it being recited. Celebrating Sanskrit does little to add to India’s linguistic skills – far from teaching an ancient language, India is still to get all its people educated in their modern mother tongues. But it does help the BJP push its own brand of hyper-nationalism.

Unfortunately, reality is often a lot more complex than simplistic nationalist myths. While Sanskrit is a marker of Hindu nationalism for the BJP, it might be surprised, even shocked, to know that the first people to leave behind evidence of having spoken Sanskrit aren't Hindus or Indians – they were Syrians.

The Syrian speakers of Sanskrit

The earliest form of Sanskrit is that used in the Rig Veda (called Old Indic or Rigvedic Sanskrit). Amazingly, Rigvedic Sanskrit was first recorded in inscriptions found not on the plains of India but in in what is now northern Syria.

Between 1500 and 1350 BC, a dynasty called the Mitanni ruled over the upper Euphrates-Tigris basin, land that corresponds to what are now the countries of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. The Mitannis spoke a language called Hurrian, unrelated to Sanskrit. However, each and every Mitanni king had a Sanskrit name and so did many of the local elites. Names include Purusa (meaning “man”), Tusratta (“having an attacking chariot”), Suvardata (“given by the heavens”), Indrota (“helped by Indra”) and Subandhu, a name that exists till today in India.

Imagine that: the irritating, snot-nosed Subandhu from school shares his name with an ancient Middle Eastern prince. Goosebumps. (Sorry, Subandhu).

The Mitanni had a culture, which, like the Vedic people, highly revered chariot warfare. A Mitanni horse-training manual, the oldest such document in the world, uses a number of Sanskrit words: aika (one), tera (three), satta (seven) and asua (ashva, meaning “horse”). Moreover, the Mitanni military aristocracy was composed of chariot warriors called “maryanna”, from the Sanskrit word "marya", meaning “young man”.

The Mitanni worshipped the same gods as those in the Rig Veda (but also had their own local ones). They signed a treaty with a rival king in 1380 BC which names Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas (Ashvins) as divine witnesses for the Mitannis. While modern-day Hindus have mostly stopped the worship of these deities, these Mitanni gods were also the most important gods in the Rig Veda.

This is a striking fact. As David Anthony points out in his book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, this means that not only did Rigvedic Sanskrit predate the compilation of the Rig Veda in northwestern India but even the “central religious pantheon and moral beliefs enshrined in the Rig Veda existed equally early”.

How did Sanskrit reach Syria before India?

What explains this amazing fact? Were PN Oak and his kooky Hindutva histories right? Was the whole world Hindu once upon a time? Was the Kaaba in Mecca once a Shivling?

Unfortunately, the history behind this is far more prosaic.

The founding language of the family from which Sanskrit is from is called Proto-Indo-European. Its daughter is a language called Proto-Indo-Iranian, so called because it is the origin of the languages of North India and Iran (linguists aren’t that good with catchy language names).

The, well, encyclopedic, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, edited by JP Mallory and DQ Adams, writes of the earliest speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian emerging in the southern Urals and Kazakhstan. These steppe people, representing what is called the Andronovo culture, first appear just before 2000 BC.

From this Central Asian homeland diverged a group of people who had now stopped speaking Proto-Indo-Iranian and were now conversing in the earliest forms of Sanskrit. Some of these people moved west towards what is now Syria and some east towards the region of the Punjab in India.

David Anthony writes that the people who moved west were possibly employed as mercenary charioteers by the Hurrian kings of Syria. These charioteers spoke the same language and recited the same hymns that would later on be complied into the Rig Veda by their comrades who had ventured east.

These Rigvedic Sanskrit speakers usurped the throne of their employers and founded the Mitanni kingdom. While they gained a kingdom, the Mitanni soon lost their culture, adopting the local Hurrian language and religion. However, royal names, some technical words related to chariotry and of course the gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas stayed on.

The group that went east and later on composed the Rig Veda, we know, had better luck in preserving their culture. The language and religion they bought to the subcontinent took root. So much so that 3,500 years later, modern Indians would celebrate the language of these ancient pastoral nomads all the way out in Bangkok city.

Hindutvaising Sanskrit’s rich history

Unfortunately, while their language, religion and culture is celebrated, the history of the Indo-European people who brought Sanskrit into the subcontinent is sought to be erased at the altar of cultural nationalism. Popular national myths in India urgently paint Sanskrit as completely indigenous to India. This is critical given how the dominant Hindutva ideology treats geographical indigenousness as a prerequisite for nationality. If Sanskrit, the liturgical language of Hinduism, has a history that predates its arrival in India, that really does pull the rug from out under the feet of Hindutva.

Ironically, twin country Pakistan’s national myths go in the exact opposite direction: their of-kilter Islamists attempt to make foreign Arabs into founding fathers and completely deny their subcontinental roots.

Both national myths, whether Arab or Sanskrit, attempt to imagine a pure, pristine origin culture uncontaminated by unsavoury influences. Unfortunately the real world is very often messier than myth. Pakistanis are not Arabs and, as the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture rather bluntly puts it: “This theory [that Sanskrit and its ancestor Proto-Indo-European was indigenous to India], which resurrects some of the earliest speculations on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, has not a shred of supporting evidence, either linguistic or archeological”.

An animated map shows how Sanskrit may have come to India

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First published in Scroll.

People in a vast swathe of the  Eurasian continent, from Britain in the west to Bengal in the east, are speakers of languages that belong to the same linguistic group, the Indo-European family. About half of the planet’s population today speaks an Indo-European language.

This is a remarkable fact: it means that around 3 billion people speak tongues that descended from what was, once upon a time, a single language and was spoken by a group of nomads whose numbers wouldn’t have been larger than that of a tribal confederation.

Indo-European expansion

How did this single language, which linguists have taken to calling Proto-Indo-European, spread across the word, giving rise to entities as diverse as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Persian and Bhojpuri?

The nomadic tribes that spoke the language spread through large parts of the known world around 6,000 years ago. In the words of anthropologist David W. Anthony, writing in his fantastic book on the spread of the Indo-Europeans, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World:

The people who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language lived at a critical time in a strategic place. They were positioned to benefit from innovations in transport, most important of these being the beginning of horseback riding and the invention of wheeled vehicles.

Horses, wagons and chariots gave these Indo-Europeans certain advantages militarily over the existing settled societies of Europe and Asia. Another innovation was biological: Indo-Europeans developed a gene mutation that allowed them to digest milk even after being weaned, thus providing these nomads with a continuous and mobile source of nutrition. We can see echoes of these historical facts in the culture of the early Vedic people who venerated horses and frowned upon the killing of milch cattle.

Where was the Indo-European homeland?

While this much the experts agree on, there are two competing hypotheses for the place of origin of these Indo-Europeans (or, as they were earlier know, the Aryans). The conventional view places their homeland in the Pontic steppe, which corresponds to modern-day Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. An alternative hypothesis claims that the Proto-Indo-Europeans spread from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey.

The latter hypothesis was recently backed up by a seminal study led by evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, which was published in the journal Science. Here’s an animated map that illustrates the results of that research.




Politics behind the theory

For a dry thesis on human prehistory, the Indo-European theory of migration has caused enormous upheavals in the modern world. Because these initial Indo-European speakers had been able to get about and, in many cases, managed to spread their culture around, a certain Mr Hitler, who considered himself a descendant of these people – the Aryans – mangled the theory into one of racial supremacy.

Race as a concept is mostly nonsense but the damage that Hitler caused with it meant that academics stopped using the word “Aryan” lest anyone think they were talking of a blue-eyed, blonde-haired alpha people (although Indian text books are yet to get the memo). “Indo-European” is the correct term now.

While the Nazis had gone overboard in their acceptance of Aryan migration, at the other end of the spectrum, many of the very people who had coined the word “Aryan” have rejected it completely.

The Hindutva out-of-India myth

In India, driven by the 20th-century ideology of Hindutva, which made nationality a matter of historical association with the subcontinent, a few people vehemently dismissed this now-standard academic consensus of migrants from the north-west bringing into India key cultural markers such as the nascent Vedic religion and early forms of Sanskrit, the liturgical language of modern Hinduism.

Instead, hemmed in by doctrine, Hindutva ideologues such as Belgian Indologist Koenraad Elst try and explain the massive spread of Indo-European languages by postulating that the original home of these Aryans was India – a theory almost as ridiculous today as Intelligent Design or a Flat Earth Hypothesis.

With the Hindutva ideology gaining popularity, you now have a huge number of people who consider this sort of dodgy stuff to be authentic. And as we can see from peeping across our western border, believing in a wonky, made-up history can have terrible consequences.