I – Sanskrit, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burmese
“[Shankardeva's] language is a kind of a palimpsest. It's a kind of a hybrid texture where there are Sanskritic nouns and verbs but there are also ways of speaking which I can recognize as distinctively Assamese.”
Ankur Barua is University Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. His work centres on Vedāntic Hindu philosophical theology and Indo-Islamic styles of sociality as well as broader issues in the comparative philosophy of religion, including cross-linguistic explorations of the intersections between the idioms of bhakti, yoga, tawḥīd, and taṣawwuf in the postcolonial linguistic landscapes of South Asia. He also writes creative fiction, including the recent The Harvest of Time, and you can find his accesible online introductions to Hindu thought on Youtube here. As always, the interview concludes with suggestions for further reading.
I – Sanskrit, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burmese
Hello everybody, and welcome to another ‘Philosophising in…’ interview. Today, we arrive in a new part of the world, to philosophy on the Indian subcontinent, and in particular the mountainous region of Assam in North-Eastern India, and to philosophy in the Assamese language. I’ll be discussing philosophy in Assamese and related Indian languages with Ankur Barua of Cambridge University. Hi Ankur.
Hi Jonathan.
I thought we could begin today by saying a little bit about Assamese itself as a language. Assamese is spoken in the Northeast of India, in a very linguistically diverse region. Could you tell us a little bit about the language itself, maybe the other languages it's related to?
Okay. So let me begin by saying that various languages in North India and Northeast India are rooted ultimately in Sanskrit, including modern standard Hindi and the modern forms of Assamese, Bengali, and others. The syntax of Assamese is derived from Sanskrit. There are various words in Assamese, which the language has picked up over the last 400 years or so from other regional groups, so there are words in Assamese which are not to be found today in a Sanskrit dictionary, but nevertheless the syntax, the grammar is largely Sanskrit. Therefore, people who speak languages like Hindi and Bengali would be able to pick up the written form of Assamese without too much difficulty and vice versa.
So on the one hand we have Assamese, Hindi, Bengali which are all Indo-European languages and related to Sanskrit, and on the other you mentioned some languages spoken in the region which are not derived from Sanskrit. Could you tell us a little bit more about those?
You noted that this region, what we read on the map as 'Assam' or 'Northeast India', is linguistically and also ethnically very diverse. What precise terms or categories we want to use for these languages or regions or people is, of course, always an interesting sociological and political question. You will hear terms like ‘Tibeto-Burmese’ for example, or you will hear terms like ‘Indo-European’ and so on.
So, if you look at the map, you will see that what we today refer to as “Assam” stands at the geographical-historical confluence of multiple streams from, say, Myanmar (Burma), China and so on. Therefore, there are these languages which we might simply call ‘non-Sanskritic’, and the present form of Assamese, being strongly rooted in Sanskrit, has developed, has evolved over 300 years or 400 years through various kinds of linguistic intersections and exchanges with these non-Sanskritic languages. So, the spoken form of Assamese is quite different from let's say the spoken form of Hindi, or the spoken form of Bengali. But the written forms of what we may call ‘high’ Bengali, ‘high’ Hindi and ‘high’ Assamese are quite similar to each other, and to Sanskrit.
Women Tea Pickers in Assam, North-East India
Excellent, that's really nice in that it brings me on to the next thing I wanted to ask you about, which is the history of writing in Assamese. Unlike many of the languages that we examine on the series, there is a very long history of writing in Assamese, and I wondered whether you could tell us a little bit both about the script in which Assamese written and also what I understand is a very special tradition of manuscript making and writing.
Actually regarding manuscript making and writing, I cannot comment with some measure of confidence, but I'll tell you something about the script. The present-day Assamese script is not very different from the present-day Bengali script and it is possible that they have a common root. Now I would say that this present-day Assamese script is already in place sometime around the 14th or 15th centuries if not even earlier, and modern-day Assamese begins to emerge from around that time frame through certain figures who begin to write commentaries on some Sanskrit scriptural texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Bhagavata Purana. And these are the local Assamese retellings or renditions or renderings of Sanskrit templates or archetypes. So we're talking about, let's say, the 14th century or the 15th century.
Now, of course, it's always possible to trace these languages even further back in time and say for example ‘oh, here is the text from the 8th century and that looks a bit like Assamese’; so, I can trace it back as far back in time as I want; and that would be a kind of philological-historical debate as to whether we are seeing Sanskrit or whether we are seeing a present-day language like Assamese or Bengali or Hindi in an 8th century text or a 9th century text. But my understanding is that the general scholarly consensus is that Assamese as we understand it today is beginning to evolve sometime around the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries.
Fantastic. As for those texts you mentioned that are glosses or commentaries, are these glosses on the classics of Hindu or Sanskrit literature? And why are these commentaries and glosses written in a vernacular rather than in Sanskrit itself - for the purpose of popularization? Are the authors of these works trying to make the originals accessible to non-Sanskrit speakers?
That is a very interesting question. A figure called Shankardeva is writing commentaries sometime in the 15th century and sometimes I myself use the term “translate” and say he's translating from Sanskrit into Assamese. But even that word “translate” is somewhat odd in that context because it makes sense to say that you translate from Sanskrit to English, but does one really translate from Sanskrit to ‘high’ Hindi? A very high literary register of Hindi? The language is already so heavily Sanskritic, it’s not quite translation but more like a reformulation or a rephrasing for general audiences who may not be familiar with a kind of very heavy technical, scholastic Sanskrit.
However, to answer your question more precisely, figures like Shankardeva are developing a style of Vaishnavism. Vaishnavism is the form of Hinduism where Vishnu is worshiped as the supreme origin, goal, telos, and foundation of humanity. And let's say the purpose of human existence is to glorify Vishnu as the ultimate ruler. And what he is doing is that he is narrating certain episodes from these epic narratives like the Ramayana and from texts such as the Bhagavata Purana I mentioned a while ago, and he is offering retellings or renditions of these Sanskrit archetypes and templates in a way that people around him in the 15th century can understand.
Linguistic Map of North-East India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar
Now a lot of the text that he's producing, of course, has these nouns which are Sanskrit and which are to be found in the Sanskrit original as well. And many of the verbs also are ultimately derived from Sanskrit – as I say the syntax is fundamentally Sanskritic – but we will also find certain verbal formulations, certain ways of speaking which are distinctively Assamese. So, the language is a kind of a hybrid palimpsest. It's a kind of a hybrid texture where there are Sanskritic nouns and verbs but there are also ways of speaking which I can recognize as distinctively Assamese.
In reading the 15th century text I sometimes stop and say, ‘oh I was talking like that just the other day to my friend’; that particular phrase is so distinctively Assamese that I want to claim that the text is Assamese. But I nevertheless know that the nouns and verbs are very heavily Sanskritic.
That's incredibly interesting: you can imagine if that's already the case for you reading in the 21st century how novel and amazing it must have been for contemporaries of him to be to be reading this. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about some of the examples of the text which are either translated or reformulated - however we want to put it. I was wondering about the content of these works - I think you mentioned that there was a translation of the Ramayana, and one of the points I found quite interesting there was that there's a decidedly non-heroic depiction of some of the central characters. Is that something which is connected to the didactic or religious aims of the movement or is this a stylistic or linguistic innovation?
Okay, that is an interesting question and also rather difficult, but as I work towards an answer to your question, let me begin by saying that when I read these texts say from the 14th century or 15th century, what category would I apply to these texts? I have to work with somewhat hybrid categories such as ‘religious philosophy’, ‘religious poetry’, or ‘literary philosophy’ where literature is the medium for expressing certain philosophical points about the nature of reality.
In these epic narratives such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, we have central figures who are the central deity. So, there is Krishna, there is Rama and often these figures are presented as heroic figures. These figures are also presented as very humanlike. So, these are figures who grieve, who feel sorrow, who feel joy, who are plunged into despair. Now what is happening with these literary texts is that they are becoming a medium for various kinds of purposes; one is to offer instruction to the people, instruction about how to live their lives; one is to offer instruction about the nature of reality, and the nature of the deity.
One famous question that comes up again and again in many of these texts is the relation between the finite world and the non-finite supreme being or Brahman. So here is the world of space and time called samsara and here is the divine foundation Brahman. And to use terms like “monism” and “dualism” the big question is whether the meaning of these scriptural texts is ultimately monism, the claim that there are no different ontological kinds or categories in the fabric of reality or some kind of duality or dualism, that between the deity and the devotee there is some kind of distinction. Now, these scriptural texts such as the Bhagavata Purana can be read alternatively as pointing towards monism or pointing towards dualism.
And what is, say, Shankardeva whom I mentioned a while ago, trying to do by writing verse? I mean he's not writing prose commentaries primarily, but is offering a verse rendering of these motifs, these templates, from the scriptures, and trying to develop his own worldview, his own vision about Krishna or Vishnu who is the supreme deity and the devotees or the bhaktas of Krishna. Is the relation monistic or is the relation dualistic? To this day there are scholars who debate this point: what exactly is Shankardeva trying to say? That between the deity and the devotee there is non-duality, or there is non-distinction, or there is some kind of distinction? Some years ago I published an article precisely on this point in the Journal of Hindu Studies.
My own reading is that Shankardeva is pointing to some sort of distinction or duality between deity and devotee but there are different alternative readings which suggest that Shankardeva is a monist. Shankardeva himself does not provide a footnote or an endnote or a glossary saying ‘okay, my dear reader in 2024, I know you will have big problems, so better be warned I'm not a monist, I'm a dualist’ or ‘I'm not a dualist but a monist’! And, for better or worse, we have to ‘mine’ those texts and say: “okay, here is the standard template that's offered by a figure called Shankara in the eight century, and he's developing a system called Advaita or nonduality; and here is Shankardeva (not to be confused with Shankara) in the 15th century. So, when he is writing his own rendition of the Bhagavata Purana, is that message duality, is it nonduality, is it monism?” And so you can see how the poetic text, the literary text, can become a site for this kind of hermeneutic dispute about philosophical categories. So, is Shankardeva a poet, a literary figure, or a philosopher? Maybe he was all of them.
In the 15th century, these categories will not quite be intelligible to him. If we could go back in time and speak in a form of Assamese to him and put this question to him: “you know Shankardeva, we are people from the future; we would like to know whether you are a poet or a religious thinker or a philosopher or a literary figure or somebody who is writing a new syntax of a new language, which one of these four are you? You can only choose one!’ I think he may say ‘no, I refuse to make the choice’.
Is there even a coherent way of separating all of those categories one from the other in the Sanskrit or Assamese he would have been familiar with?
I mean one can use terms from Sanskrit, terms which are sometimes used in Sanskrit for syntax or grammar. There is a term for religion – dharma sometimes is used; but these concepts will not have demarcated precisely distinct ways of thinking. So, people who are doing syntax or grammar may say: “well, ultimately grammar is pointing towards brahman, the nature of language mirrors the nature of reality, the relation between language and the world is deeply isomorphic so that there is some kind of one-to-one relation between the way we speak Sanskrit and the way the world is”. So, these different categories may not have been separated the way in which we may separate them in some locations in certain contexts. So, you're right. I mean how would one even pose that question to Shankardeva speaking some kind of proto-Assamese in the 14th century: ‘are you a religious philosopher or are you a poet or are you a musician or are you something else?’. He might say ‘it is a package that includes all these components and I do not have to choose’.
That's a really lovely way of putting a point which I think you probably don't need to convince many of our readers: that all of these things can usefully be construed together as contributing to the kind of activity that we sort of think of as philosophising. I was reminded when you spoke of ‘mining’ the texts of a very similar metaphor that Justin Smith-Ruiu who we did the interview with philosophy in Sakha he has this wonderful idea of ‘philosophy in the ‘ore’ of culture – of philosophy as not totally separate and distinct from culture at large but as one element mixed in as you said with poetic composition with grammatical analysis and all of the rest of it.
II - The Formation of a Philosophical Vocabulary Between Sanskrit and Assamese
Still, there is a question in that I wanted to ask concerning the sort of separate elements in terms of the Assamese philosophical vocabulary as it were: you mentioned the dispute about monism or dualism concerning the relation between samsara and brahman - both of which are Sanskrit terms – so in these early works in which Assamese thought is developing out of earlier Sanskrit works, is it the case that the ‘load-bearing’ philosophical terms are still the ones from Sanskrit, and maybe some of the sort of words you were saying before you know an Assamese speaker can recognize these are more of the sort of conversational, more ‘colorful’ terms that are built on to more heavy duty philosophical vocabulary which remains Sanskrit?
That is indeed the case. Even today, when we write philosophical English a lot of the heavy-duty, technical scholastic terms are either directly from Greek or Latin, or terms that we need to coin to do philosophy, and yet which do not yet exist in English. So, we have to look up a Greek or Latin dictionary and say ‘okay, what is the nearest noun?’ and I can just add some kind of a suffix or an affix. Likewise, a lot of the philosophical terminology not just in Assamese but also in languages like Bengali and Hindi to this day is ultimately derived from Sanskrit.
I suppose the idea is that you don't need to invent the wheel all over again: these terms already exist and have received a particular kind of signification that have particular references rooted in the particular intellectual tradition that has been developing for about one thousand years, if not longer. Therefore people who were doing what we would today recognize as “philosophy” in the 14th or 15th century did not feel the need to go back to the drawing board and say ‘okay, what terms shall I come up with when I talk about the relation between the word and the world?’ There's already a term called shakti, let's say, and they would just borrow such terms.
Even to say ‘borrow’ those terms is already slightly anachronistic because they will not have even felt that there is some kind of distinction between ‘them’ and ‘the tradition’ because they are part of the tradition; the tradition is this living, flowing stream to which they are contributing as much as the stream is shaping them. There is a kind of dialectic between a particular exegete and the tradition in which they are located. If I pick up a book in Assamese or Bengali or Hindi about means of knowledge or about epistemology, ontology, or metaphysics the language it is written in is, let's say, everyday Hindi or everyday Bengali or everyday Assamese – this would be the kind of Hindi that you will speak to your friend in the market square – but the nouns will not be very different from the nouns you will find in a fourth-century BCE or ninth-century CE Sanskrit text. So, the ‘load-bearing’ words, as you put it, would indeed be either Sanskrit or derived from Sanskrit.
Landscapes in Kaziranga National Park, Assam
Its so interesting to draw the analogy with the emergence of philosophical vocabularies in the European vernaculars – one of the things I find so interesting about these cases is as a comparison case to the emergence of philosophy in English around five hundred years ago, and you’re absolutely right that if you think about most of the sentences you would find in a contemporary philosophy textbook a sentence like: ‘the axiomatic propositions of ethics are self-evident’, almost all of these words are borrowed words from languages which are much further away from English – which we really can say are ‘borrowed’ or ‘imported’ in a much more profound sense than Sanskrit terms which are kind of ‘inherited’ perhaps in the case of Assamese. I suppose I wanted to ask whether we have the same kind of movement as in English when it borrows Latin or Greek terms and in the course of its philosophical development gives a very different sense of the term, say the change in the notion of ‘idea’ between Plato and Locke, a shift into a quite different sense than the one that they have inherited. Is this something that we find in Assamese as well, with regards to earlier inherited terminologies?
That is an interesting question and let me simply say I'm quite sure that some terms borrowed from Sanskrit have been used in distinctive ways by particular writers or thinkers. I put it slightly vaguely like that because I myself trying to think if I can immediately spot one such word like the word “idea”. As you pointed out, here is the word “idea” which is used by Plato and when Hume and Berkeley and Locke start using the word “idea” there's a semantic and a conceptual shift. I mean I'm pretty sure that terms like atman, brahman, and moksa have occasionally undergone these kinds of semantic and conceptual shifts in Assamese, Hindi and Bengali. But how significant is the shift is another interesting philosophical question.
Particularly interesting is the translation of “metaphysics” as অধিবিদ্যা: adhi-vidyā. You can see how the translator is drawing on the Sanskritic resonances of vidyā (“knowledge-wisdom that has soteriological power to liberate”) and adding the prefix adhi (which has the sense of “more”). For instance, adhi-bhūta (“more than or beyond nature”) is sometimes used for “the spiritual”. Be that as it may, interestingly enough one standard dictionary of Sanskrit does not recognise adhi-vidyā as a Sanskrit word. So, perhaps that is a new linguistic-conceptual coinage.
Nevertheless it is not easy to bring one particular concept to mind straight away like that. I cannot say, “okay, here is one major term in philosophical texts which is used in a way totally different from the earlier way to use it”. I mean there will be some kind of a continuum and the shift would often be very subtle – because the particular writer is putting a particular spin on it.
I mean if the word is used in a totally different way – a really totally different way it's not really the same word – maybe it's a homonym or something like that, but it necessarily functions very differently. What you described in terms of some of the earliest philosophical works coming out of a commentary tradition, and the development of the Sanskrit tradition in Assamese: is this similar in other Sanskrit-descended or Sanskrit-related languages say Hindi or Bengali across the Indian subcontinent? And as if that wasn't a large enough question for you, do you know if the case is different for non-Sanskrit adjacent languages say Dravidian languages like Tamil or Telugu?
So, let me answer the second part. The main languages I work with are Assamese, Bengali and Hindi. So, to what extent some of the linguistic and sociolinguistic processes I've been delineating are applicable to languages from south India like Kannada, Telugu and Tamil - I'm not quite competent to comment on that, although I do know that especially in the case of Tamil there are some forms of cross-border linguistic transference between Sanskrit and Tamil over many centuries. Of course, there are different forms of Tamil, so there will be some forms which are possibly more Sanskritic, and there will be forms which are less so.
To come back to the three languages I am more familiar with, namely, Assamese, Bengali and Hindi, this is definitely so in the case of Bengali as well. I have spent a lot of time reading texts from 1830-1910; again Bengali has different registers; so, there is a very high philosophical-literary register, and there is the more quotidian, everyday, demotic register. The quotidian, everyday, demotic register would also have a very significant component of words from Persian and Arabic. That's partly because many of the rulers of what is today Bengal were people from Persia, Turkey and Afghanistan, say, from the 14th century to about 1815 or even earlier, 1770.
Literary, technical-philosophical Bengali, the type of Bengali I usually read is again very heavily rooted in Sanskrit and Sanskrit is a language that uses compound words; so, you can take words and keep on building them up, and often the big challenge in reading Sanskrit is knowing where to “break” the compound. Do you break it here which would mean that meaning or do you break it a little bit earlier which would mean that meaning? What is very interesting is that when I read Bengali texts, philosophical Bengali texts from say 1830 or 1840, I see that they often leave these big compound nouns in an unbroken form. Now, this is not very helpful for me, because sometimes I'm trying to read the Bengali translation because I want to see what that particular translator had to say about where to break that big word but they just leave it like that. At present in the spoken forms of Bengali or written forms of Bengali we do not use such long compound nouns and verbs which can sometimes run into four lines – which is terrible because it's painful even to think of a sentence running into four lines.
But as I read texts down the decades of the 19th century, say, 1850, 1860 or 1880, I realize, thankfully, that the words are getting broken down, the words are smaller; therefore, I can say: “okay, that is the noun, that is the word, that is the preposition or the post-position”. That is what I can say about the linguistic texture of Bengali in 1820 or 1830. This means that people who are developing what is today Bengali are themselves not quite sure what to do with this new linguistic form that is emerging: “do we take it in a totally non-Sanskritic way and allow the people to speak just the way they want to or do we exercise some kind of Sanskritic control by saying ‘okay, here is this big word in Sanskrit and you better figure out how to break it up’”?
III - Vedanta and the Unitarians: Boston - Calcutta - Bristol
It's such a fascinating case because so many of the peculiarities of what you're mentioning are totally unique to the North-East Indian case, but at the same time so much is of what you were describing in terms of the difficulty of philosophy expressed in a vernacular emerging from under the shadow of a classical language is so similar to say the example of the relationship between Ge’ez and the other Ethiopian languages that I work with. I wanted to ask you in particular about the Bengali case, as you mentioned that in Bengali there are lots of words which have come over from Arabic, Persian, Turkish. I wanted to maybe complicate the picture even further by asking what happens when English is introduced to the philosophical-linguistic milieu with the coming of British imperialism. What seems to change when English arrives?
As you noted when we start talking about the gradual entrenchment of English-based education in Bengal from, say, 1820 onwards, that is only to add one more variable, one more parameter to a landscape that is already quite complicated, because there is a new form of Bengali that is emerging, there is a colloquial, vernacular, demotic style of Bengali and there is a more Sanskritized style of Bengali, and now in the middle of this mix there is a new language called English which is gradually becoming more and more powerful, popular and influential – not everywhere in Bengal but in small enclaves like Calcutta. I often read texts in Bengali from around the 1820s or 1830s and these are texts being produced by figures associated with a “reform” movement called the Brahmo Samaj. The Brahmo Samaj people are also the people who are taking to English quite early on. Various texts are being read; we are talking about texts written by many of the Unitarians in Bristol and Boston.
So, the Christian Unitarians are a group who are very powerful and very influential at that time; Unitarians are Christians who do not quite accept the mainstream, mainline doctrine of the Trinity. So, they are Unitarians; and there are various kinds of interesting philosophical reasons why the Unitarians were very interesting to these Bengalis, because these Bengalis are now having to respond to the European Christian missionary critique that Hinduism is polytheistic and filled with lamentable features like idol worship. A figure called Rammohun Roy repeatedly goes back to the Upanishads and develops a philosophical style of writing which says, by drawing on these Upanishads, that Hinduism is a form of pure Vedantic monotheism. ‘In the beginning there was one alone, one without a second’ – that is a particular quotation from an Upanishad that resonates very deeply with this kind of Unitarianism. So, it's not the Trinity, it's not the holy mystery of the Trinity but the absolute unicity of the Godhead. So, this becomes a very important linguistic triangulation where this figure, Roy, is translating some of the Sanskrit texts from the 8th century into Bengali in 1820 and he is also writing in English to these Unitarians. So, he's carrying out a transnational exchange; this vast transnational circuit is being set up between Calcutta, London, Boston and Bristol. Rammohun Roy is buried in Bristol, by the way, but that's just a side point.
Tea Cultivation under the British Raj
The language in which he is writing is a very beautiful kind of English like Victorian English; I mean it's very beautiful English. But his Bengali is quite painful to read! This is Bengali being written in 1825, or 1830 where, as I said, the words are so big that sometimes when I'm reading his Bengali I have to remind myself that actually this is Bengali I'm reading and not Sanskrit; his English is so much more beautiful than his Bengali.
That's such an interesting such an interesting reflection and case study – what a triangle of philosophical exchange between Boston, Calcutta and Bristol! There was one question I had when you were mentioning that Roy's Bengali was fairly turgid, which is related to the previous point you were making about the fact that these incredibly long, difficult Sanskrit sentences steadily over time become chopped up into smaller packages – is there a sense in which that is indicative of a movement from a 'translation' that stays as close to the Sanskrit original as possible, keeping some of the foreignness or the unusual flavor of the texts as they would appear to a Bengali reader, versus making them more digestible by making them more accessible to contemporary audiences? Is the difficulty of his prose in part an insistence on the former approach?
As to why this is happening we will only have to speculate because Roy does not provide any comments of an autobiographical nature as to why he's doing this; but I would speculate along your lines that that's simply because Sanskritic knowledge has this immense cultural prestige in South Asian cultural history. Sanskrit is the site of knowledge production, Sanskrit is the matrix of so many different intellectual streams. Therefore, Sanskrit has this aura of truth, of authenticity, of purity and the claim is that the closer you get to Sanskrit the more truthful you're going to get.
Therefore, these new languages like Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and so on, as they're evolving or emerging from around the 14th or 15th century onwards, don't quite want to move away completely from the Sanskrit archetype or the Sanskrit template even as, at the grassroots, if one may use that metaphor of height, the language is undergoing many different transformations and reformulations and is picking up quotidian expressions, mannerisms and linguistic expressions. The nouns and the verbal forms often retain a Sanskritic aura.
But, you know, the real question with any language, about any language, is “what is language for?”; ultimately language is for communication. There are different kinds of communication; so, the kind of philosophical, academic English that we use when we write a PhD dissertation is not the English we use when we go to Sainsbury’s to do some shopping. Why? Because that is not useful and because that's not relevant. We simply want to communicate the point that I want to buy that milk and not this milk - it's not an inquiry into the nature of 'milkness', it's not an inquiry into how many universals there are in these three bottles.
Because language is a tool that helps us to navigate our environment, different types of linguistic tools are used by humanity across different parts of the world – likewise at some point in time, Bengali speakers begin to realize ‘oh, we have a language which we can write in and we can print books and publish different essays and articles in it’. So, when they were publishing articles about the nature of reality, they would stay close to their Sanskritic templates; but Bengali is not just about philosophers, Bengali is also about novelists, about poets, about people who write beautiful stories. So, some of the storywriters and poets start moving away from the high road of Sanskritic modernity, if one wants to put it that way. Maybe because Roy was not primarily a poet or a novelist or a short-story writer – he was translating Vedantic philosophy from the eighth century into Bengali in 1815, 1818, or 1820 – he was almost constrained by the domain in which he was operating to use that kind of Bengali.
That's such a nice way of bringing us to what I wanted to be one of the final points. You rightly insisted that we focus on the question of 'what language is for', and I wanted to task what are the various uses of Assamese today in philosophical education. Could we comfortably teach a philosophy class in contemporary Assamese, could we translate the classical works of philosophy into contemporary Assamese, and if so would these still be highly Sanskritized? Would any of that matter, or is it simply natural in the same way that mathematics textbooks in English today will presumably include a lot of Greek words like ‘geometry’ and Arabic words like ‘algebra’, terms which are not of English origin at all! So could you tell me a little bit just about the way in which Assamese is used in the contemporary world for teaching philosophy
In the state of Assam in North-East India, there are many departments of philosophy across different colleges and universities and in many of these departments philosophy is taught in the Assamese linguistic medium. So, in one sense the answer to your question is not just: ‘it could be so’, but ‘it is so’! Greek philosophy is taught in Assamese, so is the early modern European philosophy of David Hume, John Locke, and Berkeley, and the German idealists. Their worldviews, their visions are all paraphrased and reformulated into modern standard Assamese.
Now it is, of course, an interesting question. I myself have not read many of those textbooks but sometimes I can see how in trying to translate the thought, the worldviews of Greek, German and other European philosophers sometimes a particular word is used in modern standard Assamese which has a very, shall we say, heavy-duty meaning in Sanskrit but that word, I would like to think, presumably is not being used with that heavy-duty Sanskrit meaning because that will not be applicable to Plato or Kant or Hegel. So, there are these kinds of linguistic transactions that one would have to do when one is translating into Assamese, a heavily Sanskritic language, the thought of Plato and Hegel and Kant and Fichte. How one does it and to what extent the experiment is successful are interesting questions. Right now I'm just reporting that it is done. I mean not everybody is discussing philosophy in English as we are doing; people do it in in Assamese as well and in Bengal in the state of West Bengal.
It is so interesting as well that you're saying that in translating say Kant's ‘thing in itself’ or Berkeley’s ‘veil of perception’, that the tendency is to go for a heavily Sanskrit term, as opposed to simply importing an English word that would be a perfectly easy thing to do. The preference is always to go for a term which does have some kind of deep resonance that goes further back in the Assamese / Bengali / Sanskrit tradition.
Yes that's a good point you make. Often, the term that is used is one that would have deep conceptual-linguistic resonance, and in brackets the term in English is printed in the Roman script. So, regarding the ‘thing in itself’, I do not myself know what term is used in modern-day Assamese but let's say there's a very heavy scholastic term in Sanskrit called svabhava which means ‘nature’ or ‘essence’. So let's say some formulation with the word svabhava is used – if it is used in this case, then in the Roman or the Latin script the word will be spelled out as ‘thing in itself’, so that the person who is reading it in Assamese at least knows the key term.
Much in the same way that a responsible scholarly translation into English of a work of classical Indian philosophy might list ‘essence’, and then in brackets below you'll have Swabhaba in in Sanskrit as well.
Excellent - that's why I use the term ‘transactions’. All of these are transactions which are ongoing, repeatedly carried out exercises; and every generation comes up with their own particular transactions which every subsequent generation may revise, refute or reinforce.
What a heartening point – it sounds like philosophy, philosophical translation and ‘philosophical transactions’ as you put it, are very much alive in contemporary Assam and West Bengal.
Yes, very much so indeed.
I think that's such a such a wonderful note for us to end on. On behalf of our readers I would like to thank Ankur for his contributions today: thank you very much Ankur.
Thank you, Jonathan, for inviting me in the first place.
On the sociolinguistic history of Assamese and the geopolitical complexities of northeastern India
Medhi, Kaliram. Assamese Grammar and Origin of the Assamese Language. Guwahati: Publication Board Assam, 1988
Sengupta, Madhumita. Becoming Assamese Colonialism and New Subjectivities in Northeast India. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016
Saikia, et al. Northeast India (Cambridge University Press). 2017
Kakati, Goswami, and Goswami, Golockchandra. Assamese, Its Formation and Development : A Scientific Treatise on the History and Philology of the Assamese Language. 2. ed. / rev. and edited by Golock Chandra Goswami. Gauhati, Assam: Lawyer's Book Stall, 1962
On Śaṅkaradeva
Ankur Barua, The Devotional Metaphysics of Śaṅkaradeva (1449–1568): The Advaitic Brahman as the Beloved Friend, The Journal of Hindu Studies, Volume 10, Issue 3, November 2017, Pages 301–327, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hix016
On Rajah Rammohun Roy
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