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”.