How Did Sanskrit Become India's Most Revered Language With So Few Speakers? Read in Language of The Immortals

Sanskrit has a peculiar place in the languages spoken in India, as the "language of the gods," it is today spoken by fewer individuals than live in a little English market town. G. N. Devy's latest book in the Essential India Editions series, Language of the Immortals: A Concise Study of Sanskrit, accepts the paradox. Instead of the well-trodden queries about Sanskrit's origins, it asks the far more interesting question of how a language likely never "mainstream," acquired a remarkable amount of cultural power.

Devy, right away, makes a bold choice. Instead of reiterating debates about Aryan migration, he addresses Sanskrit's unique cultural feat—an unparalleled oral tradition. As he puts it, "the small numbers of Sanskrit-speaking people are not a negative reflection on it but rather a testimony of its amazing ability to exert influence on the lives and thoughts of those who did not speak or understand Sanskrit."

The centre of the book's argument is wonderfully counterintuitive. Sanskrit's power derived from what Devy calls "memory magic," and a sophisticated memory architecture provided by the Rig Veda which allowed over 10,000 verses to be reproduced verbatim by memory for thousands of years. This was no ordinary poem, but a technology of cultural transmission that made Sanskrit texts literally unforgettable.

Devy's investigation into this system is absolutely compelling. He describes how the early composers utilised complex meters to create "a wide-ranging literary filing system embedded in rhythm and sound." What the composers produced was a completely new phenomenon: literature that was assigned divine authorship. According to the author, the Vedas were understood to be "apaurusheya" (not having an author); this enabled the claim that "the rishis came to be understood as 'the seers', those who saw the verses."

The special feature of this book is its unflinching assessment of how Sanskrit was a source of justification for social injustice. Devy argues that ultimately the varna system was contingent upon literacy in Sanskrit: there "does not seem to be any other material or historical reason for the purohits to become the highest varna other than the fact that they allegedly had a command of the Sanskrit language." Sanskrit thus became "the language of esteem"—a basis of cultural superiority that millions coveted without ever obtaining.

The author outlines the two parallel oral traditions: the "mantra literature" (the Vedas) that was carefully guarded and the "suta literature" (the epics like the Mahabharata) out of which there emerged a linguistic hierarchy that would endure for centuries, making Sanskrit "the ultimate language hegemony that the world has ever known."

Devy's treatment of colonial attitudes is similarly revealing, showing how 19th-century European scholars unintentionally created mythology around Sanskrit that served nationalist ambitions. The tragic irony is that, according to census records, even at its zenith, roughly a million people spoke Sanskrit.

The book sometimes suffers from dense academic prose and assumes a great deal of existing knowledge. The barrage of dates and academic references can distract from the larger narrative, although we still find Devy's main argument compelling.

With these caveats aside, the book explains why Sanskrit has a persistent mystique. Devy shows how "a relatively small corpus of ancient texts, through sheer linguistic virtuosity, managed to colonise the imagination of an entire civilisation." The analogy with Latin or Arabic is appropriate, but arguably, Sanskrit's achievement was more remarkable—the imposition of cultural hegemony without ever a military conquest, let alone commercial trade.

The chapter examining the impending death of Sanskrit is especially poignant. "The history of Indianization of Sanskrit is coextensive with the history of the Sanskritization of India," Devy argues, and he observes that the nascent revival movements today often seem more nostalgic than truly linguistic.

For a study of only 84 pages, it is genuinely concise, revealing how languages gain cultural authority that transcends their actual use, leading to important insights into the enigmatic nature of linguistic prestige.