“Ennaalumundazhalenikku viyogamorttum/ Innatra nin karunamaaya kidappu kandum/ Onnalli naamayi sahodararalli poove/ Onnalli kaiyiha rachichatu nammeyellam?” There was a time, not long ago, when many Malayalis knew these lines by heart. It’s a stanza from ‘Veena Poovu’, the most famous poem of Kumaran Asan, one of the three major Malayalam poets of the early 20th century. What catches the eye instantly is the fact that the second letter, or rather, akshara, of each line in this stanza is the same (“nna”). This is a traditional feature of Malayalam prosody, called dviteeyaaksharapraasam (‘alliteration of the second akshara’) by the grammarians. Now, let’s take a look at that word — it’s a compound made entirely of pure Sanskrit (tatsama) words: Dviteeya, akshara and praasa. What might not be obvious is that this exact type of alliteration is a common Dravidian feature and is seen, for example, in Tamil poetry dating to ancient times; in Tamil, it is known as edugai. The use of the language of prestige by the Malayalam grammarians masks 2,000 years of Dravidian continuity, from the Sangam Age to Kumaran Asan.
The past is not one of uniform and total exclusion of the underprivileged; there are, in a sense, two stories. One is about the exclusion of the “lower” castes and women from the later Vedic period onwards. It’s well-known that women were among the Vedic poets, and scholars have argued that they had a higher ritual and social status than in later periods. Their social degradation is reflected in how they — even queens — are depicted, alongside servants, as Prakrit speakers in Sanskrit drama.
The evolution of that very Sanskrit drama, however, is part of another tale, one of the expansion of Sanskrit over the course of the first millennium CE. Once confined to the realm of Brahmanical religion and scholarship, it descended into the world of literature, propaganda and politics, as Sheldon Pollock describes in his seminal work, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. With the birth of kavya literature — literature proper, as distinct from the sacred Veda — Sanskrit, and the cultural package it carried, spread across the Subcontinent and Southeast Asia as an idiom of kingly prestige and locus of patronage, supplanting Prakrit and creating what Pollock calls the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis”.
The cosmopolis eventually receded with the rise of regional languages as vehicles of literature and politics in the second millennium — what Pollock calls “vernacularisation”. Eventually, following this, “for reasons very likely having to do with vernacularisation itself, language options shrank for many communities and Brahmanical society reasserted its own archaic monopolisation over the language,” writes Pollock. Sanskrit was once again the domain of the sacred, the arcane and scholarly.
But there’s an addendum to this: In the interim, Sanskrit had sunk deep roots in certain regions and among some “lower-caste” groups, who had begun to study it. This can be seen among communities like the Nairs (the major dominant caste in Kerala, but with the ritual status of Shudras) and Ezhavas (among the Other Backward Classes in the modern framework but historically avarnas who faced untouchability). Their space in the world of Sanskrit was a limited, negotiated one; the Veda and some branches of learning such as vyakarana (grammar) were forbidden to them, but they could study literature, among other branches. Perhaps this was part of the legacy of the cosmopolitan tradition of Sanskrit, as opposed to the purely Brahmanical, or as some would argue, part of the heritage of Buddhist learning. In his youth, the social reformer Narayana Guru, who was born in an Ezhava family, travelled to Kayamkulam to study under a Nair guru, Kummanpalli Raman Pillai Asan, while staying at a nearby Ezhava house. He would go on to compose a number of works in Sanskrit, as well as Malayalam and Tamil.
Sanskrit, then, has not in all times and places been the exclusive domain of the “upper” castes. There are traditions of “lower-caste” people carving out their spaces in that world, and using it for their own purposes. In the present context, it is vital to study the language and its literary archive critically from an anti-caste perspective to understand the history and dharmic jurisprudence of caste, as well as to understand what, and whom, the archive does not talk about. It’s just as important to study other, non-Sanskritic traditions such as Sangam literature, to learn what Sanskrit conceals and perhaps, to recover a pre-caste past whose poetry rhymes with that of today.
The writer is senior assistant editor, The Indian Express
rohan.manoj@expressindia.com
