Veda09- Were the propagators of the Vedas illiterate?

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Just imagine that some day, not in the distant future, our entire earth gets completely destroyed either due to some natural calamity or some man-made disaster, wiping out the entire humanity. And some alien lands on this earth either by accident or as part of his exploratory expedition. What would he find here? He will definitely find lot of RCC structures, well laid roads, remnants of our electronic and other mechanistic gadgets. 

 

But he would find no evidence of our vast knowledge which were recorded and stored in our computers. All those hard drives and CDs would have been burnt to ashes. We are also not in the habit of erecting stone inscriptions the way our forefathers did. Our books and other such storage devices are highly perishable. What do you think the alien would conclude?

 

Probably he would conclude that this planet earth had an advanced civilization but the residents of this earth were illiterate! They did not know how to communicate through writing. They did not know how to store knowledge for posterity. They were great but they did not know how to write! 

 

This is how it sounds when our historians come to conclusions about ancient Indians’ ability to write. Ancient Indians were illiterates because we have not yet found any evidence of their writing. The people who constructed massive well-planned cities like those found in the ruins of Indus valley, the people who not only composed but preserved huge knowledge repositories like the Vedas, did not how to write! They were illiterate! 

 

If not anything, they could have used some pictorial scripts like the Chinese 😉 Even a speech impaired person develops a sign language without any training, all by himself. Could these Indians have not developed a set of alphabets however primitive they might be? I can’t imagine how huge well-planned cities spanning several hundreds square kilometers can be laid out without any kind of written language! Everything was done purely from memory? They at least needed some number system! 

 

But the historians need hard evidence. They find none. So, like the alien visiting a completely devastated earth, they conclude that the ancient Indians were illiterate! 

 

It is so amazing that while the entire world acknowledges Panini as the ‘father of grammar’, one whose work in linguistics remained unsurpassed till late 19th century, some historians even doubt whether Panini was literate! 

 

Panini was the first known Indian Grammarian, who was first not just for India but in the entire world! Could he have developed a detailed grammar for the Sanskrit language, where he talked about lexical analysis, grammar rules, and sematic analysis almost in line with our modern computer language theories, being an illiterate? 

 

And this Panini lived close to the Vedic era. It is a different matter though that the time when he lived is uncertain. Some say it is 400 years before Christ, while others say that it is 700 years before Christ. And even fixing this date is directly or indirectly motivated by the dating of the Aryan invasion theory and the conclusion that the Vedas were composed not before 1600 years prior to Christ! Some scholars even haggle to prove that Panini was not Indian at all. They speculate that he was a Persian who did not know any Persian language! 

 

Since Panini’s composition on grammar namely Ashtadhyayi was composed in the Sutra style and since there is no evidence that it was ever written down by Panini but propagated purely in an oral tradition, the conclusion is that even the great Grammarian Panini was illiterate! 

 

Apparently, words like ‘script’ or ‘lipi’, ‘scribe’ or ‘lipikara’ can be found in the Panini’s Ashtadhyayi. What were these words doing there when panini himself knew nothing about writing? 😉 

 

Panini mentions at least 10 Indian grammarians who preceded him. These were so ancient that today we have no knowledge about their contributions except their names. Does it not show that there was a long tradition of grammarians in ancient India? Why did none of them ever think of writing? Or is it that they wrote but left no trace of it? Or is it also possible that they did not want to write for some reason? 

 

Whether it is true or not, ancient Indians believed that the Vedas are store houses of knowledge that can make a heaven or hell out of this world. That knowledge could be dangerous in the hands of unscrupulous people. They could destroy the entire world or subjugate others with the help of those powers. So, it is better that this knowledge is kept as a highly guarded secret. Anything that is put to writing can get into the hands of wicked people however much one tries to protect it. 

 

There is a well-known Sanskrit saying which says that the Vedas beg of a scholar to keep it well guarded so that it won’t fall into the hands of wicked people and get misused. 

 

Is that the reason why the Vedas were never written down? That looks more likely than coming to the naïve conclusion that Vedic Indians were illiterates. I have more reasons to believe that that was the reason. 

 

We will discuss that in the next episode.

 

 

A series discussing the most ancient of the Indian scriptures, nay the world scriptures namely the Vedas. © Dr. King, Swami Satyapriya 2021