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by Dr. Rajasingham Narendran
"For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Mathew 16:26)
(March 12, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Sri Lanka, as we call her today, is an ancient land with an unfathomable history stretching into the mists of time. The attempt to understand her history, beyond the past few centuries, would be akin to the efforts of the proverbial five blind men to figure out an elephant. Sri Lanka, a tropical isle with plenty of rainfall, a hot and humid climate, and teaming with all sorts of creeping and crawling life, makes preserving ten-year-old books difficult even in modern homes! One need not stretch imagination far to accept that much of what were written on Ola-manuscipts in ancient and medieval times has been irretrievably lost. Only rock inscriptions and these too in sheltered locations would have survived the ravages of climate. Buildings made of clay, wood and leaves are prone to destruction within a short time by the combined effects of
climate, termites and ants. Pottery or parts thereof, on which ancient alphabets and insignia have been found, also contribute to our attempt to decipher history. Further, with the practice of cremating the dead probably stretching back into our very early history, it is unlikely sufficient evidence will be found to prove any hypothesis as to the origin or antiquity of our people. A few burial sites where urns with human ashes and some artefacts were found in Sri Lanka and South India, point to possible common cultural roots.
Alex Haley in the introduction to his monumental book ‘Roots’ states, “Finally, I acknowledge immense debt to the griots (traditional storytellers) of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground. The griots symbolize how all human ancestry goes back to some place, and some time, where there was no writing. Then, the memories and the mouths of ancient elders was the only way that early histories of mankind got passed along…. for all of us today to know who we are.” The oral tradition of transmitting the story of our history persisted over thousands of years, until attempts were made to consolidate them into writing. The oral tradition of transmitting history is of course prone to inaccuracies, exaggerations, distortions and manipulations.
In Sri Lanka, rock inscriptions and Ola-manuscripts recording the efforts of kings, priests and poets of old, are the peepholes available for us to get a glimpse into a very hazy past. In areas with no rock formations geographically, rock inscriptions were not possible, and this create a void while trying to gain an insight into ancient history. The written material available from the distant past and the stories conveyed downstream through the millennia are also likely to be unreliable, except as general pointers to how we progressed with time. Those who wrote on Ola-leaves or inscribed on rocks, may have been influenced by their own social and political compulsions. The need to glorify what they sympathized with and damn what they disliked, would have been as compelling in the past, as it is now. Our attempts to glimpse into our distant history can be only guesswork at worst and as good as the scientific tools available at best. Despite the availability of the best scientific tools, interpretations are more often than not, yet dictated by social and political compulsions.
It is a tragedy that we the component peoples of Sri Lanka, particularly the Sinhalese and Tamils, are yet involved in the debate as to who amongst us are the original inhabitants and the legitimate owners of the island. Into this meaningless, but all consuming political debate, over which a civil war is being waged, the debate on which language - Sinhalese or Tamil, is older has also been joined. Very few have paused to question how relevant such disputes and debates are to our national life and future as peoples.
Minister Champika Ranawake of the JVP has recently claimed that the, “Sinhala language is older than Indian languages with a history of more than 3000 years.” This takes the debate to encompass the Indian subcontinent and beyond the shores of Sri Lanka. If this was true, I will be proud to know one of the oldest languages in the world and share the island with a people speaking that language. Unfortunately, coming from the mouth of a man, who considers all Tamils in Sri Lanka as aliens and intruders, and would prefer them dumped en-masse into the deep sea, I set out to investigate the veracity of his claim and hence the origins of the written scripts of Sinhala and Tamil and their relationship to other languages in the region. I approached this project as an inquisitive layman. I stand to be corrected by trained linguists, etymologists and archeologists, if I am wrong in what I have understood from my efforts.
Brahmi is considered the parent script for most languages used in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma, Bali, Java, Thailand and even Laos. The origins of Brahmi are yet subject to much debate. Whether it originated from a script used in the Indus Valley civilization of old, an Aramaic script introduced from the Middle East or evolved independently from within India, is yet a subject of much debate. Brahmi itself is of two types - the Southern Brahmi and a Northern Brahmi. The Southern Brahmi is considered the parent alphabet of languages such as Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Sinhala, Burminese, Thai, Lao, Balinese, Javanese and others of a similar nature. The Northern Brahmi is the parent for the Nagari type of script as in Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Nepali and Tibetan. The Northern Brahmi is also called the Asokan Brahmi.
Further, whether the Southern and Northern types of Brahmi, independently evolved, or whether one of these was the parent of the other is the subject of much debate. The Brahmi that gave birth to the Tamil script has been called Tamil Brahmi or Tamili/Demali and that which gave rise to the Sinhala script is called the Sinhala Brahmi. The Brahmi alphabet and the differences between Asokan and Southern (Tamil) Brahmi are pictorially presented below. How closely Asokan and Tamil Brahmi (Southern Brahmi) resemble each other is noteworthy. In a history of a people spanning several millennia, would a few centuries or even a thousand years difference in the perceived origin of their languages make any meaningful difference?
The depictions (Pic-3, Pic-4) present how the Tamil Vatteluthu (Rounded alphabets) - a progenitor of modern Tamil alphabet - and the Sinhala alphabet in its various evolutionary forms compare with each other:
Brahmi script has been identified as having appeared by the 5th century BC. Brahmi was the most common script used by King Asoka who ruled between 269-232 BC. Brahmi inscriptions belonging to Asoka's period have been found in rock shelters in Sri Lanka. The language used in the Brahmi inscriptions of Sri Lanka and those of Asoka is Prakrit - a colloquial form of Sanskrit. The inscriptions using Brahmi characters have also been discovered in Tamil Nadu rock shelters and pottery fragments. The earliest language used is Tamil with a mixture of Prakrit words. Scripts earlier than Tamil-Brahmi have not been so far discovered in Tamil Nadu. The Sinhala alphabet has been identified as appearing in rock inscriptions during the 3rd and 2nd century B.C. Both the alphabet and language have changed considerably since then and the earliest surviving Sinhala literature dates from the 9th century AD. A broken jar with Tamil Brahmi inscriptions found in Quseir-al-Qadim, an ancient Red Sea port in Egypt, has been dated to the first century BC. The earliest Tamil epigraphic records have been estimated to be around 300 BC.
An intermediary alphabet that evolved from the ancient Brahmi is Grantham, which has influenced most South Indian and Sri Lankan languages including Sinhala and Tamil.
The comparison between the Grantham alphabet, Malayalam, Sinhalese and Tamil is given in (Pic-6, Pic-7):
It should be also noted 'Elu' is an ancient form of the Sinhala language, from which the modern vernacular has been derived. Elu is thought to be an older form of Sinhala by many, and a type of Prakrit by others. Organizations such as 'Hela Havula' consider Elu entirely native to Sri Lanka. There are also Tamil scholars who consider Elu to be an ancient form of Tamil. The modern alphabets of various languages currently in use in India and Sri Lanka are presented below to once again show resemblances that point to common origins:
Tamil and Sinhala, as languages have also been identified as sharing more than 4000 words and have an almost similar grammatical structure. I was surprised to hear the word ‘Thooral’ referring to a drizzle in Tamil being used in the Wattala area by Sinhalese with reference to rain. Similarly in the Negombo area, ants are referred to as ‘Sithraam Pootchi’ (Poochi - insect in Tamil), by many Sinhalese. While the Sinhalese can justifiably claim a large number of Sinhala words are used in Tamil, Tamils could also in turn justifiably claim that a large number of Tamil words are used in Sinhala. What appears reasonable in a historic context is that both Tamils and Sinhalese have much in common because of their common origins as peoples and the common origins of their languages.
Evolution whether biological, cultural or linguistic is an ever diverging process. The diversity when traced back, only points to a less divergent past and if can be traced far enough, to common origins. Every person, tribe, nation or race can claim to a pre-eminent place in matters pertaining to language, culture, religion and even biological make-up, and rightly so, because we have a common origin. Evolution guarantees that we try to unconsciously preserve what we are familiar with, through a sense of pride, which ensures diversity within our essential unity. However, evolution ensures that we keep on changing slowly and steadily with time biologically and in all other aspects relating to life, to ensure that we are fit to survive. We are all essentially the same in all aspects relating to our lives, while appearing and even trying to be different. This is the unity in our diversity. Language is only a tool for communication, and with time evolved into a medium to express our thoughts, deeds and culture. Languages have been grouped into families based on their similarities and I am sure evolved, as I had referred to in my last column and if the theory of evolution and anthropologic findings prove correct, from a primordial form of language spoken somewhere in Africa - probably a primordial form of Bantu.
The Sinhalese and Tamils have to take the giant step towards the future and cease to dwell morbidly in the past, however much we believe it was glorious. Life in the past - ancient and the middle-ages - was a mixture of what it is today - good, bad and the ugly. It could not have been otherwise. It is the propensity for us as humans to remember the good and forget the bad. If not, we could not have survived as a species this long. If not, we would have drowned in our grief a long time back in our evolutionary history. It is our politicians, for their pecuniary needs and desire for power, who keep glorifying the past to make us forget the present - a rather undesirable reality of their making.
In biology, with reference to our embryological development it is said ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ - our embryological development is a repeat of our evolutionary development as a species. Life is supposed to have originated in the seas and we as embryos develop in the womb as an entity floating in fluids. This is one aspect of the above concept. Similarly in life, ‘Where we go in the future is determined by where we have been in the past.’ While we have to carry our collective experiences as a people and as individuals, from the past into the future; we should not try to go back into the past.
Sri Lanka, is yet unfortunately a captive of its past and is unable to develop the dynamics to break out of this imprisonment, because of the efforts of our unsavoury politicians and noisy societal leadership. The antiquity of the languages we owe allegiance, the religions we profess and the history we claim as a people, are over-burdening our politics in a manner that is preventing us from becoming what we are capable of. The search Champika Ranawake set me has of course shown me he may be right in claiming Sinhala is 3000 years old, but he was wrong in asserting it is older than any language in India. Tamil is as old, if not older than Sinhala. This interesting experience made me gain greater insight into human evolution and see the merit in the pride different people feel about their respective identities! It is unfortunate, the facts that could be garnered to stress our essential unity, are being mustered by our politicians with great vigour to foster dissention, violence and bloodshed in Sri Lanka.
by Dr. Rajasingham Narendran
"For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Mathew 16:26)
(March 12, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Sri Lanka, as we call her today, is an ancient land with an unfathomable history stretching into the mists of time. The attempt to understand her history, beyond the past few centuries, would be akin to the efforts of the proverbial five blind men to figure out an elephant. Sri Lanka, a tropical isle with plenty of rainfall, a hot and humid climate, and teaming with all sorts of creeping and crawling life, makes preserving ten-year-old books difficult even in modern homes! One need not stretch imagination far to accept that much of what were written on Ola-manuscipts in ancient and medieval times has been irretrievably lost. Only rock inscriptions and these too in sheltered locations would have survived the ravages of climate. Buildings made of clay, wood and leaves are prone to destruction within a short time by the combined effects of
climate, termites and ants. Pottery or parts thereof, on which ancient alphabets and insignia have been found, also contribute to our attempt to decipher history. Further, with the practice of cremating the dead probably stretching back into our very early history, it is unlikely sufficient evidence will be found to prove any hypothesis as to the origin or antiquity of our people. A few burial sites where urns with human ashes and some artefacts were found in Sri Lanka and South India, point to possible common cultural roots.Alex Haley in the introduction to his monumental book ‘Roots’ states, “Finally, I acknowledge immense debt to the griots (traditional storytellers) of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground. The griots symbolize how all human ancestry goes back to some place, and some time, where there was no writing. Then, the memories and the mouths of ancient elders was the only way that early histories of mankind got passed along…. for all of us today to know who we are.” The oral tradition of transmitting the story of our history persisted over thousands of years, until attempts were made to consolidate them into writing. The oral tradition of transmitting history is of course prone to inaccuracies, exaggerations, distortions and manipulations.
In Sri Lanka, rock inscriptions and Ola-manuscripts recording the efforts of kings, priests and poets of old, are the peepholes available for us to get a glimpse into a very hazy past. In areas with no rock formations geographically, rock inscriptions were not possible, and this create a void while trying to gain an insight into ancient history. The written material available from the distant past and the stories conveyed downstream through the millennia are also likely to be unreliable, except as general pointers to how we progressed with time. Those who wrote on Ola-leaves or inscribed on rocks, may have been influenced by their own social and political compulsions. The need to glorify what they sympathized with and damn what they disliked, would have been as compelling in the past, as it is now. Our attempts to glimpse into our distant history can be only guesswork at worst and as good as the scientific tools available at best. Despite the availability of the best scientific tools, interpretations are more often than not, yet dictated by social and political compulsions.
It is a tragedy that we the component peoples of Sri Lanka, particularly the Sinhalese and Tamils, are yet involved in the debate as to who amongst us are the original inhabitants and the legitimate owners of the island. Into this meaningless, but all consuming political debate, over which a civil war is being waged, the debate on which language - Sinhalese or Tamil, is older has also been joined. Very few have paused to question how relevant such disputes and debates are to our national life and future as peoples.
Minister Champika Ranawake of the JVP has recently claimed that the, “Sinhala language is older than Indian languages with a history of more than 3000 years.” This takes the debate to encompass the Indian subcontinent and beyond the shores of Sri Lanka. If this was true, I will be proud to know one of the oldest languages in the world and share the island with a people speaking that language. Unfortunately, coming from the mouth of a man, who considers all Tamils in Sri Lanka as aliens and intruders, and would prefer them dumped en-masse into the deep sea, I set out to investigate the veracity of his claim and hence the origins of the written scripts of Sinhala and Tamil and their relationship to other languages in the region. I approached this project as an inquisitive layman. I stand to be corrected by trained linguists, etymologists and archeologists, if I am wrong in what I have understood from my efforts.
Brahmi is considered the parent script for most languages used in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma, Bali, Java, Thailand and even Laos. The origins of Brahmi are yet subject to much debate. Whether it originated from a script used in the Indus Valley civilization of old, an Aramaic script introduced from the Middle East or evolved independently from within India, is yet a subject of much debate. Brahmi itself is of two types - the Southern Brahmi and a Northern Brahmi. The Southern Brahmi is considered the parent alphabet of languages such as Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Sinhala, Burminese, Thai, Lao, Balinese, Javanese and others of a similar nature. The Northern Brahmi is the parent for the Nagari type of script as in Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Nepali and Tibetan. The Northern Brahmi is also called the Asokan Brahmi.
Further, whether the Southern and Northern types of Brahmi, independently evolved, or whether one of these was the parent of the other is the subject of much debate. The Brahmi that gave birth to the Tamil script has been called Tamil Brahmi or Tamili/Demali and that which gave rise to the Sinhala script is called the Sinhala Brahmi. The Brahmi alphabet and the differences between Asokan and Southern (Tamil) Brahmi are pictorially presented below. How closely Asokan and Tamil Brahmi (Southern Brahmi) resemble each other is noteworthy. In a history of a people spanning several millennia, would a few centuries or even a thousand years difference in the perceived origin of their languages make any meaningful difference?
The depictions (Pic-3, Pic-4) present how the Tamil Vatteluthu (Rounded alphabets) - a progenitor of modern Tamil alphabet - and the Sinhala alphabet in its various evolutionary forms compare with each other:
Brahmi script has been identified as having appeared by the 5th century BC. Brahmi was the most common script used by King Asoka who ruled between 269-232 BC. Brahmi inscriptions belonging to Asoka's period have been found in rock shelters in Sri Lanka. The language used in the Brahmi inscriptions of Sri Lanka and those of Asoka is Prakrit - a colloquial form of Sanskrit. The inscriptions using Brahmi characters have also been discovered in Tamil Nadu rock shelters and pottery fragments. The earliest language used is Tamil with a mixture of Prakrit words. Scripts earlier than Tamil-Brahmi have not been so far discovered in Tamil Nadu. The Sinhala alphabet has been identified as appearing in rock inscriptions during the 3rd and 2nd century B.C. Both the alphabet and language have changed considerably since then and the earliest surviving Sinhala literature dates from the 9th century AD. A broken jar with Tamil Brahmi inscriptions found in Quseir-al-Qadim, an ancient Red Sea port in Egypt, has been dated to the first century BC. The earliest Tamil epigraphic records have been estimated to be around 300 BC.
An intermediary alphabet that evolved from the ancient Brahmi is Grantham, which has influenced most South Indian and Sri Lankan languages including Sinhala and Tamil.
The comparison between the Grantham alphabet, Malayalam, Sinhalese and Tamil is given in (Pic-6, Pic-7):
It should be also noted 'Elu' is an ancient form of the Sinhala language, from which the modern vernacular has been derived. Elu is thought to be an older form of Sinhala by many, and a type of Prakrit by others. Organizations such as 'Hela Havula' consider Elu entirely native to Sri Lanka. There are also Tamil scholars who consider Elu to be an ancient form of Tamil. The modern alphabets of various languages currently in use in India and Sri Lanka are presented below to once again show resemblances that point to common origins:
Tamil and Sinhala, as languages have also been identified as sharing more than 4000 words and have an almost similar grammatical structure. I was surprised to hear the word ‘Thooral’ referring to a drizzle in Tamil being used in the Wattala area by Sinhalese with reference to rain. Similarly in the Negombo area, ants are referred to as ‘Sithraam Pootchi’ (Poochi - insect in Tamil), by many Sinhalese. While the Sinhalese can justifiably claim a large number of Sinhala words are used in Tamil, Tamils could also in turn justifiably claim that a large number of Tamil words are used in Sinhala. What appears reasonable in a historic context is that both Tamils and Sinhalese have much in common because of their common origins as peoples and the common origins of their languages.
Evolution whether biological, cultural or linguistic is an ever diverging process. The diversity when traced back, only points to a less divergent past and if can be traced far enough, to common origins. Every person, tribe, nation or race can claim to a pre-eminent place in matters pertaining to language, culture, religion and even biological make-up, and rightly so, because we have a common origin. Evolution guarantees that we try to unconsciously preserve what we are familiar with, through a sense of pride, which ensures diversity within our essential unity. However, evolution ensures that we keep on changing slowly and steadily with time biologically and in all other aspects relating to life, to ensure that we are fit to survive. We are all essentially the same in all aspects relating to our lives, while appearing and even trying to be different. This is the unity in our diversity. Language is only a tool for communication, and with time evolved into a medium to express our thoughts, deeds and culture. Languages have been grouped into families based on their similarities and I am sure evolved, as I had referred to in my last column and if the theory of evolution and anthropologic findings prove correct, from a primordial form of language spoken somewhere in Africa - probably a primordial form of Bantu.
The Sinhalese and Tamils have to take the giant step towards the future and cease to dwell morbidly in the past, however much we believe it was glorious. Life in the past - ancient and the middle-ages - was a mixture of what it is today - good, bad and the ugly. It could not have been otherwise. It is the propensity for us as humans to remember the good and forget the bad. If not, we could not have survived as a species this long. If not, we would have drowned in our grief a long time back in our evolutionary history. It is our politicians, for their pecuniary needs and desire for power, who keep glorifying the past to make us forget the present - a rather undesirable reality of their making.
In biology, with reference to our embryological development it is said ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ - our embryological development is a repeat of our evolutionary development as a species. Life is supposed to have originated in the seas and we as embryos develop in the womb as an entity floating in fluids. This is one aspect of the above concept. Similarly in life, ‘Where we go in the future is determined by where we have been in the past.’ While we have to carry our collective experiences as a people and as individuals, from the past into the future; we should not try to go back into the past.
Sri Lanka, is yet unfortunately a captive of its past and is unable to develop the dynamics to break out of this imprisonment, because of the efforts of our unsavoury politicians and noisy societal leadership. The antiquity of the languages we owe allegiance, the religions we profess and the history we claim as a people, are over-burdening our politics in a manner that is preventing us from becoming what we are capable of. The search Champika Ranawake set me has of course shown me he may be right in claiming Sinhala is 3000 years old, but he was wrong in asserting it is older than any language in India. Tamil is as old, if not older than Sinhala. This interesting experience made me gain greater insight into human evolution and see the merit in the pride different people feel about their respective identities! It is unfortunate, the facts that could be garnered to stress our essential unity, are being mustered by our politicians with great vigour to foster dissention, violence and bloodshed in Sri Lanka.
- The Colombo Post
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