Correlations Between Objects and Their Names in Terms of Origins

 

Correlations Between Objects and Their Names in Terms of Origins

 Shrikant G. Talageri

 

In my article “Why Is Indian Culture the Greatest in the World? And why is it in Mortal Peril?” (not a new article: it is an extract from the Voice of India Volume "India's Only Communalist" edited by Koenraad Elst, a Commemoration Volume to Sita Ram Goel published in 2005), I had referred to the practice of Indian musical items and musical instruments being known by names which could be traced to Western Asian (i.e/. Muslim) sources without in any way indicating that those musical items and musical instruments being themselves of Western Asian or Muslim origin:

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2021/09/why-is-indian-culture-greatest-culture.html

“Alain Danielou (“The Ragas of North Indian Music”, p.5) points out that “Amir Khusrau (AD 1253-1319)…wrote that Indian music was so difficult and so refined that no foreigner could totally master it even after twenty years of practice”; and the Muslim attachment to Indian music grew to such an extent that it led to the invention of stories about “how the various styles of Northern Indian music were developed by musicians of the Mohammedan period…Under Moslem rule, age-old stories were retold as if they had happened at the court of Akbar…Such transfer of legends is frequent everywhere. We…find ancient musical forms and musical instruments being given Persian-sounding names and starting a new career as the innovations of the Moghul court”. The sum of it is that many Muslim rulers also contributed in the preservation and perpetuation, and even the enriching, of many aspects of Indian culture.”

But these aspects of Indian culture were still purely Indian aspects, notwithstanding the fact that their most popular (and, in some cases, only surviving or known) names seem to wrongly give the impression that they are of non-Indian origin. Many Indian things have ostensibly Arabic-Persian, or even English, names, not because those things originated in western Asia or Europe, but because, in the course of hundreds of years of rule in India by people drawing their terms from non-Indian sources, these non-Indian words for Indian things became the official words replacing the original local ones.

Perhaps the most glaring examples of this are the word “monsoon” for the Indian rainy season, and the words “kharif” and “rabi” to describe the two harvesting seasons of Indian crops. The former word, though it has not replaced the original words for the rainy season, was the word adopted by the British rulers (for this purely Indian climatic season) from the Arabic word “mausam” (climate, weather) used by the earlier Muslim rulers – although it can be no-one’s claim that the rainy season itself was imported into India by Muslims coming from Arabia. Likewise, agriculture has been practiced in India for thousands of years, and harvesting is an intrinsic part of agricultural activities. Harvesting different crops in season is also a worldwide practice (wherever the climate calls for it), and so was it in India. But the official terms used for it today are Arabic terms: kharif (“autumn” in Arabic) and rabi (“spring” in Arabic). Likewise, many purely Indian fruits have varieties (cultivated strains) with names of foreign origin: two very well-known strains of mangoes (a purely Indian fruit and its purely Indian strains) in Maharashtra-Goa having names derived from the names of the Portuguese persons who cultivated and popularized those strains: hāpūs (Alphonso) and pāyri (Pereira). In such cases, obviously the contribution of people of originally non-Indian origin to the enrichment of our culture has to be acknowledged and appreciated. But it should also be understood whether the contribution pertains to development/innovation, popularization or officialization of some existing Indian cultural item, or outright foreign contribution.    

 

On the other hand, foreign names have entered India with many originally foreign items or products. And, there are countless cases where foreign names do indicate foreign origin. And the names are not always necessarily brought in by people who came from foreign countries as invaders (whether they later also became rulers or not), but can be simply the spread of names by cultural diffusion, often resulting from trade and commerce.

As I pointed out in various articles, for example the following:

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-origins-of-yoga.html

“Even small things borrowed leave linguistic traces. Plants, for example, usually take their original names with them. The English or Indian names ananas, papaya, chiku/sapota, potato/batata, tomato/tamatar, tobacco/tambaku, cocoa, cashew/kaju, guava/peru, chilli are not English or Indian names: they are derivatives of native American names for the products which came from the Americas. Chai/tea are also not Indian or English names, they are Chinese names for the product which originally came from China (although later a separate Indian sub-species was discovered by the British in Assam and became Indian tea). Coffee/kapi is a late import from West Asia, although a native of Africa, and the names are derived from the Arabic name qahwah (originally a kind of wine). The word pepper is derived from the Indian word pippali. Sugar and gur are derived from Sanskrit names in most world languages, and jaggery from Dravidian names. Mango is derived from Dravidian mangay. The list is a very long one.

Every religion, whether Buddhism, Christianity or Islam, which spread over originally different areas, also carried with it a huge corpus of religious terms and words which point towards the language spoken by the original or earliest followers of that religion in its land of origin.

Similarly, in the case of games like chess, EJR Murray, in his "History of Chess" points out that "early Persian and Arabic tradition is unanimous in ascribing the game of chess to India" (p.26), but the linguistic evidence alone is sufficient. The Indian game, called chaturanga, became shatranj in Arabia, chator in Malaysia, chhôeu trâng in Vietnam, and shatara in Mongolia.

The same is the case with the Indian game pachisi or chaupar, known commercially as ludo, played all over India from ancient times (it is said to be mentioned as pasha in the Mahabharata, and is certainly depicted in the frescoes of Chandraketugarh from 100 BCE). It spread all over Asia, and local traditions as well as the local names (barjis or barsis in West Asia, parchis in Spain and Morocco, ch'u pu in ancient Chinese texts of the Song dynasty) testify to its Indian origin.”

 

In fact, in some cases, the total absence of specific foreign terms can be positive proof of “no foreign origin”, as for example to suggestions that Yoga is ultimately of foreign (specifically Chinese) origin:

“The first flaw is that there is no tradition on either side (in China or in India) that any essential aspect of Yoga was borrowed from China. In fact, Koenraad points out in his power point that the "Chinese themselves arguably located origin abroad". However arguable it may be, it cannot be arguable to the extent that it shows that the Chinese actually originated and then loaned most of the essential points of Yoga to India. There is definitely no such tradition, arguable or otherwise, in India, locating the origin of Yoga abroad.

But the bigger flaw is that there is not even the tiniest linguistic hint of this alleged borrowing from China.”. Not a single term in Indian yoga has even the faintest original connection with China: “The human intellect is equally active in all advanced intellectual cultures, and often traverses similar paths, and ancient Indian thinkers have left extremely few ideas totally untouched. Unless traditional testimony and/or linguistic evidence show something, such claims are superficial.  Note that, when examples of interaction surface, the evidence is very clear: Koenraad himself gives an example, where, in sexual activities, cīnacāra "the Chinese practice" apparently means "saving semen while kindling pleasure in the woman in order to prolong the man's life". Here, there is no subterfuge. It is inconceivable that any major and fundamental contributions by China to Indian Yoga could have been so successfully hidden or totally blanked out.”

 

In the case of Indian culture, as already detailed above in respect of Indian music and agricultural practices, the adoption of non-Indian names for Indian cultural items happened in many fields: for example, in the field of food (or culinary issues). I dealt with this in my following articles:

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2023/04/are-idlis-of-foreign-origin.html 

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2023/06/after-idlis-it-is-now-chutneys.html 

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2023/06/an-arabic-word-halwa-makes-all-indian.html

 

And there are regular agenda-based writers determined to propagate foreign origins for many purely Indian cultural items (sometimes not even on any linguistic basis). It is necessary to deal with this kind of thing. In fact, long before I started out on my research into “Aryan” issues, my dream project in my college days was to produce a complete Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Indian Culture (covering in detail all cultural aspects − including topography, climatic types, races and languages, flora and fauna, music and dance, arts and crafts, literature, religious and philosophical schools, architecture, culinary arts, physical systems, beauty culture, etc.− and all Indian cultures right down to the distinctive Andamanese culture). Part of that project was also to deal with agenda-based attempts to deny credit to India where credit was due. Not of course as an agenda in itself, but in a bid to bring out the Truth in all these matters. As I pointed out in my above article on the Origins of Yoga:

“I am not an Indian chauvinist, at least certainly not in the sense of wanting to deny genuine contributions to Indian culture from outside — even in my work on the Rigveda, I have pointed out that both the main rituals of the Rigveda, the fire ritual and the Soma ritual, were contributed to the Vedic ṛṣis (Aṅgirases, the priests of the Vedic Pūrus) by the priests (Bhṛgus) of the non-Vedic Proto-Iranian Anus to their west, and while these Anus and their priests were as Indian as the Vedic Pūrus and their priests, the Soma ritual was not: it was originally borrowed by the Bhṛgus from other people of Central Asia to their northwest, which I would not say was from "within India".”

Therefore, in every individual case, it is necessary to use one’s viveka-buddhi in examining the particular evidence in the particular case before alleging, or for that matter denying, foreign origin. And also in understanding the extent, if any, of the foreign contribution, and the degree to which it becomes an inalienable part of Indian culture.