Mathura A District Memoir Chapter-12
IN this, the concluding chapter of the general narrative, I propose to investi gate the principles upon which the local nomenclature of Upper India has been and still is being unconsciously constructed. The inquiry is one of considerable importance to the student of language; but it has never yet been approached in a scientific spirit, and the views which are here advanced respecting this terra incognita in the philologist’s map must be regarded as a first exploration, which is unavoidably tentative and imperfect. Many points of detail will pos sibly demand future rectification; but the general outline of the subject, the fixed limits within which it is contained and some of its more characteristic features of interior development have, it is hoped, been satisfactorily ascertained and delineated with a fair amount of precision.
It is not to be inferred from this prelude that a subject of such obvious inter est has hitherto been totally neglected. On the contrary, it has given rise to a vast number of speculations, but all of the most haphazard description. And this from two causes; the first being a perverse misconception as to the verna cular language of the country; and the second, the absence up to the present time of any list of names sufficiently complete to supply a basis for a really thorough induction.
It seems a very obvious truism, and one that requires no elaborate defence to maintain, that the names of a country and of the places in it should prima facie, and in default of any direct evidence to the contrary, be referred to the language of the people who inhabit them rather than to any foreign source. This, however, is the very point which most writers on the subject have failed to see. In order to explain why the founder of an Indian village gave his infant settlement the name, by which it is still known among his descendants, our laborious philo logists have ransacked vocabularies of all the obscurest dialects of Europe, but have left their Sanskrit and Hindi dictionaries absolutely unopened.
A more curious illustration of a deliberate resolve to ignore obvious facts for the sake of introducing a startling theory based on some obscure and utterly problematical analogy could. Scarcely be found than is afforded by Dr. Hunter in his Dissertation on non-Ayan languages. In this he refers the familiar local termination ganw (which argumenti gratia he spells gang or gating, though never so written in any Indian vernacular) to the Chinese hiang, "the Tibetan thiong, the Lepcha kyong, &c., &c., and refuses to acknowledge any connexion between it and the Sanskrit grama. Yet as certainly as Anglo-Saxon was once the language of England, so was Sanskrit of Upper India; and it seems as reasonable to deny the relationship between grama and ganw as between the English affix bury or borough and the Saxon burg. The formation is strictly in accord with the rules laid down by the Prakrit grammarian’s centuries before the word ganw had actually come in existence. Thus by Vararuchi’s Sutra--Sarvatra la-va-ram, III., 3—the letter r when compounded with another consonant, whether it stands first or last, is always to be elided; as we see in the Hindi bat for the Sanskrit varta, in kos for krosa, a measure of distance, and in pem for preman, love. So grama passes into gama, and whether this latter form or ganw is used depends simply upon the will of the speaker; one man calls the place where he lives Naugama, another calls it Naughaw, in the same way as it is optional to say Edinbro ‘or Edinborough. For in Hindi as in Sanskrit a nasal can always be inserted at pleasure, according to the memorial line—Savindukavindukayoh syad abhede na kalpanam: and the distinction between m and v or w has always been very slightly marked; for example, dhimar is the recognized literary Hindi form of the Sanskrit dhivar and at the present day villagers generally write Bhamani for Bhawani, though the latter form only is admitted in printed books. If speculation is allowed to run riot with regard to the paternity of such a word as ganw, every step in the descent of which is capable of the clearest proof, then philology is still a science of the future, and the whole history of language must be rewritten from the very commencement.
Perhaps of all countries in the world, northern India is the one which for an investigation of this kind is the most self-contained and the least in need of alien analogies. Its literary records date from a very remote period; are, in fact, far more ancient than any architectural remains, or even than any well-authenticated site, or definitely established era, and they form a continuous and unbroken chain down to this very day. From the Sanskrit of the Vedas to the more polished language of the Epic poems, and through the Prakrit of the dramatists, the old Hindi of Chand and the Braj Bhasha of Tulsi Das, down to the current speech of the rural population of Mathura at the present time, the transitions are never violent, and at most points are all but imperceptible. The language, as we clearly see from the specimens which we have of it in all its successive phases, is uniform and governed throughout by the same phonetic laws. And thus, neither from the intrinsic evidence of indigenous literature, nor from the facts recorded by history, is it permissible to infer the simultaneous existence in the country of an alien-speaking race at any period, to which it is reasonable to refer the foundation of places that still bear a distinctive name, prior to the Muhammadan invasion. The existence of such a race is simply assumed by those who find it convenient to represent as non-Aryan any forma tion which their acquaintance with unwritten Aryan speech in its growth and decay is too superficial to enable them at once to identify.
As local etymology is a subject which can only be investigated on the spat, and therefore lies beyond the range of European scholars, its study is necessarily affected by the prejudices peculiar to Anglo-Indian officials, who are so accus tomed to communicate with their subordinates only through the medium of Urdu that most of them regard that lingua franca as being really what it is call ed in official parlance, the vernacular of the country. This familiarity with the speech of the small Muhammadan section of the community, rather than with that of the Hindu masses, causes attention to be mainly directed to the study of Persian and Arabic, which are considered proper to the country, while Sanskrit is thought to be utterly dead, of no interest save to professional scholars and of no more practical import in determining the value of current phrases than Greek or Hebrew.
The prejudice is to be regretted, as it frequently leads writers, even in the best informed London periodicals, to speak of India as if it were a purely Muhammadan country, and to urge upon the Government, as highly conciliatory, measures which—if taken—would most effectually alienate the sympathies of the vast majority.
Neither Urdu, Persian, nor Arabic, is of much service in tracing the derivation of local names, and it is hastily concluded that words which are unintelligible when referred to those recognized sources must therefore be non-Indian, and may with as much probability be traced up to one foreign language as another. Any distortion of the name of a town or village which makes it bear some resemblance to a Persian or Arabic root is ordinarily accepted as a plausible explanation; thus Khanpur is substituted for Kanhpur and Ghazipur for Gadhipur, Gadhi, the father. of Visvamitra, being a character not very widely known; while on the other hand a derivation from the Sanskrit by the application of well-established but less popularly known phonetic and gramma tical laws, is stigmatized as pedantic and honestly considered to be more farfetched than a derivation from the Basque or the Lithuanian.
This may seem an exaggerated statement; but I speak from personal experience and with special reference to a critic who wrote that he thought the identification of Maholi with Madhupuri far more improbable than its connection with the Basque and Toda word uri, which is said to mean ‘a village.’
Such philological vagaries have their birth in the unfortunate preference for Urdu, which the English Government has inherited from the former conquerors of the country, though without any of their good reasons for the preference. They are further fostered by a wide-spread idea as to the character the people and the country, which in itself is perfectly correct and wrong y in the particular application. The Hindus are an eminently conservative race, and their civilization dates from an extremely remote period. It is therefore, inferred that most of their existing towns and villages are of very ancient foundation and, if so, may bear names to which no parallel can be expected in the modern vernacular. This hypothesis is disproved by what has been said above as to the continuity of Indian speech it is further at variance with all local traditions. The present centres of population, as any one can ascertain for himself, if he will only visit the spots instead of speculating about them in his study, are almost all subsequent in origin to the Muhammadan invasion. When they were founded, the language of the new settlers, whatever it may have been in pre-historic times, was certainly not Turanian, but Aryan, as it is now; and though any place, which had previously been inhabited, must already have borne some name, the cases in which that old name was retained would be very rare. Thus, it may be remarked in passing, the present discussion supplies no ethnical argument with regard to the original population of the country. The names, once regarded as barbarous, but now recognized as Aryan, must be abandoned as evidence of the existence of a non-Aryan race; but, at the same time, since they are essentially modern, they cannot be taken as supporting the counter-theory. The names of the rivers, however, which also are mostly Aryan, may fairly be quoted as bearing on, the point for of all local names these are the least liable to change, as we see in America and our Colonies, where it is as exceptional to find a river with an English name as it is to find a town with an Indian one. And a still stronger and more numerously attested proof is afforded by the indigenous trees, nearly all of which (as may be seen from the list given in an appendix to this volume) have names that are unmistakably of Sanskrit origin.
Moreover, Hindu conservatism, though it doubtless exists, is developed in a very different way from the principle known by the same name in Europe. Least of all is it shown in any regard for ancient buildings, whether temples or homesteads. Though Christianity is a modern faith as compared with Hin duism, and though the history of English civilization begins only from a time when the brightest period of Indian history had already closed, the material evidences of either fact are found in inverse order in the two countries. There is not a single English county which does not contain a longer and more venerable series of secular and ecclesiastical edifices than can be supplied by an Indian district or it might even be said by an entire Presidency. Thus the temple of Govind Deva at Brinda-ban, which is popularly known in the neigh bourhood as ‘the old temple ‘par excellence, dates only from the reign of Akbar, the contemporary of Elizabeth, and is therefore far more modern than any single village church in the whole of England, barring those that have been built since the revival by the present generation. The same also with MSS. The Hindus had a voluminous literature while the English were still unable to write; but at the present day in India a MS 200 years old is more of a rarity than one five times that age in England. This complete disappearance from the surface of all material records of antiquity is no doubt attributable in great measure to the operation of the two most destructive forces in the known world, viz., white-ants and Muhammadans; but the Hindus themselves are not altogether free from blame in the matter. As if from a reminiscence of their nomadic origin, with all their modern superstitious dislike to a move far from home, is combined an inveterate tendency to slip away gradually from the old landmarks. The movement is not necessitated by growth of population, which, as in London, for instance, can no longer be contained within the original city bounds, but is a result of the Oriental idiosyncrasy that makes every man desire, not—in accordance with European ideas—to found a family or restore an old ancestral residence, but rather to leave some building exclusively comme morative of himself, and to touch nothing that his predecessors have commenced, lest they should have all the credit of it with posterity. The history of Eng land, which runs all in one cycle from the time of its first civilization, affords no ground for comparison; but in mediaeval Italy the course of events was somewhat parallel, and, as in India, a second empire was built up on the ruins of a former one of equal or greater grandeur and extent. In it we find the modern cities retaining under some slight dialectical disguises the very same names as of old and occupying the same ground: in India, on the other hand, there is scarcely an historic site which is not now desolation. Again, to pass from political to merely local disturbances: when London was rebuilt after the Great Fire, its streets, in spite of all Wren‘s remonstrances, were laid out exactly as before, narrow and irregular as they had grown up piece by piece in the course of centuries, and with even the churches on their old sites, though the latter had become useless in consequence of the change in the national religion, which required one or two large arenas for the display of pulpit eloquence rather than many secluded oratories for private devotion. When a similar calamity befell an Indian city, as it often did, the position of the old shrines was generally marked by rude commemorative stones, but the people made no difficulty about abandoning the exact sites of their old homes, if equally eligible spots offered themselves in the neighbourhood.
The same diversity of conservative ideas runs through the whole character: the Hindu quotes the practice of his father and grandfather and persuades himself that he is as they were, and that they were as their forefathers, uncon scions of any change and ignoring the evidence of it that is afforded by ancient monuments, both literary and architectural. The former he prizes only for their connexion with the sect to which he himself belongs; whatever is illus trative of an alien faith he consigns to destruction without any regard for its history or artistic significance; and in an ancient building, if it has fallen into disuse, he sees no beauty and can take no interest; though this can scarcely be from the feeling that he can easily replace it with a better, a conviction which led our mediaeval architects to destroy without compunction any part of an earlier cathedral, however beautiful in itself, which had become decayed or too small for later requirements. In all these matters England is far more critically conservative; believing in nothing, we tolerate everything; and profoundly distrusting our own creative faculties, we preserve as models whatever we can rescue from the past, either in art or literature. These reflections may seem to wander rather far from the mark; but they explain the curious equipoise that prevails in the Indian mind between a profound contempt for antiquity and an equally profound veneration for it. The very slight regard in which ancient sites are held is illustrated by the use of the terms ‘Little ‘and ‘Great ‘as local prefixes. In consequence of the ten dency to shift the centre of population, these seldom afford information as to the comparative area and importance of the two villages so distinguished: most frequently the one styled ‘Little ‘will be the larger of the two. In some cases the prefix ‘Great’ implies only that when the common property was divided among the sons of the founder, the share so designated fell to the lot of the eldest; but ordinarily it denotes the original village site, which has been wholly or at least partially abandoned, or so diminished by successive parti tions that it has eventually become the smallest and least important of the group.
The foregoing considerations will, I trust, be accepted as sufficiently demonstrating the reasonableness of my general position that local names in Upper India are, as a rule, of no very remote antiquity, and are prima facie referable to Sanskrit and Hindi rather than to any other language. Their formation has certainly been regulated by the same principles that we see underlying the local nomenclature of other civilized countries, and we may therefore expect to find them falling into three main groups, as follows:
I. Names compounded with an affix denoting place. II. Names compounded with an affix denoting possession. III. A more indefinite class, including all names without any affix at all; such words being for the most part either the name of the founder, or an epithet descriptive of some striking local feature.