The Crow’s Domain

Chandamama is hosting some of its archival editions online for free view. Along with Amar Chitra Katha, Chandamama is probably one of the most extensive ‘popular’ documenter of folklore in India. I’m slowly going through the back issues accessible online and they are an absolute treat. I only hope they decide to make all of their rich archives available online preferably for free. I’m including one of the stories I read and liked.

The ‘authentic’ tree

In his paper “The Command of Language and the Language of Command” (Subaltern Studies IV) Bernard Cohn describes the successive labours of various Europeans during the 18th century in compiling dictionaries and thesauri of Indian languages. This task necessitated a Latinization of Indian languages – the tracing of a “root” /”original” / “pure” ancient language to which all other languages could trace their ancestry.

“Sir William Jones, in his declaration of the relationship of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit in 1785, provided the impetus for the development, largely by German scholars, of comparative philology, which in turn supplied the ‘scientific’ model for the comparative study of law, religion and society… The theory of language implicit in the comparative method is that there are ‘genetic’ or ‘genealogical’ relations among languages which have been determined to belong to a ‘family’. What is posited is that there was once a single, original language from which all the languages in the family descend. .. The goal of the method was to establish a history; those features which appear from formal comparison as the most common in the family of languages were thought to be the most ‘authentic’. The end of the exercise was the reconstruction of ‘the unrecorded languages of the past'”

“The power of the comparative method was that it enabled the practitioner to classify, bound and control variety and difference. At a phenomenological level the British discovered hundreds of languages and dialects, and these could be arranged into neat diagrams and tables which showed the relationship of languages to each other. AS with genealogies, which could represent all the members ofa ‘family’ or descent group virtually as a tree with a root, a trunk, branches and even twigs, so cold dialects and languages be similarly represented and grouped. Significantly, the trees always seemed to be Northern European ones, like oaks and maples, and the British never seemed to think of using the most typical South Asian tree, the banyan, which grew up, out and down at the same time.