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BOUNDARIES, DYNAMICS AND CONSTRUCTION OF TRADITIONS IN SOUTH ASIA
II. Discos, Conditions and Dynamics of Tradition in South Asia
self-evident, and is always in need of verification. It should also be clear that people who like their traditions do not for that reason necessarily like their past. Indeed, historical research that brings to light that this or that tradition does not really continue a feature or habit from the past may not always be welcomed. The lover of traditional dances may not be pleased to learn that the dances he is so fond of are in fact a recent creation. This implies that traditions, once in place, may have a tendency to force the past into a straight jacket: the past has to be seen in this particular way, and dissonant opinions are not accepted.
Classical Indian culture has many traditions, and does not look upon these as mere sources of amusement. Traditions constitute the heart of much that we call classical Indian culture, and no pains are spared to preserve these traditions and keep them alive. This applies to the present, but also to the past. There are plenty of reasons to believe that traditions played an important role during much of Indian history. Since in each tradition a vision of this or that aspect of the past is implied, the network of traditions that make up classical Indian culture is inseparable from a vision of India's past, which is, to be sure, multifaceted and complex. An especially important tradition, which often serves as a sort of backbone to some of the others and which has a particularly close bearing on this vision of India's past, is the Vedic tradition. The importance of this tradition, or more precisely of the textual corpus that is preserved by this tradition, is illustrated by the fact that certain other traditions have borrowed its name: Veda. India's longest, oldest and most important Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, calls itself the fifth Veda. The fundamental text on Sanskrit dramaturgy and related matters, the Nalyasastra of Bharata, makes a similar claim. Indian medicine is known by the name ayurveda, the Veda of long life. Other traditions claim links to the Veda without necessarily borrowing its name. Obviously these traditions felt that they could add to their prestige by imitating the Veda, or by claiming a close connection with it.
The Veda occupies a very special position in the vision of India's past that came to predominate in brahmanical circles. Briefly put, the Veda is, or is closely connected with, the origin of all there is. The most traditional representatives of Vedic orthodoxy, known by the name Mimamsakas, maintained that the Veda has no beginning in time at all, it has always been there. This they often linked up with the idea that the world has no beginning either, that it too was always there, essentially in the same form in which we know it. Other cur rents of thought do accept that the world we live in had a beginning in time, but do not accept that the Veda was created along with all the other things that constitute this world; on the contrary, creation itself was determined by, or carried out in accordance with, the words of the Veda. In this view the Veda predates the creation of our present world. The creation of our world itself is often thought of as the most
recent installment of an infinitely long series of creations, which has no beginning in time. The Veda stands above or outside this infinite series, and is sometimes depicted as being pronounced anew at the beginning of each new creation, exactly in the same form as in all the preceding ones.
This timelessness of the Veda also finds expression in other ways. The language of the Veda, i.e. Sanskrit, is as eternal and as unchangeable as the Veda itself. Language change does occur, but not in the language of the Veda, but in its corruptions which have led to the many languages that are spoken today. 'Development is hardly the term to be used for this process, which is rather an ongoing process of corruption of the original perfect language which is Sanskrit
The essential timelessness of the Veda-or at any rate its hoary antiquity, which amounts pretty much to the same thing has not disappeared from India with the arrival of modernity. There may not be all that many people left these days who maintain that the Veda is literally beginningless and eternal, numerous are those who assign to the Veda incredibly ancient dates. Nor has the Veda stopped, in the Indian semi-popular imagination, being the beginning and source of all that it is worth knowing. "Rescarch' discovers evidence for the presence of the most recent scientific and technological develop ments in the Veda, and many a Hindu may expect that further research into this ancient textual tradition may bring to light useful knowledge such as, for example, a cure for aids.
Modern scholarship, one would expect, is not influenced by this traditional attitude towards the Veda. This optimistic expectation is not in total agreement with the facts. Modern indological scholar ship, which was initially a european affair, brought along with it its own set of presuppositions, which were in some respects not all that different from the Indian beliefs.
Note, to begin with, that the discovery of Sanskrit by european scholarship came at a time when the idea of India as the cradle of all civilization had numerous adherents in Europe. Edwin Bryant enumerates a number of representatives of this position, among them the astronomer Bailly and Voitaire, Pierre de Sonnerat, Schelling, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Johann-Gottfried Herder (Bryant 2001: 18 ft). Sanskrit came in this way to be looked upon not just as one branch language of the Indo-European family, but as its parent-language, or at ány rate very close to it. Lord A. Curzon, the governor general of India and eventual chancellor of Oxford, maintained as late as 1855 that "the race of India branched out and multiplied into that of the great Indo-European family". Scholarly interest for Sanskrit remained for a long time inseparable from the quest for the original Indo-European language. As in India, the study of Sanskrit remained also in Europe for quite a while closely linked to the quest for origins.
These romantic ideas about India did not survive for long among serious scholars, at least not in these extreme forms. It was soon discov
