Chapter 7: BONDS OF LANGUAGE
Naga was frustrated. It was nearly a week since the library encounter, and he still could not recall where he had seen Ganapathy before. He made daily visits to the library and the Anna memorial with Maya but the old man was nowhere to be seen.
Meanwhile, Maya was adjusting well, spending a considerable time at the Madras Archives. She also met some professors at the Madras Institute of Development Studies and Madras School of Economics, who gave her valuable inputs. In the evenings, they met his other friends in the city. Mathew and Ruby remained her favorite couple, and she bonded well with them.
Naga and Maya had grown closer together over the past seven days, but nothing physical. He admired her, stealing glances of her curvaceous body, having passionate dreams every night. Each passing day, she looked more desirable but he was afraid to make the first move. His roommate would be back soon and time was running out.
Maya still found the local food unpalatable, although Naga had taken her to all the popular restaurants in the city. At home he tried cooking exotic dishes that turned out to be major flops. He realized she missed her home food and made a mental note to visit Corea Town soon.
Have been putting it off for too long.
Today was Monday and he had to return back to work after a week, having made plans to keep Maya busy till the evening. First, there was the conference on 'Dravidian Culture' organized by the Dravidian Institute of Technology, for which he had registered her participation. After that, Ruby promised to pick her up and go shopping at Spencer’s Plaza. By the time they finished, he would be ready to join them for dinner on Mount Road.
The conference was a sort of revelation for Maya. There were a lot of interesting presentations, and she hoped to take a deeper look at the seminar booklet later.
It was definitely a goldmine for her research, as she got a deep insight into various aspects of the Dravidian culture, and managed to meet a lot of professors to exchange notes. They were very helpful, but she suspected they were a little too biased against the so-called Aryans.
The underlying theme seemed to be that the Aryans arrived in North India somewhere from Iran and southern Russia at around 1500 BC and conquered the indigenous Dravidian people. They were ruthless, disregarded the local cultures, and began taking control over regions, pushing the local people southwards. The caste system was established during this period to subjugate the darker skinned Dravidians.
Almost all the participants agreed that the Hindu religious stories about the many wars between gods and the dark skinned demons actually referred to Aryans and Dravidians. As far as they were concerned, it was just one aspect of cultural imperialism that justified their civil war.
In fact, a professor from Kerala pointed out that some Hindu gods were Dravidian and other gods Aryan. In particular, Shiva is a Dravidian god and not a Vedic god because he is not prominent in the Rig Veda, the oldest Vedic text. Some hold that Shaivism is a South Indian religion and the Vedic religion is North Indian. He received the loudest applause.
In the afternoon session on languages, she learned that Aryan languages like Hindi had been heavily influenced by Sanskrit, unlike the Dravidian languages. Their ways of developing words and grammar are also different.
She was surprised to know that the Dravidian family of languages comprises 27 languages spread across the entire subcontinent, while she was under the impression that there were just four. But, what absolutely took her by shock was a presentation on the similarities between Dravidian and other world languages.
Professor Robert Cadwell from Harvard University hypothesized that Dravido-Corean languages are a language family that links Tamil to Corean, the similarities were first noted by French missionaries who traveled between the two regions.
‘Some scholars believe Corean to be a language isolate. Others believe that the language and people from the South Pacific region are closely related to Dravida. There is also linguistic, anthropological and archeological evidence that Corean may be connected to the Austronesian languages, but I tend to believe the theory that early Tamil people migrated to the Corean peninsula,’ he said.
As proof, he referred to the work by a Corean researcher, Kim Jung-nam, who founded the Korean Society of Tamil Studies and identified close to 500 cognates and about 60 phonological correspondence pairs between the languages.
‘Moreover, both the languages are grammatically similar, and in both the letter 'l' is interchangeable with 'r' and words cannot begin with them.’
That is interesting. How can Dravidian languages and Corean be interrelated?
She hurriedly opened the appendix attached to his presentation and was greeted with a list of similar words. Appā, Ammā, Eonni, Nuna, Nā, Nī, Tām, Aigu, Nāḷ...it went on.
‘Tamil and Corean have the same syntactic characteristics: the word order subject-object-verb, postpositions instead of prepositions, no relative pronouns, modifiers in front of the head noun, copula and existential as two distinct grammatical parts of speech,’ Cadwell continued.
Maya decided to meet with the professor after the conference and have a lengthy chat. This was by far the most shocking news she had heard since arriving in Madras.
How come no ordinary Corean knows it? Everyone thinks it is related to Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian languages, some also believe that it is related to Turkish, but never Dravidian languages.
She lost her chance as Professor Cadwell rushed out after giving his presentation without even waiting for the customary question and answer session.
He will surely be here for the closing ceremony.
An hour later, as the valedictory speech was being wrapped up, she looked around trying to locate him again.
Not in sight.
She turned back, and sure enough, he was there in the back row engrossed in conversation. She jumped out of her seat and approached him, not wanting to lose him again, when a sharp familiar voice caught her ear.
‘Robert, the Aryans and Dravidians are part of the same culture, dividing them and placing them at odds with each other is just a mind game,’ the voice thundered.
Professor Ganapathy! When did he come here?
‘Excuse me sir. It's me Maya,’ she said, forgetting the Harvard professor in her excitement.
‘Young lady, can't you see I am busy?’ Ganapathy curtly replied, turning back to his neighbor. ‘I am meeting my dear friend after 10 years.’
Embarrassed, she stood silently on the side, and waited for him to finish the conversation.
‘Nineteenth century was the era of Europeans imperialism. Europeans thinkers of that time were dominated by a racial theory of man, interpreted primarily in terms of skin color,’ he continued. ‘The British promoted the theory of a light-skinned Aryan race ruling a dark Dravidian race.’
‘I beg to differ Ganapathy, Sanskrit and North Indian languages are relatives of the European languages, but the Dravidian languages are entirely different.’
‘Who said so? Dravidian languages have so many Sanskrit words. The European scholars always felt that the original speakers of any root Indo-European language must have been white. The British promoted religious, ethnic and cultural divisions among their colonies to keep us under control, unfortunately some of these policies were subsumed by the so called intellectuals.’
‘So you mean to say that the European scholars invented the concept of Aryan and Dravidian races?’
‘Exactly, the difference between them is not a racial division, the idea is the product of an unscientific and culturally biased thinking, which only looked at race through the narrow prism of color. Scientifically, the only three primary races are Caucasian, Mangolian and Negroid.’
‘I hope what you say is backed up by evidence, because all my research suggests otherwise.’
‘I am sure there will be evidence soon. I believe your university is undertaking a project to analyze 500,000 genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25 diverse groups from 13 state
s.’
‘That is true, my colleague is collaborating with MIT and some Dravidian organizations, once the results come out we will know whether you are right. I know it is difficult to argue with you Ganapathy, but as always it has been a pleasure. I have to rush for a dinner meeting.’
‘So long Robert. Hope to see you again soon. Let me know the results of the project once they are analyzed.’
‘Sure will. One of my students will contact you, maybe we will invite you to Harvard for a lecture.’
‘So young lady, do I know you?’ Ganapathy said, turning towards Maya.
‘Sir, it is me. I met you on Marina Beach and the library?’
‘Oh yes, how could I forget such a beautiful face, I am sorry I am getting old. Why don't you meet me at the library tomorrow, I will get you my article.’
‘I have already read it, and have a few doubts that I wanted to discuss.’
‘OK, 3'O clock at the library... and don't come with that rude friend of yours from The Hindu.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ she replied.
I am sure Naga will be thrilled to know that I finally met him.