India

How does one write a mere blog-entry about India? A single country, one-third the size of Europe (India 1,269,210 square miles, Europe 3,930,000 square miles), but rather different proportions when it comes to population (Europe 731 million people; India 1 billion people), or to language (India had, until the middle of the 20th century, 780 languages, though only 560 of those exist today; Europe has just 23, and most of those are variants of either Latin or German, though they may well actually be variants of Sanskrit, and Sanskrit, like Greek and Hebrew, may well be a variant of Hittite - I shall come back to that in a moment).

It is not known for certain where human civilisation started, though favoured candidates include the land between the two rivers of Iraq, the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the land between the two rivers of India, the Indus and the Ganges, where great cities such as Mohenjodaro and Harappa grew up as early as the 3rd millennium BCE, though this was late by Indian standards; the earliest known village, Mehergarh, was probably founded in the 7th millennium BCE, and Harappa grew out of a very much earlier settlement, known as Kot Diji.

The links between India and Europe are the ones that fascinate me. The earliest "native" Indians were the Dravidians, who mostly occupied the southern continent and Sri Lanka (Ceylon); it is highly probable that the Druids of Europe, and particularly of England, were the same people, for the testimony of their beliefs, rites, ceremonies, rituals and practices overlap quite remarkably, beyond the mere coincidence of the parallel names. 

The discovery of these commonalities belongs originally to William Jones, an 18th century English polyglot who made his name by publishing "A Grammar of the Persian Language" in 1771, and then, to show off his linguistic skills, a set of translations of poems from various Asian languages, followed by a translation of seven pre-Islamic Arabic odes known as "The Moallakát". Jones moved to India in 1783, appointed as a judge at the supreme court in Calcutta and honoured with a knighthood. He is fondly remembered by Indians for his insistence that Indians had the same civil and legal rights as their English rajas; he is not remembered by the English as a judge at all, but only for his establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which effectively began what today is taken for granted in western universities: international scientific and humanistic projects that would be unhindered by social, ethnic, religious and political barriers. The idea of Schools of African or Oriental Studies began with William Jones.

Jones taught himself Sanskrit in order to understand both Hindu and Moslem law better, and noticed a number of surprising similarities with Greek and Latin words: brother (bhratar) and father (pitar), king (raja) , god (deva), for example, or the names of numbers

Number	Sanskrit	Latin	Greek
1	éka	unus	mono-
2	dvá	duo	di-
3	trí	tres	tri-
4	catúr	quattuor	tetra-
5	páñca	quinque	pañca
6	sás	sex	hexa-
7	saptá	septem	hepta-
8	astá	octo	octa-
9	náva	novem	ennea-
10	dása	decem	deca-

Jones found thousands of these, and published them in "The Sanscrit Language" in 1786, establishing the concept of "the common source" which many etymologists now deny, while others believe they have traced that common source back to the Hittites of Anatolia, one of the world’s first empires, and significantly one that stretched east into the land between the Indus and the Ganges, south into the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and west into the lands of what would become the Hebrews, Greeks and Latins. You can follow the implications of that for western civilisation, and particularly for Judeo-Christian civiliation, at TheBibleNet.

Marks For/Against: 0 at the moment, but only because an important dispute has started; India is one of the BRIC nations, the four emerging economies whose emergence has fallen a touch backwards since the 2008 recession - Brazil, Russia and China are the other three, and they are all in serious decline. India is now finding it difficult to be a BRIC nation, and also the recipient of vast amounts of foreign aid, when it is itself now a major aid-donor to countries far worse off than itself (click here for more detail). India is in transition; marks are suspended while it sorts itself out.



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