NATIONAL 9 (Spotlight Weelky)]

Literary History

Nepali may have descended from Sanskrit, but it pulsates with the culture and traditions of the country

By AKSHAY SHARMA

The growth of Nepali into a modern unifying language that has brought together the kingdom’s diverse ethnic and linguistic groups is a story that is firmly intertwined with the evolution of our nationhood. An Indo-Aryan language, Nepali is widely spoken in Sikkim, the northern districts of West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Himanchal Pradesh and Punjab. You can run into Nepali speakers in most of Indian cities.

Nepali was given recognition as a state language in Darjeeling, West Bengal, in 1961 and in Sikkim in 1974. In the late 1970s, it was incorporated into the Indian constitution as one of the local languages of the country. The language is also extensively used in Bhutan. As a Japanese sociologist says, "Nepali in a kind of a lingua franca used widely used in the Himalayan area."

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The works of national poet Bhanubhakta Acharya and modern poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota are equally popular in both countries. "The birth and growth of the Nepali took place in Bharatvarsha, long before political boundaries separated India and Nepal," says linguist Kumar Pradhan. "The development of the Nepali language gained momentum in India after independence in 1947."

R.L. Turner in his book "A Comparative Study of the Nepali Language" writes, "The proof that Nepali is descended from Sanskrit rests upon the fact that many details of its grammatical structure find their explanations in the corresponding forms of the earlier language and much of its vocabulary, allowing for a regular correspondence of sounds between the two languages."

The language has been called by various other names like Khas Kura (the truth), parbatee or parbattiya (people from the hills), Gorkhali or simply Bhasa. One 19th century document describes the language as "Giriraja bhasa" or the language of the king of the mountains.

Brian Hogson, a British resident in Nepal, writes of the 13 distinct languages that are found in the mountainous parts of Nepal. "The language is understood and can be traced to ethnic and linguistic origins," says Pradhan. "We can find different traces of the subordination of Tibeto-Burman speaking Mongoloid by Indo-Aryans as the dominant theme in the composition of the people of Nepal," he says.

G.A. Giverson in "Linguistic Survey of India" and many experts preceding him discovered that all the Indo-Aryan languages south of the Himalayas have certain common features that were spread by the Khasas.

The Khasas carved a huge empire that included western Nepal, Garwal, Kumaun and parts of south-western Tibet in the 12 century AD. According to Guisseppe Tucci, "The remains of the Malla empire (not to be confused with the Malla dynasties in Kathmandu) include a few epigraph in a language even cursory glances evinces to be an old form of Khasa-Kura of modern Nepal."

Pre-literate oral folk literature has disappeared from Nepal. Experts say these visualized works included a lot of songs, verses, stories, annals, proverbs and idioms. These idioms in Nepali literature can have existed along with the sophisticated Nepali literature that is in use now. This tradition must have carried the literature of yore with some additions and alterations, experts say.

Many Nepali researchers have taken on the task of collecting and collating the rich history of the language. The Nepali spoken in the eastern fringe of the country may be significantly different from that spoken in the western end. Inflection and sentence structure can identify the geographic origins or the ethnic background of the speaker.

Those who are acquainted with Nepal’s villages and their people can imagine the kind of fusion of culture, literature, tradition and outlook that must have gone into creating the language as it is written and spoken today.