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How Does Bhasha Signify Its Conceptuality?

Braj prose in Rajneeti (1809)

Why do we think that in taking up a bhasha word we can decolonize our scholarship? There is a

problem with the philological practices we bring to the conceptual world of bhashas. Several

workshop papers (including my own) draw on a concept word or word cluster as aperture or a

magnet that attracts particles of concepts around it. The implicit philological premise of such a

move is that the lexeme of a concept word like Niti constitutes the logical and rational gateway

to the conceptual world of bhasha. When we posit the meaning making and conceptual

structure in bhasha as our object of inquiry it is arguable that we do not confine ourselves

within the paradigms of colonial philology and 19th century Hindi publicists but theorize at the

crossroads of several disciplines linguistics, philosophy, history, rhetoric, literary analysis.

Philology as a wild praxis is the name for that crossroads. Although both approaches to

bhasha through its lexical surfaces Inshas Rani Ketaki Ki Kahani (1803) and Lallu Jee Lals

Premsagar(1810) are far more complex in their understandings of bhasha than a literal

reading of the prefaces by Insha and Lallu Jee Lal might suggest, the dominant Fort William

approach to the conceptual world of bhasha was that if the philologist could do a linguistic

purge of yavani bhasha then surely bhasha could be accessed through its words. In effect

bhasha was in a fundamental sense the sum total of its words, hence the production of

colonial glossaries and dictionaries and the relative neglect of the literariness and conceptual

schema of bhashas. The dangers of such lexical privileging were manifest in the attempts by

Hindi philologists to lexically sever Khari Boli Hindi from words that derived from Persian,

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Turkic, Arabic and distinguish it from Khari Boli Urdu under the philological premise that a

bhashas words were a gateway to its inner being and could provide a gauge for determining

whether the conceptual armature fell into the category of indigenity and the fully indigenized

language, or contrarily betrayed modes of thought that were yavani or bideshi.

The privileging of words over other equally significant dimensions of bhasha has a

colonial and nationalist philological legacy that persists in our practice precisely when we

inhabit the post of postcolonial confidence. There is a struggle that is required in conceiving

of bhasha as possessing a concept structure that might need to be judged by its own laws; we

do not as yet know the modality of that struggle. Certain questions are obvious here: in

bhasha what is the structure that structures its system of signification as distinct from its

morphological structure? A concept structure will begin to center itself in a language, does

bhasha resist the zeal for domesticating taxonomies of conceptual structures? And where

precisely in bhasha writings can we locate its anti foundationalist impulse? In the histories

of philology in South Asia lexicography occupies the space of fixing and centering of meaning,

a lexical logocentrism of fixed and stable meaning. Our task is to re-trace this privileging of

lexicality for bhashas, and to seek out the decentering impulses in bhasha writings. In what

follows I anchor the possibility of alternate philological models for bhashas in Rajneeti. The

effort here is to think with the insights of philologists like Acharya Ramachandra Shukla,

Bhartendu, Rupert Snell, R.S. Macgregor.

Bhashas hospitality towards decentered conceptual worlds

Are there other philological ways of interrogating ways that bhasha thinks a concept? Is the

phoneme for instance a powerful, if elusive, pathway than the lexeme to the ways bhasha

organizes its conceptual rigor? I am thinking in the case of my chosen text of the difference

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between the conceptual schema signaled in the Sanskrit original Hitopadesa through the

sound of Niti/Aniti versus the conceptuality endowed in a Braj text where animal and human

characters state, Yeh niti naahi hai. The syntactic and phonetic effect on the concept of Niti

is at issue here: the readerships of king, his ministers and counselors, the sage, the kings

sons do not disappear but appear as fainter markings. Something else comes to the fore.

Syntax is a wonderful tool in bhashas for deepening or lightening language. For this reason

we might ask how precisely does the sound of Braj bhasha command the popular. One way to

begin thinking about this is that bhasha phonology is a multi sensory apparatus with the

power to evoke sound as music, sound as memory, sound as smell, sound as switch for a

succession of mental images, sound as landscape. It is an error to think of bhasha sound as a

given, a natural resource or a real or affected posture of naivete. Prose writers mobilize the

sound of Braj in a self -conscious way. The relation between the bhasha phoneme and bodily

comportment is also crucial to our analysis. In a mysterious way bhasha sound reorders the

bodily decorum of the reader/listener. This is not only aesthetic and affective but in many

instances the internal and external rearrangement of the readers body through bhasha

sound lays the groundwork for listening alertly, or listening with a different set of cognitive

resources, and for apprehending a concept in a certain way.

The sound of the word Niti in the matrix of the Sanskrit original Hitopadesa broadly

signifies the political as royal pedagogy. The sound of the same word when it is inserted

within the syntactic phrasing of Braj signifies a pedagogy of watchful servitude. In Book two

of Lallu Jee Lals Rajneeti this reconceptualization of Niti as watchful servitude is articulated

by the jackals. The jackals are tellers of tales and themselves form part of a tale of friendship

betrayed. As servants of the uncrowned bagh king Pingal they watch their masters and put

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into play a course of action that first enables the friendship between Pingal and Sanjeevak

the buffalo. After a while their Niti fails and their actions precipitate their downfall, the king

strips them of their rights, raja ne . . . damanak kartak te adhikaar khos kariyo. The cycle of

tales ends with the jackals sowing dissension between the beloved friends Pingal and

Sanjeevak. The overt proposition concerning Niti that Rajneeti faithfully adheres to from the

Sanskrit original is to educate the young prince on the value of royal friendship. In this overt

proposition in the Braj text a constituent part of Niti lies in protecting royal friendship from

being destroyed through dissension sowed by servants.

The Braj translation however also contains a fugitive and decentering concept

structure for Niti in the same prose passages. For Damanak and Katarak Niti involves a

pedagogy that is distinguished from the frame narrative reminiscent of the mirror of princes

where Raja Sundarsen entrusts the education of his sons to the sage Vishnusharma. A

different conceptual economy for Niti is at work from the speeches, actions and tales by

Damank and Katarak. For these servants Niti involves a vigilant spectatorship of the kings

actions, followed by a communal analysis of sovereignity tinged by reflections on the

wretched condition of servitude in the sevak/thakur dialectic. The Braj word Lallu Jee Lal

uses for this is tum chaukas rahiyo ( be watchful) and saavdhan hoy bato ( be seated with

vigilance). For the jackal Kartak the social classes most in need of the pedagogy of Niti are

exemplified in the figure of the sevak; it is the sevak who adopts the position of the striving,

failing, relearning student of Niti.

Servitude in the Braj translation requires the harsh and yet necessary lessons of Niti.

According to Kartak, servitude is a condition of defeat and subjugation within which the

sevak finds that his life is like a death, paradhin parbas kau jeevan mritak saman hai. For the

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jackals and servants who plot and watch the effect of their words on their superiors Niti is

not simply a reflection on them the ruler and favorites; it is a relational concept that

continually throws the sevak back into reflection on the niti that must organize his relation to

the thakur or raja and ensure his survival. In the Sanskritic original the scheming and

storytelling animal and human figures are part of a rich tapestry that pulsates with life as the

sea is rolled back to save a bird egg and snakes wear a necklace; all of this moves on in a

chain of stories that pedagogically illustrate the propositional force of Niti. The bhasha

translation lovingly reproduces this rich tapestry while at the same time decenters the

concept Niti from the pedagogy for princes and relocates it simultaneously in the

thakur/sevak set of social relations.

The distance between the conceptuality of Niti in the Sanskrit original from its Braj

translation can scarcely be exaggerated. The book of fables for the education of princes

conceives of the political in terms of how to govern. The Braj translation remains faithful to

the original in all external aspects with the significant difference that through the resources

of phonetics, interpolated dohas by Lallu Jee Lal and subtle shifts of emphasis we are

presented with a counter conception of the political. The influential suggestion in Rajneeti, a

suggestion that is later expanded by Bhartendus play Andher Nagri Chaupat Raja and Fakir

Mohan Senapatis 19th century novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha, is that the referent for Niti is

not a body of political thought or essential doctrines or set of propositions. There is no

essence to Niti even while Lallu Jee Lals preface asserts the domain of vywahar within which

Rajneeti must be read and understood. The decentering move in the Damanak Katarak

dialogues is to conceptualize Niti as a term of critique continually redeployed to examine

contemporary forms of sovereignty.

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Mittha or Nirmal Rup of Bhashas world of concepts

One way to move past the privileging of the concept word and lexicality is to entertain the

possibility that the totality of effects of a bhasha text depend on the way the prose writer (or

poet) mobilizes the resources of sweetness not merely as rasa aesthetics but as a modality of

thought that relies less on statement and more on evocation. Specific bhasha understandings

of sweetness produce prose effects of great complexity and conceptual weight. In bhasha

mittha is a watery medium for thought rather than simply a source of aesthetic pleasure.

Mittha can also be defined as the might and violence of language and the violence and force

that passes through language in its milder and more beneficent aspect. This nirmal rup of

bhasha is only one pole of the conceptual world of bhashas. As the final section of this paper

suggests, bhashas mittha camouflages and complements bhashas linguistic imaginary.

What would it mean to approach bhashas seemingly limitless resources of sweetness

as something other than a second order imitation of Sanskrits rasa aesthetics? There is a

moment early in Hindi Sahitya Ka Itihaas where Ramachandra Shukla argues, citing a couplet

from Vidyapati, that the pre-history of bhasha in aphabrahmsa can be discerned in the

difference between desi bhasha and apabhramsa as well as in the latter drawing on the

sources of mittha or sweetness in the former. Shukla cites Vidyapati confessing to a love for

the mittha in desi bhasha. Shuklas glancing remark suggests this possibility: how can mittha

constitute one of the governing principles for the conceptuality of a bhasha text?

Mittha is not a form of excess, the bhasha writer rigorously controls and mobilizes

sweetness to evoke a conceptual architecture. Bhashas sweetness contains its own strict

principles for evoking a concept. To work with the grain of bhashas conceptual weave

requires that the reader/auditor should be attuned to its linguistic and philological

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playfulness. Bhasha signifies a concept through play; this play is not discernible through the

lexeme but requires a wider lens to encompass syntactical ordering and phonology. It is by a

gathering and loosening of sound, word order, prose rhythm, phonemes, syntactic

construction, loan words, richly idiomatic surface, that bhasha plays with a concept and

reimagines it. In the case of Braj prose the playfulness at work in its delineation of the world

of concepts carries an entire aesthetic, devotional and metaphysical commitment to

perceiving the material world and the materiality of concepts as making sense in terms of a

lila set into motion by a divine presence. For example the jackal Damanak begins an extended

peroration on Niti with the prose sentence, Par hum sevak hai (But we are servants). Far

from servitude signifying the zone of silence or passive acquiescence, to be the sevak is to

have a fund of tales and aphorisms about Niti.

Damanak the servant is both the object of Niti the well governed servant as well as

the watchful critic of royal misinterpretations of Niti. The servant muses on the forms of

kingly conduct which cause Niti to flee from the royal presence, Niti gaye lok dukhi hoy

(When Niti flees then the people of the kingdom suffer and are grieved). In Braj prose there

is a call and answer structure that through play interpellates the listener. As Damanak speaks

the listener/reader in the Braj conventions of sune sunave adds to, repeats, inflects, the line

Niti gaye log dukhi hoye. This is a minor instance of how the prose writer and reader in

bhasha engages with a concept by playing it into being.

Conceptuality through (lexical, syntactic, phonetic) play

What would it mean to conceptualize through play? And where in Braj prose and poetry

might we find the philological tools for this approach to conceptuality? Rupert Snell suggests

one way to think about Sanskritic and Braj renditions of Hitopadesa when he says that the

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relation Braj seeks with Sanskrit is of sweetening, Although Sanskritic loanwords are

common in Braj, their form is often simplified you could say sweetened or domesticated

by local vernacular pronunciation. If concepts in early 19th century bhasha inhabited a mode

of linguistic existence that did not belong to the lexical singularity of a single word then how

did they function? One axis at which the word Niti and Rajniti sets its conceptuality to work

is through a certain orientation towards pairings like Niti/Aniti. An investigation of concepts

as pure lexical singularities misses this crucial dimension of the conceptual world of bhasha

within which each lexical unit has its doubles and pairings.

In bhasha doubles and pairs generally do not function as binaries. In Braj prose Aniti is

not the absence of Niti. The relation internal to a concept pair does not belong to the binary

thinking of absence/presence. Aniti is not the absence of cognitive reason but a course of action

faithful to a different principle of vywaharikta (as in the aniti of lobh) and a different schema of

time that could be short-term or owes allegiance to another dharma or another way of thinking

about the social and worldly domain of vywaharikta. Clearly this epistemological hospitality to

the Other of the normative concept advanced by the text is a latent element in the Sanskritic

Hitopadeasa as well as in Puranic Sanskrit. Nonetheless this epistemological dimension comes

to the fore in the conceptual world of bhashas. The disavowal of truth status to Niti is one

instance of the peculiarly distinct way in which bhasha thinks a concept.

Yet another peculiarity of bhasha is that it lays claim to a concept, together with the

life of that concept among bhasha readerships, by inserting explicit panegyric to bhasha.

When bhasha poets and prose writers extol the maha rasmul of Braj they are in reality

arguing for the life of the concept of Niti/Aniti among Braj speaking constituencies. Lallu Jee

Lals prefatory claim that brajbhasha bhashat sakal surbani sam tool is at one and the same

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time a claim that the thought world of niti/aniti in bhasha is coeval to the life of the concept

in the Sanskrit Hitopadesha. That might explain why Lallu Jee Lal claims that by writing in

bhasha his work is proximate to the Sanskrit original on the grounds that bhasha has Rasmul.

Linguistic Imaginary as Modality of Resistance to Lexical Retrieval

Scribal contestations occur in the 1820s at the historical moment when the prose of the

world is exemplified in adhunik Hindi; conversely Braj is relegated to its pre-history because

it is poetic, mellifluous, idle, lethargic, belonging to the primal unity of a pastoral antiquity

that has little to do with the cognitive resources required in the modern vernacular. Within

the dominant historiography for linguistic modernity Braj was defined primarily as a poetics,

thus enabling the notion that Braj poetry made eunuchs of Indian men (Badrinath Bhatt,

Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, 1911) and the sweetness of Braj was the sweetness of sleep (

Sumitanandan Pant). Hindi prose was the proper vehicle for intellection, as a bhasha it

exemplified the virtues of the linguistic modern its prosody and prose induced in the

reader a state of conceptual readiness and engagement with ideas. Braj gadhya (prose

writings) on the other hand, said Shukla, was avyawaasthit (disorganized). Shukla candidly

said that was probably a good thing because the long traditions of Braj prose hagiology,

commentaries and translations and vratas did not mean that they were models of good

prose. In direct contrast Hindi was the modern linguistic vehicle of prose eminently suited to

conceptual rigor and systematic thinking.

This paper has been an attempt to identify a set of philological protocols through

which a bhasha signifies the concept of Niti. The scribe constructs a linguistic imaginary. This

is not to be conflated with the protocols of Braj commentaries or literary interpretation. Lallu

Jee Lal also makes no claims that he opposes the dominant Sanskritic conceptuality of Niti.

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Instead Rajneeti strives for utmost fidelity to the Sanskrit original. Rajneeti dismantles all

such oppositions between Sanskrit and bhasha while simultaneously producing a concept

structure that floats just above the prose surface and is not reducible to linguistic units of

morpheme, grammar, syntax, the sentence or word order. Because the linguistic imaginary

cannot be grasped in these units and cannot be grasped at the lexical level it follows that it

cannot be tampered with and destroyed. Its mode of transcendence is at one level a mode of

dissimulation. The linguistic imaginary of bhasha in a historical moment of crisis does not

aspire to the level of an abstraction, it is transcendent while remaining embroiled in the

materiality of bhasha.

Prefaces and annotations by colonial philologists display an uneasy awareness that

Rajneeti installed Niti as a critique of sovereignty or rather as the possibility of such a

critique. In order to discredit this way of using bhasha to signify Niti there grew the legend

that Lallu Jee Lal had no Sanskrit, however his translation was a serviceable tool for

Englishmen to learn Brajbhasha. The linguistic imaginary of Rajneeti had to wait for

constituencies of lay readers to decode its intimations. An exemplary reader like Bhartendu

seized on the possibility of signifying Niti in colloquial bhasha as chaupat raja. Bhartendu

altered the tapestry of animal and human characters who debate the conept of Niti and

reimagined it as a portrait gallery of nagariks who were as misguided in their vywaharikta as

their ruler: aniti signaled the absent term of niti in the play.

If Bhartendu developed the latencies of Rajneeti into a covert comedy of colonial

misrule and a foolish and ignorant sovereign, Senapatis Oriya novel expanded the

intimations in the concept structure of Rajneeti in another and equally innovative

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experiment with bhasha as the vehicle of political thought and social commentary. The novel

opened and ended with a set of unnamed village characters who are retainers of the feudal

landlord Mangaraj. They adopt the posture, much like Damanak and Katarak the jackal

servants in Rajneeti, of the chorus who comment on the actions and hypocrisies of the

landlord class produced by the Permanent Settlement in Orissa. They do not exhibit any

expectation of the end of aniti and the possibility of a political order that possesses the virtue

of Niti. For Senapatis chorus of servants Niti is simply the habit of watchful spectatorship

and communal analysis that is necessary for their meagre conditions of survival. Through a

linguistic imaginary that retreats before the unwary reader and reappears before careful

readers like Bhartendu and Senapati, the scribe reimagines Braj as the prose of intellection at

the precise historical moment when Brajbhasha begins its inexorable descent into calumny

and decrepitude.

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