Batakrishna Ghosh

Batakrishna Ghosh (1905-1950) was an Indian linguist, who specialised in Indo-European linguistics. He wrote a number of books and articles on Sanskrit and Indo-European linguistics. He translated Wilhelm Geiger's German book on the Pali language into English, published by the University of Calcutta.

Quotes

• The Rgveda clearly reflects the picture of a highly complex society in the full blaze of civilisation.
  • Ghosh, B.K., ‘The Origin of the Indo-Aryans’, in Bhattacharya, K., (ed.), The Cultural Heritage of India, vol. I : The Early Phases, The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Calcutta, 1958, p. 137. in Danino, M. (2010). The lost river : on the trail of the Sarasvatī. Penguin Books India.

• If the forefathers of the Vedic Aryans were still in Cappadocia in the 14th century BC on their march towards India, there would be no time left for them to forget all their previous history before giving the final form to the Rigvedic hymns not later than 1000 BC.
  • B. Ghosh, in : The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. I: The Vedic Age edited by R.C. Majumdar, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Publications, Mumbai, 6th edition 1996. , quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993)

• "The language of the Rig-veda," he writes in one place, "is certainly no more different from that of the Avestan Gathas than is Old English from Old High German, and therefore they must be assigned to approximately the same age: and the relation between the language of the Gathas and that of Old Persian inscriptions of the sixth century B.C. cannot be better visualised than by comparing the former with Gothic and the latter with Old High German. Now, if the inscriptions of the Achaemenid emperors of Iran were composed in Old High German, what would be the date assigned to Ulfila's Bible? Surely something like 1000 B.C. This then would be the approximate date of the Gathas of the Avesta - with which the Rigveda in its present form must have been more or less contemporaneous. "
  • quoted in The Problem of Aryan Origins by K.D. Sethna, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, 1992.

• B.K. Ghosh informs us: " D asa princes like Sambara, Dhuni, Chumuri, Pipru and Varchin have been actuallymentioned by the Rigvedic poets, but it is significant that, as a rule , Indra himself has been made to combat them on his own initiative and not in course of rendering routine assistance to Aryan chiefs."
  • quoted in The Problem of Aryan Origins by K.D. Sethna, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, 1992.

• The Iranians had retained a distinct memory of the Indo-Iranian common home in their mythology but the Indo-Aryans... have nothing to say on the point. [... There is a ] distinctively Indian Rigvedic culture... a distinct product of the Indian soil.
  • BK Ghosh, in : The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. I: The Vedic Age edited by R.C. Majumdar, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Publications, Mumbai, 6th edition 1996. , quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993) [1] quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993)

History and Culture of the Indian people

B.K.Ghosh, in the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan volume “History and Culture of the Indian people, Vol.1, The Vedic Age”, 1951/1957, edited by R.C.Majumdar:

• “On the whole ... the language of the first nine Mandalas must be regarded as homogeneous, inspite of traces of previous dialectal differences... With the tenth Mandala it is a different story. The language here has definitely changed.”
  • B.K. Ghosh in The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. I: The Vedic Age edited by R.C. Majumdar, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Publications, Mumbai, 6th edition 1996. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• “On the whole, however, the language of the first nine Maṇḍalas must be regarded as homogeneous [….] With the tenth Maṇḍala it is a different story. The language here has definitely changed. The difference in language between the earlier Maṇḍalas and tenth would have appeared in its true proportions if the texts concerned had been written down at the time they were composed and handed down to us in that written form.

• The fact, however, is that the text tradition of the Rigveda was stabilized at a comparatively late date, and fixed in writing at a much later epoch. The result has been not unlike what would have happened if the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare were put in writing and printed for the first time in the twentieth century: in short, the text of the Rigveda as handed down to us is, in various details, not only different from what it actually was, but to some extent also screens the differences that mark off the languages of the earlier Maṇḍalas from that of the tenth.” (pp.340-341).

• “The language of the tenth Maṇḍala represents a distinctly later stage of the Rigvedic language. Hiatus, which is frequent in the earlier Rigveda, is already in process of elimination here. Stressed i u cannot in sandhi be changed into y v in the earlier parts, but in the tenth Maṇḍala they can. The ending –āsas in nominative plural is half as frequent as –ās in the Rigveda taken as a whole, but its number of occurrences is disproportionately small in the tenth Maṇḍala . Absolutives in –tvāya occur only here. The stem rai- is inflected in one way in the first nine Maṇḍalas, and in another in the tenth, and in the inflexion of dyau-, too, the distribution of strong and weak forms is much more regular in the earlier Maṇḍalas. The Prakritic verbal stem kuru- appears only in the tenth Maṇḍala for the earlier kṛiṇu-. Many words appear for the first time in the tenth Maṇḍala or are shared by it only with the interpolated part of other Maṇḍalas. The old locative form pritsu, adjectives like girvaṇas and vicharṣani, and the substantive vīti do not occur at all in the tenth Maṇḍala , though in the earlier Maṇḍalas they are quite common. The particle sim, which is unknown in the Atharvaveda, occurs fifty times in the first nine Maṇḍalas but only once in the tenth. Words like ājya, kāla, lohita, vijaya, etc., occur for the first time in the tenth Maṇḍala, as also the root labh-. Words shared with the tenth Maṇḍala only by the interpolated parts of other Maṇḍalas, the Valakhilyas, and unmistakably late hymns, are loka (for earlier uloka which is a haplology for uruloka), mogha, visarga, gup- (a back-formation from gopa), etc. And words which occur mostly, though not exclusively, in the tenth Maṇḍala and these parts, are sarva, bhagavant, prāṇa, hridaya, etc. The archaic particle ī of pronominal origin, for which the Padapāṭha throughout wrongly reads īm, does not occur at all in the tenth Maṇḍala, and the particle īm, which is only less archaic than ī, occurs in it only about half a dozen times. Of forms like dakshi, adukshat , etc., which are. the results of the action of a pre-Vedic phonetic law, only one, namely dudukshan, occurs in the tenth Maṇḍala. It is unnecessary to dilate any further on the language of the Rigveda.” (pp.343-344).

• “This also proves in a striking manner that the language of the earlier Mandalas was already in danger of being misunderstood when the hymns of the tenth Mandala were being composed.” (p.340).