Two days ago, I was going through past issues of Sino-Platonic Papers, all the way back to the first one in 1986. I was pleasantly surprised to come across this one by my late, lamented colleague, Ludo Rocher:
"Orality and Textuality in the Indian Context," Sino-Platonic Papers, 49 (October, 1994), 1-3 of 1-28. (free pdf)
As soon as I started reading it, I had a strong sensation that Ludo's paper speaks powerfully to the enigma of the overwhelming dominance of Indians in spelling bee competitions, about which we have so many times puzzled here on Language Log (see "Selected readings" below).
Ludo's paper begins thus:
I would like to preface this paper with a personal experience. One day, many years ago, my wife and I were invited for lunch at the home of an Indian friend, in Poona. I hardly recall the meal, but I clearly remember that, after lunch, we were introduced to our friend's son, a boy of five or six years old. The father was obviously proud of his son, and, to show that his pride was justified, he told the boy, in Marathi, to honor the guests by reciting the famous Bhagavadgītā, in Sanskrit. The boy positioned himself in front of us, and started his recitation:
dharmakṣetre kurukṣetre samavetā yuyutsavaḥ
māmakāḥ pāṇḍavāś caiva; kim akurvata Saṃjaya?
"On the field of Righteousness, the field of Kuru, my sons and Pāṇḍu's were gathered, ready for battle; what did they do, Saṃjaya?"
On and on he went, stanza after stanza, until his father signaled him to stop. The boy's Sanskrit was perfect. It was as clear as that of any Indian grown-up I ever heard, pronounced without any effort, with the right intonations, even with the appropriate facial expressions whenever they were required.
While this recitation was going on I could not help making a number of reflections. First, the boy had not yet learned to read. He had learned the text of the Gītā from his father's mouth, even as his father must have learned it from his father when he was five years old. There may, or there may not, have been a printed copy of the Bhagavadgītā in that house in Poona City. That was irrelevant. When one recites the Bhagavadgītā in my friend's house, one recites it from memory.
Second, not only had the boy not learned to read; he also did not know Sanskrit. When I asked the father whether his son understood what he had been saying, the answer was an emphatic "no": "the meaning of the text I will explain to him later," he said. What that meant was that the young Indian boy was being trained to memorize endless series of what, for him, were nothing more than nonsense syllables.
The Bhagavadgītā obviously was the first and only Sanskrit text the boy had been taught to recite. I regret now that I did not ask my friend many more questions. I might have asked him about other Sanskrit texts he was going to teach his son, how many, and in what order. I might have inquired about his teaching method. It might have been interesting to see the father teach his son a Sanskrit stanza in our presence. However, at that very moment I did not think of asking these questions. I was not even supposed to think of them. I was only supposed to be in admiration at the boy's oral recitation of a famous Sanskrit text.
To be sure, I was in admiration, I was in awe, as I had been in awe before and as I have been in awe since, whenever I was faced with the extraordinary capacity of Indians not only to memorize endless Sanskrit texts, but also to keep that memory securely stored and be able to call it up without the slightest effort whenever recitation is called for. I am also not the only Western Sanskritist to have been in awe before this phenomenon. Friedrich Max Müller noted: "We can form no opinion of the power of memory in a state of society so different from ours as the Indian Parishads are from our universities. Feats of memory, such as we hear of now and then, show that our notions of the limits of that faculty are quite arbitrary. Our own memory has been systematically undermined for many generations." More succinctly, the German indologist Heinrich Luders described some Indian pandits as "nothing but walking, living text books."
But Western scholars went further than being amazed. They also raised the question why Indians resort to memorization "even at the present day when manuscripts are neither scarce nor expensive." Memorization is something one expects in illiterate societies, and that includes India before the introduction of script. But why did Indians continue to memorize so much, even after the time when script came to India?
The age of the introduction of script in India — rather its reintroduction after it disappeared with the Indus Valley Civilization — is still debated, and I will not touch on that problem since it is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that there are inscriptions, all over the subcontinent, as early as the third century B.C.E., which means that Indians still resort to oral transmission more than two thousand years after they could have resorted to written transmission.
Perhaps an equivalent feat of memorization in Chinese culture would be mastering how to write six thousand or more characters.
Selected readings
- "Spelling Bee 2019" (5/31/10)
- "The worldly sport of spelling" (6/2/18)
- “Spelling bee champs” (6/1/14)
- “Spelling bees and character amnesia” (8/7/13)
- “Brain imaging and spelling champions” (8/7/15)
- “Spoken Sanskrit” (1/9/16)
- "Once more on the mystery of the national spelling bee" (5/27/16)
- "Spelling bees in the 1940s" (7/10/16)
- "Yet again on the mystery of the national spelling bee" (6/5/17)
- "What happened to the spelling bee this year?" (10/21/20)