Devanagari

At a Bengaluru Museum, a Rare Glimpse of the Golden Pages of an Illustrated Ramayana

Gold and lapis lazuli were used by craftsmen in this work commissioned by the Maharaja of Benares in late 18th and early 19th century.

In August 2021, I received a surprise e-mail from eminent art historian, professor Kavita Singh of Jawaharlal Nehru University. She asked if I knew of a magnificent illustrated manuscript of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas (1574 AD), the popular Hindi retelling of the Ramayana story, produced for the Maharaja of Banaras at the end of the 18th century. She wondered whether I knew that this seven-volume work was now being “dispersed” – broken up and sold, page-by-page, in the art market. Finally, she asked if I would assist her and her former student Parul Singh in preparing an exhibit of some of its folios for an exciting new museum, MAP (Museum of Art and Photography), in Bengaluru, at the invitation of its founder, Abhishek Poddar.

I had indeed heard of this legendary manuscript, popularly known as the Kanchana Chitra Ramayana (“Golden Illustrated Ramayana,” because of the copious use of gold in its production), from the late Maharaja Vibhuti Narayan Singh (1927-2000), when I interviewed him in 1982 during my research on oral performance traditions of the Ramcharitmanas. He told me proudly that this work, produced at immense cost for his ancestor Udit Narayan Singh (reigned 1795-1835), was one of the treasures of his family. Prepared by a veritable army of painters, calligraphers, and illuminators working under the guidance of revered Ramayanis – traditional scholars of the Tulsidas epic – it was, the Raja emphasised, “not just an illustrated Ramayana,” but rather a “visual commentary” (drishya tika) on the Ramcharitmanas. Nearly two decades later, when I accompanied a television crew making a documentary on the legacy of Tulsidas who had received permission to film inside the Ramnagar palace library, I was permitted to see a few pages from one of the seven bound volumes. Now, after another two decades, I learned from Kavita Singh that this treasure, hidden from view for nearly 200 years, was no longer intact—yet paradoxically, it might now be seen, at least in fragments, by a wider audience.

The author viewing a volume of the Kanchana Chitra Ramayana in Ramnagar Fort, 1999. Photo: Philip Lutgendorf

I was happy to assist in the project, albeit marginally. The volumes of the Golden Ramayana had been vertically bound like modern books, with a page of elegant Devanagari calligraphy facing each large and sumptuous (18.5×14 inch) painting that “commented” on it—the entire Ramcharitmanas text comprising more than a thousand pages of text and paintings. Dispersed, however, each painting stood alone and out of context, and the text on its reverse side did not correspond to it but rather belonged to what would have been the next painting in the series. As a scholar of the Manas, it was easy for me to read each page and then extrapolate backwards to identify the text – usually two to three stanzas – that would have preceded it, and thus I was able to save my art historian colleagues a little time as they began delving into the complexity, detail, and nuance of these paintings and selecting and ordering those to be shown at MAP. And as it turned out, time was important: Singh was undergoing treatment for a rare and aggressive cancer that would tragically cut short her life on July 30 of this year, a mere month and a half before the opening of “The Book of Gold,” the magnificent exhibition that now represents the fruit of her final labour and on which she worked tirelessly almost to her last breath.

Photo Courtesy: MAP, Bengaluru

The result – some eighty paintings gorgeously mounted in two large galleries on the third floor of MAP by the Museum’s talented curatorial and design staff – is not simply a dazzling and beautifully documented exhibition that pays fitting tribute to its principal curator. It is also, as Singh observes in her writing on the show, a demonstration of the need to revise the art-historical narrative about pre-colonial painting in North India, which long held that little of substance or innovation was produced after the end of the 18th century, especially in the Banaras area. As the show makes clear, master painters from several urban “schools” – probably including Jaipur, Delhi, Lucknow, Murshidabad, and Datia – were enlisted to work on this massive project, which continued for 18 years (1796-1814). Given lavish resources, including pigments of gold and lapis lazuli, by a patron who aspired to surpass the illuminated codices of the Mughals, and guided by the visionary input of Ramayanis who were often adepts of the rasika school of meditation/visualisation, they produced stunning paintings. Each must have taken weeks to complete, teeming with individualised figures as well as detailed renderings of costumes, buildings, cities, villages, and landscapes dense with vegetation, animals, and birds. Though I had seen impressive digital scans of many of them, nothing prepared me for the explosion of colour (on pages shielded from light for nearly 200 years, and now carefully lit to protect their pigments) and the almost unbelievable abundance of detail in each one. In the Balakanda paintings of Ram and Sita’s wedding, for example, the rendering of hundreds of figures includes exquisite detail of brocaded fabrics, jewellery, mandaps, and carpets, within architectural settings that evoke the courtly world of late-18th-century Ramnagar, and the triumphant Uttarkanda evocations of “Ramraj” similarly conjure a utopian Banaras of multi-storied houses (the cutaway interiors of which play M.C. Escher-like tricks of perspective), each showcasing model behaviours of the exemplary citizens of Ram’s capital.

The curators have wisely avoided a mere chronological recapitulation of the familiar Ramayana narrative and have instead grouped paintings in thematic sets, accompanied by lucid documentation that sets the “Golden Book” within (among other contexts) the cultural history of Banaras state, the political aspirations of its rulers, the idiosyncrasies and innovations of Tulsidas’s epic narrative, and the almost obsessive culture of religio-aesthetic scholasticism and connoisseurship that developed around it. The paradoxical juxtaposition of themes of inclusive, egalitarian bhakti and Brahman-brokered varnashrama-dharma, so evident in Tulsidas’s writing, is likewise rightly identified and contextualised. Besides the sheer visual ananda the show affords (and I spent a good part of two days in the galleries, often gasping in wonder), it offers the attentive viewer a marvellous introduction to one of the great classics of Indian literature as well as a detailed picture of art and society in the eastern Ganga valley on the cusp of colonialism.

Additionally, the exhibition features a digital flip-book of the entire seven-volume work as it existed pre-dispersal. This record, so rare in the world of piecemeal manuscripts, exists due to the happy circumstance of the Maharaja having consented, in 1976, to have all seven volumes photographed by the Center for Art and Archaeology of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). Protected for a half-century in the Institute’s archive in Gurugram, these images were recently digitised and made available to Kavita Singh and her collaborators and now constitute a unique resource for further study of this masterpiece. And finally, yet another MAP gallery offers a display by brilliant digital/video artist Amit Dutta that playfully yet reverently animates various elements from the paintings to astonishing visual effect.

This extravagant exhibition, on display through March 8 2024, is in every way a rare treat, for it is extremely unlikely that we will ever again be able to see so much of the fabled “Golden Book,” superbly displayed and documented, in one place.

Philip Lutgendorf, Emeritus Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa is the author of The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas(1991) and Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey(2007). His seven-volume translation of the Ramcharitmanas has appeared as The Epic of Ram in the Murty Classical Library of India series (2016-2023).

Debate | It’s Not Exaggeration to Say the British Codified the Language We Know as ‘Hindi’ Now

The initiative of Scottish linguist and the employee of East India Company, John Gilchrist and the Fort William College in Calcutta have been overlooked in a recent essay.

Imre Bangha of Oxford University, in a piece published on The Wire on September 12, 2020, referred to my 2019 essay – ‘Hindi was devised by a Scottish linguist of the East India Company – it can never be India’s National Language’ – in the very first paragraph.

Bangha introduced my essay by saying ‘those who resent the political role of Hindi in 20th century nationalism’: a comment that is unfortunately misplaced. My essay was a reaction to the Hindi imposition drive in the 21st century by the current Hindutva regime that wants to enforce Hindi as our ‘National Language’. This ‘social engineering mission’ is not acceptable to the non-Hindi speaking regions of India.

My essay argues on the line that India does not need a singular national language and provides the reasons for it. I was not resenting any political role of Hindi in 20th century nationalism. Bangha must already know that Vande Mataram – the rallying cry of 20th century Indian nationalism and the freedom movement – appeared in a novel written in Bengali, not Hindi.

Bangha’s explicit pro-Hindi sentimentalism – that makes him misunderstand, or even overlook, evidential facts – is revealed further when he bypasses the all-critical role of John Gilchrist and Fort William College in Calcutta, by focusing much of his piece upon comments made by George A. Grierson, and his ‘unclear’ ideas about Hindi being ‘a language, a speech and then a dialect.’

Bangha goes to discuss Rekhta and the Nagari script that no one has claimed to have been devised by the British, who only played a pivotal role in popularising it.

Also read: Pushing Hindi as Politics, Not Hindi as Language

Bangha concludes his piece by saying, ‘Although the colonial claim that the British created a new language – a language appropriate to the modern needs – has taken deep roots in contemporary thinking, it is only partially justified…the British created a highly Sanskritsied style of Khari boli perceiving it to be a Hindu speech variety.’

The last line only supports what was pointed out in my essay: the colonial British bifurcated secular Hindustani into two separate modern languages for Hindus and Muslims.

Gilchrist also claimed the same – as quoted in my essay – ‘bifurcation of Khariboli into two forms – the Hindustani language with Khariboli as the root – resulted in two languages (Hindi and Urdu), each with its own character and script.’

“In other words” – what I wrote in my essay – “what was Hindustani language was segregated into Hindi and Urdu (written in Devanagari and Persian scripts), codified and formalised.”

Blanconi; Dr John Borthwick Gilchrist (1759-1841); UCL Art Museum; Photo: Public domain

And this was achieved through the initiative of the Scottish linguist and the employee of East India Company, John Gilchrist (1759-1841) and the Fort William College in Calcutta (1800-1854).

This pivotal piece of history in modern Hindi’s origin is glossed over by Bangha who says, “Hindustani was standardised into its single modern grammar by Urdu intellectuals in the 18th century and by print culture and Hindi intellectuals in the 19th century. Although Fort William College also had its share in it, claiming its entire agency is exaggeration.”

By saying the above, Bangha completely omits the fact that the very first printed book in modern Hindi – Devanagari or Nagari type-set – was not written by someone with a surname of Sharma or Tripathi, but was written by John Gilchrist.

And it was a work titled ‘A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language, or Part Third of Volume First, of a System of Hindoostanee Philology’, Calcutta: Chronicle Press, 1796.

The first two volumes of the grammar were included in the very first work that Gilchrist published: ‘A Dictionary: English and Hindoostanee’, Calcutta: Stuart and Cooper, 1787-90.

The grammar of modern Hindi – as we know it to be now – was ultimately standardised by John Gilchrist of Fort William College.

In order to popularise Hindi, Gilchrist recruited and paid native writers to produce works in accordance to that grammar.

It was also Fort William College that got these works – vernacular textbooks, dictionaries and literary creations – published by the ‘Serampore Mission Press’ – one of the earliest printing presses in India, and got them widely disseminated all across India.

These inconvertible facts make it unreasonable to say – like Bangha has said in his piece – that the ‘entire agency’ of the college’s role is an ‘exaggeration’.

One also needs to point out that the Devanagari or Nagari type-face or font was developed by the Orientalist, typographer and founding member of The Asiatic Society, Charles Wilkins and one of the employees of Wilkin’s printing press in Calcutta, Panchanan Karmakar: a Bengali born in Hooghly district. The reference to this is print expert Arun Bapurao Naik, son of legendary Bapurao Naik, the author of Indian Bookprinting and other notable works.

Fort William College in Calcutta – under Gilchrist’s leadership – became a centre for both Hindi and Urdu prose. It started within the premises of Fort William, in the location, where the Raj Bhavan – or the present Governor’s residence – was built (between 1799 to 1803) by Governor-General Wellesley.

So the college was moved in 1800 to another building – originally designed by Thomas Lyon in 1777 – in the nearby area, now known as the Dalhousie Square or the B.B.D Bag.

Several structural changes were made to the building to accommodate a new hostel, several halls (for examination and lectures) and four libraries dedicated to the cause of Hindi, Urdu and other languages.

The institution gathered writers from all over India to compose Hindi, Urdu and other vernacular texts; and hence, even after it moved out of the B.B.D Bag building in 1830, the 150-meter long premises of the former college still continues to be known as the “Writers’ building”: a famous landmark of Calcutta; the old secretariat building of the State of West Bengal and the actual historical birthplace of modern Hindi.

Devdan Chaudhuri is the author of the novel Anatomy of Life. He is also a poet whose works have featured in Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians published by Sahitya Akademi; a short story writer; an essayist on politics and culture and one of the contributing editors of The Punch Magazine. He lives in Kolkata.

Politics of Language in UP Reflects India’s History of Favouring Sanskrit Over Urdu

Despite Hindi being the language of the UP legislative assembly, BJP members have been allowed to take their oath in Sanskrit, while doing so in Urdu has been disallowed.

Despite Hindi being the language of the UP legislative assembly, BJP members were allowed to take their oath in Sanskrit, while doing so in Urdu was disallowed.

Currency notes. Credit: Karnika Kohli/The Wire

Do many people know that one of the reasons behind Nathuram Godse deciding to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi was the latter’s stance on Hindi, or Hindustani, as he preferred to call it? In his statement to the trial court, Godse, whose mother tongue was Marathi, said, “Gandhi’s pro-Muslim policy is blatantly in his perverse attitude on the question of the national language of India. It is quite obvious that Hindi has the most prior claim to be accepted as the premier language. In the beginning of his career in India, Gandhi gave a great impetus to Hindi but as he found that the Muslims did not like it, he became a champion of what is called Hindustani. Everybody in India knows that there is no language called Hindustani; it has no grammar; it has no vocabulary. It is a mere dialect, it is spoken, but not written. It is a bastard tongue and cross-breed between Hindi and Urdu, and not even the Mahatma’s sophistry could make it popular. But in his desire to please the Muslims he insisted that Hindustani alone should be the national language of India. His blind followers, of course, supported him and the so-called hybrid language began to be used. The charm and purity of the Hindi language was to be prostituted to please the Muslims.” What does the “charm and purity of the Hindi language” consist of? Godse did not explain, but clearly implied that he was referring to the Sanskrit-laden Hindi without the presence of Persian and Arabic words in it.

One was reminded of his words as well as the fierce debates that took place around the same time in the constituent assembly over the question of independent India’s national language when a controversy erupted a few days ago on the issue of oath-taking by two Muslim members of the newly elected Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly. When Alam Badi and Nafees Ahmad, both of the Samajwadi Party, took their oath in Urdu, pro tem speaker Fateh Bahadur disallowed it and made them take it in Hindi. While following his direction, they protested that as many as 13 members of the BJP had been allowed to take the oath in Sanskrit.

The official explanation is that rule 282 of the general rules and procedures of the assembly clearly states, “Subject to the provisions of the constitution the business of the assembly shall be transacted in the Hindi language and in the Devanagari script.” This obviously raises a question: Are Hindi and Sanskrit two different languages or not? If not, why have they been listed as two separate languages in the Eighth Schedule of the constitution? While the answer to this can be nothing but a simple ‘no’, the reality is not so simple.

There was a group within the Congress, led by Purushottam Das Tandon, Seth Govind Das and a few others, that had been taking an extremely Hindi-chauvinist position on the language question. As the demand for Pakistan gathered momentum during the 1940s, this group’s stance also hardened. In 1945, Gandhi wrote to Tandon that he intended to resign from Hindi Sahitya Sammelan as it advocated that only Hindi written in Devanagari script would be the national language.

When he did not receive a satisfactory reply from Tandon, Gandhi resigned a few days later. Gandhi had always advocated that Hindustani “should be neither Sasnkritised Hindi nor Persianised Urdu, but a happy combination of both. It should also freely admit words whenever necessary from the different regional languages and also assimilate words from foreign languages.” Earlier in 1938, when renowned Hindi scholar Hazari Prasad Dwivedi was invited to join Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, he had declined. In his book Hindi Nationalism, Alok Rai quotes Makhanlal Chaturvedi, a well-known Hindi writer and journalist from Madhya Pradesh, who wrote in 1943, “ When we destroy Hindi’s natural fluency by forcing difficult Sanskrit words into it, then we put obstacles in the path of the language remaining simple like the language of the saint-poets, and thereby provide ideological support to the demand for Pakistan.” Jawaharlal Nehru viewed the situation thus, “Scratch a separatist in language and you will invariably find that he is a communalist, and very often a political reactionary.”

In March 1947, fundamental rights sub-committee of the constituent assembly decided that, “Hindustani, written at the option of the citizen either in the Devanagari or the Persian script, shall, as the national language, be the first official language of the union.” However, as Pakistan came into existence on August 14, situation started to undergo an important change and the Hindi chauvinists felt emboldened. On August 6 and 7, 1949, Das organised a National Language Convention in New Delhi which demanded that “Sanskritised Hindi” and the Devanagari script be made the national language of India. After long and fierce debates, the constitution not only adopted Hindi in Devanagari script as the official language but also mandated that in future it would borrow primarily from the Sanskrit word stock to enrich itself.

Can we believe that there was a serious attempt to make Sanskrit the official language of the Indian Union?

In September 1949, Kuladhar Chaliha, a member of the constituent assembly from Assam, declared, “We will become better Indians by adopting Sanskrit [as the national language], because Sanskrit and India are co-extensive.” Constitutional historian Granville Austin informs us that 27 other members made a similar proposal aimed at fighting the Hindi imperialism. Among them were B. R. Ambedkar, T. T. Krishnamachari, G. Durgabai (Deshmukh), Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra and Naziruddin Ahmad. In October 1956, the government of India appointed a seven-member Sanskrit commission headed by emiment linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterjee. Renowned Sanskrit scholars like V. Raghavan and R.N. Dandekar were among its members. In its report submitted in November 1957, it recommended that Sanskrit should be made the official language of the nation and its study be made compulsory in schools.

Against this historical backdrop, it becomes understandable how an oath can be taken in Sanskrit but not in Urdu although the rules clearly state that Hindi is the language of the UP legislative assembly. It is clear as day that the mere fact that both Hindi and Sanskrit are written in Devanagari script does not turn Sanskrit into Hindi or vice versa. However, if one recalls the attitude of the BJP towards Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit, things become clearer. When the then N.D. Tiwari government in UP bestowed the status of second official language to Urdu in 1989, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had bitterly criticised the move on behalf of his party, citing it as yet another example of “Muslim appeasement”. As Sanskrit happens to be the liturgical language of Hinduism, the Hindutva brigade has a special fondness for it. It is another matter that its leaders are by and large innocent of the rich literary and philosophical legacy of this classical language. Quoting the example of Israel where Hebrew was revived and adopted as the lingua franca, they champion the cause of Sanskrit while downplaying the significance of Urdu. At least, Sanskrit is seeing achhe din.

Kuldeep Kumar is a senior journalist who writes on politics and culture.

Using Devanagari Numerals on New Currency Dishonours a Historic Compromise

The Modi government has reneged on a significant compromise on national language made during the constituent assembly debates – the Munshi-Ayyangar formula.

The legality of using Devanagari numerals in new currency notes has come into question. Credit: PTI

A fascinating new challenge has been brought against the newly printed Rs 2000 and Rs 500 notes in the Madras high court. A recent PIL brings into question the fact that the new notes have international numerals and Devanagari numerals printed on them, and argues that they should hence be declared “invalid” since the Indian constitution does not permit the use of Devanagari numerals on currency notes.

Writing for The Wire, Kavin Aadithiyan and Sahil Mathur have already pointed out that the legality of the move is at best doubtful. They note that according to the Presidential Order of 1960, the Official Languages Act of 1963 and Article 343 of the constitution itself, there appears to be no legal basis for the sudden introduction of the numerals. But it remains to be seen whether the court will consider the historical context and complexity involved in the matter.

While this may seem like a trivial change, the decision to introduce Devanagari numerals carries with it a huge amount of baggage. By including these new numerals, the Modi government has reneged on one of the most important compromises made during the constituent assembly debates – the Munshi-Ayyangar formula.

The Munshi-Ayyangar formula

The Munshi-Ayyangar formula – named after constituent assembly members K.M. Munshi and N. Gopalaswamy Ayyangar – was the compromise that was reached on the question of a national language.

These debates have often been recognised as the most divisive among all the constituent assembly debates. In India After Gandhi, Ramchandra Guha notes that there were voices in the assembly that would not recognise anyone as Indian if they did not understand Hindustani – a language similar to Hindi. There were also several people from the south who were worried that the rise of ‘Hindi imperialism’ would engulf the states that did not speak Hindi.

According to the formula, the assembly agreed that the official language of the union would be Hindi in the Devanagari script and the form of numerals to be used shall be the international form of Indian numerals. This compromise meant that India would have no national language and that the non-Hindi speaking states could maintain the international numerals.

The debates on numerals

From a modern perspective, it is difficult to understand just how controversial the introduction of Devanagari numerals was during the framing of the constitution. The introduction of Hindi in the Devanagari script was seen by non-Hindi speakers as a difficult pill to swallow. To them, it meant that they would be compelled to learn a new language that is alien to their part of the country. The retention of international numerals became a token of good faith on the part of the Hindi speakers in the country, something to reassure the non-Hindi speakers that they would not entirely be sacrificing their native languages for the sake of the dominant Hindi speakers.

Two days in 1949, September 13 and 14, were set aside for deciding the question of a national language and numerals. On these days, three speakers stood out, each representing a different but important set of stakeholders. The first was Jawaharlal Nehru – the progressive – who argued that there was a need for retaining the international numerals so that India could keep abreast in matters of science and technology. For him, the international numerals were vital so that the country could continue to progress and not fall into the trap of romanticising the past.

The next stakeholder was Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He attempted to ameliorate the situation by linking the use of international numerals to Arabic and Indian history. He noted that the numerals travelled to the west through the Caliphs who themselves had borrowed the numerals from the Vedic scholars of India. His intent was clear. He wanted to position the use of international numerals in a manner that would be acceptable to the religious Hindu majority and to the Muslim minority.

The final stakeholder in the debates on numerals was the president of the assembly, Rajendra Prasad. He spoke after the resolution was passed as it was important for him to remain neutral. His address is still vital as it summed up the spirit of the debate. Prasad focussed on the importance of the compromise and how historic it was. He brought this up in the form of a metaphor:

“We want some friends to invite us. They invite us. They say, “You can come and stay in our house. We welcome you for that purpose. But when you come to our house, please wear the English type of shoes and not the Indian chappal which you wear in your own house.” I should be not very wise to reject the invitation, simply because I do not want to give up my chappals. I would accept the English type of shoes and accept the invitation, and it is in this spirit of give and take that national problems can be solved.”

This metaphor highlighted the importance of constitutional and national compromise in nation building. It also highlighted just how important the non-Hindi speakers considered the retention of international numerals.

The new notes

These debates throw the historic nature of the inclusion of Devanagari numerals into sharp relief. The challenge in the Madras high court is no longer a waste of time brought about by those who dislike the current government. Nor is it the desperate recourse of sympathisers of kala dhan. It is an appeal to maintain the pact that the Hindi speaking north made with south.

Equally, the debate underlines the value of discussion and consultation in a diverse society. Unsettling these longstanding compromises may unleash unforeseeable circumstances with potentially disastrous consequences.

Apoorva Sharma is an Associate Editor for the Constitutional and Civic Citizenship Project at the Centre for Law and Policy Research. Under this project, he is involved in curating, coding and tagging the constituent assembly debates and making the database available at cadindia.clpr.org.in.