Build on linguistic links with Western India
TSUNDAY, APRIL 16, 2017
he traditional New Year was celebrated in Sri Lanka linked as it is to a millennia- old common heritage in many parts of India and South East Asia around the rice harvesting season.
Age- old customs and rituals largely connected to auspicious times laid down by astrologers take centre-stage.
In this backdrop of the country’s historical connectivity with this part of the world, renewed discussions have emerged of linguistic relations that exist among the same constituencies with regard to the Sinhala language.
Sri Lanka and, particularly, India have had a shared cultural heritage outside the Tamil Nadu sphere from the Mauryan Empire; the land of Magadha, India's ancient seat of Buddhism which is now Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal and Jharkland, Chhatisgarh and Orissa.
Similarities between the Sinhala language and the Sanskrit- based languages are many. In the states of Western India, Marathi and Gujarati share many Sanskrit words even in current usage like ‘Akka’ and ‘Archchi’.
Pali books from Sri Lanka were the first to be transliterated in Devangiri for the Indians to gain an understanding of the Dhamma. Given the cultural sea- links between Lanka and the Indian state of Maharashtra, there was similarity in dress, food and even architecture.
The Sinhala language must therefore be made to link with the larger family of Sanskrit- based languages in Western India which can also help spread the Dhamma.
After partaking in the New Year sweetmeats and performing the customary rituals, the Sri Lankan linguistic academia must buckle down to doing something substantial to promote and widen the horizons of the Sinhala language and establish links with Indian academics such as those in the Pali Department in the University of Mumbai -- and it should be part of Government foreign policy as well.
Western India today has a GDP six times that of Sri Lanka and it makes sense for academics and governments of both Sri Lanka and India to look at that long neglected historical connectivity between Sri Lanka and Western India to bring the two countries closer together rather than to be bogged down in the political theatrics of the state of Tamil Nadu that has been the bane of Indo-Lanka relations now for decades.