My Son Knew the Word Better: On Recovering the Contexts of Civilisational Language
It was an ordinary Tuesday evening. The kind where the day has already drain you out and the only thing left on your mind is getting through the last few hours before sleep. I had just come home from work. I changed my office clothes, and was moving around the house. I was like in autopilot mode - keys on the hook, bag on the chair, water from the kitchen. My son Vardhman, three years old and unaware that the world had totally different dynamics was already waiting near the door with his little rubber sandals.
“Papa, chalo,” Vardhman announced.
“Mandir.”
We generally went to the nearby temple every evening. It had become one of those quiet rituals that held the day and us together; five minutes of walking, the smell of incense from the gate, the coolness of the stone floor, Vardhman’s excitement whenever the bells rang.
I picked up him again. “Haan, chalo. Pani chadavi aavie,” I said casually - let’s go offer water to the deity - the way one says anything routine.
Vardhman stopped mid-sandal.
He looked up at me with the particular expression that three-year-olds reserve for moments when adults have said something baffling.
“Papa,” he said, with great patience, “pani nahi chadavavanu. Abhishek karvano chhe.”
I looked at my son.
Vardhman looked back at me.
Neither of us moved for a moment.
I almost laughed, except I found I couldn’t quiet, because something in that small correction had landed somewhere it wasn’t supposed to. My son was right. What we did every evening at that temple was not simply offering water. It was Abhishek: a ritual with its own name, its own sequence, its own meaning. Pouring water over a deity with intention and devotion and a specific set of steps was something different from casually placing a glass of water before someone as an offering. One was a domestic gesture. The other was a civilisational act.
Vardhman had not been taught this distinction. Nobody had sat him down and explained etymology. He had simply experienced Abhishek as Abhishek, repeatedly and directly, and so for him the two things were not interchangeable. The word and the experience were still one.
We went to the temple. Vardhman was very serious about the bells.
But I kept turning the small conversation in my mind while coming back to the home. I thought about how, if my wife had been there, she would have known what I meant. If my mother had been there, or my father, they would have filled the gap without thinking. The word would have been wrong, and the meaning would have survived anyway, because they shared enough context to reconcile the two.
But Vardhman had no such accumulated habit of reconciliation. He only had the word, and what the word actually meant. And that, I thought, might be precisely the problem not with Vardhman but with the rest of us.
The importance of words and their use are of great importance in our daily lives. Generally, the common understanding regarding the communication between two or more people in worldly life and in personal life is that, there will be fewer misunderstanding if the communication is done properly. Generally, everyone is suggesting that improve your communication skill, some would suggest some tricks too. I have a hypothesis that if anyone uses the words in the manner that it is ‘meant for’, the problem of miscommunication will drastically reduce. This premise of this hypothesis is that the words is the most efficient tools that humans has ever invented to communicate with each other, and when the context differs the word for the same object/article/person/situation will be different.
Is that possible that many of the mis-communication is due to choosing a poor word for the given situation. The word which conveys a slightly different context will also convey the different situation and feeling. Now you must be thinking what this would have any relevance to IKS or an economy. In our society we are using many words which literally either degraded the context behind the word or there is total different context. For an example in earlier paragraph I have used the word ‘Temple’. There are other words in our daily spiritual practices that we have adopted. The words are like ‘Religion’, ‘Worship’, and ‘Goddess’ and many more. Just hold your breath, these are not the translation for the words
‘Dhrama’, ‘Pooja’, and
‘Devi’ respectively. The context is totally different based on which the words are used for. Let me elaborate what I am trying to convey. [See; when I am not able to express the context exactly, I took the help of process of elaborating.] We do not go to temple just for praying. We, not necessarily do Puja of ‘Deity’, while the word worship is exclusively reserved with the God only. One cannot worship any earthen objects like river, trees as per the root meaning of the word ‘worship’. While we Indians use ‘worship’ as English equivalence of ‘Pooja’ and that’s why we use worship everywhere where we generally use the word ‘Pooja’. Now assume that there is a conversation between two groups of people where one is not having any context of the word ‘Pooja’ being used in their day to day life activity. This group’s context of the ‘worship’ is quite restricted, so this group will definitely make mistake of interpreting the word ‘worship’. Primarily it is the responsibility of listener to check for any reconciliation require for the context of the communication/words/sentences. If this group is impatient, the friction will emerge from this point onwards.
So let us understand some of these words in our day-to-day context and its mistranslation generally people assumed to be true. [Note: There are definitely hundreds of mistranslated words, I am refereeing these two without any classification standards, it is purely random choice]. The discussion of these two words are as follows.
1. Pooja vs. Worship: First let us get ourselves familiar with the root from where the word worship is evolved and used in the English language. The worship comes from the meaning ‘condition of being worthy, dignity, glory, honour’. Where the is derived from ‘Worthy + ship’(Etymology dictionary by Douglas Harper). The one more mening derived from the root meaning is “to hold in honour, esteem, show respect for a deity. (Merriam Webster Dictionary)” So with reference to this meaning if we analyse the meaning of the word “Pooja”, it is not just the honouring the deity, rather it is the whole process. The meaning of word “Pooja” includes the systematic rites and rituals which may or mayn’t differ from ‘Sampraday’ to ‘Sampraday’. A ‘Pooja’ includes devotion, knowledge, and action. The three-dimensional process which cannot be convey the true spirit of the word ‘Pooja’ by mealy the word ‘worship’ which included just one dimension of partially devotion. In ‘Worship’ only auditory senses primarily and ‘sight’ involved as it is primarily based on prayer cum song. In ‘Pooja’ all five senses are actually involved from sound (where prayer is a part of Pooja’), touch (Various liquid and non-liquid elements used), sight (observing deity) , taste (experiencing the
Prasadam), and smell (fragrance of flower and other things). Thus from the depth of an experience ‘Pooja’ is much deeper than just ‘Worship’. The Structural form of ‘Pooja’ is precisely codified depends upon the type of ‘Pooja’. Both ‘Worship’ and ‘Pooja’ can be performed by anyone who knows how to execute ‘worship’ or ‘Pooja’. [Note: There is largely misconception that in Hindu traditions only ‘Brahman’ can perform the ‘Pooja’, however there are enough evidence available across the timeline to destroy such propagative narrative. There is another dimension to ‘Pooja’ is Cosmic dimension; linking not just to Prosperity but to
Mukti too. There is one more dimension is that in addition to external rites and rituals, through engaging all the senses the internal (mental Pooja) involvement is also there.
2. Dharma vs. Religion: As stated by P.V. Kane in his History of Dharma Shastra (Vol.1, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1930) “Dharma is one of those Sanskrit words that defy all attempts of an exact rendering in English or any other language.” The word ‘Religion’ etymologically comes from the word ‘religio (Nominative) first recorded in 1st century BC. Its ultimate origin is itself is academically contested a rare situation where academicians and scholars disagree on a word’s root. These two words are originated from different civilizational experiences. The word ‘Dharma’ comes from the root ‘dhr’ which means “to hold, to uphold, to support, and to sustain.” The word comes in Rigveda in the cosmic sense of universal law. It says that “Dharma is the only thing that keeps the entire world stable and prestigious.” [Note: I don’t know the exact citation in this context, I have heard the same in many of the ‘Katha’ during ‘Shravan’. So if we want to define the ‘Dharma’ can be stated as ‘that which upholds, sustain, and supports the cosmos, society, and individual life.’ Here it gets interestingly dynamics. When one need to uphold, sustain, and supports society and individual life, there is higher chances that under the influence of ‘Maya’ the sustainability and support for individual life might get crossed with that off society’s. I deliberately exclude the cosmos aspect here as right now we ourselves doesn’t comprehend the cosmos as it is. [Note: Our ability to comprehend the knowledge is limited by our senses. May be that’s why our Gurus ask us to practice rites and rituals to go beyond the senses. We will discuss this aspect some other time. Let me get myself to back to the track.] These two concepts have no point of intersection (Chaturvedi Badrinath, 2019). Chaturvedi Badrinath states in his book ‘Dharma’ that religion works as a central belief system, where ‘God’ is understood to be the creator of the universe and where there are scriptures and commandments illuminating the teachings of God. ‘Dharma’ on another hand is a unique understanding. It is our way of understanding the human lives and the way of the civilization that exists around human lives. By this short statement we can see that that ‘Religion’ is very narrow and concrete meaning which is clearly visible unlike the word ‘Dharma’ which is having wide and abstract nature which can and cannot be visible and at the same time compressive and not too. ‘Dharma’ word also discusses the knowledge beyond our ability to comprehend the knowledge that is beyond our senses through which we understand the knowledge. Now let us compare these two words on different layers. We have seen the etymological root, and civilizational origin earlier. Now let just brief the scope of these two words. Dharma’s scope includes, individual life, society at large, and cosmic aspect and that all three simultaneously. The word religion’s scope is limited to the concept of God / creator of the universe and human’s relationship with the creator. This implies that the word ‘Dharma’ in Venn diagram metaphor the religion is a subset of the concept of dharma. The other group of set under the dharma may or may not share the same observations like the religion. So the text which states the code is multiple, open and evolving (Note: we all have heard from childhood that
“Shruti and Smruti e pratipadit hoy ene dharm jaanvo” which indicated its dynamic and evolving nature) in relation to ‘Dharma’, while in relation to ‘religion’ the people made it fixed and limited to certain texts only. If we take the layer of ‘method of salvation’ the word ‘dharma’ is more inclusive in nature, it does not defy the other ways, rather various ways concentrate on their own way and not cancelling the other ways. In the word religion, the people often exclude the other perspective, it concentrates only the one way for the salvation. Religion is binary in nature where concepts like sin / salvation, sacred/profane, right/wrong are exist. The word ‘Dharma’ is more like a spectrum and not just binary where the possibilities of simultaneous existence (with different degrees of the quality of two binary qualities exists, like a spectrum) of various concepts can be feasible and practical too. [Note: It may be one of the reason why we never feel insecure where someone is praising their concept of creator.]
The two words explored here Pooja and Dharma are, in truth, merely the first two steps into a vast and largely uncharted terrain. Words like Mandir, Devi, Guru, Karma, Aatmaa, Mokṣa, Yajña, Saṃskāra, and many more, each carry within itself an entire civilisational memory, a specific context born from centuries of lived experience, observation, and refinement. It would be intellectually dishonest to claim that this exploration is either complete or conclusive. The intent here has never been to assert the superiority of one language over another, or one civilisation’s vocabulary over another’s. Every language, after all, is the most honest and precise instrument its speakers have developed to describe their own experience of reality and in that, every language deserves its due respect. What is being attempted here is something simpler and perhaps more urgent: to recover the original contexts that these words carried, so that when we use them or translate them, we do not unknowingly shed the very meaning we are trying to communicate. The three-year-old who corrected me did not do so out of pride; he did so out of innocence because for him, the word and its lived experience were still one and the same. Perhaps that is the only quality worth recovering, ‘the innocence of using words the way they were meant to be used’. If this discussion has managed to plant even a small seed of curiosity a desire to pause before accepting a translation as complete, or to ask what context a word originally belonged to then it has served its purpose. The journey of such inquiry has no definitive end, and that is precisely what makes it worthwhile.
That evening, after we came back from the temple, Vardhman fell asleep quickly the way children do when they have no unfinished thoughts. I sat for a while at the edge of the bed, watching him sleep, still turning over his three words in my mind:
“Abhishek karvano chhe”. He had not read a single book on Sanskrit etymology. He had not sat through a lecture on Indian Knowledge Systems or civilisational vocabulary. He had simply lived the word, every evening, at the same cool stone floor, with the same bells and the same incense and the same careful pouring and so the word had stayed whole for him. Somewhere between his childhood and our adulthood, most of us had quietly accepted the reduced version of such words without ever noticing the loss. Not out of carelessness but just out of the ordinary, accumulating habit of living in two languages at once and assuming they mapped perfectly with each other. They do not always. And perhaps the first step is simply to notice that with the same patience, and the same certainty, like a three-year-old.
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