I am entrusted with the task of putting together some facts which would
support the view that the art of writing was known in India before the
time of our grammarian--the Siva-taught Panini. Professor Max Muller has
maintained the contrary opinion ever since 1856, and has the approbation
of other illustrious Western scholars. Stated briefly, their position
is that the entire absence of any mention of "writing, reading, paper,
or pen" in the Vedas, or during the whole of the Brahmana period, and
the almost, if not quite, as complete silence as to them throughout the
Sutra period, "lead us to suppose that even then [the Sutra period],
though the art of writing began to be known, the whole literature of
India was preserved by oral tradition only." ("Hist. Sans. Lit.," p.
501.) To support this theory, he expands the mnemonic faculty of our
respected ancestors to such a phenomenal degree that, like the bull's
hide of Queen Dido, it is made to embrace the whole ground needed for
the proposed city of refuge, to which discomfited savants may flee when
hard pressed. Considering that Professor Weber--a gentleman who, we
observe, likes to distil the essence of Aryan aeons down into an attar
of no greater volume than the capacity of the Biblical period--admits
that Europe now possesses 10,000 of our Sanscrit texts; and considering
that we have, or have had, many other tens of thousands which the
parsimony of Karma has hitherto withheld from the museums and libraries
of Europe, what a memory must have been theirs!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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