In a time of fake facts, can languages guide us to a way of looking at truth?
Whitney Cox
Truth is on everyones mind. Whether in the domain of fake news, in the near-daily reversals of the positions of certain national governments, or in the increasingly vocal scepticism towards such scientific orthodoxies as anthropogenic climate change, truth the anchor of the relation between human consciousness and the world outside of it is at present beleaguered, refigured, placed in question. At such a moment, it is worth the effort to look back over the different cultures past understandings of and negotiations with the concept to better fathom, perhaps, the historical truth of truth. Those interested in the history of science or of philosophy will, of course, have a lot to say on the topic. But the cultures of premodern southern India also have much to tell us.
Tamil and Sanskrit, the two South Asian languages with the longest classical pedigrees, have existed in a complex relationship down through the centuries, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in stark opposition.
For a history of the concept of truth, both languages contribute materially to our understanding. Sanskrits two leading candidates for translation by the English word truth, satyam and tattvam, are both abstract.
The first of these as in satyam eva jayate, truth alone triumphs, the official motto of the Republic of India derives from the verbal root for being: truth as what actually exists. Tattvam, derived from the word tat, that, refers to the invariant quality, the reality, of a thing. Tamil possesses an equally abstract term, unmai, also formed from a verb to be; unmai might, in fact, have long ago been coined on the model of the Sanskrit term.
But other Tamil truth-terms are more surprising, and more eloquent. Mey can mean truth or it can mean the body: the direction of travel from the concrete and personal to the abstract and universal is not at all clear. Is truth what is most intimate, closest to hand? Or is the body, in the end, the only truth on which we can depend?
Vaymozhi perhaps the spoken word is the most evocative of all. It is one of the Tamil names for the Sanskrit Vedas (The Truth), whose oral preservation down through the centuries presents a limit case of what can be relied upon to be present and real. Vaymozhi also supplied the title to the South Indian saint Nammazhvars devotional classic, The Tiruvaymozhi: it summons up an altogether different understanding of truth, as something actualised, brought into being, through speech.
In his remarkable new book, Tamil: A Biography, the Indologist David Shulman alights especially on this final notion of truth as an emergent property of language. Its title notwithstanding, Shulmans work depicts Tamil as never existing in a sort of pristine purity: Sanskrit and Tamil are for him parts of the same weave, along with Prakrit, Telugu, Malayalam, Arabic and now, of course, English.
Nevertheless, Tamil has its own special colouring, especially in its conception of truth; for Shulman this is a part of a more general claim that the notion of truth or truthfulness is always culturally determined. Shulman finds the most powerful articulation of a medieval Tamil conception of truth in the 12th-century Tamil poet Kambans retelling of the story of the god-king Rama. The archaic world of Kambans source, the ancient Ramayana written by the Indian sage Valmiki, had possessed its own culture of truth.
The old world was that of aristocratic heroes, whose word was their bond and who would rather die than fail to live up to their oaths. Related to this were the magical potencies of the speech of gods and sages, whose curses, once uttered, could be mitigated but never revoked.
Whitney Cox teaches in the department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago
