Ancient India taught us how to chronicle our times

In Nicholas Carr's now legendary essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (2008) he relates a wonderful episode about the German philosopher-poet Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1882, Nietzsche bought a typewriter and soon learnt touch-typing. In spite of his poor eyesight, he was able to resume putting his thoughts on paper without much struggle. This had a subtle effect on his work. One of his friends, a music composer, noticed this change in his writing style. He wrote in a letter to Nietzsche, "Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom," and mentioned that in his own work, his "'thoughts' in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper." Nietzsche replied, "You are right, our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts."

In any form of art, there is an inexorable bond between form and content. In Sanskrit, we use the word shabda (sound, structure) to represent "form" and artha (meaning, substance) to represent "content". While the interplay of form and content is evident in the performing arts, it is rather understated in literature. The language that we use to formulate our thoughts and the way in which we engage with that language - both these seem to profoundly influence our thoughts.

The earliest thoughts available to human beings come from ancient India. Composed at least 5,000 years ago, the Rigveda Samhita is the oldest text among the Vedas and is the fountainhead for a great deal of the literature, philosophy, culture, and art that was produced in the years succeeding its composition. The Sanskrit language is, however, much older than the Rigveda Samhita. To reach the level of sophistication and nuance that we see in the Vedas, the language itself should have evolved over a few thousand years. Also, Sanskrit, as a language, was very conducive for the kind of compositions the Vedic rishis were preoccupied with.

In those early years, Sanskrit was only a spoken language. The poetry of the Vedas was composed orally. Anyone who has tried composing a poem - let alone a story or a play - without a piece of paper (or any other writing or recording tool) knows the difficulty behind this exercise. So, it was inevitable that the medium of expression of the ancient people was metrical poetry. The moment we introduce a poetic metre (chandas), the piece we are composing attains a certain rhythm and structure. It adds as an additional memory peg in case we forget a line or an idea. In addition to metre, the Vedas also had specific intonations and a systematic methodology of recitation that was religiously followed.

If the Rigveda had poetry, the Samaveda had songs and the Yajurveda had prose. But these songs were also set to metre and the prose had a rhythm to it. Else it would have been very difficult to memorize. There was no other way to record and transmit these works; one had to commit them to memory.

Just think about it - these ancient works were handed down for centuries by means of an oral tradition. There were families who were devoted - across generations - solely for the learning and transmission of a specific text - for example, the Madhyandina recension of the Shatapatha Brahmana text of the Vajasaneyi branch of the Shukla Yajurveda. People spent entire lifetimes just learning up a text and preserving it for the future generations.

During the 19th century, when the British and German orientalists started taking an interest in the study of the Vedas, they travelled all over India to interact with Vedic scholars. After meeting many scholars and collecting information, they began preparing a written version along with English translations. They were astounded to find that the textual variations were negligible - after being passed on from teacher to disciple for some five millennia without a single word being written down!

Writing was possibly introduced by the time of the composition of the Vedangas (auxiliary subjects studied along with the Vedas). These included technical subjects like astronomy, law, rituals, and economics, so writing was unavoidable. Further, with the rise of Buddhism, many works were composed in Pali. Apart from poems and songs, several stories, plays, and novels were composed. In the literary landscape of India, the number of languages and the media of expression grew over the years. With the advent of printing technology and later with the introduction of typewriters and computers, we saw more change in the ways in which we engage with language.

Today we engage with language in myriad ways. When it comes to consuming language, we read books (print and e-books), we see posters and infographs, we hear audio books, we watch videos, we listen to lectures, etc. When it comes to composing, we write with pen on paper (or with a stylus on a touch-pad), we type out words into the computer, we compose orally and record it - to have it transcribed later, or we compose in our heads.

We tend to prefer a few chosen modes of consuming language and we seem to be even more rigid when it comes to composing. We lean towards prose, we type directly on the computer, and we tend to write more to educate or entertain rather than express. It might be worthwhile to explore the various modes of composition and different languages - not just for writers or poets, playwrights or journalists but also for the common person who uses language every day to create something beautiful, to express a sentiment that s/he finds worthy of expression.

Try using elements of poetry while composing a mundane e-mail to your colleague. Try writing a short story about the invention of the god particle in your mother tongue. Try writing a dialogue between two people to discuss a complicated design problem. Or a three-panel comic strip to explain an idea to your boss. A three-verse song in a new language that you're learning. The opportunities are endless. Give it a shot.