By Kamal Prakash Malla
Posted by The Himalayan
Voice: August 4, 2011
[Chronologically, what is of
critical interest here is that although the story of milch cow was not unknown
to the medieval chroniclers, Ne Muni or Ne the sender to
paradise was not known to them. The compilers of Gopalarajavamshavali were
familiar with the tradition relating to Nepa the cowherd who dug out
the Jyotirlinga or the Luminous Phallus of Lord Pasupati. Prior to
the late 15th century, Ne Muni did not seem to exist at
all. Gajapati, a mediocre Sanskrit playwright, who composed a Sanskrit
play called Caturanka Mahabharata (preserved in the National
Archives, Kathmandu, Catalogue Part I, No. 449), wrote in the preface that
“the country protected in the past by Ne Muni is called Nepal”.
This is the only known and reliable ancestry of the sage Ne Muni.]
1. Antiquity of the Word
: The word Nepala is obscure in origin. The earliest reliable
incidence of the word is in the Allahabad pillar inscription of
Samudragupta (A.D. 335-375). The undated inscription mentions that among other
frontier-kings, the king of Nepal“paid tribute, obeyed orders, and came to
prostate themselves to satisfy the proud will of the master”. In Nepalese
sources, the earliest incidence of the word is in an inscription dated
equivalent to A.D. 512. Issued by King Vasantadeva, it is located in Tistung, a
small valley at the foot of Candragiri, on the ancient entry route to
the Nepal Valley. The form used in the inscription is swasti
naipalevya, translated by the authorities variously as “(greetings) to
Nepalis”, “(greetings) to the residents of Nepal”, “(greetings) to the
Nepalas”, and “(greetings) to the leaders/kings of Nepalas”.
The form naipaevya is
dative plural. Naipala is from Nepala, combined with the
suffix-an. The vowel e in the first syllable ne becomes diphthong ai
when the suffix- an is used. Unfortunately, however, the suffix
- an is used for different shades of meaning, coming for, among other
things, attributives (e.g., saiva fromSiva), aggregates
(e.g. bhaiksam from bhikksu), and patronymics
(e.g. aupagavali from upagu). It may sometimes bear the sense of
‘king/leader of’ as in saibhyah, “king of Sibis”.
Although the exact shade of
meaning of the form of address swasti naipalevyah is debatable, two
facts of its use are in clear evidence. Of the nearly 200 extant ancient
Nepalese inscriptions belonging to the 5th to 9th century A. D., the form of
address is used in only three inscriptions. Although they are chronologically
nearly a century apart, they are all located in the Tistung valley. Two of
these, issued 95 years apart, are located exactly in the same find-spot. The
total absence of the form of address in the rest of ancient inscriptions, on
the one hand, and the evident concentration of it within a limited geographic
area, on the other, compels us to reject the translation
of naipalevya as “to the Nepalis in general”. It can only mean either
“to the Nepalis” or “to the leaders/kings of the Nepalas”. If this
interpretation of epigraphic facts is sound, the word Nepala stood,
in the past, for a well-defined and specific social aggregate whose identity
was intact till the beginning of the 7th century A.D. The use of the form of
address coincides with a phase in ancient Nepalese political history when
the Abhira clan was in evident ascendancy (A.D. 512-640).
2. The Word Nepal in
Literary Sources
Nepal is, of course, not a
rare word in classical Indian literature. It occurs in an alleged Vedic
text, Atharvaparista. It occurs in Kautalya’s Arthashstra, in
Bharata Natyashastra, in some recensions of the Mahabharata, in
the Buddhist canonical text, Mulasarvastivada Vinaya, and
the Jaina text, Parisistaparvan. However, the main problem
with these literary sources is that they do not have any firm, reliable, and
absolute chronology. For example, some authorities claim that Arthashastra belongs
to the 4th century B.C. while others would not date it earlier than the 4th
century A.D.! The critical edition of Mahabharata does not contain
any reference to Nepal, but a southern recension does have a reference.
Textual studies of these classics have shown that they belong to “evolving
anonymous literature” and that there are far too many interpolations and
scribal “improvements” for anyone to be able to decide what constituted the
“original text”. Thus, although the name Nepal appears in Indian
literary sources, most of these are so difficult to date with any exactitude
that these sources are not of much use in establishing either the origin or the
antiquity of the word.
3. Traditional Interpretations of
the Word
In Nepal, there are two kinds
of historical writings available in the traditional genre: the
medieval vamshavalis (theGopalarajavamshavali, compiled in ca. 1380s,
and its cognates) and the vernacular chronicles (compiled between the 1820s and
1880s). One of the most important differences between the two traditions is
that whereas the medieval chronicles are relatively free from mythological
digressions and puranic materials, the later chronicles are infested
with them. It is interesting to note that the traditional interpretation of the
word Nepal is not preserved in any of the three surviving medieval
chronicles whereas the later chronicles, both Brahmanical and Buddhist
versions, contain interpretations and rationalizations of the word Nepala.
In one version, it is said that “the great Rishi, from
whomNepal derives its name, was a devotee named Ne” (Wright.
1877:89). In the same chronicle, we also come across the following story:
The cowherds who came in the
train of Lord Krishna settled down ...and built cowsheds. One of their cows, by
nameNe, was a mulch cow, but gave no milk. Every day at a certain time she went
running to a certain place. One day the chief cowherd followed her, and saw
milk issuing from her udder, and saturating the spot on which she stood. His
curiosity was excited to know what was under the spot, and on removing some
earth he discovered the light, which however consumed him.
Ne Muni, from
whom Nepal derives its name, then came, and having persuaded the
people that there would be noChhetri Rajas in the Kali Yuga, he
installed as king the son of the cowherd who had been consumed by the
light. (Wright, 1877: 107-108)
The Buddhist interpretation,
however, is quite different. According to a recension, compiled in ca. A.D.
1825,Manjushri Bodhisattwa, the divine agent who drained the
primordial Lake of Serpents, Nagahrda, that was
the NepalValley, persuades the serpent-king Karkotaka to stay on
in the drained valley :
In order that the city may be
well populated, you will have to cause the rains to be set in here always in
due season and cherish the people; and the Self-Existent Buddha called Ne,
(i.e. the sender to paradise) will also take care and multiply the community.
The Valley will be called after his name Nepal or the Cherished of
the Adi Buddha. (Hasrat, 1970:7)
In these traditions two elements
emerge clearly into relief. The imputed etyma (Ne the
sage, Ne the cow, and Ne the sender to paradise) are
primarily sectarian in nature, and the interpretations are drawn from a given
religious-cultural system so that the name could be, not only interpreted, but
also legitimatized within the system. The word, thus, becomes not just a
linguistic sign, but also a cultural syndrome.
Chronologically, what is of
critical interest here is that although the story of milch cow was not unknown
to the medieval chroniclers, Ne Muni or Ne the sender to
paradise was not known to them. The compilers
ofGopalarajavamshavali were familiar with the tradition relating
to Nepa the cowherd who dug out the Jyotirlinga or the
Luminous Phallus of Lord Pasupati. Prior to the late 15th century, Ne
Muni did not seem to exist at all. Gajapati, a mediocre Sanskrit
playwright, who composed a Sanskrit play
called Caturanka Mahabharata (preserved in the National
Archives, Kathmandu, Catalogue Part I, No. 449), wrote in the preface that
“the country protected in the past by Ne Muni is called Nepal”.
This is the only known and reliable ancestry of the sage Ne Muni.
In the Nepal Valley,
during the 15th-16th century there appears to have been an upsurge of religious-cultural
nationalism. Nepal Mahatmya (earliest extant copy dated A.D.
1654), Svayambbhu Purrana (earliest extant copy dated A.D.
1558), Pashupati Purana (earliest extant copy dated A.D. 1504), and
similar puranic texts were compiled. This literature appears to have
grown, at least in part, out of the cultural need to glorify and legitimatize
the local shrines, including the rivers and their confluences, by some or other
kind of divine association. Initially, the inspiration may have come from the recent
migrant religious and cultural elites from India. There is hardly any
doubt that sectarian and religious interpretation of the
word Nepal was sought during this fertile period of myth-making. Ne
the sender to paradise and Ne the sage may have been pious afterthoughts of
this phase in Nepal’s cultural history.
4. First Approaches to Secular
Analysis
The earliest known secular (i.e.
linguistic) attempt to analyze and interpret the word Nepala was made
by Christian Lassen (1800-1876), a Norwegian scholar who spent most of
his working life as Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Bonn, Germany.
The four volumes of his Indische Alterthumskunde (Indian
Archaeology), published between 1847-1861, are regarded by the knowledgeable as
“a milestone in the progress of the science of Indology,” and “one of the
world’s greatest monuments of untiring industry and critical scholarship”. In
volume I fascicle 2, Lassen writes
that Nepala, like Himala, Pancala, and similar other words,
is formed as a compound of nipa and ala(standing for alaya,
i.e. abode). Nipa is “foot of a mountain”. Nepala thus
means “abode at the foot of a mountain” (Lassen 1861:76, footnote no 3). In the
meantime, Lassen dismissed Ne Muni as “just a concoction”.
At the beginning of the present century,
Sylvain Levi (1863-1935)- a French savant of great repute and vast erudition in
Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan languages, published a monumental three-volume
study on the history and culture of Nepal : Le Nepal : Etude Historique
d’Un Royaume Hindou (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1905-1908). He begins his
survey of the history of Nepal with a lucid and critical examination
of the earliest references to Nepal, both epigraphic and literary,
including the legendary interpretations of the word. In this context, Levi also
scrutinizes Lassen’s etymological explanation :
Even supposing that the change
from nipa to nepa were legitimate, the sense attributed
here to this word (i.e., foot of a mountain - KPM) would have no other
foundation than the gloss of a scholiast (i.e., a 16th century commentator
called Mahidhara, in his commentary on Vajaseni Samhita - KPM).
Moreover, it applies rather badly to a country already situated in the
mountains themselves. Nepal strictly speaking is only the large
interior valley. The word nipasignifies above all a kind
of asoka (the nauclea cadamba of the botanist) which is far
from being characteristic of the Nepalese region.
In addition, one could still
bring in the Nipas, a princely race of the cycle of the Pandavs, who
reigned in Kampilya inPanchala. (Levi, 1905 : II : 66)
Not only that Levi found Lassen’s
Sanskrit etymology of the word Nepala untenable, he went on to
confess :
The name Nepal, Nepala,
despite its Sanskrit appearance, does not lend itself to a satisfactory
etymological explanation. (Levi, 1905 : II : 66)
Despite his vast Sanskrit
learning Levi himself had no definite contribution to make, except a suggestive
hint where he said : Either newara derives its origin from the
word Nepal, or that Nepal owes, on the contrary, her name to a
Sanskrit adaptation of local ethnic. (Levi, 1905: I: 222- 223)
Sir Ralph L. Turner, in his
famous A Comparative and Etymological Dictionary of the Nepali
Language (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1931) reinstates Levi’s
suggestion in his entry in the dictionary under the head-wordNepala, where he
writes : Late Sanskrit, Nepala singular, the country; plural, its
people; - this may be a sanskritization of newar, or the latter may be a
later (Eastern Hindi or Bihari) form of Nepala. (Turner, 1931 : 353)
5. Tibetan Etymology : The
Miscarried Attempt
Austin L. Waddell (1893:
292-294), a British civil servant turned Tibetologist proposed an etymology of
the wordNepal based on what he thought were Tibetan data. According to
him, the first syllable ne (corresponding to the written Tibetan
form gnas) signifies home, spot, sacred place, or place of
pilgrimage. The syllable pal would be the equivalent of bal,
signifying “wool”. Nepala would then signify “the sacred place of the
bal or wool”. Waddell’s monstrous etymological explanation has no basis in
facts of the Tibetan language or Tibeto-Burman linguistics. For one thing, the
usual word-order is Bal-po, Bal-yul. So instead
of gnas-bal , it would ordinarily be bal-gnas. Secondly, the
Tibetan name for Newars (Bal-po) and Nepal (Bal-yul), as Tucci
has conclusively shown, is due to “curious duplications of place names”. In the
A.D. 821 Treaty Inscription at Lhasa, Nepal, is clearly referred to
as gcen lho Bal pho (Tucci, 1958:344-347; 397).
6. Indo-Aryan Etymologies : The
Topographic Interpretations
Topographic features
of Nepal in general and the Nepal Valley in particular
have remained the bases of Indo-Aryan interpretations of the word so far. These
interpretations have several problems—the problems of imputed meaning as well
as the problems of rules of word-formation. Robert Shafer, an American linguist
who was basically a Sino-Tibetanist rather than an Indologist, says :
The first part
of Nepala is phonetically quite regular as a derivative of nipa (foot
of a mountain). Sanskrit ai, as a rule, became Prakrit e.
Then Shafer goes on to add:
But I do not believe we can
consider Nepala in isolation when discussing the last part of the
word. At least some of these final-la’s
(in Panchala, Nepala, Kosala, Bangala - KPM) found in
place names may have been Tibeto-Burmic in origin. (Shafer, 1954 : 137)
Whereas Shafer was bothered by
the last part of the word Nepala, offering to explain the word as
Indo-Aryan in root and Tibeto-Burman in suffix, a different problem in
Indo-Aryan explanation bothered Button-Page, a British expert on South Asian
archaeology. He interprets the word as a derivative of nipa (damp,
low-lying), affixed with ala, the old Indo-Aryan suffix meaning
‘pertaining to, possessing’. This would result in naipala. So he says:
The real difficulty from the
Sanskrit viewpoint is the gu`a-vowel; the v{ddhi ai would be expected in the
Sanskrit derivative of naipala.
To get over this difficulty
Burton-Page (1954:596) proposes to interpret the word Nepal in a
somewhat tortuous way :Nepala is a “re-sanskritisation
of Prakrit nevala which is derived from
Sanskrit naipala which in turn is a derivative of the root n}pa
suffixed with ala”. According to him, the meaning of this compound will be
“damp, low-lying home”. To call Nepal in general or
the Nepal Valley in particular “damp, low-lying home” may be an
unsatisfactory metaphor, but not a very apt toponym. We are, therefore,
relieved at the fact that Burton-Page concedes that “this is not offered as a conclusive
solution”. Because, while the interpretation may be sound phonetically, its
semantics is questionable.
Recently, Nepali historian D.R.
Regmi has come up so late in the day with yet another Indo-Aryan etymology
based on topographic semantics.
According to Regmi :
Nepala might have derived
its name from nipa (note that the vowel i short in Regmi,
whereas it has always been long earlier-KPM), meaning as it goes to cause, to
imbibe as a verb or a water jar or a lake as a noun. By vrddhi it
becomesNaipa. Nipa obviously means a tank or a lake in the present
context ...... (The settlers) gave it the name according to its potential
supporting capacity to be associated with palayati and lastly the
name Nepal came to birth. (Regmi, 1983:1)
A careful perusal of Sanskrit
dictionary or dictionaries would immediately expose how disastrous this
etymology is. In his dictionary Regmi just looked at the head-word at the top
of the column, ignoring the other elements of the compounds. n}pa is, of
course, a water jar. But it does not mean a lake. The word which stands for “a
well, pool, tank, any place or trough for watering cattle”, is not nipa,
but nipana. Similarly, nipasaras is “a pool or lake for watering
cattle”. How the most unlikely compounding of naipa+palayati will result
in Nepala by any rule of Sanskrit morphophonemics, unfortunately, the
Nepali historian does not care to explain.
7. Sanskritisation
Scholarly Sanskrit
dictionaries-the native Indian dictionaries, the great St. Petersburg
Dictionary of Bohtlingk and Roth, and Mayerhofer’s recent etymological
dictionary-all appear to have maintained a studied but intriguing silence about
the origins of the word Nepala. Two of the greatest Indo-Aryanists of the
twentieth century, the late Sir Ralph L. Turner of Britain and the
late Suniti Kumar Chatterjee of India, have both indicated that the word
may have been a sanskritisation of Newara. As we have shown earlier, Levi
too hinted at the possibility of the word being a Sanskrit adaptation of de
l’ethinique local. Despite his Indo-Aryan leanings, Burton-Page concedes
that Nepala is a sanskrit form of Nevala (Prakrit). Baburam
Acharya, the late Historian-Laureate of Nepala, at first proposed to
interpretNepal as a sanskritisation of a tribal name which he hypothesized
as Nepara. Later on he, too, came round to accept that Nepala is
a sanskritisation of Newara (Acharya, 1953 and 1972).
Recently, the sanskritisation
hypothesis has gained some additional evidence. A great many place-names traced
in ancient Nepalese inscriptions-the names of rivers, hillocks, fields, canals,
etc., are non-Sanskritic in origins. Recent analyses (Malla, 1981 and 1983)
have shown that many of these toponyms and hydronyms are, in fact,
Tibeto-Burman in stock. An analysis of ancient river-names and their recent
transformations has nearly conclusively established that several names are
sanskritisation of Tibeto-Burman words and roots.
Levi, Turner, Chatterjee,
Burton-Page, and Acarya are all unanimous on the point
that Nepala is a sanskritisation ofNewara. However, it will be closer
to the known linguistic/phonetic facts of the two words
(Nepal>Nebala>Newala>Newara) if we consider them as two phonetically
variant forms of the same word : Nepalais the learned Sanskrit form
whereas Newara is the colloquial Prakrit form. The earliest
verifiable incidence ofPrakrit form of the word (naivala) is attested in
the Gilgit manuscript of the Buddhist canonical
textMulasarvastivada-vinayavastu by Jinamitra compiled “after the
3rd century A.D” (Levi. 1907:115). It was translated into Chinese by
I-tsing in A.D. 700.
8. Tibeto-Burman Roots ? : An
Ethnolinguistic Hypothesis
Classical place-names in South
Asia have almost always been the names of the tribes, clans, and peoples who
had been inhabiting the place, e.g., Bharata (from the
Bharatas), Panchala, Magadha, Videha, Andhra, Anga, Vanga,Kalinga, Matsya, Kuru, Pundra,
etc. At least, in one classical Indian text,
Bharata’s Natyashastra (XIII:32), usually dated back to second
century A.D., the people of Nepal (naip@lika) is mentioned along with other
well-known
tribes-Anga, Vanga, Kalinga, Vatsa, Odra, Magadha, Pundra,
etc. The epigraphic evidence in Nepal also indicates that the country
probably got its name from the people who inhabited it, rather than from any of
its isolated topographical feature — real or imagined.
To say that Nepala is a
sanskritisation of Newara does not explain much in etymological
terms. The crux of the problem is to identify and define, if possible, the
semantic primitives, i.e., the basic roots of which the original word is made.
Local traditions and interpretations consistently retain a kind of unconscious
echo of certain roots: ne, the cow, Nepa, the cowherd Ne-muni, the
sage, and Ne, the sender to paradise. Of these the earliest tradition is
of Nepathe cowherd-the eponymic ancestor of the clan
of Ahbiras who migrated to Nepal. This tradition is recorded in
theGopalarajvamshavali. Although the chronicle was compiled in ca. A.D. 1380s,
the compilers had drawn upon sources which went back at least to the A.D.
1050s. Manikya Vardhana, a court-poet of Sthitirajamalla’s time (A.D.
1382-1395) also mentions Nepa the cowherd as the founder of the
Nepalese scion of the Abhiras.
Local traditions are nearly
unanimous on the point that prior to the arrival of the Hindu dynasty of the
Licchavis in early centuries A.D./B.C., the early settlers of
the Nepal Valley were the herdsmen, the cowherds (gopala-s) and
buffalo-herds (mahisapala-s). Ne is cattle, cow, buffalo is some Tibeto-Burman
languages of Nepal and pa is a suffix for man, very widespread in
Tibeto-Burman area. On the basis of these scanty linguistic and
ethno-historical evidence, some tentative hypotheses may be hazarded :
a. nepa is a
Tibeto-Burman stem consisting of the roots ne (cow, buffalo, cattle)
and p@ (man, keeper);
b. nepa was
sanskritised as Nepala/nevala, possibly on the analogy
of gopala (cowherd). Tibeto-Burman pa can elegantly be transformed
into Indo-Aryan pala/vala (keeper).
The later
Hindu-Buddhist puranas and chronicles may have found the idea of a
cowherd as the eponymic ancestor of the country somewhat unpalatable to their
religious and cultured taste. Nepa the cowherd was conveniently
metamorphosed into Ne the sage or Adi Buddha - the sender to
paradise ! The original meaning was lost and forgotten in the process of
sanskritisation and linguistic acculturation.
In conclusion, one can only quote
what the late Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, the National Professor in the Humanities
and perhaps twentieth-century India’s most leading Indo-Aryan scholar, had
to say on the word Nepala :
Various derivations of the
name Nepal (Nepala) were proposed by the Pandits of Nepal in medieval
times, both Buddhist and Brahman. It would appear, however, that the name came
from that of a Tibeto-Burman speaking tribe, the ancestors of the present-day
Newar people, and consists of two elements--a prefix Ne--, of uncertain
meaning (it may be the name of some hero-king or priest among the tribe) and
the proper tirbal name pala or bal- the meaning of which
in Newari is lost. (Chatterjee, 1974:64)
References
Acarya, Baburam. 1953. “Nepal,
Newar, and the Newari Language.” Nepal Samskritik
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Nepali.
Baburam Acarya and His Work.
Kirtipur: Institute of Nepal and Asian Studies, Tribhuvan
Vniversity. In Nepali. - 1972
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1855-75.Sanskrit-Worterbuh. St. Petersburg. 7 Volumes.
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Name Nepal.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
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Waddell, Austin L.
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Press.
(This paper was originally published in The Nepal Heritage Society Souvenir for PATA Conference, Kathmandu, 1983, pp. 33-39).
@ Heritage Preservation: Tourism for Tomorrow
(This paper was originally published in The Nepal Heritage Society Souvenir for PATA Conference, Kathmandu, 1983, pp. 33-39).
@ Heritage Preservation: Tourism for Tomorrow
In commemoration of the 3rd PATA
International Tourism & Heritage Conservation Conference, Kathmandu
(November 1 - 4, 1983)
* The author is
Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics
at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal
