The Genius of Dnyaneshwar Dnyaneshwari Verse 2
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Chapter 3
Elephant God By history, tradition and thoughts
Ganesha you are the Lord, the God You enlighten All that there is for me Listen, says Nivrutti’s servant That is me …2 From ‘that inscrutable primal thing’ Dnyaneshwar suddenly in the very second verse descends (!) to an animal God, Ganesha, half elephant and half man, a popular icon1 if there is, not only in India but all over the East. Even the West is catching up with Ganesha, out of curiosity if not adoration. This second verse is pregnant with history, tradition and the Indian thought streams and is explained below point by point. • India’s literary tradition has a history going back to almost three and a half thousand years. It was originally in Sanskrit, first preserved by an oral tradition and later by way of a script. • Sanskrit is an Indo-European language and like all things in the past, it is impossible to make out how much of this language was Indian (Indo) and how much European (and from what part of Europe). • It had been a long-held view that most of the thoughts enshrined2 via the Sanskrit language had their antecedents outside India and were brought to the Indian subcontinent by successive waves of alien (!) people, that is people not indigenous to the subcontinent. • That view has taken several knocks in the recent past by way of archaeological evidence which supports the theory that the indigenous populations in the northwest of India were capable of the thoughts conceived in the then literature in Sanskrit. • Even here on the Indian subcontinent, progress in literary or