Orchestra brings notes from Europe’s north and living links with Sanskrit

By their looks, Lithuanians, who live right across the sea from the Swedes in Northern Europe, could hardly be described as cousins of Indians. But if one considered only speech, things would look more interesting. It turns out that Lithuanian is very close to Sanskrit, with many of its words and formations almost indistinguishable from India’s much revered ancient tongue (see graphic).
Thus, when today and tomorrow, members of the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra (LNSO), in Mumbai for two concerts, speak among themselves, they will use words and expressions that are as ancient as Sanskrit, but spoken through a living language. “We are visiting India for the first time,” says the orchestra’s chief conductor and artistic director Modestas Pitrenas. “We are proud to announce to all the world that our people came from India. This can be seen in our language, which preserves its ancient roots and has stayed more or less the same for thousands of years.”
That Lithuanians trace their ancestry to India is Baltic folklore. Linguists and population experts have a slightly different take.
In the evolving process of history, Sanskrit transitioned into modern languages like Hindi and Marathi, and is no longer spoken as a mother tongue by a reasonable number of people. But for various reasons, such historic pressures weren’t brought upon Lithuanian, which today retains characteristics from several millennia ago. Among the Indo-European languages (IELs), the world’s widest spoken language group, which includes tongues as diverse as Assamese, Persian and English, Lithuanian is the one that bears the most similarities to Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed common ancestor of this superfamily of languages (two other languages that are very close to PIE are Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek). Though Lithuanian and Sanskrit belong to very different branches of IELs, they owe their similarities to Lithuanian’s retention of PIE characteristics which have been lost in other living languages.
Linguists call a language that is averse to change ‘conservative’. Lithuanian and its close relative Latvian are said to be the most conservative IELs, the former more so than the latter.
The Baltic languages’ close links with Sanskrit may sound spectacular, but shouldn’t be surprising as there’s strong evidence that PIE originated in the Pontic Steppes (much of present-day Ukraine and parts of Moldova, Kazakhstan and Russia), from where it radiated outwards in waves of human migration. Some scholars say there is evidence that such an origin and development is also true of what today are known as Vedic practices. In this light, it is interesting to realise that Lithuanians were the last pagan people of Europe, before taking to a monotheistic faith in the late 14th century.
The LNSO is one of Lithuania’s two national orchestras and was founded in 1940. If one has a shelf full of old records by the Soviet-founded label Melodiya, it’s quite possible that the orchestra is somewhere in the collection.
On the LNSO’s two-day Mumbai programme are more or less the staples of the repertoire, by Berlioz, Liszt, Grieg, Brahms, Bruch, and Prokofiev, and a novelty, the symphonic poem ‘In the Forest’ by a national figure of Lithuania, Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911), who was a painter, composer, poet and writer.
The programme’s standouts are Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, which the Russian composer wrote in 1944 in anticipation of Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. In Prokofiev’s words, his Fifth is “a symphony of the greatness of the human spirit, a song of praise of free and happy mankind”.
There’s always the risk of similarities between nations being exploited and appropriated by cultural nationalists, if not racists, to ulterior ends. May that not happen in this instance and may historic Lithuania-India connections be the subject of further scholarly analyses, if not interesting coffee table talk. Here’s raising a toast, along with Prokofiev, to santarve—peace—shanti.