Yesterday I watched the critically acclaimed English movie Arrival (2016) for the first time, and the first thing that stuck with me was the use of the word गविष्टि (gaviṣṭi).
***spoilers ahead***
In the film, the protagonist, a professor of linguistics, is approached by the US government to attempt to translate alien communication. She tells the Col. who approaches her that she needs to see said aliens and talk to them face to face in order to translate. The Col. refuses, with the implication that he would seek another expert. Our protagonist asks him to judge the proficiency of their other candidate by asking them
the Sanskrit word for 'war' and its translation
The word the candidate came up with was गविष्टि. This is in itself strange because Sanskrit has many common words for war, all of which have also been inherited by multiple Indian languages and are in currency in the 21st century.
What is stranger is the literal translation offered for this word. The other candidate translated it as 'argument', and our protagonist translated it as 'desire for more cows', and the movie implies that the latter is more accurate.
They're both wrong. It is an easy error to make, because it is a compound word made out of the word गव, which indeed means cow, and ईष्टि which does mean desire. But this error is all the more egregious because linguistics is one of the foundations of the movie and the story it was based on.
In reality, the word गव, meaning cow, is often put in compound words for emphasis, both in Sanskrit and its nibling languages such as Bengali. I have here four examples to demonstrate my point.
गविष्टि (gaviṣṭi): A desire as ardent as the desire for cows. Ultimate desire, basically. Extended meaning: the conflict fuelled by said desire, or the desire for such conflict. In practice, the kind of conflict referred to by this word is restricted to individual battles, not a whole war
गवेषणा (gaveṣaṇā): Synonymous with above, including the extended meaning about conflict. However when used in neuter/feminine gender it has the additional meaning of: the quest/research undertaken to acquire the object of said desire. This last meaning is now the dominant meaning of the word, especially in the extant Indian languages where it is used to describe scientific and philosophical research.
গোহারা (gohārā): A loss as bad as the loss of cows, i.e. an utter and humiliating defeat. I grew up hearing this applied to the Indian Men’s cricket team’s losses, especially against their Pakistani counterparts
গোরুখোঁজা (gorukhonja): A search as desperate as the search for a missing cow.
Evidently, cows were and continue to be important!
I don’t know how they got Gaviṣṭi to mean ‘argument’. Yes, the word ‘गो’ also means ‘word’ in addition to 'cow', but that has no relation to how it got to acquire the meaning of a ‘conflict’.
Anyways, as a fun exercise, here are the actual words for war in Sanskrit and their meanings, in order of popularity of usage:
युद्ध (yuddha) - in the masculine gender: the conquered party; in the feminine gender: the action of gaining victory over, or launching attack on; in the neutral gender: the battle or war that is fought
संग्राम (sangrama) - the coming together or assembly of a tribe/village/troops thereof, to beat the shit out of other tribes/villages. The resulting battle/war.
रण (raṇa) - in the masculine gender: joy, pleasure (related to रम्), making noise (onomatopoeia); in the neuter gender: fight, struggle, war - presumably in the sense of 'an encounter that makes a lot of noise'
समर (samara) - the act of joining together to hurt others, war.
It is significant, I think, that two out of these words focus on the fundamentally cooperative nature of war - about how war is a collective effort - it is not one person’s struggle against anything.
Coming back to the film, another egregious error it commits is in its handling of Linguistic relativity. But that's a subject for another post.
