Thursday, November 15, 2012

On Zachariah and Shekar Aiya.

Names are footprints in the sands of time. Pursuing the trail of footprints and tracking them back to the original source can be as exasperating as identifying a virgin in a Sheikh’s harem.

Nevertheless, it’s an adventure well worth the effort, as success could mean linguistic discoveries that can change the way we view history.

The thrill of uncovering new cross connections led me to examine ancient Jewish names. I pored over scores of Judaic names and their biblical etymologies. The more I stared at the names, the more I got this feeling that there is a distinctive Indian flavour to most of the monikers.

Noah, the builder of the ark, sounds like the Sanskrit word for ‘ship’ (Naava). The third month of the Hebrew calendar is called Sivan. Incidentally the Shivratri is celebrated in March, the third month in our nation.

Abraham derived from Avram meaning ‘father of the multitude’ and Ab-Brahma (father of mankind in Hindu scriptures) seem homophonic. Moses or the Hebrew Moshe looks like a long lost cousin of the Malayalam word ‘Mashe’ (master). The brother of Moses is Aaron (Hebrew for ‘mountain’). Doesn’t it feel similar to Aaran in Aaranya (hilly forest)? Zipporah, the wife of Moses, also has a Sanskrit type name and it may have flowed from Shipra (river).

The most interesting parallel however is the striking usage of the ‘iah’ suffix. Cueing ‘the lord’, it serves the same purpose as the Tamil word ‘aiya’. Given this background, may be we should start viewing the ‘-iah’ set of names from a Tamil prism. In which case, Jeremiah (‘the exalted one’) will be Yerum Aiya (‘the one who rises’). Isaiah (‘salvation of the lord’) will be Eesha Aiya (‘the lord is god’). Zachariah (‘god remembers’) will be Shekar Aiya (‘the divine lord’) and Nehemiah (‘god’s compassion’) will be Nesam Aiya (‘the lord who’s affectionate’).

If Samuel owes its birth to Sami Vel and Rebecca to Rupaka, then how come no one ever talked about it? Actually, a wise old man did. Three hundred years before Christ, he argued that Jews could be a philosopher tribe from India called the ‘Kalani’. His name was Aristotle!