Gaviṣṭi

Gaviṣṭi

The movie Arrival consisted mostly of trying to figure out the language of some aliens who landed on Earth. The main character of this movie is a linguist, played by Amy Adams, tasked with figuring out the alien language in order to convey friendly intentions to them. At the beginning of the movie, when she is recruited for this task, she is painted as someone who is foremost in the field of linguistics. When the government official who recruited her is on his way out of her office, she asks the official to test the next person who is being recruited for the mission with the question “what is the Sanskrit word for ‘war’?” The response she received to this question when arriving at the military base is “gaviṣṭi,”which she says means ‘a desire for cows.’ This is, indeed, what it literally means. “go” (“cow”) when combined with “iṣṭi” becomes a dative tatpuruṣa compound meaning “a desire for cows”. However, the dialogue in the movie does not entirely capture the contextual nuances of this word. According to Monier-Williams, the word gaviṣṭi, in the context of the Rg Veda, does actually mean “a desire for war,” along with its literal meaning “a desire for cows.” 

Why was this Sanskrit included in the movie? My initial thought was that it gave a stamp of approval to the main character’s legitimacy as a linguist. The inclusion of Sanskrit in the movie banks on the assumption that Sanskrit is a difficult language, and that knowing it is an indication that one is an expert linguist. Further, the usage of the Vedic word for “a desire for war” rather than the many other (not as contextually nuanced) words which can mean “war” also serves to show the depth of both of the linguists’ experience with and fluency in different types of Sanskrit. This detail, however, would not have been evident to a viewer who had had no previous experience with Sanskrit. But, it does show a willingness of the writers of the movie to invest time in the details of the Sanskrit that they included, rather than just throwing whatever stereotype they wanted into the works. 

However, even if Sanskrit was fitting in the context of the plot of the movie and conveys the expertise of the linguists, there are hundreds of other incredibly difficult languages on the planet. Why would Sanskrit be needed in an interaction with aliens? One possibility is that Sanskrit has taken on such a (problematic) connotation of exoticism that it has essentially become “alien” and thus applicable in interactions with aliens themselves.