Representative image showing various languages.
Credit: iStock Photo
There was human habitation in India for thousands of years prior to the emergence of Sanskrit; and it is known that various languages existed, but we have no record of the languages, which could help to reconstruct the entire linguistic past. The earliest records of oral texts date to about 35 centuries BP (Before Present), and the earliest records of writing date to 24 centuries BP. While scripts had been in use in other parts of Asia, and west of India for 50 centuries BP, why the neighbouring Indian subcontinent took so long to get into lexical modes of expression is not yet fully investigated.
The yet undeciphered sign system of the Indus Valley civilisation makes any historical narrative of Indian languages incomplete and tentative. Writing originated in India some 24 centuries BP in the form of inscriptions and handwritten manuscripts. The writing culture got completely transformed when paper came into use about 10 centuries BP, and it experienced another profound shift two centuries BP with the advent of printing of the first few Indian languages.
We still do not have any conclusive knowledge of the remote-ancient past of Tamil and several other indigenous languages in existence during the second millennium BC in the eastern parts of India. We know that at a somewhat uncertain point in time, during India’s transformation from a hunter-gatherer society to a pastoral society, a branch of the remote-ancient Tamil spread to the north and another to the Northwest. Nevertheless, the precise timing remains unknown.
Finally, it is still a mystery as to when exactly the languages described in genetic linguistics as ‘isolates’ — the Nehali spoken in Maharashtra’s Buldhana district is an example — emerged locally or arrived in their present location. These are only some of the difficulties in presenting a clear historical picture of the origin, rise and transformation of languages.
Over the last five millennia, roughly from the early Harappan times to our time, the subcontinent accepted language legacies as distinct as the Avestan of the Zoroastrians, the Austro-Asiatic of the Pacific and the Tibeto-Burman of east and northeast Asia. The Indic (or the Indo-Aryan) languages in the northern states, together with the Dravidian languages in the south, and the Tibeto-Burman languages in the northeast, each with a great variety of sub-branches, make for the larger bulk of the Indian languages.
Throughout the known history of the subcontinent, there has been an active exchange and cultural osmosis between the indigenous languages and the migratory languages, producing, in the process, great literature in many tongues. In the past, Pali, Sanskrit and Persian had acquired currency over considerably extensive geographical areas of the subcontinent. Yet, the local languages — the Prakrits and Apabhramsas (in the case of Sanskrit) and desi-bhashas (in the case of Persian) — continued to thrive. Over time, they gained greater currency and, in various amalgamated forms, overshadowed the supra-languages. The intimate love-hate relationship between Indian languages and the English language over the last two centuries is developing precisely along the same trajectory.
However, this neat separation of a given language from its surrounding languages in theory does not accurately reflect the ground reality of existing languages. In order to get a picture of that, one must look into the figures provided by the census. These figures show that the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule have a much larger number of speakers than those not included. The only exception to this is that of English. This increase is caused not only by the general population growth in different linguistic states, but also by the decline of the languages not included in the Schedule. The decline is natural (and probably expected by policymakers), because the facilities provided for language education are mainly for the languages included in the Eighth Schedule. In the years to come, the other languages — mostly spoken by Adivasi communities and those belonging to the Austro-Asiatic family and the Tibeto-Burman family — may disappear altogether as demographic indicators. That is to say that while the diction and the syntax patterns of these languages will no doubt survive, there may be a greater assimilation of these in the main languages of India. Whether this is desirable or not is a question that not only the cultural anthropologists, but all of us, have to answer.
As for the main languages, the picture of their development is a mixed one. On the one hand, there is an unprecedented growth in printed materials in these languages, and naturally so, given the multiplication of print capitalism and digital technology from the 19th century till now. On the other hand, the English language has come up as the major adversary to these languages. Many members of the class which, during the 19th century, advocated the cause of the major Indian languages have turned to English as a vehicle for their economic betterment. As such, there has been a sharp decline in the number of readers of literature in Indian languages in cities and semi-urban areas.
(G N Devy is chairperson, The People’s Linguistic survey of India)