A civilisation founded on multilingualism
From the 19th century till the early 20th century, history and archaeology had remained fairly separate scholarly pursuits. Archaeology was considered to be the science of reconstructing the past through tangible evidence such as rocks, bricks, buildings, beads, skeletons, metallic objects and seeds. It was focused on the descriptive study of specific locations, and its aim was to arrive at an understanding of how people lived in the past eras, which had eluded the grasp of history.
History, on the other hand, acknowledged that literary and linguistic evidence came down to us in oral traditions, manuscripts, coins and inscriptions. Archaeology was predominantly non-linguistic and history was predominantly lingual. The significant disparity in study methods between the two branches of historical inquiry led people to commonly perceive the past, which was examined by archaeology, as pre-history.
This approach has changed during the last few decades after human genetics has notably heightened awareness regarding the movements of humanity’s earliest ancestors. In particular, we now know a lot more about the spread of Homo sapiens and the growth in their populations in different parts of the world since the Holocene, some 12 millennia ago.
Four major migrations into India have taken place in the last 70,000 years. The first of these was the pre-Holocene migration, all the way from Africa. The next took place in the millennia following the commencement of the Holocene and within Asia.
The spread of agriculture to India, and later within India can be dated back to 9,000 to 8,000 years ago. Human settlements, along with the domestication of cattle around cultivated areas, would have formed the foundation of the villages in India.
It is established that domestic cattle were used in the northwest part of South Asia by the seventh millennium BCE following which, by the third millennium BCE, cattle pastoralism was quite common in the Indus Valley and adjoining areas. What is interesting to note here is that agrarian communities, which spread over India prior to the second millennium BCE had their languages — Homo sapiens have been using complex languages for the past 70,000 years. In fact, the ability for acquisition of language was one of the factors that made prehistoric migrations possible at all.
Though we have neither any written nor oral evidence as to the characteristics of the languages used by the pre-Sanskrit groups in India, it would not be illogical to assume that they created a profusion of nature-related and agriculture-related terminologies. Given the long duration of the migration and the slow spread of agriculture and habitation in the extended geographic region of South Asia, the existence of hundreds of languages cannot be ruled out.
Thus, diversity as a cultural value, a symbiotic relationship with cattle and other domesticated animals, a respectful attitude to plants and closely formed clans, as well as the resulting Sanskrit term ‘gotra’, literally meaning ‘cattle-related family identity’, formed prehistoric India, with diversity of natural languages being one of its overarching attributes.
We do not have adequate technological tools to access pre-Indus languages. The languages spoken by the Indus valley people themselves have remained an unresolved mystery. If and when it becomes possible in the future to place all the existing mother tongues in India together and to scientifically reconstruct their historical, phonetic and syntactic evolution, we may get access to at least some of those pre-Indus and pre-Vedic languages. As of now, no Indian language research establishment is equipped to carry out such a mammoth research investigation.
One would have thought that the emergence of what the 19th century archaeologists have termed ‘civilisation’ — the Indus valley urban habitats and those who populated them — became the force to bring about a radical shift in the worldview of the people in India during the third millennium BCE.
That fundamental shift had to wait for another half a millennium, till the arrival of the Sanskrit language in India. The mutual entanglement of Sanskrit and the language varieties that were spoken in India during the second half of the second millennium BCE, and the first millennium BCE, resulted in that shift. The myths, cosmology, worldview and philosophy that India has inherited from the Sanskrit ‘knowledge system’ are, thus, a result of a multilingual ethos.
Though we cannot decipher it at the present stage of our knowledge of prehistoric India, that ethos had resulted out of a synthesis of a large number of languages used by small communities which existed in India for the eight millennia before the emergence of the Vedas. No doubt, Indian civilisation is founded on multilingualism.
(The writer is chairperson, The People’s Linguistic Survey of India)