The modern linguistic map of the subcontinent is complicated
on the
northern fringes by the spillover of languages from adjoining regions,
and in the hill country of east-central India by pockets of speakers of
what are called the Munda languages, possibly an ancient intrusion from
Southeast Asia. But otherwise the picture is remarkably simple. Only
two language families occupy the great bulk of the subcontinent, Indo-
Aryan in the north (e.g., Hindi) and Dravidian in the south (e.g.,
Tamil). The line separating them runs roughly from southwest to
northeast; there is a clean break in the west, but with scattered
islands of Dravidian in the northeast.
The question we have to address is how this linguistic
partition might
have arisen. The obvious hypothesis is that the Dravidian languages
were there before the speakers of Indo-Aryan arrived, and several
things support this. One is that there is no consensus among linguists
linking the Dravidian languages to any others outside the subcontinent.
Another is that the scatter of Dravidian islands in the northeast
invites interpretation as the residue of an originally wider presence
(though the Dravidian-speakers of the far northwest may be migrants who
arrived there in the last thousand years or so). Last but not least,
the oldest form of Indo-Aryan we possess is already marked by the
presence of some Dravidian loanwords; and since this was a language
spoken in the northwest, these loanwords are a strong indication that
this region, too, was once Dravidian- speaking. All this suggests that
before the appearance of the Indo- Aryan-speakers, the Dravidian
languages were spoken over most of India.
The Indo-Aryan languages, by contrast, are very well
connected outside
India. They form part of the Indo-European language family to which the
Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and several other groups of languages also
belong. These various groups are likely to have arisen from the breakup
of a parent language in eastern Europe. But even without that
reconstruction, the fact that only one branch of Indo-European is found
in India, while all the others are located outside it, makes the
presence of Indo-Aryan in India look like an intrusion.
Languages spread in two ways: people who speak them
may move to new
areas, and people who did not originally speak them may adopt them.
Often both processes may be involved. The problem in such cases is to
decide the relative weight of the two. With regard to India two things
can be said with some confidence. One is that Dravidian-speakers would
not have begun to adopt Indo-Aryan languages unless some Indo-Aryan-
speakers had brought them to the subcontinent in the first place. The
other is that for the incoming Indo-Aryan-speakers to have had the
impact they did, they must have been either numerous, or powerful, or
both. The idea that a significant number of people were involved has
some support from a limited body of genetic evidence, which points to a
marked affinity between high-caste Indians and Europeans-particularly
eastern Europeans. The idea that political power was involved is
supported by the very fact that it is high-caste Indians who most
display this affinity, and also by the finding that it is stronger on
the male than on the female side.
The first hard evidence of Indo- Aryan comes not from
India but from
the Near East. The place is the kingdom of Mitanni, in the region of
what is now southeastern Turkey, and the date is the fifteenth and
fourteenth centuries B.C. The spoken and written language of Mitanni
was Hurrian, a local Near Eastern language; but Indo-Aryan words crop
up in such suggestive contexts as royal names, names of gods, and the
technical language of chariot driving. This looks like the residue of
an Indo-Aryan military presence at some earlier date-except that these
would be speakers of Indo-Aryan who never went to India.
In India itself in this period, no contemporary texts
have been
preserved. Instead, we must work with two sources of diametrically
opposed character. One is the physical remains of Harappan civilization
and of post-Harappan cultures. The other is the oral tradition of the
Indo-Aryan- speakers. Oral tradition has been a salient feature of
Indian religious life for a very long time. In the mainstream Hindu
tradition the Brahmins were the priests, and one of their key roles was
to memorize and transmit to future generations enormous bodies of
textual material related to the cult. The oldest and most prestigious
of these texts were the four Vedas, transmitted in a number of versions
by the various Brahmin groups of the different parts of India. Of the
four Vedas, the oldest was the Rgveda, a substantial collection of
hymns addressed to the gods. Here, as in many aspects of Indian
history, the chronology is vague, but scholarly consensus dates the
composition of this material to the second half of the second
millennium B.C. The geography is less of a problem: we are in the
eastern Punjab, a part of the northwest where the various tributaries
of the Indus have not yet joined to form a single river- just
where we would expect to find people who had recently entered India
through the mountain passes. The subsequent transmission of these hymns
seems to have been extraordinarily faithful. One indication of this is
the fact that these Bronze Age compositions have not been contaminated
by the Iron Age, in which the great majority of those who transmitted
them actually lived (by contrast, anachronistic references to iron have
seeped into the portrayal of Bronze Age society in the Homeric epics).
The language of the hymns is an archaic form of Sanskrit, the Indo-
Aryan classical language of Indian civilization; the ttgveda thus
provides our earliest window onto an Indo-Aryan-speaking society in
India. In fact, we can call these people by the name they used of
themselves: Aryans.
Aryan society had little in common with the urban civilization
of
Harappa. It was very much a society of pastoralists, proud of its
cattle, its horses, its chariots, and its raids; it included kings and
warriors alongside its priests, but had nothing we would really want to
call a state. This society did not exist in a human vacuum, for
alongside the Aryans there appears a dark-skinned people whom they hold
in contempt. Thus it would not be hard to imagine this aggressive
pastoral population playing a part in the demise of the Indus Valley
civilization. What is surprising is the scale of its wider impact on
India. It is not just that the language it brought to the subcontinent
is now spoken in various forms by the majority of the Indian
population. It is also that such rough-edged pastoralists should be at
the root of Indian civilization as it has existed for the last three
millennia. This is perhaps another instance of a lesson we learned from
the ancient Near East: not to underestimate the potential historical
impact of pastoral peoples.
Up to this point in our analysis the key role in the
shaping of India
has been played by the northwest. It was in the early centuries of the
first millennium B.C. that this monopoly was finally broken. India was
now entering its Iron Age, and iron tools made it easier to clear the
jungle and plow the soil of the northeast; this in turn made possible
the large-scale cultivation of an East Asian domesticate, rice (perhaps
the only item of major importance to enter prehistoric India from the
east). The outcome was a fundamental change in the human geography of
the subcontinent: within a few centuries its center of gravity had
shifted to the Gangetic plains. There the rise of cities toward the
middle of the first millennium B.C. was matched by that of states. Our
sources enable us to glimpse the existence of numerous states in
competition, and in due course one of them, Magadha, came to dominate
the entire region. A few of these states had been tribal republics
(there were more such polities to the west, some of them sufficiently
well developed to mint coins); but monarchy was dominant. At the same
time the northeast was playing the key role in the formation of
classical Indian civilization. This was the period in which India
reacquired literacy. By the fourth century B.C., and perhaps for some
time before, India was using a form a'arphabetic writing that owed
nothing to the forgotten script of the Indus Valley; this new script,
Brahmi, is the source of all the Indian scripts in use today.
