The Aryan Languages.

We now return to the fascinating story of the spread of the Indo-Aryan languages over the north and west of the peninsula. In the tale, captured from the patient study of words and idioms, and finding only occasional support from legend, and practically none from history, since history had not yet begun to exist, we get a singularly moving and interesting picture of the social existence of vanished tribes of men. We partly know and partly conjecture that there was once a race of men whom we may conveniently call Indo-Europeans who spoke the parent-speech of the modern languages of Europe, Armenia, Persia, and northern India. Probably the Panjāb in very early times was occupied by several immigrations of Indo-European folk, for in the earliest days of which we have any knowledge, the land of the Five Rivers is already the home of many Indo-Aryan tribes, who live at enmity with one another, and have a fraternal habit of speaking of one another as unintelligible barbarians.

In the Sanskrit geography of somewhat later times, India is divided into the sacred Madhya-deça, the "Midland," and the rest. Already this Midland country, the home of the latest immigrants, is considered to be the true habitat of civilised Aryans, all the rest of the peninsula being more or less barbarous. It is important that the reader should understand exactly where this Midland lay. On the north it ended below the foot-slopes of the Himalayas. On the south, it was bordered by the Vindhyā hills, the southern boundary of the Gangetic plain. On the west it extended to Sirhind on the eastern limits of what is now the Panjāb. On the east its limit was the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna. Its inhabitants, of mixed Aryan and Dravidian origin, had spread eastwards from the upper part of the do-āb, the watershed between the two rivers. Their language gradually became the current speech of the Midland. It was cultivated as a literary tongue from early times and came to be known as Sanskrit, the "purified" language. Purified and systematised it was by the labours of grammarians and phoneticians, the most famous of whom is Pānini, who lived and wrote about 300 B.C.

To the phonetic acumen of these early grammarians the existing alphabets of northern India, singularly different in arrangement from the confused order of European and Semitic letters, bear testimony. In the Indian alphabets the letters are arranged in order, according to the vocal organs chiefly used in their pronunciation, as Gutturals, Palatals, Cerebrals, Dentals, and Labials. All the phonetic changes which occur in the formation of the numerous compound words are carefully reduced to rule, and the spelling professes to be (what perhaps no spelling ever has been or can be) phonetic.

Plate VI

A Bhuiyār
(Mirzapur district)

It is a moot point whether Sanskrit was in Pānini's time a spoken vernacular. It is more probable that it was, what it still remains in most parts of Hindu India, a second and literary language, used much as Latin was used in medieval Europe. The spoken form of the archaic language found in the older Vedas developed into Prākrit, which existed side by side with Sanskrit as the spoken dialects of Italy existed side by side with literary Latin. As the Italian dialects developed into the modern languages of Europe, so the Prākrits gave birth to the Aryan modern languages of India. Thus the latter were not in any accurate sense derived from Sanskrit, but only shared a common origin with it[4]. It remained, however, as a standard of literary perfection and was destined to play an important part in the enrichment of many of the modern languages of India, when contact with western culture brought about what may fairly be called a literary renaissance. This was particularly the case with Bengali. Its medieval literature was all but confined to rhymed hymns and tales. English education led to a revival of Sanskrit studies. From England Bengal learnt that it was possible to write prose in many varied forms, in novels, essays, histories, journalism, and so forth. The medieval literary language, derived from the Prākrit, had grown insufficient for the expression of anything but the simplest devotional or amatory emotion, and Bengali borrowed freely from the rich treasury of Sanskrit.

In the "Midland," then, were various forms of Prākrit, side by side with the sacred and literary Sanskrit. Round the Midland, on the west, south, and east lay territories inhabited by other Indo-Aryan tribes. This country included what is now the Panjāb, Sind, Gujarāt, Rājputānā and the country to its east, Oudh and Bihār. The tribes inhabiting this semicircular tract had each of them its own dialect. But it is important to note that the dialects of this "Outer Band" were much more closely related to one another than to the spoken language of the "Midland." It was this circumstance which suggested Dr Hoernle's ingenious theory, already mentioned, of the second and separate invasion of Aryans into the Midland over the mountainous passes of Gilgit, too high, arduous, and difficult to be traversed by the families and herds of the nomad newcomers.

In course of time the population of the Midland grew in numbers and valour and pressed closely on the food supplies of the tract. It was already the centre of a vigorous and widely influential civilisation. It contained the imperial cities of Delhi and Kanauj, and the sacred city of Mathura (Μόδουρα ἡ τῶν θεῶν, as Ptolemy calls it). This crowded, vigorous, and martial population was bound to expand. It spread into the eastern Panjāb, Rājputānā, Gujarāt and Oudh, carrying with it its language. Hence, as Sir George Grierson points out, we get in this "Outer Band" mixed languages, of the Midland type near the "Midland" centre, but fading into local dialects as we go further west, south, and east. Finally as the Midlanders crowded into the territories of the Outer Band, the inhabitants of these took refuge among the Dravidians of the south and east, and so gave birth to dialects which ultimately became Marāthi in the south and Oriyā, Bengali and Assamese on the east, all of them characteristic languages of the "Outer Band."

I am borrowing so freely and unscrupulously from Sir George Grierson that it is a relief to pause for a moment to interpose a very diffident suggestion of my own. Vocabulary, and even idiom, have become a dubious guide to the constituent elements of the "Outer Band" languages which have almost entirely destroyed the original vocabularies of the Dravidian or Mongolo-Dravidian races who use them. But it is just possible that accentuation, rhythm, metre may furnish some clue to these vanished dialects, which may have bequeathed a characteristic tone of voice to their Aryan successors. Bengali, for instance, has a very peculiar initial phrasal accent which strongly distinguishes it from the etymologically cognate speech of Bihār, much as the characteristic accent tonique of French distinguishes it from Italian and Spanish. Native scholars in Bengal are, I am glad to say, beginning to work at the Dravidian elements in their expressive and copious language, and will, I hope, soon investigate the Mongolian elements, whether of idiom or pronunciation, in the Bengali of the north-eastern part of the province.

To return to Sir George Grierson, he holds that the present linguistic condition of northern India is this:—there is, firstly, a Midland Indo-Aryan language which holds the Gangetic Doāb. Round it on three sides is a band of Mixed languages, in the eastern Panjāb, Gujarāt, Rājputānā and Oudh. With these Sir George includes the Indo-Aryan languages of the Himalayan slopes north of the Midland, which have been introduced in comparatively recent times by immigrants from Rājputānā.

The Prākrits. Before I leave the Aryan languages of India, I must give a brief summary of what Sir George Grierson says of the Prākrits, the spoken speeches which have always, implicitly or explicitly, been distinguished from the artificial and literary Sanskrit. The Primary Prākrits of the Midland and Outer Band (of which latter no record survives) were of the same type as the Latin known to us in literature. They were synthetic and inflected languages. These gradually decayed (or developed) into what Sir G. Grierson calls the Secondary Prākrits. These are still synthetic, but diphthongs and harsh combinations of consonants are avoided, "till in the latest developments we find a condition of almost absolute fluidity, each language becoming an emasculated collection of vowels hanging for support on an occasional consonant." These Secondary Prākrits lasted from the days of the Buddha (550 B.C.) to about 1000 A.D.

One at least of these Secondary Prākrits, Pāli, has obtained world-wide fame as the language of the Buddhist scriptures. Thus crystallised, it underwent the same fate as Sanskrit and became more or less what we call in Europe a "dead" language. In the Midland was a great and famous Prākrit called Sauraseni, after the Sanskrit name, Surasena, of the country round Mathura. In Bihār was Māgadhī; in Oudh and Baghelkhand was Ardha-māgadhī or "half Māgadhī"; south of these was Mahārāshtri, which is best known to students of the ancient Indian drama as the vehicle of the lyrics with which the plays are studded. Kings, sages, heroes and other noble characters speak Sanskrit. Inferior personages use Sauraseni.

The Secondary Prākrits themselves degenerated into what Indian grammarians call Apabhramsas, "corrupt" or "decayed" tongues, which were used for literary purposes and finally became the parents of the great Aryan languages of the present time.

For comparison with the preceding table of the Dravidian languages, I give below the census table of the Aryan languages as recorded in 1901:—

Number of speakers
A. Language of the Midland.
Western Hindi40,714,925
B. Intermediate languages.
a. More nearly related to the Midland language:
Rājasthānī10,917,712
The Pahārī (or 'mountain') languages of the Himalaya3,124,981
Gujarāti9,439,925
Panjābi17,070,961
b. More nearly related to the Outer languages:
Eastern Hindi22,136,358
C. Outer languages.
a. North-western group:
Kāshmīrī1,007,957
Kohistānī36
Lahndā3,337,917
Sindhī3,494,971
b. Southern language:
Marāthī18,237,899
c. Eastern group:
Bihārī34,579,844
Oriyā9,687,429
Bengali44,624,048
Assamese1,350,846

Of all these modern languages, their idioms, their characters, their literature, I do not venture to give even a summarised account. Those who have any curiosity to learn more about them cannot do better than consult Sir George Grierson's work on The Languages of India, until it, in its turn, is superseded by the book he is now writing from the materials collected in his Linguistic Survey. But everyone who has read The Newcomes will want to know what Hindustāni is, especially as it is one of the languages prescribed for the study of probationers for the Indian Civil Service and is taught at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Dublin. In the strictest sense Hindustāni is the dialect of western Hindi spoken between Meerut and Delhi. It was much cultivated, as a literary dialect, by both Hindus and Musalmāns. The latter wrote, and write it, in the Persian character, and have added a large number of Persian and Arabic words. In this Persianised form it is known as Urdū, "a name derived from the Urdū-e mu 'alla, or royal military bazaar outside the imperial palace at Delhi, where it is supposed to have had its origin." Under Muhammadan rule Urdū was almost as much the lingua franca of India as English has come to be in modern times.

Another point is worth noting here. The Aryan languages of northern India are, in a very real sense, Hindu languages. Perhaps I shall make myself clearer by asserting that the languages of Western Europe are Christian languages. For historical reasons, their religious phraseology has a Christian connotation and allusiveness. But in the west, the distinction between things secular and things religious has become so familiar that the Christian element in our speech is not recognisable in our ordinary talk. In Hindu India, on the other hand, almost every act of a man's life has some religious or superstitious significance, and hence all the Aryan languages in the mouths of Hindus are markedly different from the shape they assume when spoken by Musalmāns. In the case of western Hindi we have the recognised Muhammadan dialect of Urdū, but in other languages too there is a Muhammadan dialect or patois, even if it has no separate name. A curious exception, however, occurs in eastern Bengal, where the bulk of the population is Musalmān. In this region the Muhammadans are comparatively recent converts from the lower aboriginal or Mongoloid castes, whose Muhammadanism sits very lightly on their habits and consciences, and so far as my own experience goes, there is little difference between the speech of the lower Musalmāns and their friends and cousins the Chandāls and other indigenous castes.