The Peoples of India

by J. D. Anderson

[1] The actual date is very uncertain. Dr Burnell thinks the book was composed so late as A.D. 500, but it was probably much older.

[2] "Moon-physicians," an allusion to the crescent-shaped brass basin of the barber, such as the helmet of Don Quixote, familiar to us all.

[3] But see the postscript to this chapter.

CHAPTER II
THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA

It is quite possible to live many years in one province or another of India without obtaining more than the vaguest conception of the linguistic riches of the country. It was Sir G. A. Grierson who rendered it impossible for any but the most careless to ignore the fact that India has not only more languages than Europe, but many more kinds and families of speech. Most Europeans in India live in the populous areas where ethnical and geographical conditions are favourable to the evolution and spread of one of the great literary languages. In Madras, the European comes into contact with one or other of the cultivated Dravidian tongues. In Bombay, he learns that Marāthi and Gujarāti have ancient and interesting literatures. In Calcutta, he is surrounded by millions of Bengalis, who in modern times have as many varieties of literary expression as the most advanced of European races. In Rangoon, he hears the most highly organised of Tibeto-Burman speeches. In Allahabad, Benares, Lahore, Patna, he acquires some smattering of the beautiful and expressive languages which are closest to the model of the original Indo-Aryan idiom. These are the exact counter parts of the great literary languages of Europe, of English, French, German, Italian, etc. But while the European mountains contain one or two shy survivals at most of primitive ways of talking, India has many languages of the type of Basque. In the little frontier province of Assam alone, dozens of grammars and vocabularies have been printed, and much more remains to be done. Happily, an appetite for more information has been aroused by the feast spread before linguists in Sir G. A. Grierson's great Survey. He himself is at work on a book which will tell us all that is at present known about the many languages of India, and their relations with one another. But in addition to his own labours, Sir George Grierson has been an apostle of linguistic research and has gathered round him many disciples, not all of whom recognise whence came the impulse that has set them to an examination of the history and growth of Indian languages. Most promising sign of all, native scholars no longer disdain the living tongues of India, nor confine their studies to the classics of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. In Bengal alone, the Proceedings of the Vangiya Sāhitya Parisat, a society for the pursuit of linguistic and ethnological research, now form a goodly library of books, and the poet, Rabindranath Tagore, whose own English version of his charming Gitanjali is in the hands of all who love poetry or are interested in Indian matters, is also a very keen and competent student of his native language on lines suggested by the enquiries of European scholars. Much has been learnt, but linguistic research in India has still many interesting secrets for the zeal of European students to reveal. In Scandinavia, Germany, France, a new sense of the value of such studies has been aroused. All that can be attempted in the following pages is to show, very summarily and briefly, what is known at present.

We have already seen that there are seven more or less recognisable types of Indian humanity. To these roughly correspond five great families of living vernaculars. The Turko-Iranian, the Indo-Aryan, the Scytho-Dravidian, the Aryo-Dravidian, and the Mongolo-Dravidian races have for the most part acquired Aryan languages which, in their relations to Sanskrit and Persian, may be compared with the Romance languages of Europe in their relations to literary Greek and Latin. The Dravidian races speak one or other of the great Dravidian dialects, or some idiom of the Mundā languages of Chota Nagpore. Among the Mongoloid races of the extreme north and east of India, we find the Mon-Khmer and the Tibeto-Chinese families of speech. Of these, the Dravidian family seems to be confined to India—to the high tablelands of Southern India, with one outlying settlement among the Brāhuis of Baluchistan. This Dravidian speech would seem to be the original and indigenous language of India. The Mundā languages of Chota Nagpore, again, are plainly very ancient Indian tongues and are, in all probability, as aboriginal as the true Dravidian speech. But Mundā tongues have elements in common with the Mon-Khmer languages of Further India, Malacca, and Australonesia. The present explanation of this fact is provided by the supposition that, in prehistoric times, these distant regions shared a common language with great part of Northern India. But, for all practical purposes, the relations of the Mundā languages with the Far East are still so vaguely defined, that they may be provisionally regarded as being as indigenous as their neighbours, the Dravidian languages. The connection of the Mon-Khmer languages with Further India and the Pacific have formed the subject of the now famous researches of Pater Schmidt of Vienna and other German investigators. The Indo-Chinese family of languages is obviously connected with the many dialects of Southern China. An Indian journalist once told me that he thought that the tumbled mountain ranges which separate India from China and form, for the time, a semi-savage "no man's land" of primitive social customs and administration, are the most interesting area on earth. It is an Asiatic and a huger Albania, of whose ethnological and linguistic condition much has yet to be learned. Those who heard Mr Archibald Rose's lectures in London and Cambridge on his travels in these regions will easily realise how much room there is here for anthropological and linguistic research among the rough but attractive races of this quarter.

Lastly, in the great alluvial plain which separates the Himalayas from the tableland of the south, and along the western coast, are the peoples who use one or other of the great Aryan vernaculars, languages of much the same type as the modern languages of Europe, sharing much of their vocabulary, and ultimately derived from similar if still obscure origins. It is of all these languages, and of some of their innumerable dialects (not all of them even now known by name), that some account must be given in this chapter.

The history of the languages of India has reflected the long struggle for pre-eminence between the indigenous Dravidian culture of the south and the Aryan civilisation of the north. The Mundā languages are those of an isolated group of highlanders, who, till quite recent times, hardly came into contact with or were influenced by the speech or thought of other races. The Mon-Khmer-speaking people of the Khasi Hills were similarly wholly isolated, and were long supposed to be absolutely aboriginal and separate from other races of men, till quite recent investigations discovered their linguistic affinities with the Mons of Southern Burma and races in French Indo-China. The Tibeto-Burman languages of the north-eastern frontier are the simple and primitive speech of semi-savage men. For such languages, contact with the Aryan languages means rapid decay and dissolution.

Hindu civilisation and Hindu religion find easy converts in the rude and simple Mongoloid people of the north-east, and acceptance of Hindu manners and customs almost always results in a rapid change of language. So again, the Iranian languages represent the final stage in the advance of Islam and its languages as a conquering religion. The Iranian tongues of the north-western frontier are only Indian in the fact that they happen to fall within the administrative border of British India. If we omit all consideration of these races and languages for the present, we shall be free to consider the long struggle between the Aryan and the Dravidian. The Aryan religion, the religion of the Hindus, has spread all over India, and as the Dravidian temples of the south are among the glories of Hindu religious architecture, so the Hinduism of the south is now, in many ways, the most typical and interesting form of the religion. The spread of the Aryan blood has been far less wide in extent, as the previous chapter sufficiently shows. The Aryan languages have spread all over the north of India, up to an irregular line running obliquely across the peninsula from near Vizagapatam on the east coast to near Goa on the west coast. Into the Aryan area projects the rocky plateau of Chota Nagpore, where the Mundā dialects still survive, and there are a few other outlying areas where Dravidian tribes still use the original language of India. With these exceptions, Northern India, from Bombay to Calcutta now speaks Aryan languages.