Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

by Peggy Mohan

What we are on the lookout for are the two distinct parental streams we saw in the Caribbean creoles: the vocabulary layer, on the one hand, which is the superficial legacy of the more powerful group in the fray, and the more intrinsic sound system and grammar, which tell the maternal side of the story—the ‘mother’ in ‘mother tongue’.

In other words, Sanskrit had not simply gained six new sounds: it had also gained a more general contrast—dental versus retroflex—one that permeated its entire sound system. And since this contrast is part of all the Dravidian languages spoken in south India, like Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu,5 but non-existent in any of the Indo-European languages to the north of India like Persian, Greek, Latin or the modern European languages, Deshpande was certain that retroflex sounds had to have come into Sanskrit from a Dravidian source.

What is significant about retroflexion, or the existence of a parallel series of retroflex consonants alongside the dental ones, is that it is not merely a Dravidian feature, but a part of all the languages of the Indian subcontinent except for Assamese and the tribal languages of the North-east, Ladakh and northern Nepal.

Almost a century later, casting about for a label to use for this family, Friedrich Max Müller in 1862 came up with ‘Aryan’, derived from the Sanskrit word ārya and the Old Iranian word airiia.

A patrilineal group of migrating men can never be so concerned with ethnic purity that they forego passing on their genes in the lands where they stop. If they were, they would quickly go extinct.

‘Interestingly,’ she continues, ‘Vritra, in fact all the demons of the Rig Veda, are known by matronymics rather than patronymics. Vritra is a Dānava, son of Danu. In one passage, describing his death, the Rig Veda links the two in imagery of cow and calf: “The vital energy of Vritra’s mother ebbed away, for Indra had hurled his deadly weapon at her. Above was the mother, below was the son; Danu lay down like a cow with her calf.”’24 Who are

One feature of the Sanskrit sound system that we have not looked at yet, and which is absent from Indo-European languages north of the Indian subcontinent, is aspiration—specifically, the consonants kh, gh, ćh, jh, ṭh, ḍh, th, dh, ph and bh.

But Punjabi and Sindhi, from the north-west of the subcontinent, also avoid voiced aspirates, gh, jh, ḍh, dh and bh, like Dravidian languages do.

Infants can learn, as a mother tongue, any language they are adequately exposed to before the age of five or six, even if their actual mothers do not speak them, and older children and adults go on to learn additional languages if they need to.

Deshpande gives the example of Vyāsa, a scribe who wrote down the Vedas (Veda Vyāsa) whose ‘mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and perhaps great-great-grandmother were all at least non-Brāhmaṇas, if not non-Āryan. But he was a Brāhmaṇa.’

With diglossia, however, what you find is a child first learning one language and speaking it at home, and then later on, maybe at school, transiting to another language which is used for less basic things. The end result is not two separate languages that exist in parallel, but a single competence, where ground-level things are done in the first language and things to do with school, or the modern sector, in another.

English in india?

In Kālidāsa’s play, Abhijñānaśākuntalam, composed in the post-Rig Vedic period somewhere between the first century BCE and the fourth century CE, the men speak in Sanskrit and the women speak a local Prakrit. In texts of this play, the Sanskrit translation of the women’s speech is given separately, in a note at the bottom of the page.

This infinity-l symbol that we find in Marathi, ळ, and in Dravidian languages, is absent from Pāṇini’s list of Sanskrit sounds. Could this retroflex ḷ have been part of Śākalya’s Sanskrit?

C.V. Vaidya points out that the Brahmin families who have preserved the Rig Vedic tradition are, at present, only to be found in the Deccan, Konkan and some parts of south India: all places south of the Vindhyas, where ḷ exists in the local languages.61 We do not have, for the Rig Veda, other versions from other parts of India to compare with: they did exist, but they have been lost.

At any given time the number of people reciting the Rig Veda who did not understand it too well would have outnumbered the scholars.

And every time you hear a Hindi speaker pronouncing Rig Veda as Rgved, or suktaṁ as sukt, deleting the final a, you are hearing a Hindi saṁdhi in action, since Hindi has no short final vowels: i and u (however they may be written) are pronounced as ī and ū at the end of words in Hindi, while final a is simply lost.

Even in more recent times, young Indian men who went as graduate students to the United States in the 1960s often ended up marrying local women: it was not until a generation later when Indian women began migrating to the United States in larger numbers that Indian men in the United States began finding Indian wives easily.

The last dodo bird must have closed its tired old eyes one day, with no younger generation to take its place, because all the dodo eggs had been eaten by a new predator species: the rats that had come to Mauritius on the great ships with the explorers.

In time, nearly all the kings of Kerala had Namboodiri fathers, though they themselves were Nairs.

In Malayalam, there is only one present tense form of eat: tinnunnu.21 And there is only one past tense form: tinnu. The future tense and the habitual are tinnum . So you cannot leave out the pronouns, the way you can in other Dravidian languages, where verb endings also give you that information:

What is striking is that the poorer and less educated the migrants, the faster and better they pick up Malayalam. It is only the ones who knew English from the start who seem to have a problem making this adjustment.

The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands.

Suddenly I realized that what I had been noticing all this time were probably not Turkic words left in Urdu by horsemen sweeping into India from the Central Asian steppes—‘Turkic’ here refers to the entire Altaic family, of which Turkish is only the westernmost member. What I was finding in Istanbul were Persian words that happened to be in both Urdu and Turkish.

In fact, so strong was the Iranian cultural presence not just in Turkey and India, but throughout all of Central Asia, even without any military muscle to back it up, that the words Ramızān and Namāz effectively served as markers of Iran’s cultural footprint all over the region.

the Turkish writer, Irfan Orga,3 writing about how Turks had begun to invent family names during the time of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and about how he himself had chosen as his surname Urga, the name of a fishing village in Uzbekistan near the Aral Sea, turning the initial u into an o to make it sound more Turkish. So Ordu would have to be Urdu in Uzbek. The Golden Horde! ‘Horde’ was the English word that corresponded to ‘Urdu’.

The first conquest by an Arab army was in the year 712 when Muhammad bin Qasim conquered the province of Sindh, in the north-west, and made it a province of the Umayyad Caliphate.

When times are stable, languages do not change much, except for adding new vocabulary as needed. Change, when it does happen, tends to be radical—when something disrupts the status quo.

In a post from 2011 titled ‘Uzbek, “the penguin of Turkic languages”’ by Asya Pereltsvaig29 Uzbek is described as the ‘odd man out’ among the four major Turkic languages in Central Asia (Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Turkmen)30 and ‘the least Turkic-like of the Central Asian Turkic languages’ because ‘In Standard Uzbek . . . vowel harmony does not apply, and the front/back distinctions are not maintained [at all]’.

So it’s no surprise that we never found any exotic Turkic vowels shining in the Indian sky like ay-yıldız, ‘the moon and star’: they were not there in Uzbek to start with.

Zatalli was scathingly critical of the Mughal monarchy, writing biting and often obscene satire with shocking titles like Gāṇḍūnāma, meaning ‘The Life and Times of the Anus’, a biting comment on how the government was treating the population, in his view, just barely steering clear of angering Aurangzeb, the last of the strong Mughal emperors. Gayā

With the coming of the British, Ghalib had lost his pension as a poet from the royal darbār, and was reduced to taking loans to survive. In desperation, he destroyed his original draft of Dastambū, his chronicle in Persian of those times, and made up his mind to write only positive things about the British occupation in the vain hope that his pension might be restored.

In many elite Hindu families in the Delhi region and the North-west, until about the time of Partition it was the custom for boys to learn Persian and Urdu and be literate in the Persian script, while the girls were taught Devanagari.

Japanese proved to be impractical, while Dutch was now banned. ‘During this period,’ Nugroho says, ‘Bahasa Indonesia evolved from a little-used language, known only to a small group of leaders in political and literary circles, to become one which was universally used in all fields of life and knowledge . . . it was the Japanese occupation that opened the way for the adoption and general use of the Indonesian language.’36 What the Indonesians did, then, was take another Austronesian language that was just a trade language, and no Indonesian’s mother tongue, and make it into their lingua franca, giving it space to grow. There was no attempt to fit their own languages into it. Instead they took it wholesale—this language that had originated across the strait in what is now Malaysia.

WW2

There are English-based creoles, French-based creoles, Portuguese-based creoles and Dutch-based creoles. But there are no Spanish-based creoles, despite all the Spanish-speaking territories in the New World, many of which had slave plantations.

What made all the difference was the presence of large numbers of poor migrants from Spain who were accessible to Africans. Because of these poor whites, Africans in Latin America ended up learning a more or less standard variety of Spanish.

Missing in all the sound and fury of migration and settlement in India’s past is people being captured and spirited abroad against their will to live out the rest of their lives in slavery with strangers.

The story of Assamese—the language the Naga traders encountered—is like a prequel to the story of Nagamese. The Ahom people trace their origins back to the Tai-Ahom, who migrated from South East Asia and settled in the Brahmaputra Valley in the year 1228.

This migration, like so many others in our history, was almost totally male-driven: 9000 men led by a man named Sukaphaa who set up the Ahom kingdom that ruled Assam for 600 years.

There is no retroflexion in Assamese, nor is there any retroflexion in Nagamese or in any of the tribal languages that surround it. In other words, Assamese has just t, th, d, dh, n and r, which are alveolar t and d sounds, the same ones you hear in British and American English. The western border of Assam marks the unequivocal end of the retroflexion zone in South Asia.

The Munda group was found to have 0 per cent South East Asian mtDNA, but 60.56 per cent South East Asian Y-DNA. Khasis, on the other hand, were found to have 38.57 per cent South East Asian mtDNA, but 74.62 per cent South East Asian Y-DNA. Speakers of the Tibeto-Burman tone languages in Assam had 66.91 per cent South East Asian mtDNA and 85.95 per cent Y-DNA from South East Asia.

Khasi stood out from everything around it in a North-east full of tribal tone languages by having no tones, a gender system with nouns that were either masculine or feminine, adjectives that take tense markers like verbs (the way they do in Caribbean creoles too), and words in common with Khmer, the Austroasiatic language spoken in Kampuchea.

The present-day Mundas are clearly the descendants of Indian women, but the majority of their male ancestors trace their descent back to South East Asia.