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

by Peggy Mohan

How did these creoles and a West African language like Ewe end up with a similar substratum? The answer is that the creoles were made by Africans and not by the white plantation owners, who merely served as a source of vocabulary. The languages that belonged to the white elites—English, French, Portuguese—continue as elite languages to this day, while the West African languages have disappeared . . . but not entirely. They have kept this inner core, on to which new words got attached. This point is crucial to understand: the substratum layer is not a free element that can ‘join’ a new speaker community. It is the layer that remains in place, because the people who make the new language are the same people who once spoke West African languages. So labels like English-based and French-based, like Indo-Aryan, are actually misleading, because they give importance to the people least active in the making and using of the new language.

One big reason why we start our exploration with a recap of the creole story is to get a feel for what substratum actually means. Many linguists and historians in India believe that the substratum is a layer that can ‘leak up’ and infiltrate a language like Sanskrit, which had no signs of Dravidian influence up to that time. What they imagine is that the people who had brought Sanskrit to the subcontinent had themselves changed. This is not how creolists view the substratum. For us, this bedrock layer does not float free and attach itself to a new host. The presence of a substratum is instead a sign of another less powerful, less visible group of people that is still there in the reckoning; a group that has managed to survive and preserve the mindset of its old language after adjusting to a new status quo. The mere thought that the substratum could ‘leak up’ told me that scholars were still looking at the elite group and not at anyone else, simply because seeing history in terms of the literate elite who left a convenient record was the easiest thing to do. In the process, local people were reduced to being just background noise! The substratum, then, would be a good lodestar to keep in our sights as we set about reconstructing how things had really happened, to better understand the role of the little people in the making of language in India.

The period between the tenth and twelfth centuries was a watershed moment for language in Brahminical India. So while individual Namboodiri Brahmins might have felt a sudden motivation to experiment with literature—not just for themselves and the royal courts, but for a larger public too—there was also a brighter sun shining on them as they wrote, which probably helped them create a fusion-language that expressed the changed environment in Kerala.28 But why would the sun be shining more brightly on Namboodiri Brahmins? According to K. Sugathan, in his book Buddhamathavam Jaathi Vyavasthayam (Buddhism and the Caste System),

When the Vedic people reached the north-west of the subcontinent, they found other people there besides the local Dravidians. One group that they mention was the Paṇi, who were traders with possible links to the Phoenicians, whose name in Latin was Poeni.31 These Paṇi would have spoken Phoenician, a Semitic language that originated in Syria and Palestine (or ‘Canaan’) related to Hebrew and Aramaic, and which was written from right to left. There are Aramaic stone markers in Taxila and Afghanistan; Emperor Ashoka also wrote his Prakrit edicts in the Aramaic script in this region, since Aramaic was the official language of the Achaemenid Empire that covered present-day Iran and Afghanistan.

Creoles, then, were all about social chaos and breathtaking speed, things that did not seem to be present when Hindi and Marathi were first taking shape. These two criteria seemed to eclipse all other important characteristics associated with creoles, like simplification and the use of the substratum languages to shape the grammar of the new language. But were creoles really ‘simple’? Or did they only appear so when you compared them with languages like English, or French (as in our earlier example ‘I went—I come [back]’)? They were expected to look like these European languages, but the latter were really more like sperm donors who provided the vocabulary than like hands-on parents. When you compare the Caribbean creoles with their maternal side, they seem to be not so much ‘simple’ as normal for a West African language.

Hindi, Braj and Awadhi did not sit down at a table to resolve their differences, shaping themselves into a single language with the best features of all. That democracy is never a part of standardization, which, like nature, is red in tooth and claw.

In fact, the European story is even closer to the Indian story than that! To the north of the Romance languages one finds the Germanic languages, which is a family that includes not only all the varieties of German, but Dutch, English and the Scandinavian languages all the way to Iceland—except, of course, Finnish and Sami, which are Finno-Ugric languages. Germanic languages are a separate branch of the Indo-European family from the Romance languages.

Variation in Retroflexion in South Asia (the white areas are areas without retroflexion)54

Retroflexion inindian lnguages

Is it a step down for our language to be a mixed language, not really different from a creole? Shouldn’t highly evolved people like us be speaking a language that is . . . pure? That is a loaded question. If we believe in evolution, we should welcome adaptation. Languages are living things, and they live in ecosystems; they are highly responsive to signals from the environment, and there is a battle for survival going on out there, with new neighbours and new threats. Languages that refuse to adapt, languages that hide from the light, tend to go extinct. Their speakers pick up other languages to manage the daily grind, and over a very few generations those new languages take over. The

Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.

Purity

Finding these mixed languages blooming around us, then, is a cause for celebration. What it means is that the little people were able to take on a suitable camouflage while tucking deep into the grammars and sound systems of their new languages precious relics of an earlier life. There is a truly ambidextrous feel to this achievement, one that reaffirms our bond with an older world while asserting our intention to take on the new. The link between Indo-Aryan languages and the Prakrits they got their words from is something dynamic, something negotiated by the little people with the new political entity that they had to face, a group that was not able to snuff out their old languages and hand them down a new operating system, wiping their memory clean of any other traces of their past. In the very forms of the mixed languages we speak, as we go about our daily lives, are encoded unwritten parts of our long, long history.

beauty of indian languages nd theiir suurvuvl