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Evolution of languages,
literature and architecture - Part 1
1.0 INTRODUCTION
It is speculated that around two million years back, the Homo habilis had a sufficiently developed Broca's area in his brain that made it possible for him to speak but anatomically, he was not yet able to gain enough control over exhalation or breathing necessary for proper speech. Therefore his 'speech' probably consisted more of gestures, grunts and shrieks, rather than words. It is debatable, as to how much the Homo erectus improved upon this capacity. Evidence suggests that the hole in the lowest vertebra through which the spinal cord passes was still too small.
It was the Homo sapien, who finally had a fully developed capacity for speech. He could frame words and set them in sentences ('syntax'). This is a feature common to all the known languages of humanity, however primitive the speakers. The number of languages that were spoken before the Neolithic Revolution must have been vast, since it is now realised that the more primitive the human societies, the more numerous are the languages spoken.
As human interaction improved, trade networks became extensive; and each of the individual states brought under its control more and more areas, within which it tended to use a single language. Languages with limited numbers of speakers gradually began to disappear. Migrations could also lead to the replacement of the older natives' language(s) by the language of the emigres; or a dominant section or ruling class might impose its language on the rest of the population. Consequently, there had been a large reduction in the number of languages spoken since the Neolithic Revolution. The majority of the spoken languages can be grouped under the following four 'families': 1. Indo-European (Indo-Aryan or Indie, Dardic, Iranic and Nuristani branches); 2. Dravidian (Southern, Central, South central and Northern branches); 3. Austro-Asiatic (Munda and Mon-Khmer branches); and 4. Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burmese branch).
2.0 Indo-European Family
Major constituents in the Indo-European family, the Indo-Aryan or Indi languages are today spoken by a majority of the population of the Indian subcontinent. These include Hindustani (the spoken form of Hindi and Urdu), Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Sindhi, Oriya, Assamese, Nepali and many other languages. The Dardic branch, close to Indo-Aryan, consists of a set of languages in the far north of India, among which Kashmiri alone is a major literary language. Then, there are Iranic languages, to which Pashto and Baluchi in Pakistan belong. The Nuristani languages, spoken in distant valleys of northwestern Afghanistan and north NWFP, belong neither to the Indo-Aryan nor to the Iranic branch, and have many archaic features.
3.0 The Earliest known languages
The earliest known languages of the Indo-Aryan and the Iranic families, the Rigvedic and Avestan, were so close that they easily enabled philologists to reconstruct a Proto-Aryan (or Proto Indo Iranian) language. The use of 'Aryan' as a designation of the Indian and Iranian branches of the Indo-European family is generally accepted; so also the name 'Indo-Aryan' for the Indian branch alone. There is now no doubt that the Aryan or Indo-Iranian group of languages belongs to the Indo-European family, as one can see from the similarities in many words in ordinary usage, like those for father, mother, daughter, brother, etc.
Continuous research has not only added a large number of languages to the Indo-European family, but also established a sequential order of changes, whereby the older ('archaic') forms of words can be distinguished from the later.
3.1 The Rigvedic language
The Indo-Aryan speakers migrated to Swat and Pirak before 1500 BC and soon they moved into the Punjab. Possessing horses and chariots, they would have a decisive advantage over their eastern foes, who still had only ox-carts (to judge from the terracotta figurines of Cemetery-H and Late Harappan cultures). The expansion of Indo-Aryan speech necessarily involved the migration of a significant number of people from the borderland, into the Indus plains. But, at the same time, the migration might not have been on such a massive scale as to leave its imprint on the genetic complexion of the region. Moreover, since the Indo-Aryan speakers had settled in these areas for some time previously, they must have already mixed with populations which, being neighbours to the Indus people, were not probably biologically much different from the latter.
3.2 Origin of Prakrit
There was another set of languages which was neither Dravidian nor Austro-Asiatic and probably contributed some non-Indo-European words to the Rigveda and early Sanskrit. Interaction with such languages in Afghanistan (like Nuristani) probably started much before the Indo-Aryan speakers reached India, and might have caused the early appearance of a unique feature of Indo-Aryan languages, namely, 'Prakrit'.
Prakrit simplified the Indo-Aryan word structure by dispensing with compound consonants (usually replaced by single consonants, for example, puta for putra, son). Some Prakritisms are found not only in the Rigveda but also in Mitanni speech: for the Sanskrit ashva (horse), Mitanni has assu, and for the Sanskrit sapta (seven), it has satta. Such simplification must have helped to spread Indo-Aryan speech among ordinary people because of which prakrit was known as the language of the masses. Rigvedic Sanskrit, like the later Sanskrit, evidently remained a language of the few. By the sixth century BC, it was the Prakrit language of each region that the people understood; and so it was in the Prakrit of Magadha that Lord Mahavira and Gautama Buddha delivered their sermons. Hence if Indo-Aryan speech was spread predominantly by way of 'elite dominance', the people still had a share in determining its popular form namely, Prakrit.
4.0 The Dravidian Languages
The Dravidian languages today form the second largest language family in India. Within this family, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada belong to the Southern group; Telugu and Gondi (in parts of Madhya Pradesh) to the South Central; Kolami (mainly in Maharashtra) to the Central; Kurukh (in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Nepal) and Brahui (Baluchistan) to the Northern. There are also many minor languages attached to these different groups.
A comparison of the vocabularies and grammars of these languages enables us to reconstruct a hypothetical Proto-Dravidian language that must have been spoken before the speakers of the Dravidian languages broke up from each other. The use of certain retroflex sounds (such as the hard /, n, r and rh) is one of the most common traits in the Dravidian languages. A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology. Other terms occasionally encountered are domal and cacuminal. But such retroflexion is absent in both Austro-Asiatic and Indo-European languages spoken outside the Indian subcontinent. Hence, it is postulated that it is from the Proto-Dravidian or its early successors that the Austro-Asiatic and Indo-Aryan languages derive their retroflex consonants. This assumption has many consequences.
4.1 Interaction with Indo-Aryan languages
The Rigveda has both retroflexion and more than two dozen words of possible Dravidian origin. But retroflexion is totally absent in the Avesta, the earliest Iranian text. Otherwise it is very similar to the Rigveda in vocabulary and grammar. Therefore, it is often suggested that the Rigvedic reciters might have introduced retroflexion in the pronunciation of even the most impeccable Indo-Iranian words, under the influence of the pronunciation of speakers of the earlier local languages.
Since the Rigvedic hymns were composed in the area between the Hindukush and the Ganga, the likelihood of some of the 'substrate' languages of the Punjab or upper Indus basin at the time, being members of the Dravidian family is bright. The possibility is increased further by the geographical proximity of the Brahui language, whose speakers today are to be found in northeastern Baluchistan, not far from the Punjab. Brahui's own case for antiquity has been augmented by the recent discovery of links between it and Elamite (the language of Elam in Persia), though the exact extent of the links may be disputed. Similarly, connections have been seen between Proto-Dravidian and the Uralic languages of Eastern Europe and Siberia; and this would also suggest that there were once Dravidian speakers in latitudes much farther to the north than today.
5.0 Official Indus Language
According to some scholars, there are strong indications in the Indus script towards linking the 'official' Indus language to the Dravidian family. The cultural unity based on agriculture in the Indus basin might have also aided the expansion of this official language at the cost of other languages. It is not certain whether Dravidian languages were also being spoken in South India at that time.
There is a hypotheses that suggests that the extension of copper-use and the increase in crop inventory that we can trace after 2000 BC, through the Malwa and Jorwe cultures, into Southern India, marks a migration of Dravidian speakers from the north. Upon arrival there, a small number of Dravidian languages could have supplanted the numerous separate languages of the earlier nomadic pastoralists, as agriculture, crafts and commerce spread over larger areas. This hypothesis, however, is yet to be proved.
5.1 Austro-Asiatic family
Major branches: According to linguists, there are two main branches of the Austro Asiatic families of languages.
- The Mon-Khmer branch to which belongs Khasi, the language spoken in eastern Meghalaya which is isolated from its sister languages in Southeast Asia.
- The Munda branch includes Mundari and Santhali in Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa. Savara in south Orissa and Korki on the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border, much further to the west, form two distinct small pockets.
While the Munda branch is confined to India, the Mon-Khmer branch includes such languages outside India as Vietnamese, Khmer (in Cambodia) and Mon (in Myanmar and Thailand). It has been suggested that the original ancestral language was spoken in Southeast Asia, and that as rice cultivation spread from there, after 5000 BC, peasant communities speaking languages derived from it spread out.
5.2 Sino-Tibetan family
The languages belonging to the Sino-Tibetan family are all spoken in Northeast India and the Himalayas, bordering the area where languages of the Tibeto-Burmese branch are spoken, principally in the Tibet region of China, Bhutan and Myanmar (Burma). Only the Garo language spoken in western Meghalaya is separated from the main Tibetan zone in the north, by a narrow belt of Indo-Aryan languages (Bengali and Assamese); and this Indo-Aryan intrusion may have occurred much later than the arrival of the Tibeto-Burmese branch in the area.
From all the above hypotheses and suggestions, the following conclusions can be drawn.
- Most languages normally tend to be spoken in geographically defined regions, since their spread depends on the degree of human interaction. People are also usually inclined to mingle more and intermarry within such regions, so that eventually, a broad association between genetic and linguistic borders starts emerging. But such association could also be misleading. Hence, the point should not be stretched too far.
- In fact, there are no genetic controls by which one person speaks one language better than another. In other words, particularities of pronunciation are transmitted not by birth, but through what a person hears, especially in childhood, both at home and outside. Thus, there is no necessary association between a language group and a genetic group, which in popular parlance, is called a race.
- This can be proved by many examples. Turkic is a relatively young family of languages (not older than 1,500 years), presently spoken over large parts of Asia and Europe. The spread of these languages was caused mostly by migrations (originally from Mongolia and western China) that are fairly well documented by historical sources. But the people of Turkey, the leading Turkish-speaking country today, are 'Caucasoids', genetically very close to Greeks, and quite distant from the oldest Turkic-speaking people, the Uighurs of western China, who are 'northern Mongoloids'.
- Similarly, in India, no marked genetic differences are observable among speakers of the Munda (Austro-Asiatic), Dravidian and Indo-European languages, all being classed as Caucasoids.
6.0 Writing and Languages
The advent of writing signifies an epochal advance in any society. Except for the Indus characters of the third millennium BC, there is no physical evidence of writing in India till the Ashokan edicts. There is no mention of writing in the Vedic literature. The earliest literary evidence for writing is in Panini's Ashtadhyayi. Although Panini is supposed to have written his work in the fourth century BC, there is no certainty about his date. Further, he might have used the word lipi for the Aramaic script, which must have been known about fourth century BC to people in Gandhara, his native region. Mention of writing in early Pali literature is also of little relevance, since it is usually held on various grounds that much of it was compiled long after the Buddha, in Mauryan times or even later.
The Greek sources mostly give us the impression that there was no writing in India in the time of Alexander and Chandragupta Maurya. Strabo says that, while "other writers say that they (the Indians) make no use of written characters", only Alexander's admiral Nearchus recorded that they wrote on closely woven cloth.
The issue of the beginning of writing in India is usually linked with that of the origin of the Brahmi script. Majority of those holding the view that writing existed in India in pre-Mauryan times are inclined to argue that the Brahmi script evolved in northern India out of a process of internal development from marks and symbols. Some see even a link with the Indus script. However, if the Brahmi characters could have originated from something so dissimilar to them as the Indus ideographs or pictographs, they might conceivably have originated from almost anything with any kind of form. On the other hand, the origin of the Kharoshthi script, employed to represent Ashokan Prakrit along with the Brahmi, is fairly well established. Many characters of Kharoshthi exhibit distinct resemblances to Aramaic characters bearing identical phonetic values.
Whatever might have been the manner in which the Brahmi script began, early in Ashoka's reign or a little earlier, the art of writing seemed to have spread rapidly. The kind of interest Ashoka took in getting his edicts inscribed in places all over his Empire means that he expected that there would be some persons everywhere who could be able to read them aloud to others. He also distributed copies of his edicts written obviously on lighter materials. The Mahasthan slab inscription and Sohgaura copper plate inscription show how official business was now being conducted in writing. The Piprahwa soapstone vase inscription and the Bhattiprolu casket inscriptions also give evidence of how writing was being put into use even in the Buddhist Samgha. The Tamil Brahmi inscriptions too tell a similar story of its use among the Jain monks or those who made gifts to them.
Such spread of the use of writing would inevitably have had the most far-reaching consequences for various institutions of society. In the bureaucratic setup it might have begun to replace professional memorisers with scribes, and by simplifying the keeping of records and accounts, immediately improved the effectiveness of administration. Writing enabled all religious sects, including the Brahmanical, to preserve and transmit the sacred texts, though the use of writing for this purpose took time. Secular compositions, in any case, came to have a much better chance of survival than in earlier days, when preservation was based on memory, without any claim to sanctity. It is very likely that commerce too would have greatly benefited from written accounts and messages.
6.1 Early historical period
In the early historical period, the spoken Aryan language had developed three distinct dialects - northern or north-western (udichya), mid-Indian which was the language of the Madhyadesa and the eastern which was the language of the Prachya countries. The first regarded as conservative, was the purest form of Aryan speech. A new form of it had come into existence - Sanskrit, described by Panini as Bhasa - which became the vehicle of expression of the elite or the brahmins. The inscriptions of Asoka present broadly three distinct local dialects. There is & Prakrit or Aryan speech of the north-west, as in the edicts at Mansehra and Shahbazgarhi. Then, there is a Prakrit of the east, found in eastern inscriptions of Asoka and elsewhere, which was the language of Asoka's court at Pataliputra. Thus in Rajputana in western Uttar Pradesh, in northwestern Uttar Pradesh (Kalsi) and in central Uttar Pradesh (Allahabad), the eastern dialect was employed as much as in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Banaras (Sarnath) and Bihar (Lauriya, Rummindei and Barabar caves). Finally, the Rock edicts of Girnar in the west represent a slightly modified form of midland dialect, though even in that part of the country, the eastern official language was used in inscriptions.
The dominant language of Ashoka's court was Prakrit or the Magadhi - the language spoken by the people at large. The edicts first written in Pataliputra in that language were sent to far away places for publication after being engraved on stone. The eastern Prakrit became an important vehicle of religious culture of the Buddha and Mahavira. But this dialect seems to have lost its influence with the decline of the Mauryan empire. The midland, forming the real heart of India, gained its natural place and discourses of the Buddha were rendered in the midland dialect, the precursor of the Sauraseni apabrahmsa of early medieval times (600-1200 AD). Pali, linguistically the literary form of midland speech, was taken to Ceylon by Mahendra from Ujjain, via Pataliputra and Tamralipti.
But even in this period, classical Sanskrit established from the time of Panini, did not lose its importance. It was cultivated by the Brahmanical schools and other grammarians - Katyayana and Patanjali, belonging to the Maurya and Sunga periods respectively - who raised the language to a high level of development. The language, simplified at the hands of Panini, had become distinct from that of the Vedas and came to be increasingly used in the growing body of epic and poetic literature.
There was a good deal of grammatical activity during the Mauryan period. In Sanskrit grammar, Panini had already written the Ashtadhyayi. Between Panini and Patanjali, there appeared a number of commentators (Varttikakaras) on Panini's aphorisms. Vyadi, a descendent of Panini on his mother's side, produced the monumental work Samgraha in 1,00,000 verses. To Vyadi is also ascribed the Paribhashasor - the rules for interpreting Panini's sutras, as well as a lexicon, named Utpalini. Another versatile figure of the Nanda-Maurya epoch was Katyayana alias Vararuchi, the famous commentator of Panini's sutras. In his Vajasaneyi Pratisakhya, he subjected about 1,500 sutras of Panini to critical observations.
Another scholar was Katya, whom Patanjali mentioned as Bhagavan Katya and his observations as Mahavarttikas. Katya and Katyayana were followed by many lesser commentators - Bharadvaja, Sunaga, Kroshta, Kunarvadava and Surya. Of all the commentators on Panini's work, Patanjali's Mahabhasya is encyclopaedic, throwing light on the state of contemporary society, religion, philosophy, literature and art. Patanjali's authority remains unchallenged on questions of grammar.
The genesis of classical language may be traced back to the early historic or post-Vedic period, but it was the post-Mauryan period which saw its early flowering. The language of the two epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, has recognisable popular elements in it, as the transmission of the epic material was done by the Sutas, who did not belong to the hieratic groups. However, although the epics are believed to have exerted considerable influence on early classical authors, Sanskrit became more and more a literary language and its sphere as a spoken language gradually decreased. It fed the growing volume of courtly and didactic literature and the extent of the support for classical Sanskrit may be gauged from the lengthy prasasti of the time of Rudradaman I at Junagadh (mid-second century AD), the earliest such prasasti being in Sanskrit.
That the language attributed to the common strata in society was various forms of Prakrit, is shown by various Sanskrit dramas where Prakrit, and not Sanskrit, is spoken by women and common men. By the end of the first or beginning of the second century AD, in the plays of Asvaghosa, the three varieties of Prakrit: Ardhamagadhi, Magadhi and Sauraseni had perhaps come to be recognised. In the south, the earliest compilations of Tamil poems correspond to the beginnings of the Christian era. They are believed to have been composed by poets and bards who presented them at the three assemblies (Sangams) held at Madurai, the Pandyan capital. What remains of this literature is about 33,000 lines of poetry classified as eight anthologies (Ettulogai) and ten idylls (Pattupattu). The corpus also includes the Tolkappiyam, the earliest surviving Tamil grammar. The Tamil epics, three of which have survived, appear to have been later compositions.
Of all the branches of science and technology, astronomy and medicine appear to have made considerable progress in this period, and it is not unlikely that this progress was to some extent, a result of contact with other contemporary civilizations. While the astronomical texts are lost, leaving only their names and impress on such later texts as the Brihatsamhita, two important treatises on the indigenous system of medicine have survived. Despite their incorporation of later revisions, the originals traditionally go back to the early centuries of the Christian era, perhaps being themselves based on earlier Agnivesa and Susruta Samhitas.
Our knowledge of the Indian system of medicine is based on the two Samhitas: Charaka and Sushruta, but the system certainly had an earlier origin. Rudiments of the system are already available in the later Vedic literature, not only in the countless names of diseases and the recognition of natural, along with supernatural causes for them, but also in the suggested remedies, as in the Vajasaneyi, Taittiriya and Maitrayani Samhitas, effected by plants, metals, sunlight and animal products. However, the systematisation of this knowledge and its further advancement were only achieved in the period of the Ayurvedic Samhitas, both of which mention eight branches of medical knowledge. The basic difference between them is that Charaka is mainly a treatise on therapeutic medicine, whereas Susruta is primarily devoted to surgery. Together, they represent the core of the Ayurvedic system in that both make a plea for a maximum utilisation of natural resources and advocate a true relationship between the complex of body, mind and soul and the eternal universe.
6.3 Gupta and Post-Gupta period
The most notable point about language in this period was the ascendancy of Sanskrit, the process of which had started earlier. This was in this period, associated to a large extent, with the patronage to brahmins and their dispersal through the medium of land grants. In the inscriptions, which are now mostly official records, the transition from Prakrit to Sanskrit is complete -until the period of the emergence of proto-regional languages in different areas. Needless to say, the change is extremely significant from the perspective of the social history of the period.
This triumph of Sanskrit is at one level, evident from the magnificent secular literature that the period produced. As both tradition and the extant royal prasastis of the period indicate, this spurt in literary activity centred around the court - an association which benefited the major genres of creative literature: poetry, drama and so on. The major ritis or literary styles began to develop. The use of various metres had become common by this time; in his Brihatsamhita, Varahamihira illustrated as many as sixty metres.
At another level, Sanskrit became the vehicle for giving a standard shape to much of what had hitherto remained amorphous. The best illustration of this would be the Puranas. The nucleus of Puranas certainly existed earlier, as also did its five lakshanas, but the form in which they are available certainly does not correspond to this scheme and they present a vast mass of material, the incorporation of which must have been felt necessary only around this time. The process can also be seen in the 'Sanskritisation' of folk tales and fables, of which the original Panchatantra appears to have been a contemporary example.
Sanskrit as an official language, penetrated to the far south (and in fact, it spread to the south-east Asian countries too), but the rich literary heritage of Tamil continued to prosper from local patronage. Two epic-like compositions are believed to have been products of this period. The better known of them, the Silappadikaram Ilango Vadigal, reveals that Brahmanism and its values had penetrated considerably into the Tamil society, but structurally, the epic is distinct and presents a combination of 'high' and 'folk' tradition - a tradition which is perhaps totally absent in the north Indian epics.
Several scientific thinkers of the period refer to the work of their predecessors, thereby suggesting the assimilation of earlier indigenous as well as heterogeneous influences in their own thinking. Varahamihira, for example, in his Panchasiddhantika, mentions five earlier Siddhantas of which Romaka and Paulisa are believed to have been derived from the Hellenistic world. Similarly, rasavidya or alchemy, which gradually came to be associated with esoteric tantric practices, may have grown out of contacts with southern China. The attribution of male and female principles to mercury and sulphur respectively, is common to both the areas.
However, indigenous scientific thinking, which originated from practical necessities as early as the Vedic period, reached now its most innovative phase.
The most remarkable works of the period are perhaps Ihose by Aryabhatta to whom is attributed a series of important contributions. Some of the philosophical systems too were disposed towards science. The Nyaya-Vaisesika system, which explained the formation of gross bodies from atoms through dyads (dvyanuka) or triads (tryanuka) or elaborated the 'notion of impetus,' must have been fed by the cross-currents of the contemporary scientific enquiries.
The recognition of Indian science came early through translations of a variety of works in the Arabic world and their transmission to the west. It has however, to be remembered that in India, the spirit of scientific enquiry did not go entirely unopposed. Some of the brilliant discoveries of Aryabhatta were rejected and even condemned by his illustrious successors like Varahamihira and Brahmagupta.
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