India : A Linguistic Civilization

The author starts this book with a beautiful paragraph:

"For millennia, Indians have cultivated a multilingual mindset, integrating it into their daily lives and environment. The national anthem they sing with such great pride describes India primarily in terms of some of its language communities, speakers of the Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Dravidian languages, Odia, and Bangla. Clearly, Indians understand that their unity as a nation doesn't hinge on speaking a single language, nor does it falter despite their rich linguistic diversity; rather, it thrives precisely because of the multitude of languages they embrace."

India's spectacular linguistic diversity is one of its most defining characteristics as a civilization. The story of Indian languages is extremely complex and has an epic span. The number of languages that have existed in the subcontinent in the past eras and the languages that are currently in existence all put together is far too large to admit any single and cohesive description.The complex trajectory of our languages is intertwined with the evolution of the Indian identity, imagination, and intellectual history. Our languages are a repository of human ideas and experiences across millennia and remain at the core of intense deliberations on what constitutes the idea of India.

Many Indians mistakenly believe that Sanskrit is the source of the majority of languages spoken today. Where as many languages are actually derived from Tamil that is mentioned in the below pointers, and some others in the Northeast from Sino-Tibetan or Tibet-Burmese origin. And Prakrits and Pali have contributed as significantly to our languages as have Sanskrit, Tamil, Arabic, Persian, and English.

Never in its long history did India have any single 'pan-Indian national language'. India has always been multilingual and it is in the multilingual character of India that 'Indian-ness' can be located. As of now, India has 850 living languages and every language matters since each one provides a unique world-view and people will be ready to fight for the preservation and dignity of their mother tongues. Out of 7,000 existing languages in the world, the first thirty include Bengali, along with Hindi, as well as Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Gujarati. There is no way that Hindi can be imposed on them or the speakers of these languages can be made to accept such an imposition. Hindi is now claimed as the mother tongue by almost one in every three Indians.However, it is necessary to bear in mind that what is counted as Hindi is, in reality, a group of a large number of dialects, regional varieties and sub-languages.

Each language presents a world-view. It combines a community's imagination as well as memory. Each language is a unique world. The imagination and memory combine in a language. The consciousness-supported by the sensory capabilities of the human body in time and space-makes sense of the world only through constant encounter with time and space. It is imagination which helps us through a series of images to organize space. Images of external objects keep bombarding our mind through the eye and the mind, and organize them as a created replica of the space. That's why imagination is important. 

Scripts, though conventionally wedded to their respective languages, have no logical relation whatever with the languages they represent. A given language is never dependent for its growth or decline on the script in which it is written. Having a well-developed script does not ensure superiority of a given language over other languages. A language can never be considered lacking in valuable aspects if it has not developed a script for itself. For example, the English language does not have a script of its own till today. English uses the Roman script. Yet, it is a mighty language. We cannot dismiss it as a dialect of Latin.

Here are some below pointers that I learnt and felt were important to be highlighted and explain India's spectacular linguistic diversity and rich tapestry of Indian languages. 

• Language is not only a social system of verbal icons, arbitrarily assembled through ages, it is also a 'means' of carrying forward the cumulative human experience of millennia to the future generations. When language trajectories are snapped, the accumulated wisdom in those languages too gets submerged and continues to survive in severely truncated, irreparable, and insensible forms.
  
  
• In human history, language was created as a surplus of man's cognitive and emotive transactions, a product of the labour of the mind. For a significant duration spanning human history, language continued to retain its character as a predominantly free system that is sturdily resistant to government controls, market regulations, and cultural oppressions.
  
  
• Only the human animal speaks in a complex language. Other animals can refer only to the present—a dog or a dolphin may have limited memory. Humans, on the other hand, have conceptualized time, and complex time at that. 
  
  
• The present tense was easy. The present tense refers to 'fact or truth', and the past tense tells a memory impression or fiction'. Telling an imagined memory' demands a much more complicated working of the brain. In the evolutionary history of language it has taken nearly 200,000 years or so for the humans to formulate something in the past tense.
  
  
• India literally past, most of the linguistics creativity has been in the oral tradition Though people knew how to write, writing was not used as a means of educating the next generations.When British arrived in this country, we decided that the written is more important than oral and thus when British arrived in this country, the written became sacred.
  
  
• The most striking example of reference to writing embedded in oral traditions is found in the Mahabharata, the mother of all that is literature in India. The Mahabharata has been, in its textual tradition', an 'oral epic', something so beautifully captured by A. K. Ramanujan, when he stated that, 'Everybody in India knows the Mahabharata because nobody reads it.'
  
  
• In the 2011 census, Hindi was reported to be spoken by 52 crore people in India. But, out of those 52 crore, there were many who did not speak Hindi as their mother tongue but only as a second language. For instance, Bhojpuri speakers had numbered about 5.03 crore in the same census. But they were clubbed together with Hindi. Similarly, Rajasthan has nearly 40 odd languages small and big all of them were grouped under Hindi. 
  
  
• There have been at least five major language families in India: (1) Indo-European; (a) Indo-Aryan, (b) Germanic, (2) Dravidian, (3) Austro-Asiatic, (4) Tibet-Burmese, (5) Semito-Hamitic.
  
  
• Middle Indo-Aryan dialects in the East split into Bangla and Odia (tenth century). Subsequently, Bangla gave birth to Assamiya (thirteenth century). The Northwestern dialect developed into Kashmiri (thirteenth century), Sindhi (fifteenth century), and Punjabi (fourteenth century).
  
  
• Middle Indo-Aryan distributed itself into Hindi (which till the beginning of the nineteenth century existed as several distinct dialects), Gujarati (eleventh century), and Marathi (eleventh century).
  


• Tamil after a continuous history of two thousand years, branched into Telgu (eleventh century). Earlier, Kannada had already become an independent dialect of Tamil (fifth century). Nine hundred years later, Tamil and Kannada jointly gave birth to Malayalam (fourteenth century).
  
  
• The Hindi family of dialects developed autonomy in the fourteenth century. It also interacted with Persian, which was spoken in India from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and Arabic, in use from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries, and produced the cantonment language Urdu (thirteenth century), which later became a great literary language.
  
  
• There was human habitation in India for thousands of years prior to the emergence of Sanskrit, and it is known that various languages existed, but we have no record of those languages which can help to reconstruct the entire linguistic past. When Sanskrit arrived in India thirty-five centuries ago, there already were languages which were later identified as Prakrits and ancient Dravidian.