CHAPTER II THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA

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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 Marathi and Gujarati 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 Sahitya 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 Munda 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 Brahuis of Baluchistan. This Dravidian speech would seem to be the original and indigenous language of India. The Munda languages of Chota Nagpore, again, are plainly very ancient Indian tongues and are, in all probability, as aboriginal as the true Dravidian speech. But Munda 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 Munda 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 Munda 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 Munda 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.

Plate V

Seoris or Savaras
(Mirzapur district)

Let me then begin by giving a brief account of the two ancient and indigenous families of language in India, the Dravidian and Munda families. Sir G. Grierson's Survey has definitely established the fact that, in spite of the close physical resemblance between the Dravidian races properly so called and the inhabitants of Chota Nagpore, there is no linguistic affinity between them. In Sir George Grierson's own words "they differ in their pronunciation, in their modes of indicating gender, in their declensions of nouns, in their method of indicating the relationship of a verb to its objects, in their numeral systems, in their principles of conjugation, in their methods of indicating the negative, and in their vocabularies. The few points in which they agree are points which are common to many languages scattered all over the world."

The Dravidian Languages.

These are, as aforesaid, the languages of Southern India. Two of them survive further to the north in Chota Nagpore and the Sonthal Parganas, where they exist side by side with Munda dialects. One curiously isolated Dravidian language is Brahui, an extraordinary survival, far to the north-west, in the midst of the Iranian and Muhammadan languages of Baluchistan. The Sanskrit writers knew of two great southern languages which they named the Andhra-bhasha and the Dravida-bhasha. The first corresponded to what is now Telugu and its cognates, the latter to the rest of the southern languages. Sir George Grierson classifies the Dravidian family thus:

Number of speakers
(1901)
A. Dravida group:
Tamil 16,525,500
Malayalam 6,029,304
Kanarese 10,365,047
Kodagu 39,191
Tulu 535,210
Toda 805
Kota 1300
Kurukh 592,351
Malto 60,777
B. Intermediate languages:
Gond, etc. 1,123,974
C. Andhra group:
Telugu 20,696,872
Kandh 494,099
Kolami 1505
D. Brahui 48,589
56,514,524

Sir G. Grierson borrows the following general account of the main characteristics of the Dravidian forms of speech, with slight verbal alterations, from the Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency:

"In the Dravidian languages all nouns denoting inanimate substances and irrational beings are of the neuter gender. The distinction of male and female appears only in the pronoun of the third person, in adjectives formed by suffixing the pronominal terminations, and in the third person of the verb. In all other cases, the distinction of gender is marked by separate words signifying 'male' and 'female.' Dravidian nouns are inflected, not by means of case terminations, but by means of suffixed postpositions and separable particles. Dravidian neuter nouns are rarely pluralized; Dravidian languages use postpositions instead of prepositions. Dravidian adjectives are incapable of declension. It is characteristic of these languages, in contradistinction to Indo-European, that, wherever practicable, they use as adjectives the relative participles of verbs, in preference to nouns of quality or adjectives properly so called. A peculiarity of the Dravidian (and also of the Munda) dialects is the existence of two pronouns of the first person plural, one inclusive of the person addressed, the other exclusive. The Dravidian languages have no passive voice, this being expressed by verbs signifying 'to suffer' etc. The Dravidian languages, unlike the Indo-European, prefer the use of continuative participles to conjunctions. The Dravidian verbal system possesses a negative as well as an affirmative voice. It is a marked peculiarity of the Dravidian languages that they make use of relative participial nouns instead of phrases introduced by relative pronouns. These participles are formed from the various participles of the verb by the addition of a formative suffix. Thus 'the person who came' is in Tamil literally 'the who-came'." It is worth while, for once, to quote this somewhat technical description because it shows that though the Aryan languages have driven the Dravidian languages out of Northern India, the latter may have affected the Aryan speech in the transition which, in common with the corresponding speeches of Europe, it has undergone from inflected to analytic ways of talking.

Tamil. Tamil, or Arava, is spoken all over the south of India and the northern part of Ceylon. It extends as far as Mysore on the west coast and Madras on the east coast. It has been carried all over Further India by emigrant coolies. As might be expected from its geographical position, it is the oldest, richest, and most highly organised of Dravidian languages. It has an extensive literature written in a literary dialect called "Shen" or "perfect" as compared with the colloquial "Kodum" or "rude" speech of ordinary men. The words "Tamil" and "Dravida" are both corruptions of an original "Dranida." Tamil has an alphabet of its own.

Malayalam. Malayalam is a branch of Tamil which came into existence in the ninth century A.D. It is the language of the Malabar coast, and has one dialect, Yerava, spoken in Coorg. This language has borrowed its vocabulary freely from Sanskrit. It differs from the mother tongue in having dropped the personal terminations of verbs. Its alphabet is the Grantha character, much used in Southern India for writing Sanskrit.

Kanarese. Kanarese is the language of the Kingdom of Mysore and the adjoining British territory. It has an ancient literature written in a character resembling that of Telugu. Its dialects of Badaga and Kurumba are spoken in the Nilgiri hills. Kodagu, the language of Coorg, is said by some to be a dialect of Kanarese, and is the link between it and Tulu, the language of part of South Kanara in Madras. Toda and Kota will always have an interest for anthropologists in connection with Dr Rivers' now classical investigation into the social life of the Todas.

Gond. The Gond language is spoken outside the true Dravidian area, in the hill country of Central India. It is intermediate between the Dravida and Andhra languages, and like most hill languages has many dialects. It is unwritten and has no literature.

Telugu. Telugu is the only important Andhra language now surviving. It is the language of the eastern coast from Madras to near the southern border of Orissa. It has an extensive literature written in a character of its own, adapted from the Aryan Devanagari. This character, like the writing of Orissa, is easily recognised by its loops and curves, said to be due to the difficulty of writing straight lines with a stylus on a palm leaf without splitting the leaf.

Finally there remains the isolated and distant Brahui language in Baluchistan. Its separate existence has led to a very pretty quarrel between linguists and ethnologists. Dr Haddon in his work on the Wanderings of Peoples, in this series, says that "the Dravidians may have been always in India: the significance of the Brahui of Baluchistan, a small tribe speaking a Dravidian language, is not understood, probably it is merely a case of cultural drift." Sir George Grierson says "if they (the Dravidians) came from the north-west, we must look upon the Brahuis as the rear-guard; but if from the south, they must be considered as the advance guard of the Dravidian immigration. Under any circumstances it is possible that the Brahuis alone retain the true Dravidian ethnic type, which has been lost in India proper by admixture with other aboriginal nationalities such as the Mundas." My own diffident suggestion is that the Brahuis may be a Dravidian race as a survival of emigration when Northern India was also Dravidian, as the French are a "Latin" race.

Of the Munda languages I need not speak at any length, interesting as they are to students of spoken speech. They are spoken by over three millions of people, and, besides numerous dialects of each, are six in number. They have been carefully studied by missionaries and others, and many of them are now recorded in the Roman character. I must apologise for a somewhat dull and detailed account of the Dravidian languages. It seemed necessary to explain what manner of languages they were that fought an unequal and not always losing fight with the great Aryan languages of the north. The account of the struggle between the two, on the other hand, has an enduring interest. Dravidian and Aryan languages now face one another much as do French and Breton in Brittany, English and Gaelic in the Highlands, Flemish and French in Belgium. But in the Indian plains the contest was waged on a much vaster scale, and some of the incidents of the long struggle can still be recovered. One point should be carefully borne in mind. In Northern India the Aryan languages and the Hindu religion are openly and completely victorious. The peculiar philosophic and religious ideas of Hinduism find apt and copious expression in the Aryan vocabulary of the north. But Dravidian India, too, in accepting Hinduism, perforce accepted with it much of the Aryan vocabulary. It is Dravidian still, as England is still mainly Germanic. But without Aryan words it could hardly give expression to Hindu speculations and aspirations. As our own language, as these words I write, have a strong intermixture of Latin phrase and idiom, so the Aryan influence has in a greater or less degree penetrated to Ceylon itself, once held by Aryan poets to be the home of demoniac and barbarian races. There are Dravidian traces in the north, survivals of old days of Dravidian supremacy. In the south, a veneer of Aryan culture has been added to the ancient Dravidian civilisation. This was strong to resist a change of idiom: it clung sturdily to most of its vocabulary; but there has been an infusion of Aryan words, needed for ritual and, in some cases, for administrative purposes. The use of the word "administrative" reminds me to say, before passing on, that nowhere in India is English so freely used as in the Dravidian south. Originally Englishmen seem to have found Dravidian languages too difficult a means of communication. But Dravidians themselves soon discovered that English was a convenient lingua franca. All India is now making the same discovery, and English is binding the educated classes into a new pan-Indian race.

The Aryan Languages.

We now return to the fascinating story of the spread of the Indo-Aryan languages over the north and west of the peninsula. In the tale, captured from the patient study of words and idioms, and finding only occasional support from legend, and practically none from history, since history had not yet begun to exist, we get a singularly moving and interesting picture of the social existence of vanished tribes of men. We partly know and partly conjecture that there was once a race of men whom we may conveniently call Indo-Europeans who spoke the parent-speech of the modern languages of Europe, Armenia, Persia, and northern India. Probably the Panjab in very early times was occupied by several immigrations of Indo-European folk, for in the earliest days of which we have any knowledge, the land of the Five Rivers is already the home of many Indo-Aryan tribes, who live at enmity with one another, and have a fraternal habit of speaking of one another as unintelligible barbarians.

In the Sanskrit geography of somewhat later times, India is divided into the sacred Madhya-deÇa, the "Midland," and the rest. Already this Midland country, the home of the latest immigrants, is considered to be the true habitat of civilised Aryans, all the rest of the peninsula being more or less barbarous. It is important that the reader should understand exactly where this Midland lay. On the north it ended below the foot-slopes of the Himalayas. On the south, it was bordered by the Vindhya hills, the southern boundary of the Gangetic plain. On the west it extended to Sirhind on the eastern limits of what is now the Panjab. On the east its limit was the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna. Its inhabitants, of mixed Aryan and Dravidian origin, had spread eastwards from the upper part of the do-ab, the watershed between the two rivers. Their language gradually became the current speech of the Midland. It was cultivated as a literary tongue from early times and came to be known as Sanskrit, the "purified" language. Purified and systematised it was by the labours of grammarians and phoneticians, the most famous of whom is Panini, who lived and wrote about 300 B.C.

To the phonetic acumen of these early grammarians the existing alphabets of northern India, singularly different in arrangement from the confused order of European and Semitic letters, bear testimony. In the Indian alphabets the letters are arranged in order, according to the vocal organs chiefly used in their pronunciation, as Gutturals, Palatals, Cerebrals, Dentals, and Labials. All the phonetic changes which occur in the formation of the numerous compound words are carefully reduced to rule, and the spelling professes to be (what perhaps no spelling ever has been or can be) phonetic.

Plate VI

A Bhuiyar
(Mirzapur district)

It is a moot point whether Sanskrit was in Panini's time a spoken vernacular. It is more probable that it was, what it still remains in most parts of Hindu India, a second and literary language, used much as Latin was used in medieval Europe. The spoken form of the archaic language found in the older Vedas developed into Prakrit, which existed side by side with Sanskrit as the spoken dialects of Italy existed side by side with literary Latin. As the Italian dialects developed into the modern languages of Europe, so the Prakrits gave birth to the Aryan modern languages of India. Thus the latter were not in any accurate sense derived from Sanskrit, but only shared a common origin with it[4]. It remained, however, as a standard of literary perfection and was destined to play an important part in the enrichment of many of the modern languages of India, when contact with western culture brought about what may fairly be called a literary renaissance. This was particularly the case with Bengali. Its medieval literature was all but confined to rhymed hymns and tales. English education led to a revival of Sanskrit studies. From England Bengal learnt that it was possible to write prose in many varied forms, in novels, essays, histories, journalism, and so forth. The medieval literary language, derived from the Prakrit, had grown insufficient for the expression of anything but the simplest devotional or amatory emotion, and Bengali borrowed freely from the rich treasury of Sanskrit.

In the "Midland," then, were various forms of Prakrit, side by side with the sacred and literary Sanskrit. Round the Midland, on the west, south, and east lay territories inhabited by other Indo-Aryan tribes. This country included what is now the Panjab, Sind, Gujarat, Rajputana and the country to its east, Oudh and Bihar. The tribes inhabiting this semicircular tract had each of them its own dialect. But it is important to note that the dialects of this "Outer Band" were much more closely related to one another than to the spoken language of the "Midland." It was this circumstance which suggested Dr Hoernle's ingenious theory, already mentioned, of the second and separate invasion of Aryans into the Midland over the mountainous passes of Gilgit, too high, arduous, and difficult to be traversed by the families and herds of the nomad newcomers.

In course of time the population of the Midland grew in numbers and valour and pressed closely on the food supplies of the tract. It was already the centre of a vigorous and widely influential civilisation. It contained the imperial cities of Delhi and Kanauj, and the sacred city of Mathura (??d???a ? t?? ?e??, as Ptolemy calls it). This crowded, vigorous, and martial population was bound to expand. It spread into the eastern Panjab, Rajputana, Gujarat and Oudh, carrying with it its language. Hence, as Sir George Grierson points out, we get in this "Outer Band" mixed languages, of the Midland type near the "Midland" centre, but fading into local dialects as we go further west, south, and east. Finally as the Midlanders crowded into the territories of the Outer Band, the inhabitants of these took refuge among the Dravidians of the south and east, and so gave birth to dialects which ultimately became Marathi in the south and Oriya, Bengali and Assamese on the east, all of them characteristic languages of the "Outer Band."

I am borrowing so freely and unscrupulously from Sir George Grierson that it is a relief to pause for a moment to interpose a very diffident suggestion of my own. Vocabulary, and even idiom, have become a dubious guide to the constituent elements of the "Outer Band" languages which have almost entirely destroyed the original vocabularies of the Dravidian or Mongolo-Dravidian races who use them. But it is just possible that accentuation, rhythm, metre may furnish some clue to these vanished dialects, which may have bequeathed a characteristic tone of voice to their Aryan successors. Bengali, for instance, has a very peculiar initial phrasal accent which strongly distinguishes it from the etymologically cognate speech of Bihar, much as the characteristic accent tonique of French distinguishes it from Italian and Spanish. Native scholars in Bengal are, I am glad to say, beginning to work at the Dravidian elements in their expressive and copious language, and will, I hope, soon investigate the Mongolian elements, whether of idiom or pronunciation, in the Bengali of the north-eastern part of the province. To return to Sir George Grierson, he holds that the present linguistic condition of northern India is this:—there is, firstly, a Midland Indo-Aryan language which holds the Gangetic Doab. Round it on three sides is a band of Mixed languages, in the eastern Panjab, Gujarat, Rajputana and Oudh. With these Sir George includes the Indo-Aryan languages of the Himalayan slopes north of the Midland, which have been introduced in comparatively recent times by immigrants from Rajputana.

The Prakrits. Before I leave the Aryan languages of India, I must give a brief summary of what Sir George Grierson says of the Prakrits, the spoken speeches which have always, implicitly or explicitly, been distinguished from the artificial and literary Sanskrit. The Primary Prakrits of the Midland and Outer Band (of which latter no record survives) were of the same type as the Latin known to us in literature. They were synthetic and inflected languages. These gradually decayed (or developed) into what Sir G. Grierson calls the Secondary Prakrits. These are still synthetic, but diphthongs and harsh combinations of consonants are avoided, "till in the latest developments we find a condition of almost absolute fluidity, each language becoming an emasculated collection of vowels hanging for support on an occasional consonant." These Secondary Prakrits lasted from the days of the Buddha (550 B.C.) to about 1000 A.D.

One at least of these Secondary Prakrits, Pali, has obtained world-wide fame as the language of the Buddhist scriptures. Thus crystallised, it underwent the same fate as Sanskrit and became more or less what we call in Europe a "dead" language. In the Midland was a great and famous Prakrit called Sauraseni, after the Sanskrit name, Surasena, of the country round Mathura. In Bihar was Magadhi; in Oudh and Baghelkhand was Ardha-magadhi or "half Magadhi"; south of these was Maharashtri, which is best known to students of the ancient Indian drama as the vehicle of the lyrics with which the plays are studded. Kings, sages, heroes and other noble characters speak Sanskrit. Inferior personages use Sauraseni.

The Secondary Prakrits themselves degenerated into what Indian grammarians call Apabhramsas, "corrupt" or "decayed" tongues, which were used for literary purposes and finally became the parents of the great Aryan languages of the present time.

For comparison with the preceding table of the Dravidian languages, I give below the census table of the Aryan languages as recorded in 1901:—

Number of speakers
A. Language of the Midland.
Western Hindi 40,714,925
B. Intermediate languages.
a. More nearly related to the Midland language:
Rajasthani 10,917,712
The Pahari (or 'mountain') languages of the Himalaya 3,124,981
Gujarati 9,439,925
Panjabi 17,070,961
b. More nearly related to the Outer languages:
Eastern Hindi 22,136,358
C. Outer languages.
a. North-western group:
Kashmiri 1,007,957
Kohistani 36
Lahnda 3,337,917
Sindhi 3,494,971
b. Southern language:
Marathi 18,237,899
c. Eastern group:
Bihari 34,579,844
Oriya 9,687,429
Bengali 44,624,048
Assamese 1,350,846

Of all these modern languages, their idioms, their characters, their literature, I do not venture to give even a summarised account. Those who have any curiosity to learn more about them cannot do better than consult Sir George Grierson's work on The Languages of India, until it, in its turn, is superseded by the book he is now writing from the materials collected in his Linguistic Survey. But everyone who has read The Newcomes will want to know what Hindustani is, especially as it is one of the languages prescribed for the study of probationers for the Indian Civil Service and is taught at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Dublin. In the strictest sense Hindustani is the dialect of western Hindi spoken between Meerut and Delhi. It was much cultivated, as a literary dialect, by both Hindus and Musalmans. The latter wrote, and write it, in the Persian character, and have added a large number of Persian and Arabic words. In this Persianised form it is known as Urdu, "a name derived from the Urdu-e mu 'alla, or royal military bazaar outside the imperial palace at Delhi, where it is supposed to have had its origin." Under Muhammadan rule Urdu was almost as much the lingua franca of India as English has come to be in modern times.

Another point is worth noting here. The Aryan languages of northern India are, in a very real sense, Hindu languages. Perhaps I shall make myself clearer by asserting that the languages of Western Europe are Christian languages. For historical reasons, their religious phraseology has a Christian connotation and allusiveness. But in the west, the distinction between things secular and things religious has become so familiar that the Christian element in our speech is not recognisable in our ordinary talk. In Hindu India, on the other hand, almost every act of a man's life has some religious or superstitious significance, and hence all the Aryan languages in the mouths of Hindus are markedly different from the shape they assume when spoken by Musalmans. In the case of western Hindi we have the recognised Muhammadan dialect of Urdu, but in other languages too there is a Muhammadan dialect or patois, even if it has no separate name. A curious exception, however, occurs in eastern Bengal, where the bulk of the population is Musalman. In this region the Muhammadans are comparatively recent converts from the lower aboriginal or Mongoloid castes, whose Muhammadanism sits very lightly on their habits and consciences, and so far as my own experience goes, there is little difference between the speech of the lower Musalmans and their friends and cousins the Chandals and other indigenous castes.

The Indo-Chinese Languages.

Finally, I must say a few words about the Indo-Chinese and Mon-Khmer languages. I spent most of my official life among people speaking these languages, and find, somewhat shamefacedly, that Sir G. A. Grierson makes me responsible for sundry vocabularies compiled in my distant youth. Naturally, I feel a personal interest in the people of the north-eastern border, and am tempted to enlarge on their qualities of speech and character. But I have left myself little space, and the Mongoloid races of the frontier are hardly Indian in any proper sense of the word. Moreover, though their total number is not great, they speak many languages. The Census of 1901 recognises 119 such languages. The most important of them all is, of course, Burmese, which is spoken by about seven and a half millions of people. There are nearly 900,000 Karens in Burma, and about 750,000 Shans. The Meithei (now Manipuris) mentioned above are 272,997 in number. The Boro or Kachari people of the Assam valley, a most attractive and delightful race, number somewhat less than 250,000. The other languages of this type have mostly a much smaller number of speakers than these. But mention should be made of 250,000 Mons, Palungs and Was in Burma, and 177,827 Khasis in Assam, since these constitute the only members of the Mon-Khmer family still found within the limits of British India.

These people, speaking Indo-Chinese languages, surround India proper on the north and east in a crescent-shaped curve, mostly in the valleys of lofty and rugged mountains. From the eastern mountains projects into the midst of the modern province of Assam a range of hills, dividing the valley of the Brahmaputra from that of Sylhet, which is watered by the Surma. Readers of Sir W. W. Hunter's delightful little book on The Thackerays in India will not need to be told where Sylhet is, or what sort of a place it is. This range of hills is inhabited by the Garos on the west, and the Nagas on the east, both Tibeto-Burman races. Between them, on one of the most beautiful plateaus in the world, are the Khasis, once, as I have said elsewhere, regarded as being as isolated and unique as our European Basques, but now proved to be, linguistically at least, connected with the Mons in Burma, and many races and tribes in Further India and Australonesia.

All these Indo-Chinese people seem to have come originally from north-western China, following the beds of great rivers in their travel; down the Chindwin, the Irrawaddy, and the Salween into Burma, down the Brahmaputra into Assam, and up the Brahmaputra into Tibet. There seem to have been at least three waves of migration. First, in prehistoric times, there was a Mon-Khmer invasion into Further India and Assam. Next, also at an unknown date, was a Tibeto-Burman invasion into the same regions and Tibet. Next the Tai branch of the Siamese-Chinese entered eastern Burma about the sixth century A.D. A fourth Tibeto-Burmese invasion, that of the Kachins, when in Lord Dufferin's time, the British annexed Upper Burma.

I think I have now said enough to show how the languages of India are distributed. It only remains to give a brief and cursory account of the Indian Religions. This is a subject on which big books might be, and have been, written. But, even in so small a book on the Peoples of India it seems necessary to give some account of their religious divisions.

[4] As in Europe, the modern Aryan languages differ from one another chiefly in survivals from the indigenous earlier speech which preceded each of them.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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