Every language has a different way of organising the world based on how it interprets time and space. A language is a distinct way of thinking as well as a means of communication. Therefore, it is necessary to consider India’s enormous linguistic diversity as a reflection of the variety of worldviews and distinctive ways of seeing the world. The idea that language is the only way culture can be expressed and that language and culture are one and the same is widely held. Without language, it is argued, cognition would also be impossible.
As I start reading India: A Linguistic Civilisation, I discover that the author G. N. Devy, presents a comprehensive analysis of how changes in India’s self-perception might reveal what India has been and still is. There are other approaches to characterising the epistemic transitions, including examining material culture, interpreting philosophical works, recounting political histories, or calculating demographic differences. Examining India’s language usage and the ways in which different languages have influenced India’s epistemic architecture across time is one of these methods. It’s interesting to remember that before the second millennium BCE, agrarian communities across India had their own languages. For the past 70,000 years, humans have been speaking complicated languages. Actually, one of the things that allowed the prehistoric migrations to occur at all was the capacity for language acquisition.
Although there is no written or oral evidence regarding the language characteristics of the pre-Sanskrit groups in India, it would be reasonable to suppose that they produced a large number of terms relating to nature and agriculture. To access the pre-Indus languages, we lack the necessary tools. It is unclear exactly when the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages first came into contact, but it is certain that a proto-Dravidian language variety existed in South India and probably in many other regions of India before it came into contact with Sanskrit. There were a number of characteristics of this language that set it apart from the Indo-Aryan language family’s Sanskrit.
However, the author goes on to say that a lack of knowledge about the dialectic between language and script, varna and jati, and religion and sect frequently led to the widening of divides. Many Indians believe that Sanskrit is the source of the majority of languages spoken today, followed by Tamil and, in the Northeast, Sino-Tibetan or Tibet-Burmese languages. Anthropologists, linguists, and some tribal activists are also aware that our languages are likewise of Austro-Asiatic origin. Every Indian is well aware that our languages have a vast vocabulary thanks to Arabic and Persian. It goes without saying that they also acknowledge and encounter the significant number of new terms and expressions that the English language has brought to Indian languages in their everyday interactions. The fact that some Prakrits and Pali have made as substantial contributions to our languages as Sanskrit, Tamil, Arabic, Persian, and English is unknown outside of a small group of archaeologists and ancient Indian experts. Both Prakrits and the old Tamil are responsible for the development of the languages spoken in the South, as well as in Goa, Maharashtra, Orissa, West Bengal, and Bihar. Since Sanskrit was mostly the language of the priestly classes and elite rulers in ancient India, the Prakrits were the languages of the lower classes.
The author also cited a number of foreign authors who have made significant contributions to Indian literature through their works on a variety of topics. They established a number of organisations, including the Gujarat Vernacular Society, the Asiatic Society, and the Literary Society of Bombay. A new understanding of India for modern Indians evolved as a result of the Orientalist researchers’ influence, and in Germany and France, a new school of historical linguistics began to categorise languages into families. George A. Grierson, an Irish linguist, conducted the last extensive language survey. His writings are now considered a timeless reference point for any sociolinguistic analysis of Indian languages. For the majority of India’s lengthy history, multilingualism has remained a normal cultural trait in many subcontinental regions. There were 1,369’mother tongues’ listed in the 2011 census. There have been at least five major language families in India, according to later studies, primarily conducted in the 20th century: One is Indo-European; (a) Indo-Aryan; (b) Germanic; 2. Dravidian; 3. Austro-Asiatic; 4. Tibet-Burmese; 5. Semito-Hamitic.
Along with discussing English and anti-English protests, the author poses the question of whether English will eventually replace Indian languages or if it will eventually make a peaceful retreat to the remote island from which it originated. Every decade’s first year is when the language enumeration is conducted. About six or seven years later, the public is informed of the data that was gathered. The Indian Census released the 2011 census’s linguistic data in 2018. The reasons why a language died are sometimes asked. Is the government solely to blame, the education policy, or the poor census quality? Can it be seen as a globalisation attack? Or is the decline of the languages due to colonialism and its aftermath? Or, for that matter, can we blame the print technology? There is a much more substantial reason for these questions than all of these elements together. In India, philosophical and poetic works were written and taught orally in Sanskrit and Tamil about two thousand years before our time. Although the length of a student’s internship with the teacher varied from case to case, it is undeniable that the sole educational option accessible at the time was oral teaching from the teacher and the memorisation of large amounts of literature.
In the pages that follow, the author describes the process of moving from oral memory to script, written, paper, and print form. Because of the land record system, writing has gradually come to be revered since the British arrived. One way to characterise this linguistic condition is as “partial language acquisition,” where a person who is fully literate and has a relatively high level of education can read, write, and speak a language other than their mother tongue, but they can only speak and not write the language they claim to be their mother tongue. A language’s loss means that centuries’ worth of knowledge is lost forever.
In addition to celebrating the diverse range of Indian languages, this book provides a suitable critique of majoritarian beliefs that jeopardise our thriving multiculturalism.
Shahruk Ahmed Mazumdar is a Writer, Columnist from Assam, India
X/Twitter id: @Shahrukhahmedsk
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