Eternal India Encyclopedia

Eternal India encyclopedia

EXPRESSIONS OF INDIA

EXPRESSIONS OF INDIA

it developed as a vehicle of literature in the Muslim Kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda in the South. In the North, Persian was the dominating language but in the South, Dakhani Urdu found free scope for development in the middle of a totally alien linguistic en- vironment with Marathi in the west, Telugu in the east and Kannada in the south-west. In the 19th century when the Delhi Sultanate disappeared and the British became the rulers of India, Sir Sayeed Ahmed Khan started the revival of Urdu as the language of Muslims. Modem Urdu was thus born with the substitution of words of Prakrit origin with Perso-Arabic words and the development of the language as the vehicle for political, scientific- and journalistic literature. Sanskrit is the classical language of India. Although hardly spoken nowadays, it has been listed in the 8th Schedule of the Constitution. One notable exception is a Sanskrit-speaking village in Mallur 12 Km from Shimoga in Karnataka. Scholars realised that Sanskrit is closely related in structure and sound to Greek, Latin and the other languages of Europe (with the exception of Finnish, Es- tonian, Hungarian, Turkish and Basque). This led to the theory that the Indo-Europeans had a common language and a common home- land in the region of the Caspian Sea and the Southern Russian steppes from where they migrated to various parts of Europe, the Iranian plateau and then to India around 1500 B.C. by which time they were called Aryans. The hymns of the Rig-Veda, the earliest form of Vedic literature which were probably composed between 1500 and 900 B.C., are in Sanskrit. The remaining Vedic Literature — the Sama, Yajura and Atharva Veda — also compiled in Sanskrit are of later date. Vedic Sanskrit developed into polished classical Sanskrit, the language in which the major poetic works, drama and tales such as the Hito- padesha and Panchatantra are written. Panini in the 4th century B.C. laid down the grammatical rules for Sanskrit in his grammar Ashtadhyaya ("Eight Chapters"). " One of ancient India's greatest achievements is her remarkable alphabet, commencing with the vowels and followed by the consonants, all classified very scientifically according to their mode of production, in sharp contrast to the haphazard and inadequate Roman alphabet which has developed organically for three millennia. It was only on the discovery of Sanskrit by the West that a science of phonetics arose in Europe." (A.L. Basham). According to Weber, it is "superior to all similar works of other countries by the thorough- ness with which it investigates the roots of the language and the formation of words." India's pre-eminence in this area was highly appreciated by Max Muller who observed that "there are only two nations in the whole history of the world which have conceived independently, and without suggestions from others, the two sci- ences of Logic and Grammar, the Hindus (i.e. the Indians) and the Greeks. The Indians excel in accuracy and the Greeks in grasp." Two outstanding grammarians of the post-Panini age were Ka- tyayana (4th or 5th century B.C.) author of the Pali grammar guide Katyanaprakana and Patanjali (2nd century B.C.), the author of the Mahabhashya , the great commentary on the work of Panini. The Tolkappiyam, the earliest extant grammar of the Tamil language, is a treatise on the subject, being truly encyclopedic in range and masterly in treatment.

The linguistic heterogeneity of India is reflected in the number of mother-tongues recorded by various authorities. Even here there is a wide discrepancy. Sir George Grierson in his Linguistic Survey of India (1903-28) listed 225 main languages. The census of 1961 listed 1,652 languages because it recorded even minor dialects spoken by as few as five persons. The census of 1971 gave a figure of 700 taking into account only dialects spoken by a thousand people and above. The languages of India can be divided into four groups: Indo- Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan (or Mongoloid). There are 18 major languages. Of these 13 belong to the Indo- Aryan group. They are: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Ka- shmiri, Konkani, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi and Urdu. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam belong to the Dravidian group. Manipuri comes under the Tibeto-Burman group of languages which is one of the two important branches of the Sino- Tibetan family of languages. Manipuri is written in the Bengali script. There is a strong movement for revival of the original Manipuri script which was replaced by the Bengali script at the end of the 19th century. Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Manipuri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu are official languages in the states concerned and are listed in the 8th Schedule of the Constitution along with Hindi. Hindi is the official language, along, with English, of the Union of India, and the official language in the states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Konkani is the official language of Goa along with Marathi. It is also spoken in the coastal areas of Karna- taka and Kerala. In Goa it is written in the Devanagari script and in Karnataka in the Kannada script. Sindhi is not the official language of any state but has been accorded the status of official language because of the large num- ber of Sindhi speakers in India after their influx from Pakistan following the partition of the sub-continent. Of the estimated three million Sindhi speakers, approximately one-third are in the Kutch- Saurashtra region in Gujarat and in Jaisalmer District of Rajasthan, while the rest are spread throughout the country with concentrations in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi. Nepali is spoken by the Nepalis living in Sikkim, the northern parts of West Bengal and the north-eastern states. It is written in the Devanagari script. Nepali is the official language of Sikkim. Although Kashmiri has been recognised as an official language, the state language of Jammu and Kashmir is Urdu. This is perhaps the only Indian state where a native language has not been recog- nised as the state language. One of the possible explanations could be that Jammu and Kashmir comprises three different cultural and linguistic areas: Ladakh is Tibeto-Burman, Jammu is Indo-Aryan and Kashmir proper is Dardic. According to one view supported by Grierson Kashmiri belongs to the Indo-Iranian sub-family of the Indo-Aryan family. Other authorities consider it a branch of Indo- Aryan like Hindi, Punjabi etc. Kashmiri, like Urdu, uses the Perso- Arabic script. The writing is from right to left except for numbers. Urdu developed from the Khariboli dialect that was spoken in Delhi and the surrounding areas of Agra and Meerut since the 13th century. Although Urdu as a spoken language had its origin in North India,