Eternal India Encyclopedia

Eternal India

encyclopedia

EXPRESSIONS OF INDIA

EXPRESSIONS OF INDIA

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,

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.