THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA.*
WHEN it is remembered that our Indian Empire covers an area of a million square miles, or eight times that of the nation that rules it, and that, far from being sparsely peopled, its population is six or seven times that of Great Britain and Ireland, we need not be surprised that it harbours people of very different races, and that its tribes and languages are counted by scores, if not by hundreds. Conceive the whole of Western Europe,—Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, all the German States, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and Switzerland,—placed under one sway, and called by one common name, and we have a tolerable notion of what "India" means. Even in this imaginary European Empire, notwithstanding the powerful influences of easy intercourse and of literature, we should count up a considerable number of dialects, spoken by tribes still more or less distinguishable from the nations surrounding them. Besides eight languages of literature and science, we can count up some fourteen humbler ones, all of which are employed in literature, to wit,—Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Breton, Provencal, Basque, Catalan, Greek (in Southern Italy), Illyrian, Bohemian, Lusatian, Roumansch, and Frisian ; and the dialects, which are nearly as distinct as some of these languages from one another, would add some dozens to this number. India is just as little of a " country " as such a European Empire would be ; and its people differ as widely,—indeed, more widely.
It is, indeed, at the outset a misnomer to give to our Eastern Empire the name " India" at all. India is derived from the indu.s; as the Oriental form Hindu-stan, from Sindhu, the Sanskrit name of the same river ; and the name was given to the Aryan people who invaded India from the north, following the course of the Indus and settling on its banks, and those of the other rivers which together constitute the Punj-lb or Five-river-land. They were for centuries confined to this country, spreading no further east- wards than the Sutlej, the easternmost of the five rivers ; but sub- sequently advanced as far as Oude, and founded Canoge and Oude, two of the most ancient Indian cities. Here they were already in the basin of the Jumna and Ganges ; and in later times their descendants occupied the basin of the latter river as far as its mouth. But the Hindus never permanently occupied much more than the lands of the Indus and the Ganges—from Bengal on the East to the Punjab on the West ; and this is the true Hindustan. The triangular peninsula to the south is, indeed, separated from Hindustan by such natural barriers as often keep nations asunder. The hills which rise on the south of the Ganges culminate in the Vindhya range, which runs from west to east just within the tropics, and falls down sheer on its southern declivity, forming with the opposite and parallel range of the Satpura the steep and narrow valley of the Nerbudda. The Nerbudda and the Sone, which continues on nearly the same line towards the north- east, form approximately the boundary between two distinct lands and races. To complete the boundary, a line must be drawn nearly due south from near Bihar, where the Sone joins the Ganges. All the country to the south of this line, and bounded on the east and west by the ranges called Ghats, forms a great elevated plateau, essentially very different from the low plain of the Ganges, and called in Sanskrit Dakshina, and in modern times the Deccan, or Southern Country; it is largely covered with forests, and is inter- sected by rivers flowing in steep and narrow channels, and forcing a passage through the Ghats to the ocean.
Now when we consider the difficulty of passing the natural barrier formed by the double range of the Vindhya and the Satpura, and the Nerbudda river between them, and further, the difference in habits and constitution necessary for living on the high forest lands of the Deccan on the one hand, or on the sultry lowlands of the Ganges on the other, we cannot be surprised to find the two districts occupied by different races. With the Hindus we are well acquainted, both from daily contact with them in all the great centres of rule, of population, and of industry (except indeed Madras), and from their history. The oldest songs in their religious books, which are estimated to have as high a date as 1,500 B.C., describe the people as living on their flocks and herds, and show no trace of India at all, but rather appear to speak of a time before they separated from their brethren the pro- genitors of the Persians, and lived north of the Himalayas. Issuing thence, they penetrated the mountains and came down the Indus, and gradually overspread the plains of the Indus and the Ganges, as we have said. Now, one fact appears clear from the ancient Sanskrit literature, from the Vedas, and still more from the Epics
* Outlines of Indian Philology. With a Map showing the Distribution of Indian Languages. By John Beames, Bengal Civil Service. Second Edition. London: Trtibner and Co. 1868. and the Laws of Mann,—that the Aryan invaders found the land full of people. These must have fled north and south before their advance, and it is their descendants whom we find in Nepal and the Himalayas on the one side, and in the Deccan and throughout southern India and Ceylon on the other. The ancient Hindus must have entertained no gentler feeling towards the aboriginal people than theii modern descendants ; for whilst they appro- priated to themselves the term Aryas, "the honourable," they called the natives in the north "serpents and in the south "monkeys ;" and the term Dasyu, which may have been the proper name of one of their tribes, became synonymous with "robber." One of the names applied in the Mahabharata to an aboriginal tribe, Kirata, has survived in the Himalayan tribe Kiranta.
Thus the non-Aryan races of India are proved to be aboriginal. In other words, since the earliest record of the Aryan invasion dates from about 1,500 B.C., and the invasion itself was probably much earlier, we have the remains of a race which occupied the world long before those tumultuous Western movements occurred which covered Europe with Aryan nations, two of which, the Greek and Roman, let it be remembered, have an authenticated antiquity of 900 or 800 years before Christ. Traces of pm-Aryan nations are found in modern Europe in the Basques, the Finns and Lapps, probably the Albanians, and some Caucasian tribes ; and many now extinct may have belonged to the same list, especially the Iberians, Etruscans, Rhaetians, Pelasgians, and Scythians. It will afford a very interesting field of inquiry, for which things are not yet fully ripe, to collect all these traces, and ascertain if possible whether the pre-Aryan peoples of Europe were related to those of Asia. But before so ambitious a problem can be undertaken with the slightest hope of success, more ought to be known of the mutual relations and of the formation of the Indian languages in question. Mr. Beames's little book gives a very clear outline, drewn up like a genealogical statement, and illustrated by a map of India coloured to exhibit the scope of the different languages. With the brevity of a well-defined purpose it gives simply the divisions and subdivisions, with the main facts about the history and geographical extent of the language. An exposition is then given of the classification of languages, showing in what the in- flecting class differ from the agglutinating, and the analytical from both. A chapter on dialects, and the means of distinguishing between a dialect and a language, follows, from which we extract the following concluding remarks :— 1. The test of mutual intelligibility is a very, unsafe one, as it de- pends on the intelligence of individuals. The savage and the peasant will exaggerate it; tho man of education will make too light of it. "2. By taking into consideration certain influences which have operated on the people, the mutual-intelligibility test may, however, be brought to bear to this extent, that it may be fairly said of two forms of speech that if they are not mutually intelligible, they ought to be, and, in fact, they may often be so much alike that the student who is master of one, would almost, if not altogether, understand the other, though two natives could not.
"3. These influences are geographical position, civilization, political and physical accidents, religion, difference of pronunciation, education. "4. Mispronunciation of words by the uneducated, where the educated pronounce them rightly, is a peculiarity which should not be mistaken for a dialectic one, as is too often done.
"5. The fact that a form of speech is used only by a small number of people is no argument against its being really an independent language. It may be that the tribe which speaks it was once larger, and has shrunk to its present small dimensions from various causes ; it may also be that, like the Hebrews, a special religion has marked and set apart the tribe, and prevented its spread ; or, in the third place, it may be that, like the Basque, all its congeners have been swept away, and their places supplied by tribes from other families of the human race. " 6. It is a mistake to suppose that rustic dialects are degenerate or debased forms of a language. In those languages with which we are most familiar, it has generally been found that many different dialects have existed side by side from the earliest times. One of these, by some accident, has been taken up and cultivated, has produced a litera- ture, and been enriched with additions from other sources, while the others have remained in their original obscurity. Far, however, from being debased, they often retain early and pure forms of words which have dropped out of the cultivated dialect."
Mr. Beames classifies the Turanian or non-Aryan languages of India thus :-1. Thaic (Siamese). 2. Himalayic. 3. Lohitic (Burmese). 4. KW. 5. Dravidie. Of the substantial correct- ness of this division the specimens of the numerals in many dialects of each class afford abundant proof ; yet cases occur in which, judged by this standard, a language differs throughout from its neighbours. Thus in the KO1 class, the Yernkali-Khond and the Northern-Gond show far greater affinity to the Dravidian than to the Kol. But languages so near to one another, both geographically and ethnologically, must have borrowed and lent many words, and are not to be dismissed with an off-hand judgment based on a few words only, while their general
phonetic relations to one another are undetermined. It is inter- esting to find also indications of roots common to all these classes, which may serve as a link to bind them into one great family. Thus the number five is expressed in dialects of the Himalayic, Lohitic, Kol, and Drividic class respectively,—banga, bongci, manke, ancha ; and five in the first three classes, phi, phili, ciplean. And in all these classes the original numerals only reach to five, to an extent which seems to justify us in assuming this as a common principle in them ; six being denoted by 3 x 2, seven by 3 x 2 + 1; eight and nine sometimes by two or one (respec- tively) from ten, for which last a distinct word exists.
These languages have very various degrees of importance in the world. The Telugu and Tamil, the chief languages of the Dravidic class, are spoken throughout the greater part of the Madras presidency, and have each its peculiar alphabet, and abundant literature ; the Burmese is also written and literary ; but the other languages are mainly the property of isolated semi- savage tribes, who hide themselves from the gaze of Europeans, and still more from that of their hereditary and insolent foes the Hindus, in the forests, on the abrupt hills of Central ludia, and in the numerous narrow gorges of the Southern Himalayas. •
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