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6. * Sanskrit or Dravidian?*


Many hypotheses have been put forward about the affinity of the Indus
language, but only two alternatives have had wider support.

Indo-Aryan languages have been spoken in the area once occupied by the
Indus civilisation and gradually all over North India since at least
1000 B.C. It is natural to assume that they were spoken there even
earlier. Speakers of Hindi, Bengali and other Neo-Indo-Aryan languages
especially have been prone to interpret the Indus texts as Sanskrit
(understood in the broad sense of Old Indo-Aryan), from which their own
mother tongues have evolved.

The Sanskrit hypothesis, however, is difficult to reconcile
chronologically with the date of the Indus civilisation (about the
second half of the third millennium B.C.) and antecedent Early Harappan
neolithic cultures which were responsible for its creation. Comparison
of the Vedic texts with the Avesta and with the West Asian documents
relating to the Aryan kings of Mitanni suggests that the Vedic Aryans
entered the Indian subcontinent from Northeast Iran and Central Asia in
the second millennium B.C.

Moreover, it is abundantly clear that the early Aryans were nomads and
that the horse played a dominent role in their culture, as it did in the
culture of their Proto-Indo-European-speaking ancestors. The horse is
conspicuously absent from the many realistic representations of animals
in the art of the Indus civilisation. Comprehensive recent bone analyses
have yielded the conclusion that the horse was introduced to the
subcontinent around the beginning of the second millennium B.C.

Horse-drawn chariots made the Aryan-speaking nomads a superior military
force which gradually subdued all of North India. Numerically the early
Aryans can have been only a fraction of the Indus population, which is
estimated to have been about five million. Obviously these millions of
people were not all killed; they were made to acknowledge the Aryan
overlordship and to pay taxes. In the course of time and through
gradually increasing bilingualism, the earlier population eventually
became linguistically assimilated. It is most unlikely that this process
of linguistic Aryanization happened without leaving clear marks of the
earlier substratum language upon Indo-Aryan.

There are several structural and lexical Dravidisms even in the Rgveda,
the earliest preserved text collection, pointing to the presence of
Dravidian speakers in Northwest India in the second millennium B.C. The
25 Dravidian languages spoken at present form the second largest
linguistic family of South Asia. Until recently, about one quarter of
the entire population has spoken Dravidian, while the speakers of
Austro-Asiatic, the third largest linguistic family of long standing in
South Asia, numbered just a few per cent. The Indus language is likely
to have belonged to the North Dravidian sub-branch represented today by
the Brahui, spoken in the mountain valleys and plateaus of Afghanistan
and Baluchistan, the core area of the Early Harappan neolithic cultures,
and by the Kurukh spoken in North India from Nepal and Madhya Pradesh to
Orissa, Bengal and Assam.
 


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