Readings in history (part 2 - languages)

Thanks for all the comments - inspires me to keep going.

More highlights follow from Sastri's book and some from other sources including a friend of mine I will call RG (who is well versed in these matters and has been educating me a little).

First, it would be good to clarify the linguistic hierarchy as widely agreed upon. Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada are part of the same language family (Dravidian languages) rooted by the theoretical language proto-Dravidian. Tamil is the oldest as we all know. Telugu and Kannada branched off earlier and Malayalam was the last one to branch off from Tamil (around 9th century AD). i.e. it is the closest language to tamil. Telugu and Kannada countries were ruled by kings who patronized Sanskrit as the religious language and those languages have come to borrow heavily from Sanskrit. That is to say, while they are not Indo-European (like Sanskrit and its north Indian derivatives), Telugu and Kannada are much more influenced by Sanskrit . Clearly political history influences language history.

An interesting member of the Dravidian family, as some of you may have heard of is Brahui, a language spoken in what is now Baluchistan (parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan). A remote Dravidian language island in an ocean of Indo-European? There are a couple of theories on how this came about. One is that Dravidian speakers (and hence Dravidians?) occupied all of the subcontinent until the wave of Aryanization swept through all of north India somehow leaving a small island of Dravidian speakers. Another theory maintains the more prevalent view that Dravidians did not occupy north India; some of them just migrated to Baluchistan later. The Aryan/Dravidian debate as I mentioned earlier is a juicy one which I hope to return to at some point.

Anyway, coming back to the main thread, Sanskrit had been the language of high culture throughout South India while commoners spoke the regional languages. Tamil developed the "literary idiom" first. The earliest known Tamil literature is what we call the Sangam literature which is placed in 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The Sangam literature itself says that this was the 3rd Sangam and there were 2 other Sangams earlier which ran for a total of 9999 years. This is considered a big exaggeration. Surely Tamil literature is not 12,000 years old; but if Tamil evolved to a point where beautiful poetry following complex metres was written in 1st century AD, the language must have existed for a few hundred years before that in more rudimentary forms (this my own guess). But few hazard guessing a date.

Telugu and Kannada literature start showing up in the latter half of the 1st millennium AD with the bulk of it in the 2nd millennium. If we use the dates when the languages developed the literary muscle, then Telugu and Kannada are younger than Tamil by almost 1000 years. Malayalam is even younger*.

Other interesting titbits.
- Sanskrit was never written down for a long time and primarily stayed alive as an oral tradition as a way to carry the Vedas forward.
- Languages and scripts are "orthogonal'" . i.e. When we talk about a language's history, we talk about it independent of its scripts. There are often multiple scripts developed at various points for the same language. For e.g., Sanskrit was written in a script called Grantha in South India. Tamil had another script called Vattezhuthu. The current script for Sanskrit and many other north Indian languages is as you might know Devanagari.
- From a religious perspective, the source of Hinduism as we know lies in the Vedas and Upanishads (some consider the Upanishads as part of the Vedas) and the puranas most of which are dated in the BCs. However Buddhism and Jainism made a strong push that almost pushed Hinduism out of India. You might remember Amartya Sen's characterization of India as a Buddhist/Jain country until the 5th century AD. Then Hinduism makes a big revival after the 5th century AD. And as many of you might know, the saints who are credited for Hinduism's modern revival (if you can call 1500 years old as modern) are Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva who were proponents of the Advaita, Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita Hindu philosophies respectively. All three of them notably hailed from South India; they published their findings, ahem I mean wrote their philosophies in Sanskrit.

That's all for now.

- R. Balaji

P.S.
* The discussion of the age of these South Indian languages reminded me of the debate going on right now in India where folks in Andhra have applied to the central government to give Telugu classical language status. There was some recent court finding that went against this. Apparently Tamil and Kannada have been given this status already. I forget what benefits this status provides.