Journey
The making of Indian languages and scripts
Every Indian language became a written language at a datable moment, usually on stone, usually recording a grant, and usually centuries before it acquired a literature. What decided the moment was almost always institutional: a dynasty, a religious movement that refused Sanskrit, or a press with the right type. Halmidi for Kannada, the Gurjara grant for Gujarati, a Tamil-Brahmi cave label for Tamil: the dates are all fixable.
Stops (13)
- Kalamalla · Telugu on stone — Kalamalla, 575
A Renati Chola temple inscription in Kadapa district, the earliest dated Telugu, recording a grant. Telugu waits another four centuries for Nannaya's Mahābhāratamu, so the gap between a language being fit for a public record and fit for literature is the interesting number here.
- Shravanabelagola · Kannada in the Jain country
Shravanabelagola's hills carry some of the earliest substantial Kannada among eight hundred inscriptions, and Halmidi of about 450 is the earliest dated record. Jain sites hold a disproportionate share of early Kannada because the tradition wrote on rock and recopied on a schedule, which is also why Kannada's earliest literature is Jain.
- Charyāpada tradition · The eastern languages, undivided
The Charyāpadas of about the tenth to twelfth centuries are claimed as first literature by Bengali, Assamese and Odia alike, because at that date the three had not separated. One manuscript found in a Nepalese royal library in 1907 is the origin point of three modern literatures at once.
- Kānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram · Kānchī — four languages at once
A city that carried Sanskrit learning in its ghatika, Tamil devotional poetry from the Ālvārs and Nāyanmārs, Prakrit in its Jain establishments and Pali in its Theravāda ones, simultaneously and for centuries. Indian multilingualism is the normal condition rather than the exception, and Kānchī is where it is best documented.
- Grantha script · for the sounds Tamil lacks
Tamil has no separate letters for aspirates or voiced stops, and Sanskrit needs them — so the Tamil country developed a second script out of the Pallava hand purely for writing Sanskrit, and used the two together, Tamil for the Tamil and Grantha for the Sanskrit words in the same manuscript. Its Pallava parent is the ancestor of most Southeast Asian writing, and its own descendants include Malayalam, Tigalari and the Sinhala letters, with the Maldivian script in the same family.
- Kanchipuram ghatika · The ghatika and Sanskrit as a second language
Sanskrit was almost nobody's mother tongue, which is why it needed grammars, why it had to be taught in institutions like this one, and why it worked as a link language across the subcontinent for fifteen hundred years. Its stability is a consequence of Pānini rather than of anyone speaking it at home.
- Nīlakantha Somayāji · Malayalam takes over from Sanskrit
Nīlakantha wrote in Sanskrit and his successor Jyeshthadeva wrote the Yuktibhāshā in Malayalam within a generation, which is the moment a vernacular became capable of carrying technical mathematics. The Kerala school is the clearest recorded case in India of a spoken language being promoted into a scientific medium.
- Jyeshthadeva · The Yuktibhāshā — proofs in a spoken language
A textbook giving derivations rather than results, written in Malayalam about 1530, which makes it the earliest work anywhere to do mathematics the way a modern textbook does — and it did so in the language of its students rather than in the language of the discipline.
- Kanchipuram silk · Kanchipuram — weavers who moved with their language
Devanga and Saligar weaving families settled at Kānchīpuram from the Vijayanagara period, bringing Telugu and Kannada into a Tamil city where their descendants still speak them at home. Craft migration is one of the main ways languages actually move across India: a guild relocates for patronage and takes its speech along.
- Serampore & the Mission Press · Serampore — forty languages in type
The Baptist press cut type for scripts never printed before, produced grammars and dictionaries for about forty languages and dialects, and in doing so fixed orthographies that had varied from scribe to scribe. Printing standardises a language; manuscript copying does not, and the difference shows within one generation.
- Farangi Mahal, Lucknow · Farangi Mahal — Persian and Arabic as Indian languages
The Dars-i Nizāmi taught logic and jurisprudence in Arabic within a Persian-speaking scholarly culture, at Lucknow, for two centuries. Persian was the language of administration across northern India until 1837 and of poetry for longer, which is most of why Urdu's literary vocabulary is what it is.
- Nawal Kishore Press · Nawal Kishore and the vernacular public
A press issuing Urdu, Hindi, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and English from one shop, cheaply, from 1858. Hindi and Urdu separated into two languages with two scripts and two canons during exactly these decades, and commercial printing is one of the instruments that made the separation stick, because a press must choose a script per title.
- Santiniketan · Śāntiniketan — teaching in the mother tongue
Tagore's argument was that education in an imported language produces clerks rather than thinkers, and he taught in Bengali. Every vernacular devotional movement from the Ālvārs onward had made the same argument, and so had Jyeshthadeva writing mathematics in Malayalam; Śāntiniketan is its twentieth-century institutional form.