Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (42 page)

Being a Hindu god, Krishna does go on to ground this exposition of the heroic code within a theology of reincarnation and a theory of knowledge that reduces the world of action to a shadow-play of appearances; but the basic ethic of nobility expressed through courage and military prowess is clear.

It is usually presumed that it was this attitude to life, together with the dominating technologies of warhorses, wheeled vehicles and metal weapons, which spread Aryan lordship and language across northern India, and then kept the various kingdoms in an almost constant roil of mutual warfare over this period. (This model of language spread is, after all, well attested in many parts of the world in the historical period, as when the Normans brought Norman French to England, or the
conquistadores
brought Spanish to Central and South America.)

But besides the battles recounted in Sanskrit epics there is very little evidence, from archaeology, inscriptions or indeed from indigenous tradition, that the language was spread with fire and sword. Particularly in India, there is an ingrained belief that Hinduism and Sanskrit are not the result of alien invasions, but developed rather wholly within the subcontinent. There has even been a recent attempt to give this story a full quasi-mythological backing, developing the theory that, if there are linguistic and genetic links with the rest of the Indo-European language family, this is due to the spread of the Aryans round Europe before their return to their true home of India.
²³

Whatever the truth of the Aryans’ prehistoric wanderings, there is a lot that shows that horses were important to them from the beginning. In the Hittite libraries of central Anatolia (2500 miles to the west of the Indus) we find a manual on horsemanship and chariotry, written by Kikkuli the Mitannian in the mid-second millennium BC: he gives his profession as
assussanni-
, which can be equated with the Vedic Sanskrit
aśvasani
‘gaining or procuring horses’, and his text is full of loan words which are evidently Indo-Aryan: courses can be
aikawartanna, terawartanna, panzawartanna, sattawartanna, nawartanna
, ‘1-, 3-, 5-, 7- or 9-turns’, which is just Sanskrit
eka-, tri-, pañca-, sapta-
and
nava-vartana.
Most Mitannians spoke a completely unrelated language, Hurrian, but in another text written in this language at much the same time (from the city of Nuzi—Yorgan Tepe—in northern Iraq) horse colours are given in something close to Sanskrit:
babru (babhru
), ‘chestnut’,
parita (palita
), ‘grey’,
pinkara (pingala
), ‘roan’.

Here the Aryan elite culture of the horseman had been superimposed on a populace that spoke another language. The evidence stems from long before and far away; but the situation of the early days of Aryan language in India was probably very similar. This can be seen even within the structure of Sanskrit itself.

Sanskrit and its related Indo-Aryan languages are different from all their relatives to the north and west, in Iran, Russia and Europe, in possessing an extra series of consonants, known to Sanskrit grammarians as the
mūrdhanya
(’in the head’) sounds, or to Westerners as the retroflex stops, after the position of the tongue:
,
,
h,
h
and
with the tongue curled backward against the roof of the mouth, as against
t, d, th, dh
and
n
, where the tongue touches the back of the front teeth. So
pa
ati
, ‘splits’, is a different word from
patati
, ’falls’, and
ma
a
, ‘foam, cream’, from
manda
, ‘dull’. These sounds are also characteristic of the Dravidian languages now spoken to the south of the Aryan languages in India, as well as other neighbours, such as the Munda languages dotted around the north-east of India. Whereas no other Indo-European language has them (making them unlikely as a feature of whatever language they all originate from), they are so systematic in Dravidian that they are probably as old as the family. It would appear, then, that they have established themselves in Sanskrit and Aryan as a ‘substrate’, a residual feature of the languages that the earliest adopters of Sanskrit were speaking, and could not lose when they learned the new language.

There is also some cultural evidence in the Rig Veda which suggests how the invading Aryans felt they differed from the peoples, the
dāsa
and
dasyu,
^*
their language came to dominate, for they saw them as having darker skins, ‘of black origin’,
k
ayonī
.
²⁴
This fits with the Sanskrit word used traditionally for the four-fold division into social castes, Brahman~Kshatriya~Vaiśya~Śudra, namely
va
a
, ‘colour’. The
dasyu
are represented in the epic
Mahabharata
by the two younger sons of Pandu (’the Pale’), Nakula and Sahadeva, born to his second wife Madri, who is said to be black eyed and dusky complexioned. Throughout the epic, they act as faithful, but unimaginative, supporters of their apparently nobler Aryan elder half-brothers, Yuddhishthira (’Firm in Fight’), Bhīma (’terrible’) and Arjuna (’Resplendent’).