LAUSR

There is an immanent tension in the word ‘ancestry’. Gaining significance at crucial historico-political junctures, it disengages the present from the past, pushing us into a hungry quest for unearned heirlooms, achievements and conquests, with the false hope that it will absolve us from our current battered minds and identities. When ‘ancestry’ takes center stage in academic discourse, it is, therefore, best to tread carefully and to avoid the overshadowing of the present by the past. Scientific discourse – whether it be in the domain of linguistics or genetics – thus needs to focus on enriching the present by, first, illuminating the multitudinous, intricate and invisible web of relations that define us and our present and, second, by acknowledging the possible drawbacks of scientific methods and constructs, and the near-impossibility of exact and precise results in any domain of knowledge. Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi’s paper, which aims to ‘lend a linguistic perspective on the issue of human diversity and ancestry in India’ fairs well on both counts. Using the lens of languages, Kulkarni-Joshi presents the current Indian subcontinent as a land whose linguistic identity (or identities) has been shaped and is continuously being shaped by its multitude and their multiple languages. The present also reflects the past. Several millennia ago, people’s languages, irrespective of their origins, were not isolates, but mingled and assimilated with each other, engendering new and interesting lexical and structural overlaps in their lexicons and grammars. Evidence for contact between old Dravidian and Old Indo-Aryan/OIA languages abounds in shared vocabulary items found in the ancient Rg Veda verses, covering different cultural, economic and ecological aspects of life (Kuiper 1967, 1991). There is also evidence of phonetic and syntactic assimilation, such as the case of the retroflex sounds and quotative constructions that apparently made their way into the earliest Vedic texts from old Dravidian. But history is not just about facts, but also the historian’s take on those facts. So it is with linguistic facts and language histories. Here too, there are multiple theoretical and explanatory narratives or inferences. Contradicting the contact and diglossic narratives about OIA and old Dravidian, Hock (1996) and Hall (1997) build their explanations away from contact situations, and directly into grammar-internal processes. Hall, for instance, suggests grammar-internal repair strategies to avoid impossible phonemic inventories as possible reasons for the rise to retroflex sounds in any language, even when there is no positive evidence of such sounds in the speaker’s linguistic environment. The same can be said of quotative constructions, which are not always results of borrowing from neighboring languages; a recent illustration being the rise of the new quotative marker ‘like’ in some current, non-standard varieties of English. The ‘one fact/multiple explanations’ narrative gains further ground when Kulkarni-Joshi presents her case for the origins of the Indo-Aryan people and their languages. Three major pieces of evidence are adduced in favor of the ‘migration into India’ story: (i) the mention of Rg Vedic gods, concepts and words in Mittani (Egyptian) texts, dating back to 1400 BC, (ii) the economical process that reduces three vowels e, a and o in Greek and Latin to a single vowel a in Vedic Sanskrit and (iii) the unidirectional process of change from velars k, g to palatals c, j. All three facts, taken together with many others, strongly suggest that the lineage of people speaking the IA languages lies somewhere outside India. Once again, and unsurprisingly, there is no unanimity on this point. Hock (1993) points to the possibility that some of these said OIA-like features in the Mittani language may have come from contact with non-Indo European Hurrian languages. Misra (1992) likewise questions