The Pre-Transportation and Exploration Phase (up to 1813)

Waves and Waves; Layers and Layers

The Indian subcontinent, comprising what are now called India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, has absorbed several innovations in the past.

EARLY SETTLERS

The Aryans came and settled down in the subcontinent. Sometime in the remote past (probably during the second half of the second millennium BC), the Aryans must have entered India. They were part of a group that must have lived in a compact area (the exact location of which is still a riddle), speaking Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, Greek, French, German: a group called Indo-European, Indo-Aryan or Indo-Germanic languages. The Aryans emigrated to India and brought with them their language, Sanskrit or Samskrity (which meant ‘carefully made or perfected’)—a literary language known as the ‘high-speech’. Later, the Prakrits (i.e. the vernaculars or the dialects) developed, and the most important one, Pali, became the language of Buddhist and Jain thought and literature. Sanskrit became a representation of the Vedic civilization and the Prakrits developed into several languages of the common people—Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, and so on. They were written in the Devanagari script. Sanskrit became the language of the learned class.

Even before the Aryans came to the subcontinent, there was a glorious civilization that belonged to a highly developed community flourishing in the Indus Valley. The beginnings of this civilization are still a riddle—some trace it to a Sumerian origin and some to a non-Aryan, pre-Aryan or perhaps Dravidian origin.