Dr. Ved Pratap Vaidik 2nd Memorial Lecture on "Discovery of Language: Three Chapters of Indian Civilization," delivered by Prof. Ganesh N. Devy.

[This is the full transcript of the lecture delivered by G.N. Devy at India International Centre on 29.12.2025]

"If we protect our languages, the world can say these were different people. They knew how to defeat hegemony by using multilingualism."

—G.N. Devy

Memory, as we understand it, is at the foundation of language. The kind of complex language that humans speak, with the present tense, the past tense, and the future tense structure, assumes that the world is interpreted by placing the world, the space, in the framework of a time imagined. I just do not know if time exists or not. But language has brought it into existence. I do not know how other animals look at time. But we humans have an overwhelming sense of time. And that has become possible because of the kind of linguistic structures that we use. I am not speaking about the natural memory, which all animals have. And this arrogant animal that calls itself homo sapiens (intelligent animal), also has that natural memory. But there is something more that we carry with us. Language becomes very crucial for that.

There is one plea that I want to place before you. I just do not know if the phenomenal world exists as it is, as I imagine it. Immanuel Kant had serious philosophical problems about the world around us. And I have even a greater doubt, not just if the phenomenal world, the world of phenomena, the universe, or cosmos; if it is there, or whether it is my imagination, or my bhranti or bhram, but more than that, is also the doubt about the nature of the human consciousness.

It is not just phenomenology or psychology or many other disciplines or philosophies that tell us that who we are, who each one of us is, is a kind of a net of ideas, illusions, impressions that one constructs. And it changes every moment, possibly. While there is uncertainty about if the consciousness is there or not- 'Chit hai ya nahi, main nahi jaanata. Vishwa hai ya nahi, ye bhi main nahi jaanata.' But one thing I understand, and I am convinced of that, there is only one bridge connecting the consciousness with the phenomenal world, and that is language. Humans interpret the entire world through language. And without that, there is no interpretation possible, no cohesive interpretation possible. So, I speak of that language.

Structural linguists have a different idea of language. Particularly after intergenerational memory started becoming heavy in the western world, and this is decolonization again; in the western world, the scholars there, Italian, Spanish and French, they were trying to figure out if it would be possible to bring together all the different taxonomies, different classificatory systems related to zoology, botany, sociology, physics, etc. And someone like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz finally came up with a solution by creating a higher order of organization, higher order of taxonomy, a taxonomy of all taxonomies. At that stage, something very profound change occurred in human attitude to language. And that change was, like the other species, like plants and birds and things alive, scholars started constructing language history in terms of language family. That a certain language had to be the daughter of some other language.

If I go back to Panini, I don't have that view of language. If I go to Anandvardhana or Riti Siddhant, I do not have that view of language as a family. Language is considered as a cultural product, a social system, not a biological system, not a life system, but a system of science, system of significance, system of abhidha, system of vani, whatever way. Given this idea that languages have families as fish or trees or mosquitoes or insects or humans; when at the end of the 18th century, Sir William Jones discovers that there is a similarity between Latin, Persian, Greek and Sanskrit, his mind immediately goes to deciding as to which family of languages this is. He could have possibly thought of language neighborhood.

Gnaneshwar in Marathi, described Marathi as a 'Iye Marathi Chiye Nagari,' a sociology of language, not a family of language, a society, a community of language. Given this attitude to language history which emerged with Sir William Jones and his contribution is immense. He carried the philosophical bias of his time in his work and that's not his fault. He was a young man when he was proposing this hypothesis that there is some ancient relationship between Latin, Greek, Iranian, Persian and Sanskrit. His contribution is immense.

It opened up a new vista before the world. What kind of world was this? This was the western world and some of the historians have been saying that at the time the colonial powers encountered the rest of the world. Having gone through this severe clash between Catholicism and Protestantism, clash between natural order of things, the order of beings, nature's wisdom as against rationality, the western world felt, also I should add that with Locke's theory that the responsibility for the society is on every individual. That is when one individual looks at the limits of freedom and the freedom possible as against other individuals, there can be some kind of economic stability. Rather than giving the responsibility to God Almighty or nature or whichever power it is, to give it to humans was a new thing. And in that world, where spirituality was being set aside or at least rituals related to spirituality were being set aside. Colonial powers, it seems, imagined that the world that they were conquering was spiritually surfeit, resplendent. That vision of the rest of the world, of Africa and Asia was internalized by Indians and Africans. And suddenly after William Jones's thesis of Sanskrit being related to Latin and Greek, Indians who had forgotten Sanskrit for about 800 or 900 years, I mean there were few scholars here and there, but as mass, as society, Sanskrit was not in circulation. I mean that's why the other languages like Marathi, Oriya, Bengali, Bangla, Hindi, they started surfacing. But we return to that, imagining that all that was there in Sanskrit world of knowledge was spiritually powerful, sacred. A false overestimation of the ancient literature was a collective result of what was happening in Europe, what happened to this theory and then after that, all of us got convinced that we are a language family. Many of us felt that of which Sanskrit alone is the grandmother or mother or the grandest mother. For quite some time, during several decades of the 19th century, many Indian languages' scholars in Indian languages actually claimed that everything in India that is linguistics has come from single source. Until somebody like Alice Davison (American linguist) had to show that Dravidian language family is different. It's not this family, it's another word. But it was considered, it came to be considered as secondary, not primary.

The fact of history is that humans were inhabiting this part of the earth for about 65,000 years. After out of Africa, humans migrated to what we call South Asia or Asia or whichever name you call this part of the world. And these had been able to move out of Africa because they had invented language, their master language as a weapon for self-defence. Because this was a species like other animal species. And someone like Prof. Ravi Korisettar (Archaeologist) argues that it must have taken at least 20 lakh years for humans to train what was not meant for language to produce language. What was not meant for language? Your teeth were not meant for language, your lips were not meant for language, your throat, nose, nothing is meant for language. It's not like people are born with languages inside the brain. This is a social acquisition which was developed slowly, gradually by Homo sapiens. And once it was fully developed, they decided that this could be weaponized for self-defence. And occasionally for attacks on other species, they could start moving out of their area of habitation. Anybody who has read Tony Joseph's "Early Indians," will get a complete story on this.

So, if there were people who had come, small numbers, but they came to this part and they settled. Initially as hunter-gatherers, then as the food supply becomes less, they become pastoralists. In order to be capable pastoralists, they start becoming nomads because all of that is related to availability of food for your survival. So, the hunter-gatherers, then pastoralists, nomads, and finally agrarians. That phase in our history belongs to roughly 7000 years before our time.

Please mark my words. Go to any part of India and collect the words, terms related to agricultural implements or methods of agriculture, or quality and texture of the earth, and you will find that none of those terms have come either from Sanskrit or from Persian or from English. That is to say, there is huge amount of evidence in our languages, whichever they are, that agrarian communities in India were using language, is obvious, but they had their own languages. Now, how many of them were there? The answer is in anthropology. Any anthropologist will tell us that when such nomadic communities can form a settlement, a group of 900 to 1000 is enough for sustaining the group, defending it, gathering food, doing labour distribution and division of labour. All over India, when I say all over, it's not like today's crowded India, but the population was much less. But there were villages, I will call them villages or call them camps, they were habitations. And considering the large time, between the arrival of Sanskrit and the settlement of these places, it is not unnatural that these were hundreds of small languages. Do we know their names? We don't know them. But someday it may become possible to find out the language personalities of those local languages when more fieldwork is carried out by our scholars.

I said Sanskrit arrived. And there is huge debate about did it go from here to outside India or did it come from outside. Time has come when that debate should be closed because the last word in that appeared in the Nature magazine in the month of February this year, where a group of scientists actually doing genetic testing of the Eurasian state finally figured out the root of movement and so on. And of course, this debate is connected with the idea of horse. Was horse here or some kind of horse was here? Did it come from outside? Or there is some kind of image found in the civilization? Did they have horses? What about Mahabharata? What about Ramayana's Ashwamedha? Because Ramayana is 5000 years old, 10,000 years old, 50,000 years old, all scientifically. By the time the Sanskrit language enters what is today's Afghanistan or today's Pakistan or today's Punjab, maybe up to Yamuna, I mean I'll include even Delhi in that. India had already experimented in a very major way with creating an urban civilization. That experiment failed is the Indus Valley Civilization. We do not have very clear idea as to why it failed. But archaeologists and others have been working on that. Someday we will know why the Indus Valley Civilization failed. Whether it was due to climate or due to… there was one simplistic idea that somebody attacked it from outside. It doesn't appear to be a very good idea to solve that mystery. The second debate related to this whole phenomenon is did not the Indus people have a script? The answer to that is: A) It is still not deciphered fully; B) It may not become possible to decipher it for a foreseeable time of a century or two centuries. And the third reason is when a script enters a society, whether that society is rich or poor, irrespective of that, that script continues to circulate in that society. The first writing in India that we know belongs to Ashoka's period, the inscriptions. My centuries may be wrong, but the Indus Valley Civilization comes to an end around the year 1900 B.C. That's roughly 4000 years before our time. The first time, writing appears in India is 2300 years before our time. 1600 years gap is not a small time, that script never resurfaces. Let's close that debate.

What we need to debate is something very big. And that's what we should be doing and that is when Sanskrit was there in India, were there other languages in existence? Were they major languages? The answer to that, without any iota of doubt, is that there were other languages existed also. Tamil or Proto-Dravidian or whatever you call it. And there is an ancestor of Assamese that we still have not identified, but somebody like Maheshwar spoke about, while Suniti Kumar Chatterjee (Indian linguist and educationist) brushed aside that idea. There were Dravidic languages, there were the Eastern languages and it is in the North-East and there were many Prakrits. Now you will ask me, did not the Prakrits come out of Sanskrit? My answer to that is this recent book of Andrew Ollett (Philologist and cultural historian of South Asia) titled, 'Language of the Snakes: Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India,' which won the Infosys award, please read that book. Prakrits have predated Sanskrit in India. And there is a wonderful scholar in Bhandarkar Institute called Prof. Shrikant S. Bahulkar (Professor of Sanskrit) who has been working on the Atharva Veda's primary Prakrit basis and how Sanskrit got overlaid on that. It's not so with the Rig Veda. I am not trying to minimize the importance of Sanskrit. It was a wonderful language, absolutely fascinating. It produced huge amount of literature. But why did the prestige of Sanskrit go up in India? I am not saying why it should have gone. That's not the case. I feel very happy. Because it is my language, just as it is your language. It's everybody's language. All languages in India are everybody's languages. Why should a person have only one language? Every language is mine, yours, everybody's.

I have often been thinking as to why the Rig Veda achieved such huge esteem. Because there are no formal institutions for spreading it, like schools and universities. Sri Aurobindo, whom I admire, whose scholarship I admire, has answered that in a book called 'The Secrets of the Veda.' In that book, Sri Aurobindo writes that 1400 B.C. is the assumed date of the Rig Veda composition. He says that it came down up to the 7th century. That is, on one side it is the date of Brahadaranyaka Upanishad. On the other side, in disciplinary sense, it is Yaska's time when Nighantu is being produced. How to pronounce? What is the meaning of each and every term? Aurobindo says that by the time Yaska was busy on the Rig Veda corpus, practically everybody had forgotten the symbolic meaning of what those mantras meant. But they were remembered, orally handed down. And the secret of that is again the enormously inventive, ingenious mnemonics that were woven into the composition of the Rig Veda. I mean, all the mantras, the suktas, the mandalas. If there are more lines in a sukta, that comes at the top. One line less, that comes next, and so on and 70-72 meters making these graspable by memory if one received training of 8 or 10 or 12 years. So, the corpus itself makes memorization possible and that possible memorization had allowed the handling down of the Vedic verses up to the 7th century, that is the argument of Sri Aurobindo. This memorable poetry is the creation of Sanskrit which the Tamil or other Prakrits till that time had not attained. The great range of memory tricks was what made Rigveda live through the ages and keep inspiring people. But after the 7th or 6th century prior to Christ, that's about 2600 years before our time, the prestige attached to remembering the Rig Veda had gone up, particularly because nobody understood what is being remembered. It is like in a village, some village school teacher speaks English and every villager says this man knows, there is that Oliver Goldsmith's village school master poem, he knows everything. This actually came handy as an instrument, as a weapon of social construction or social engineering. Those who had access to this memory became uppermost. Those who provided security to these people, they came next. The others in the supply line came, yet others, they were nowhere.

So, the Varna system is based on this ability to remember the Vedic. And when our Darshanas came up in subsequent centuries, in the 4th, 3rd, 2nd century B.C.E, they made this a test for validity. How is your argument logical? It is logical because the Vedas have said that. While the names of the Rishis for all those what we call books are there, they came to be seen as apaurushiye because a special power was attached to them. I respect the Vedas and my attempt is not to minimize their importance. It is our heritage and I feel very proud of that heritage.

Sanskrit became a language of esteem and therefore a kind of hegemony of Sanskrit spread all over India. To give a simple explanation for that, who do you call well-cultured? A susanskrit person. A susanskrit is the one who has got access to Sanskrit. Culture, you are using the term Sanskriti for that. What about the Prakrits at that time? What about Prakriti? That's for the villages. That's nature, beautiful nature.

All through the 1st millennium, most of the literary works that were produced were either bilingual, multilingual or in Prakrits. The Mahabharata for instance, when I was telling somebody, the first recitation of the Mahabharata is recorded in the first book of the Mahabharata where the story is told by a person visiting this ashram and he says, I know only so much but Shuka knows a little more and somebody else also knows a little more. Sanjay belongs to one kind of community. Shuka, belongs to another kind of community. This man who was a forest traveller, wanderer belongs to what we call today Adivasis and so on. They had brought different language traditions into Mahabharata. Mahabharata remained open all through with access to people who did not understand Sanskrit and that's what explains the immense popularity of the Mahabharata. Everybody knows stories from the Mahabharata because Mahabharata allowed languages to flow into that corpus. If you go to Brhatkatha or Kathasaritsagar, the story once again takes you to languages. I mean I don't have that time to tell the entire story of how Shiva and Parvati had the first recitation, Parvati's curse somebody, that person, pair of them remember this whole story later on. But it is said in that memory of the Brhatkatha that the first time it was written, was written with the blood of an animal while making a bone the pen. And this is not what the Vedic scholars would have done.

In many of the plays of the time, all through the thousand years, I mean Kalidasa used many languages in his plays. So many stories, so many epics, so many poems, Prakrit comes there. Prakrit survived and not one Prakrit, several Prakrits. By some mistake the government has come to the conclusion that Prakrit is a single language in recognizing it as a classical language. There are many Prakrits. There is Prakrit on the side of what we call Bengal today, there is Prakrit on the side of what we call Gujarat today (it is a Middle East kind of). So, several Prakrits are there. Prakrit survived, Dravidic languages survived, Tamil started growing. So, Sanskrit was growing. Prakrit were also growing and Tamil or Tamil's ancestor language was also growing. This was India and this is essential India. I am trying to say that while a language may attain esteem and try to spread this idea of the society, the Indian languages have always remained there and they have continued to thrive and never felt subjugated.

In that sense, I can mention perhaps the name of this Italian person who was imprisoned in 1926, Antoni Gramsci, who uses the term 'Hegemony.' Hegemony is, there is an idea, nobody has to propagate it, but people give a consent to accept that idea and then they become slaves of that idea. That is hegemony. It is not domination by sword but it is acceptance of an idea which is considered a superior idea. Sanskrit became the language of hegemony but other languages continued to thrive.

I now quickly come to the next one. Around the 9th century, somebody in the Sanskrit tradition, an extremely gifted scholar, Anandavardhana, who wrote Dhanyaloka, realized that the meaning and the words in Sanskrit are falling apart. That there is a need to bring them together and therefore he created this concept of Dhanyaloka where he speaks of Vaikhari, Abhidha, Vani etc. The timing of Anandavardhana's attempt to put the Sanskrit together again and to make it a language of circulation was not quite the right time because it was the 9th century when the Persian languages started touching India. Please remember that the Persian did not come to India only through aggression. I will add, the Persian did not come to India mainly through aggression.

All through the history of Persian in India, forget about the 9th century but at least from the 13th century when Amir Khusrou shows up in our history. From that date till, let me put a date there, Raja Ram Mohan Roy wrote his first book in the Persian language. It was a book which spoke about many religious faiths and Raja Ram Mohan Ray said that they are all equal, that God in Islam or Christianity or Hinduism is the same divine, one God. He was not talking of only one God; he was talking of the unity of divinities in the sense of parity of divinities. He wrote it in Persian and that's the end of the 18th century. So, from the 13th century to 18th century, for 6 or 7 centuries, Persian dominated the Indian imagination. But Persian brought with it an idea of love, the kind of idea of love which the Sanskrit had not localized. And that idea of love also triggered a new resistance to the hegemony of Persian as well. This time the resistance was to Sanskrit as well as Persian. Marathi poet Eknath said that if Sanskrit is made by Gods, is Marathi made by saints? That is, he was not against Sanskrit, he was defending Marathi. And if you look at what happened in the medieval times, we call medieval I think that nomenclature is not correct. I believe that Indian modernity begins with the Bhakti period and not with the arrival of the British. Because Bhakti period started thinking of a social inclusion, a dissolution of the Varna system and a kind of empathy for fellow human beings. Whether it is Tukaram or Kabir, whether Meera or Tyagaraj, whether it is Chaitanya or Shankaradev or Basavesvara or Akka Mahadevi, hundreds of these poets, they came from all castes. They did not come only from ashrams or from among the Brahmins. Some of them were Brahmins. Namdev was a Brahmin; he was thrown out of his community. But they came from all castes and they were responding to a new hegemony of Persian by accepting, not by resisting it. They were responding to this legacy of Sanskrit by trying to reject it. And this was a strange picture. We still have not fully analysed or understood that. Partly because when William Jones in the famous speech in Asiatic society said, my job is to go back in the past as far as possible, but I stopped at the 11th century. So, we thought that after the 11th century everything in India that happened was declined; that these were dark areas but that's not historically accurate attitude. Because many things were happening during these centuries. Perhaps the most civilized existence India ever experienced was in those centuries.

I come to the question of English. When Britishers came to India, neither the Gujaratis spoke English nor the East India Company officers spoke Gujarati; that was at the beginning of the 17th century. By the time we come to the 19th century, people in Bengal have been asking for the same Rajaram Mohan Roy. In 1804, he published the Persian book; in 1805, Henry Derezio and others, Michael Madhusundar asking for English. And we plunged for English. We thought that is bringing a new world, a modernity kind of world.

It is not that idea of modernity that gave place to English in India. It is not the British domination alone that gave place to English in India. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that the magic of the oral order that the Rig Veda had invented, which is a linguistic technology of poetry, which gave Sanskrit its esteem. Persian came, neither with, I am not thinking of swords and kings and that's a different matter. Persian came with the use of paper, which is writing technology and that created esteem for Persian. There were merchants of paper in Delhi in the 11th and 12th century who became extremely prosperous. English came with printing. These are all language related technologies and that's what the other languages did not have. English still continues to haunt us and we often agitate against it with good justification.

But there is something else that happened in between and that is when India was about to become independent, the leaders at that time had been thinking what kind of India should there be and they imagined India to be a multi-lingual place. Whether it was 1927 resolution in the Congress or the Constituent Assembly debates and the 8th schedule was brought in, which was a very unique feature for a country trying to be a nation after partly at least getting inspired by the examples of 19th century struggles of Italy and Germany who had decided to become mono-lingual nations. Indian nationalism was a deviation, a different variety from Italian and German nationalisms of 19th century and we know that in the 20th century the same Germany and Italy developed fascism. Monolingualism and fascism seemed to be close keens. India decided not to be a fascist nation, not just to be a multi-lingual nation. Not just that but Indian states were made linguistic states and that was not enough. In the census of India in 1961, a list of all mother tongues was presented. It had 1652 names of mother tongues. These 1652 mother tongues are, in my opinion, if one were really went to that wrong model of family of languages, straight come from the languages that were developed prior to the Indus Valley by agrarian communities in this country.

Language hegemony has not terrified India. Every hegemony has given greater strength to Indian languages. Prakrits have developed, desi bhashas have developed and despite English, our writers in Hindi, in Gujarati, in Punjabi, in Urdu, in Marathi produced literature of world standard. English did not quieten them. India could fight hegemonies of all kinds because of India's multilingualism, because of the desi bhashas, because people related to ground were producing new words and they kept these languages in circulation.

I will now conclude what I have to say. I am sure many of you expect me to speak on, comment on whether Hindi is spreading its hegemony and I don't think that question needs to be considered so long as the constitution of India is alive. I love Hindi language. In fact, in India, most of us fall in love if there are Hindi songs, film songs, not otherwise. Today the question is different. The question is of a new language culture and that is the language culture which is compacting human memory, the artificial memory. That language is surfacing from the virtual world and all of us are engaged in that virtual world. Each one of us who is using a mobile is actually feeding into the power of the metaverse. I said at the beginning I don't know if the universe exists or my consciousness exists.

There is an attempt to create a parallel universe that is called metaverse. If you go to a library, you got set of books and then there is a description of those books that is called metadata of those books. This metaverse is a new description of our universe where our shadows, our biometric impressions, our sounds, our photographs, all can be put together in the virtual world and they get a circulation in that universe. There are people who actually are trying to pay, to remain in the metaverse after they physically die in this universe. So, the metaverse is acquiring a greater sense, greater significance. The universe is losing its ground. If we do not have our digital numbers, we no longer are citizens. While we are here with legs and arms and chest and back and everything. That is a new hegemony.

It is not related to a single language or a single nation or a single continent. It is a global challenge for humans. If that metaverse succeeds, possibly we might become either Homo Deus, that is a god of gods, or we might become partly like machines, mix with the machines, that is cyborgs. Neither cyborg nor Homo Deus will have language that humans understand or languages that humans have used. And they won't have languages that build communities. Our communities are being broken. Don't think politicians are breaking them and they cannot do much. They can neither make a language nor destroy a language. No king has ever made a language or destroyed a language. It is people who make the languages.

I think we are surrendering to a new hegemony and at this time for us it will be good to remember that we have fought all hegemonies of languages by keeping our multilingualism alive. If today, we decide that we devote ourselves to Indian languages and their lives, we might be able to fight somehow the new metaverse which is enslaving our minds. We are already 75% there, but we can still rescue ourselves.

Finally, how many Indian languages need to be protected? In the last census, the list had 1369 mother tongues. Where are they? Are they in schools, colleges, universities, libraries? No madam, no sir. Are they in our thoughts? Are they in our cities? Are they on our signboards? No. Are they in our telephone languages? No. We have a huge world at hand to preserve the languages which we had history and let me quickly say, there is a language called Nihari in Maharashtra. It doesn't belong to any language family. It is spoken in the Buldhana district. It is at least 22 to 20,000 years old. But the Nihari will get wiped out in no time because an industrial part is coming there.

In Andaman, which is now given to some industrial house for developing, the last speaker of Bo language, Anvita Abbi (Indian linguist and scholar) will tell you, was speaking a language which had been around for 60,000 years. There would be many, many such languages. In India, we decided to call only 11 languages as classical languages. We have thought of calling 22 languages as scheduled languages. We thought our census accepts 121 languages as recognized by census and 1369 are claimed by people as mother tongues. Actually, it is a Chaturvarna system. We will have to fight against it. Let every Indian language, whether it is spoken by one person or one crore or ten crores, be the language of legacy and heritage for us. Let each of these be recognized as classical language, as scheduled language. Let the census have good sense not to conceal the language data. Census has been concealing language data in a very big way for several decades now. And now that some kind of census is happening, we must raise our voice and tell the census that it is accountable. It must give an account of our languages of India. It is our legacy. If we protect our languages, the world can say these were different people. They knew how to defeat hegemony by using multilingualism.

Thank you so much!

Ganesh N. Devy is a retired professor, thinker, cultural activist and an institution builder best known for the People’s Linguistic Survey of India and the Adivasi Academy created by him.

The transcript is prepared by Rahul Khandelwal who is a PhD Research Scholar in the Department of History and Culture at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Note: Pictures used in this blog are taken from the Facebook account of Dr. Aparna Vaidik.