Burying the past with language


removes it from the usual patterns of evolution, as would deliberate gene splicing. The Dravidian languages of southern India deliberately remove Sanskrit influence while ignoring similar influences from English, which would certainly be easier to locate and remove because of their obvious foreignness. Local politics and petty jealousies weigh heavily. ‘Aryanization’ carries with it the connotation of ‘civilization’, at least in Thai, notwithstanding the fact that the same people now called ‘Dravidians’ have ancestors who created one of the world’s greatest early civilizations in the Indus River valley. They undoubtedly left much DNA in the current bloodlines of both northern and southern India. Unfortunately for them, this is the darker-skinned lower-caste bloodline that was ripe for Islam to enhance their status. It’s no accident that that same Indus River is now in Muslim Pakistan, though linguistic traces with their forbears are long gone. The lingua franca of Pakistan, Urdu, in fact is mutually intelligible with Hindi, the closest thing India has to a national language, and the local language of no one in Pakistan. Once again, efforts are continuous to separate the two for political reasons. The same has not yet happened, but could, with India’s other major language, Bengali, also known as Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh.

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