As a linguist I work on the languages of South Asia. While this may sound like being captivated by the richness and variety of our languages, what I actually do is look through our languages to find the backstory of who we are, how we came to be the way we are, and where we as a people are headed. Tucked into the sounds, words and grammars of our languages are clues that tell about our history, the rise and fall of civilisations over the millennia, and the reactions of ordinary people sitting on the sidelines of the great spectacle, just living out their lives and unwittingly holding on to precious fragments of our past.
Early on, I began to see patterns: Many of our languages were mixed, but not randomly so, in the manner of a khichdi. The words always seem to come from more recent groups who settled here, while sounds and grammar trace back much, much further, often all the way to the very first humans who came as settlers to the subcontinent. By the time I sat down to write this up, geneticists were already coming out with their own studies that pointed to a divided history, matching male DNA (Y-DNA) to known population influxes over the ages, while the female line, the mitochondrial DNA, traced all the way back to the first humans to leave Africa about 70,000 years ago. In other words, the subsequent migrants to South Asia had mostly been men. The words we used as we spoke every day were words these men had brought.
Studying the evolution of new languages in South Asia had led me straight to those moments in time when our social environment changed abruptly because of migration, and new formations, and ultimately new civilisations, emerged.
These repeating patterns began to coalesce into a model, which saw long periods of stability which were “punctuated” by the sudden arrival of new people from other lands — young men who settled down with local women and had families, with children who were “mixed”. Change, here, was not something gradual, a day-by-day “improvement”. This sort of change was something “catastrophic”, happening in an instant of time, an environmental “shock” that the existing society was unable to absorb. Social evolution in South Asia and, indeed, the world, was ultimately about ecology.
Two things stand out in this model of evolution. The first is the long, long periods when things are stable, and societies able to handle small challenges and keep functioning. And the other is the tipping point moments, when groups of men show up, abandoning their old lands, able to change the trajectory of societies that had previously been stably at peace.
Where does this stability come from, this ability to survive for hundreds of years? Despite modern words like “development” that suggest a predetermined goal and a scripted journey, what we see from the lives of older civilisations is that they crave a sort of stasis. When things are going well, they do not want major change. There is a certain inertia that keeps them going with what has worked for generations, even cushioning them against the early stages of decline. That is how, before the 12th century, the prakrit-speaking kingdoms across the north of the subcontinent could keep plodding on, down but not out. Then, in the turbulent 12th century, they all broke like dry twigs and were swept away by a new power group that came from Central Asia.
As societies running only on fumes cling to old fantasies of stability, the pressure for adaptive change keeps building, gestating invisibly. And when the moment of turn is finally upon us it takes us by surprise. This is because, at this scale of existence, the tempo of evolution is different. There is no long period of twilight when we get used to seeing a system in terminal decline. Like an alkaline battery, large systems like societies, the economy, the environment, or even languages run at full power till the very end, and then they “die” within a generation. This is what makes large systems so difficult to read.
At this very moment we are in the middle of a major global reset, and even though some of us have been expecting it, the speed at which it is happening is enough to take our breath away. We in India have been “running on fumes”, like traders taking comfort in yesterday’s balance sheets, while around us, in the outside world, the future is approaching at hypersonic speed, and power equations are shifting. We are back in a 12th century moment when, once again, India as a civilisation is stuck, hitching its wagon to a falling star, content to slide into insignificance while the rest of Asia is thinking many moves ahead in the game, planning and developing systems and technology for situations that are yet to arise.
I think we can take it for granted that the 21st century Asian ship has sailed without us. So maybe we should take a break and mull over where we went wrong, where we got derailed as a civilisation, and watch the inheritors of the new age proceed to make their mistakes and try not to repeat them, for one day they too will be gone. There is one major change we need to make if, as a civilisation, we ever hope to “fire on all cylinders” the way China, Russia and Iran do: We must abandon the old elitist mode, where science and technology are effectively kept off limits to the vast majority of our population, leaving them out of a discourse that we conduct only in English, because we need their energy in order to be whole. And we must get back to “playing the long game”, thinking in 20-year, 50-year, 100-year cycles. We need systems that preserve stability and allow long-term planning while making room for public participation and course correction. This thing we call electoral democracy has shown itself to be too buyable, too corruptible, too unaccountable to persist without scrutiny. If there is no inbuilt political way of ensuring continuity over the long term, it will leave a vacuum which Big Money, answerable only to itself, will fill. But most of all, we must try to imagine a future where we can live, without war and friction, in the calm stasis that the human spirit needs to become its best self.
This, in the end, is why in a world of ever-present tech we still need social sciences, why we try to study how the world has worked over the ages. The real value of our models is not that they tell us about our past, but that they help us to read the signs and understand when the outwardly healthy systems we live in might actually be in distress. These models serve as a compass helping us to project ahead and anticipate the future. Not that the future is ever wholly predictable: But thinking about it more rigorously, as social scientists, will keep us alert and proactive as we go.
The writer has taught Linguistics at Howard University, JNU and Ashoka University. She is the author, most recently, of Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia
