FROM THE MEKONG TO MALKANGIRI
Ethnonyms like Bhil and others figure in the old Indian epics, where princely figures encountering the forests is a recurring trope. And genetic studies confirm what archaeologists always knew: human presence on the subcontinent is as old and stable as a grandfather clock. The word ‘Adivasi’, a conceptual bundle expressing rootedness and genetic continuity, is a recent coinage spun off from ‘aboriginal’, though. We interpret that maximally because the actual history stretches before us like an aranya of the epics, deep and mysterious. But science has of late been throwing fascinating new light on one aspect here.
India’s ‘tribes’ can be found among all our four major languages families: AustroAsiatic, Tibeto-Burman, Dravidian and IndoAryan. Bhili, spoken by our most populous Adivasi group, belongs to the last named—and is thus in a kin group with Marwari, Gujarati, Punjabi, Hindi, Sanskrit et al. Gondi, the second largest, is Dravidian. Garo, the native tongue of Meghalaya CM Conrad Sangma, is part of a continuum of Tibeto-Burman languages called GaroBoro that straddles the Northeast, sweeping in everything from Assam’s Bodo to Tripura’s Kokborok to the largest Naga language Konyak. (Despite the ethnic kinship, the 89 Naga languages are mostly mutually unintelligible; that’s why they use Nagamese, a creolised form of Assamese, as lingua franca.) But the
Northeast also supplied one part of an old jigsaw puzzle. Khasi, in Meghalaya, was clearly AustroAsiatic—unlike its neighbours—and thus part of a family that mostly stays in another part of India. This is the canonical ‘Adivasi’ group: Munda, Santhal, Kol, Ho et al, strung around the contiguous tribal districts of Jharkhand, Bengal and Odisha. There was another outlier: Nicobarese. (The Andamanese groups speak entirely unrelated languages.) Outside India, the biggest representatives of AustroAsiatic are found on the far side of Indochina—Vietnamese and Cambodia’s Khmer—and some on the Malay coast. Quite a disunited family, by geography. How did this come about?
There has never been a dearth of theories, including (inevitably!) an overland ‘Out of India’ one. But linguist Paul Sidwell, refining a model over years, has furnished us with a new, compelling one: the Munda Maritime Hypothesis. In this reading, the Urheimat—or original homeland—of protoAustroAsiatic was Vietnam’s Red River delta, from where a Chinese influx drove them out in waves of migration. Primary route: the sea, through the Strait of Malacca, with a pitstop at Nicobar, up to the Mahanadi Delta. Timeframe: circa 2000 BC, around the same time as the Vedic people up north. As with the latter, and most other ancient migrations, there was a gender skew: a small, predominantly male founder population mixing with local Ancient Ancestral South Indians. Both linguistics and genetics converge here. A separate, secondary dispersal—inland, up the tributaries of the Red River—deposited languages like Palaungic and Khmuic in Laos and Yunnan, with Khasi being the westernmost sibling. What all this does is dispel the common myth of an umbilical cord between ‘people’ and ‘language’. Imagine a Mundari Eve, with a Dravidian matriarch and a seaweary father from out east. ■
What this does is dispel the myth of an umbilical cord tying people and language