The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c15.71

v1.c15.71

The language of the United Provinces and of considerable districts to east, south, and west of them, is Hindī, the tongue of modern India most directly connected with ancient Sanskrit. Hindī is now spoken by a hundred million people in all the north centre of India. It is the language not only of Bihār and the United Provinces, but also of Delhi and of a wide district in Central India drained by the Chambal and Son rivers. Other tongues of similar origin are spoken in the regions around—Bengali to the east, Marāthī and Gujarātī to the south-west beyond the Ganges basin, and Punjābī to the north-west. Away to the south, beyond the limit of the Sanskrit tongues, in the Province of Madras and neighbouring areas, are languages wholly alien from Sanskrit. They differ from Hindī, Bengali, Marāthī, Gujarātī, and Punjābī much as the Turkish and Hungarian languages differ from the group of allied Indo-European tongues spoken in Western Europe. These southern Indian tongues are known as Dravidian. The most important of them are Telegu, spoken by twenty millions, and Tamil spoken by fifteen millions. The Dravidian south, however, and the Āryan north and centre agree generally in holding some form of Hinduism or Islām.