Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s12.3

c12.s12.3

The Aryan speech during the Nanda and Maurya periods would appear to have been current, in its various local or dialectal forms, as the language of the land, from the Punjab to the eastern boundary of Bihar, which thus became the true home of the Aryan speech in India, the land of the great Aryan states: and from this area, where Brahmanism was developing as the result of a synthesis of the worlds of the Aryan and the non-Aryan, the Aryan speech was spreading south, mainly along the west, through Rajputana and Malwa and Sindh; and it had already been established in Gujarat; and colonies of Aryan speakers would seem to have been formed in what is now northern Mahārāṣṭra, as far down as the Godāvarī. The belt of forest land in the east, corresponding to present day Eastern Madhya Pradesh and Chota Nagpur, harboured rather backward groups of Non-Aryan tribes, the ancestors of the present day Kol (Munda) peoples and of Dravidian tribes like the Gonds, the Oraons and the Maler, and effectively checked, though only for a time, the penetration of the Aryan language into these tracts. Although the conquest of Kalinga (corresponding to Orissa of the present day) by Aśoka in the third century B.C. opened up this area to the Aryan language, it was some time before the latter could establish itself in Eastern India—in Bengal proper, and then (by a double current from Bengal and from Kosala or Eastern U. P. through Mahākosala or Eastern Madhya Pradesh) into Orissa. The main line of North Indian Aryan linguistic expansion into South India thus from the second half of the first millennium B.C. has always been along the west—from the Midland through Rajputana and Malwa; and subsequently North Indian Muslim expansion into the Deccan carrying with it the Hindi speech followed the same route, in both pre-Mogul and Mogul times.