A Union government panel has sought to portray India’s many languages as "one family" bound together by Sanskrit, rejecting long-established linguistic classifications as colonial prejudice and drawing sharp criticism from leading linguists.
The Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti, established by the education ministry in 2021 and chaired by the head of an RSS affiliate whose academic credentials remain unclear, does not explicitly say that Sanskrit is the root of all Indian languages.
But it uses expressions like "Bharatiyata" and "spiritual grammar" to identify a commonality among them, which it ties to Sanskrit texts from the Vedas to the Mahabharata. It also portrays Tamil as virtually underpinned by Sanskrit, borrowing its grammar from the north Indian language.
For decades, linguists have classified Indian languages into four major families: Indo-Aryan (such as Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati), Dravidian (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu), Austro-Asiatic (such as Mundari, Santali), and Tibeto-Burman (such as Bodo, Garo, Meitei and Mizo). This classification is based on differences in structure, grammar, vocabulary and speech sounds.
Some scholars, though, consider the Tai-Kadai languages of Arunachal Pradesh and the Great Andamanese languages as distinct groups.
The Samiti has attributed these classifications to what it describes as a colonial perspective, arguing that Indian languages are "bound by something far deeper than grammar — they are bound by Bharatiyata (Indianness)".
Ancient Sanskrit texts — from the Vedic hymns to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — offer a "common cultural grammar" that was absorbed across regions, "from Kupwara to Kanyakumari, Kutch to Kamakhya", the panel has said in a two-volume publication, Bharatiya Bhasha Pariwar.
In an introductory message titled "About Bharatiya Bhasha", Samiti chairman Chamu Krishna Shastry writes: "There are many Indian languages, but their family is one which is called Bharatiya Bhasha Pariwar."
The Vedas and the Upanishads were not regional works but "civilisational texts" that echoed a shared "spiritual grammar" which influenced languages across the subcontinent, says the first volume, subtitled A New Framework in Linguistics.
According to the publication, many scholars believe that the Tolkappiyam, a foundational Tamil grammar text, was modelled on the Sanskrit grammatical tradition of the Aindra school.
"The Tolkappiyam mentions traditions and practices originating from the Aryans. The narrative that credits the birth of the Tamil language to the Vedic rishi Agastya is worth noting," it says.
According to legend, as mentioned in the publication, Agastya presided over the first two Sangams (conventions of Tamil poets and scholars), authored the first Tamil grammar book Agattiyam, and continues to be revered in temples and households across Tamil Nadu.
Linguists have questioned the panel’s projection of Sanskrit as the cornerstone all Indian languages, saying the study appears to mix up influence with linguistic genesis.
"Nobody denies the influence of Sanskrit on other languages. Sanskrit itself has been influenced by other languages. But to imply that Sanskrit is the origin of all (Indian) languages is a myth," said Anvita Abbi, a member of Unesco’s expert committee on the World Atlas of Languages and a former professor of linguistics at JNU.
Abbi and other scholars said archaeological, historical and genetic evidence showed that India had experienced multiple waves of migration over thousands of years, including movements from the Eurasian steppes that introduced Indo-Aryan languages into the subcontinent.
Those populations interacted with local Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic-speaking communities, leading to intermarriage, cultural exchange and the borrowing of linguistic features.
"Each language family has borrowed features from neighbouring families, resulting in convergence," Abbi said. "But convergence cannot be cited to argue that all Indian languages belong to a single family."
Gyaneshwer Choubey, a genetic researcher who had contributed to the publication, told The Telegraph he had acknowledged the distinct identity of Sino-Tibetan language speakers of India.
"This family, the second largest in the world after Indo-European, originated in China and spread from the Yellow River into Burma and the great Himalayan region," says the publication's section on "Anthropological Evidence Against the Aryan Invasion Theory".
Choubey told this newspaper: "We see a clear association between the genes and the speakers of Sino-Tibetan, including Tibeto-Burman languages. On the basis of genetic study, the Sino-Tibetan language family can be categorised as a distinct group."
The Samiti has claimed that Indian languages share a common sentence structure: the subject-object-verb order.
A linguist familiar with the research, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said such structural similarities were not unique to India and reflected broader linguistic universals.
"Despite certain universal similarities, languages retain distinct identities because of differences in vocabulary, syntax and sound systems," the linguist said. "Such similarities cannot be used to establish the oneness of Indian languages."
The linguist disputed the claim that all Indian languages followed a subject-object-verb structure, noting that Kashmiri, an Indo-Aryan language, and Khasi, an Austro-Asiatic language, typically use a subject-verb-object order.
Several linguists said the study made assertions unsupported by sufficient evidence or the accepted research methodology.
An email sent to panel chairman Shastry on January 23, seeking his comments, remains unanswered.
Shastry is a member of the RSS-affiliated Samskrita Bharati, which seeks to promote Sanskrit learning. The Telegraph had on May 5 last year reported how the education ministry had failed to provide his bio-data when sought by this newspaper under an RTI application.
The first volume of the publication names 26 scholars under the head of "content, writing, editing and review". They include 13 linguists, five academics working in language-teaching departments at various universities, four historians and one academic each from the fields of physics, zoology, biotechnology and anthropology.