When does the study of history begin?
Kamal Lodaya, Bangalore
How did so many languages come to be spoken in India? When did we become an agricultural society? When did we start using tools? How do we study our history? There are many ways in which we study our past. 

Studying by language
Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Odia, Sindhi are all called Indo-Aryan languages. These are the Indo-European languages spoken in South Asia. The earliest such language is Rig Vedic Sanskrit. The Rig Veda is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (type of devotional songs). In the hymns, the people who made and sang them are called as Arya (or Aryans).
The German Indologist Max Mueller produced the first printed edition of the Rig Veda. The earliest written versions we have are from Nepal and Tibet, dated to the 11th century CE. The picture shows a page of a 19th century manuscript of the Rig Vega written in Devanagari (the script in which Hindi and Sanskrit are written).
Mueller dated the Rig Veda to 1200 BCE. We continue to accept this date because it fits with other pieces of evidence. For example a tablet from Turkey dated to 1380 BCE refers to Vedic deites like Mitra, Varuna, Indra and Nasatya. From the references to rivers, we locate the Rig Veda to Punjab, the land of the tributaries of the river Sindhu (Indus).
Rig Vedic Sanskrit is earlier than Classical Sanskrit, which developed around 500 BCE, and uses the rules of the grammarian Panini. The Rig Veda refers to the opponents of the Arya as Dasa or Dasyu. Who were they? Most likely they spoke Dravidian (like Tamil, Kannada, Telugu) or Austroasiatic languages (like Munda spoken by today's tribals). We don't have texts in these languages from when the Rig Veda was written.
Scholars like Franklin Southworth have shown that Indian plants and animals with Sanskrit names do not have the same names in other Indo-European languages. Many names have been traced to Dravidian and Austroasiatic languages. Some names are new: mrigahastin (animals with hand) suggests wonder on encountering elephants.
Dravidian languages can be linked to South Indian sites from 2500 BCE. The Munda language can be linked to East Indian sites from the same period.

Studying by archaeology
The Harappan or Indus Valley civilization was discovered in the 1920s. It flourished from 2600 to 1800 BCE. It had cities, writing and trade with other parts of Asia. Could the language of the Indus script, which we cannot read yet, be Rig Vedic Sanskrit? No, because the dates for the Harappan civilization are earlier, estimated as lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE.
There are other differences between them as well. Rig Vedic hymns show a village pastoral (rural) society mainly concerned with keeping cattle. Rhinoceros and elephant are unfamiliar animals, but they were well known to the Harappans in the Indus Valley. The horse was well known to the Indo-Aryans, but its presence in Harappan sites is seen as doubtful by skeptics.
On the other hand, Sanauli in Uttar Pradesh has a burial with an associated chariot with wooden wheels covered with copper. It is dated to 1800 BCE. The relationship between the Harappans and these Copper Hoard people is not clear.

Studying by biology
Biologists have done a lot of work on the Human Genome project. Using the Y chromosome of our cell nucleus (which is inherited by son from father) and DNA in our cell mitochondria (which is inherited by daughter from mother), they have tried to reconstruct movements of people in the past. Based on their genes, populations of Indians (on the mainland) can be divided as coming from four kinds of ancestors: Ancestral North Indian, Ancestral South Indian, Ancestral Austroasiatic and Ancestral TibetoBurman. There is a lot of mixing between these populations. More refined studies have shown that communities migrated from the steppe lands of Eurasia (near the Caspian sea) to South Asia between 1700 BCE and 1000 BCE.
Analysis of genes from a skeleton from the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi in Haryana relates to groups from Iran and Turkmenistan who were in trade with the Harappans. Studying different kinds of evidence from different disciplines also allows us to reach out to movement of crops, languages and people, for which we do not have any written record. The last issue of JM (JM Nov-Dec 2023) talked about how studying the Y-chromosome in men has allowed us to trace the movement of populations over the ages. See the migration chart of humans from many thousands of years go.

When does the study of history begin?
Cosmologists study how the universe began. Geologists study what early Earth was like. Biologists study how our species Homo Sapiens evolved from earlier primates. Archaeologists study how the human species developed tools. Paleobotanists study how we developed agriculture. The study of history is mostly based on texts. One also considers images such as paintings found in the caves of Bhimbetka (MP) (see picture), nearly 10,000 BCE. Largely, the study of history begins around 9000 years ago.
 
[Based on an article by Meera Viswanathan]