The Visvabharati Quarterly May - July 1952

The Nishada or Austric people of ancient India are now represented by the Kol or Munda peoples of modern India like the Santals the Mundas the Hos theSANSKRIT AND THE LANGUAGES OF ASIA 3 Korkus the Gadabas and the gavaras and others the Khasis of Assam and the Nicobarese ; allied to them in speech and culture and probably also in blood are the original inhabitants of the whole of Indo-China [...] Then the peoples of these tracts in ancient times formed at least two main ethnic groups — the Indo-European (including the Iranian peoples closely allied to the Indian Aryans like the Sogdians and the Khotanese or Sakas on the one hand and the Tokharians or as they were probably known in ancient India the Rishikas on the other ) and the Mongoloids. [...] And so it happened that during the early centuries of the Christian era Mahayana Buddhism and the Sanskrit language as the vehicle of both this religion and Indian science became accepted by the various Tokharian peoples by the Iranians like the Sakas and the Sogdians ( the latter were known as Sulikas to ancient Indians ). They passed on what they received from the Indians to the peoples to t [...] It has been a little different from the beginning in the matter of the position of Sanskrit among the peoples of the Near East that is of the Arab lands and Iran as well as Asia Minor and Greece. [...] The stories of the PaRcatantra in Sanskrit centering round the adventures of two bulls named in Sanskrit Karataka Damanaka came to be known to the Persian as the book of Kalalak and Damanak : later an Arabic translation of the work appeared and the two names were transformed into Kalilab andSANSKRIT AND THE LANGUAGES OF ASIA 13 Dimnah in Arabic.