The Cemetery H culture was a Bronze Age culture in the Punjab region in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, from about 1900 BC until about 1300 BC. It is regarded as a regional form of the late phase of the Harappan civilisation, but also as the manifestation of a first wave of Indo-Aryan migrations, predating the migrations of the proto-Rig Vedic people.
Devanāgarī or Devanagari, also called Nāgarī, is a left-to-right abugida, based on the ancient Brāhmī script, used in the northern Indian subcontinent. It is one of the official scripts of the Republic of India and Nepal. It was developed and in regular use by the 7th century CE and achieved its modern form by 1000 CE. The Devanāgarī script, composed of 48 primary characters, including 14 vowels and 34 consonants, is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world, being used for over 120 languages.
Sanskrit is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting effect on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies.
Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Deccan, Northern India and Pakistan, and used as a lingua franca in both countries. Hindustani is a pluricentric language with two standard registers, known as Hindi and Urdu. Thus, it is also called Hindi–Urdu. Colloquial registers of the language fall on a spectrum between these standards.
The Indo-Aryan languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Maldives. Moreover, apart from the Indian subcontinent, large immigrant and expatriate Indo-Aryan–speaking communities live in Northwestern Europe, Western Asia, North America, the Caribbean, Southeast Africa, Polynesia and Australia, along with several million speakers of Romani languages primarily concentrated in Southeastern Europe. There are over 200 known Indo-Aryan languages.
Asia, comprising different language families and some unrelated isolates. The major language families include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Caucasian, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turkic, Sino-Tibetan and Kra–Dai. Most, but not all, have a long history as a written language.
Gāndhārī is a Prakrit language found mainly in texts dated between the 3rd century BCE and 4th century CE in the region of Gandhāra, located in present day Pakistan’s Potohar region. The language was heavily used by the former Buddhist cultures of Central Asia and has been found as far away as eastern China, in inscriptions at Luoyang and Anyang.
Hindustani is one of the predominant languages of South Asia, with federal status in the republics of India and Pakistan in its standardized forms of Hindi and Urdu respectively. It is widely spoken and understood as a second language in Nepal, Bangladesh, and the Persian Gulf and as such is considered a lingua franca in the northern Indian subcontinent. It is also one of the most widely spoken languages in the world by total number of speakers. It developed in north India, principally during the Mughal Empire, when the Persian language exerted a strong influence on the Western Hindi languages of central India; this contact between the Hindu and Muslim cultures resulted in the core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the Indian dialect of Hindi spoken in Delhi, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi, being enriched with Persian loanwords. Rekhta, or "mixed" speech, which came to be known as Hindustani, Hindi, Hindavi, and Urdu, also locally known as Lashkari or Lashkari Zaban in long form, was thus created. This form was elevated to the status of a literary language, and after the partition of colonial India and independence this collection of dialects became the basis for modern standard Hindi and Urdu. Although these official languages are distinct registers with regards to their formal aspects, such as modern technical vocabulary, they continue to be all but indistinguishable in their vernacular form.
Indo-Aryan peoples are a diverse collection of Indo-European peoples speaking Indo-Aryan languages in the Indian subcontinent. Historically, Aryans were the Indo-Iranian speaking pastoralists who migrated from Central Asia into South Asia and introduced the Proto-Indo-Aryan language. Today, the Indo-Aryan language speakers are found across the modern-day regions of Bangladesh, Nepal, eastern-Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives and northern-India.
Indo-Iranian peoples, also known as Indo-Iranic peoples by scholars, or as Arya or Aryans from their self-designation, were a group of Indo-European peoples who brought the Indo-Iranian languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, to major parts of Eurasia in waves from the first part of the 2nd millennium BC onwards. They eventually branched out into Iranian peoples and Indo-Aryan peoples.
South Asian literature refers to the literature that is composed by authors in the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora. It has an extensive history with some of the earliest known pieces of literature. South Asia has many different languages that have been spoken due to its size and how long people have been inhabiting it. This has caused the region to be the most linguistically diverse region in the planet, and as well as having four language families, hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects. Many modern pieces of South Asian literature are written in English for a global audience. Many of the ancient texts of the subcontinent have been lost due to the inability to preserve verbally transmitted literature. South Asia has many significant authors that shaped the postcolonial period and response to the British establishment in the subcontinent. Modern South Asian literature has a deep focus on independence from Britain, mainly expressed in prose, this literature commonly discusses the partition of India and how different South Asian nations, religions, and cultures interact with each other. Countries to which South Asian literature's writers are linked include India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Works from Bhutan, Myanmar, Tibet, and the Maldives are sometimes also included.
The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages, the predominant languages of today's North India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Indo-Aryan population movements into the region from Central Asia are considered to have started after 2000 BCE, as a slow diffusion during the Late Harappan period, which led to a language shift in the northern Indian subcontinent. Several hundred years later, the Iranian languages were brought into the Iranian plateau by the Iranians, who were closely related to the Indo-Aryans.
The Painted Grey Ware culture (PGW) is an Iron Age Indo-Aryan culture of the western Gangetic plain and the Ghaggar-Hakra valley in the Indian subcontinent, conventionally dated c.1200 to 600–500 BCE, or from 1300 to 500–300 BCE It is a successor of the Cemetery H culture and Black and red ware culture (BRW) within this region, and contemporary with the continuation of the BRW culture in the eastern Gangetic plain and Central India.
The Gandhara grave culture of present-day Pakistan is known by its "protohistoric graves", which were spread mainly in the middle Swat River valley and named the Swat Protohistoric Graveyards Complex, dated in that region to c. 1200–800 BCE. The Italian Archaeological Mission to Pakistan (MAIP) holds that there are no burials with these features after 800 BCE. Recent research by Pakistani scholars, such as Muhammad Zahir, consider that these protohistoric graves extended over a much wider geography and continued in existence from the 8th century BCE until the historic period. The core region was in the middle of the Swat River course and expanded to the valleys of Dir, Kunar, Chitral, and Peshawar. Protohistoric graves were present in north, central, and southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province as well as in north-western tribal areas, including Gilgit-Baltistan province, Taxila, and Salt Range in Punjab, Pakistan, along with their presence in Indian Kashmir, Ladakh, and Uttarakhand.
Vedic Sanskrit has a number of linguistic features which are alien to most other Indo-European languages. Prominent examples include: phonologically, the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals, and morphologically, the formation of gerunds. Some philologists attribute such features, as well as the presence of non-Indo-European vocabulary, to a local substratum of languages encountered by Indo-Aryan peoples in Central Asia (Bactria-Marghiana) and within the Indian subcontinent during Indo-Aryan migrations, including the Dravidian languages.
Indigenous Aryanism, also known as the Indigenous Aryans theory (IAT) and the Out of India theory (OIT), is the conviction that the Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. It is a "religio-nationalistic" view on Indian history, and propagated as an alternative to the established migration model, which considers the Pontic–Caspian steppe to be the area of origin of the Indo-European languages.
The Dravidian peoples, Dravidian-speakers or Dravidians, are a linguistic and cultural group living primarily in Southern Asia and speaking any of the Dravidian languages. There are around 250 million native speakers of Dravidian languages. Dravidian speakers form the majority of the population of South India and are natively found in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Dravidian peoples are also present in Singapore, Mauritius, Malaysia, France, South Africa, Myanmar, East Africa, the Caribbean, and the United Arab Emirates through recent migration.
The Vedic period, or the Vedic age, is the period in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age of the history of India when the Vedic literature, including the Vedas, was composed in the northern Indian subcontinent, between the end of the urban Indus Valley Civilisation and a second urbanisation, which began in the central Indo-Gangetic Plain c. 600 BCE. The Vedas are liturgical texts which formed the basis of the influential Brahmanical ideology, which developed in the Kuru Kingdom, a tribal union of several Indo-Aryan tribes. The Vedas contain details of life during this period that have been interpreted to be historical and constitute the primary sources for understanding the period. These documents, alongside the corresponding archaeological record, allow for the evolution of the Indo-Aryan and Vedic culture to be traced and inferred.
The Persian language in the Indian subcontinent, before the British colonisation, was the region's lingua franca and a widely used official language in North India. The language was brought into South Asia by various Turkic and Afghan dynasties from the 11th century onwards, notable of which were the Ghaznavids,Ghurid dynasty, Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Dynasty. Persian held official status in the court and the administration within these empires. It largely replaced Sanskrit as the language of politics, literature, education, and social status in the subcontinent.
Sinauli is an archaeological site in western Uttar Pradesh, India, at the Ganga-Yamuna Doab. The site gained attention for its Bronze Age solid-disk wheel carts, found in 2018, which were interpreted by some as horse-pulled "chariots".