Before the English Tongue: The Unbroken India That Spoke in a Hundred Voices

We often hear a story about India. It’s a story that says we were always a collection of separate, distant kingdoms, forever divided by language and culture. That it was the British who, for the first time, united this vast land. And that English became the necessary glue to hold us together.

But what if this story is wrong? What if we look back, not a hundred years, but a thousand, and find a different India? An India, already woven together by threads of trade, faith, and ideas long before a single English ship arrived on our shores.

This is that story.

A Land Connected, Not Divided

Imagine a merchant from Kanchipuram in the 10th century. His cart is filled with fine silk. He doesn’t see a "South India" cut off from a "North India." He sees a road. This road connects him to the bustling ports of the Chola kingdom, where his silk is loaded onto ships bound for Southeast Asia. It also connects him to land routes heading north, where his goods will be traded for precious stones from the Deccan or spices from further west.

How did he communicate? He didn’t use English. The languages of trade were Sanskrit and Prakrit in ancient times, and later, words and gestures mixed with regional tongues. The key was understanding, not a single language.

The Grand Tour of Ideas: How Knowledge Travelled

Think of the great ideas that define India. They flowed freely across the land, respecting no artificial borders.

• The Journey of the Epics: The stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata were not trapped in the north. They travelled south, were translated into magnificent Tamil and Kannada versions centuries ago, and became the heartbeat of the entire peninsula. A villager in Kerala and a scholar in Kashmir worshipped the same Rama.
• The Language of the Gods: Sanskrit was the original unifier. It was the language of science, law, philosophy, and religion. Great scholars like Adi Shankaracharya (from Kerala) used Sanskrit to travel from Kedarnath in the Himalayas to Rameswaram in the far south, debating and establishing spiritual centres (mathas) in all four corners of India. He didn’t need a translator for the elite; Sanskrit was his passport.
• The Bhakti Wave: The profound Bhakti movement, which emphasized devotion to God, swept across India like a monsoon rain. It started in the Tamil land with the Alwars and Nayanars and travelled north. The poems of Mirabai (Rajasthan), Kabir (Uttar Pradesh), and the Varkari saints of Maharashtra all sang the same song of love for the divine, creating a cultural unity that kings and empires could only dream of.

The Kings Who Ruled Beyond Their "Zone"

History books are filled with empires that saw the entire subcontinent as their realm.

• The mighty Mauryan Empire (3rd century BCE), with its capital in Pataliputra (modern-day Patna), stretched right down to the Karnataka region. The edicts of Emperor Ashoka, carved on rocks and pillars across the country—from Kandahar (now in Afghanistan) to Brahmagiri in Karnataka—were written in Prakrit and Brahmi script, not English, so that his message of Dhamma could reach everyone.
• The Gupta Empire (4th-6th century CE), the "Golden Age" of India, was a patron of Sanskrit that influenced art and culture from the north to the Deccan.
• Most famously, the Cholas (9th-13th century CE), a powerhouse from Tamil Nadu, did not just rule the south. Their incredible naval power reached the banks of the Ganges in the north and across the oceans to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Their administration was in Tamil, yet their influence was pan-Indian.

These rulers administered vast, diverse populations. They did it by employing local languages and dialects for day-to-day governance, while using a link language like Sanskrit for broader communication. The system worked because it was flexible and respectful of diversity.

So, What Changed?

The British did not "unite" India; they conquered and centralized it for their own purpose—to rule and extract resources. They replaced our old, flexible systems with a rigid, top-down administration. To run this massive system, they needed clerks and officers who could understand their orders. Thus, they created a new class of Indians educated in English.

Over time, this created a powerful myth: English was modern, efficient, and unifying, while Indian languages were local, old-fashioned, and divisive. The truth is, we were united for millennia by our own languages and cultures. English was the language of our rulers, and we learned it to survive and challenge their rule, eventually using it as a tool to win our freedom.

The Real Takeaway

The next time someone says English is the "link language" that holds India together, remember the deep, ancient bonds that already exist. Remember the silk merchant, the travelling saint, the rock edict, and the epic poem. Our unity was written in Sanskrit, sung in Tamil, preached in Prakrit, and traded in a dozen dialects.

English is a useful tool in the modern world, a window to global knowledge. But it is not the foundation of Indian unity. That foundation was laid by our ancestors, and it is made of stronger, more enduring stuff. It is a foundation of shared stories, shared dreams, and a civilization that has always known how to find harmony in a hundred different voices.