Place names in India

Place names in India are usually in Indian languages. Other languages include Portuguese, Dutch, English and Arabic.

Quotes

• So many names that at a hasty glance appear utterly unmeaning can be traced back to original Sanskrit forms as to raise a presumption that the remainder, though more effectively disguised, will ultimately be found capable of similar treatment: a strong argument being thus afforded against those scholars who hold that the modern vernacular is impregnated with a very large non-Aryan element.
  • Frederic Growse about place names in India. (Growse 1883, 353). quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 5

• The non-Indo-Aryan nature of the terms and names noted earlier also has to be juxtaposed with the fact that the place and river names in northern India are almost all Indo-Aryan. Place and river names are, to my mind, the singlemost important element in considering the existence of a substratum. Unlike people, tribes, material items, flora and fauna, they cannot relocate or be introduced by trade, etc. (although their names can be transferred by immigrants). Place names tend to be among the most conservative elements in a language. Moreover, it is a widely attested fact that intruders into a geographical region often adopt many of the names of rivers and places that are current among the peoples that preexisted them, even if they change the names of others (i.e. the Mississippi river compared to the Hudson, Missouri state compared to New England). With this in mind, it is significant that there are very few non-Indo-Aryan names (and almost none whose etymologies are completely uncontested) for rivers and places in the North of the Indian subcontinent, which is very unusual for migrants intruding into an alien language-speaking area. All the place names in the Rgveda, which are few in number, are Indo-Aryan, or at least sanskritized...
  • Bryant, E. F., & Patton, L. L. (2005). The Indo-Aryan controversy : evidence and inference in Indian history. Routledge 479

• And curiously, an astonishing number of names of towns and villages in western Rajasthan (the heart of the Thar Desert) have names ending in the word ‘sar’, such as Lunkaransar, with ‘sar’ meaning ‘lake’ (from the Sanskrit word saras). I counted over fifty of them on an ordinary map, and there must be many more. Why should all those places be named after non-existent lakes? An unwary tourist reading a map of western Rajasthan might as well assume that the region is some kind of a Lake District!
  • Danino, M. (2010). The lost river : on the trail of the Sarasvatī. Penguin Books India.

The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture

Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 5

• The non-Indo-Aryan nature of the terms and names noted earlier also has to be juxtaposed with the fact that the place-names and river names in northern India are almost all Indo-Aryan. These names are, to my mind, the single most important element in considering the existence of a non-Indo-Aryan substratum position. Unlike people, tribes, material items, flora, and fauna, they cannot relocate or be introduced by trade (although their names can be transferred by immigrants). In other words, it is difficult to exclude the possibility that the foreign personal and material names in the Rgveda were intrusive into a preexisting Indo-Aryan area as opposed to vice versa. This argument of lexical transiency can much less readily be used in the matter of foreign place-names. Place-names tend to be among the most conservative elements in a language. Moreover, it is a widely attested fact that intruders into a geographic region often adopt the names of rivers and places that are current among the peoples that preceded them. Even if some such names are changed by the immigrants, some of the previous names are invariably retained (e.g., the Mississippi river compared with the Hudson, Missouri state compared with New England).

• With this in mind, it is significant that there are very few non-Indo-Aryan names for rivers and places in the North of the Indian subcontinent, which is very unusual for migrants intruding into an alien language-speaking area. Of course, it could be legitimately argued that this is due to the Aryans' Sanskritizing the names of places and rivers in the North- west (although this raises the issue of why the local flora and other names were was not likewise Sanskritized).

• The lack of foreign place-names in the oldest Indo-Aryan texts, in contrast, is remarkable when compared with the durability of place designations else- where. The same applies to rivers.

• In view of the fact that Witzel has provided a list of thirty-seven different Vedic river names, these two or three possible exceptions do not make as strong a case as one might have hoped. All the rest can indeed be derived from Indo- European roots. Morever, other scholars have even assigned Indo-Aryan etymologies to two of these three possible exceptions.

• Many of die foreign terms for flora and fauna could simply indicate that these items have continually been imported into the subcontinent over the centuries, as continues to be the case today. The exception to this is place-names and river names, but the absence of foreign terms for the topography and hydronomy of the Northwest deprives us of significant evidence that has been used to establish substrata elsewhere.