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f any evidence were needed of Asia’s tremendous diversity, you need look
no further than language. There are over 2,000 distinct languages spoken
in East, South, and Southeast Asia. Language both creates communities
through mutual intelligibility—a group in a room with a light on—and divides
people, possibly even close neighbors, across language borders in the darkness
of nonintelligibility. Language may, in fact, be the most severe of cultural
boundaries, for when you cannot understand other people it is easy to suspect
them of any number of other contrasts with yourself: they speak gibberish; they
are barbarians (heathens, cannibals); they are uncivilized (uncultured, primi-
tive, savage); they are irrational; they should learn from us. On the other hand,
language creates communities of mutual comprehension and becomes the base
for other markers and reinforcers of community. We who speak a common lan-
guage also share a common culture, have a sense of common identity, surely
must have a common history and common ancestors, and are a common “peo-
ple,” a nationality, an ethnicity. Many of these commonalities are actually fic-
tions—but important fictions in the creation and maintenance of social unity.
For instance, in the present age when so many national borders enclose
people with no common language, there may be a desperate search for one. In
India, where there are over 150 distinct languages, the effort to create a com-
mon one has been intense and controversial. The dominant language, Hindi
(which is the fourth largest linguistic community in the world after Mandarin,
English, and Spanish), has been hotly resisted in South India where speakers of
Dravidian languages resist imposition of a northern language. If there is a neu-
tral common language, it is English, although the irony is that this is the lan-
guage of the former colonial power. And, of course, a great number of Indians
never learn this “common” language.
China, too, is a country of linguistic diversity, but it deals with the problem
somewhat differently. It simply declares that all ethnic Han Chinese (92 percent
of the population) speak “dialects” of Chinese, even though these “dialects” are
mutually unintelligible, and linguists consider them separate languages. The
“Chinese” language is actually a language family equivalent to the “Romance
Family” of Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. It helps, of course, that in
written form, speakers of these separate languages of Chinese can actually read
the same texts (see later in this chapter). It is as if all speakers of the various Euro-
pean languages had a single written language that everyone could understand.
I
Chapter opener photo: A Brahman consults the genealogist about a potential marriage for
his daughter. Genealogies 24 generations long are maintained in traditional style texts
in this part of India.