[2] "Moon-physicians," an allusion to the crescent-shaped brass basin of the barber, such as the helmet of Don Quixote, familiar to us all. [3] But see the postscript to this chapter. CHAPTER II THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA It is quite possible to live many years in one province or another of India without obtaining more than the vaguest conception of the linguistic riches of the country. It was Sir G. A. Grierson who rendered it impossible for any but the most careless to ignore the fact that India has not only more languages than Europe, but many more kinds and families of speech. Most Europeans in India live in the populous areas where ethnical and geographical conditions are favourable to the evolution and spread of one of the great literary languages. In Madras, the European comes into contact with one or other of the cultivated Dravidian tongues. In Bombay, he learns that Marāthi and Gujarāti have ancient and interesting literatures. In Calcutta, he is surrounded by millions of Bengalis, who in modern times have as many varieties of literary expression as the most advanced of European races. In Rangoon, he hears the most highly organised of Tibeto-Burman speeches. In Allahabad, Benares, Lahore, Patna, he acquires some smattering of the beautiful and expressive languages which are closest to the model of the original Indo-Aryan idiom. These are the exact counter parts of the great literary languages of Europe, of English, French, German, Italian, etc. But while the European mountains contain one or two shy survivals at most of primitive ways of talking, India has many languages of the type of Basque. In the little frontier province of Assam alone, dozens of grammars and vocabularies have been printed, and much more remains to be done. Happily, an appetite for more information has been aroused by the feast spread before linguists in Sir G. A. Grierson's great _Survey_. He himself is at work on a book which will tell us all that is at present known about the many languages of India, and their relations with one another. But in addition to his own labours, Sir George Grierson has been an apostle of linguistic research and has gathered round him many disciples, not all of whom recognise whence came the impulse that has set them to an examination of the history and growth of Indian languages. Most promising sign of all, native scholars no longer disdain the living tongues of India, nor confine their studies to the classics of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. In Bengal alone, the Proceedings of the _Vangiya Sāhitya Parisat_, a society for the pursuit of linguistic and ethnological research, now form a goodly library of books, and the poet, Rabindranath Tagore, whose own English version of his charming _Gitanjali_ is in the hands of all who love poetry or are interested in Indian matters, is also a very keen and competent student of his native language on lines suggested by the enquiries of European scholars.