The Hindu Lit for Life 2026 | In conversation with author Laura Spinney

Half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. An obvious question to ask, therefore, is where was it born?

For long, similarities have been noticed between what we now refer to as the Indo-European languages, but they hadn’t been conceived of as a family. It was about the end of the 18th century that a British judge, Sir William Jones, posted in Calcutta (now Kolkata), mused that, perhaps, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and some other languages sprang from a common ancestor, which no longer existed. He turned out to be right. The idea that Latin spoken on the Italian peninsula and Sanskrit spoken in India naturally leads to the idea that there must have been a place where this one ancient language that gave birth to all the others was born, a homeland, a birthplace, a people who spoke them. Until quite recently, there were a number of rival theories to explain where the languages came from and how they were born. Only in the last 20 years, has the weight of evidence, partly thanks to new scientific tools and new kinds of evidence, come down quite solidly behind one of those theories.

If I take all the research that I condense into my book and summarise it, I would say that those languages were born in the Eurasian steppe, in what is now a war zone between Ukraine and Russia, and that they were born there somewhere between 5,000-6,000 years ago.

What has changed now for us to have a better understanding?

The arrival a decade or two ago of a new discipline, namely paleogenetics, with its ability to extract and analyse ancient DNA, has transformed this story. What it has meant is that we can now trace migrations of prehistoric people. We can track people through space and time before historical records documented where they were going and what they were doing. So, now we have another window on that prehistoric world.

Since there’s very often a correlation between prehistoric migration routes and the diasporas of languages, the way that language families branch as people migrate and their dialects get separated, mean that those two sources of knowledge together are extremely powerful. It helps us with the third part of the puzzle archaeology to fill out this picture.

There has been a long-standing debate on where Sanskrit was born. Is there more clarity on its origins?

Certainty and absolute knowledge are in scarce quantity in this story. Is there a consensus? Yes. But there are several theories still on the table. The weight of the evidence is behind the theory that Sanskrit came with immigrants who we know for sure came into India via the northwest corner, perhaps via the Khyber Pass, like so many later immigrants, around 1600 BCE or a little earlier. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that suggests that people brought Sanskrit with them. For example, there are very close similarities between Sanskrit and the Persian languages, including Avestan, which was the language spoken by Zarathustra. There are also ritual similarities with prehistoric cultures. There is this culture that archaeologists refer to as Sintashta, which was discovered in the 1960s, in the Russian steppe southeast of the Urals. It looks as if this culture essentially invented the chariot around 2000 BCE. Sanskrit and Avestan have the same word for a ‘chariot’ (ratha) that is derived from the Proto-Indo-European word for wheel, “roteh” which is the root of English “rotate” and was the word, the proto-Indo-European word for wheel.

There are also a lot of coincidences in this story. For example, there are strange similarities between the Baltic and the Indic languages. That could be explained if the migration across the steppe split at some point and one branch went up to the Baltic states and one branch continued south and east towards the subcontinent. So, it is circumstantial evidence. There’s no direct evidence that those immigrants coming into India via the northwest corner in the second millennium BCE spoke Sanskrit.

 A lot of scholars, however, claim that not only Sanskrit but the entire Indo-European language family originated in India. Does this theory hold any water?

There’s very little scientific evidence to support that. Uncertainty remains around the fact that nobody can say for sure that those immigrants spoke Sanskrit. And it is possible, like with many later immigrants to India, for example, the Scythians, the Greeks, the Mughals, that they abandoned their language and took up the local language. In order to resolve this mystery, we would like to know what language was spoken by the Harappan people. The Harappan script remains undeciphered. People have been trying to crack it for 100 years, and one of the reasons they’ve failed so far is because there’s no equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. That is, there is no document or probably clay tablet that has been excavated by archaeologists that bears that language and another language that would allow us to compare the two.

One more piece of indirect evidence that supports the steppe theory is that there’s an indirect link between Sanskrit, the Vedas, and the Brahmins. The Brahmins are traditionally the custodians of the Vedas and the ancient Hindu and Indic scripts; the Brahmins tend to have higher steppe ancestry than other social groups in India.

A lot of your book is set in the battlefields of Russia and Ukraine. Is the war a setback in unravelling the puzzle?

Many of the archaeological sites that are relevant to this story are out of bounds today. Many of them have been mined, so they will be out of bounds for a very long time if they haven’t been already destroyed. The museums also are threatened and there’s a fight going on for possession of their contents and for who gets to tell the story about the history of that part of the world. It’s a tragic state of affairs, but it makes it all the more urgent to tell this story and to continue doing the research.