T he E arly Y ears India was not isolated from the world even two thousand years ago. We have read in our history textbooks about the famous Silk route, which centuries ago connected India to the great civilisations, which existed in China, Persia, Egypt and Rome. We also know that throughout India’s long past, people from different parts came here, sometimes as traders , sometimes as conquerors , sometimes as migrants in search of new lands and settled down here. In remote Indian villages often people ‘recall’ a time when their ancestors lived elsewhere, from where they came and settled down where they now live.
It is interesting to note that the greatest grammarian in Sanskrit namely Panini, who systematised and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin. …The seventh-century Chinese scholar Yi Jing learned his Sanskrit in Java (in the city of Shri Vijaya) on his way from China to India. The influence of interactions is well reflected in languages and vocabularies throughout Asia from Thailand to Malaya to Indo-China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea and Japan. … We can find a warning against isolationism in a parable about a well-frog- the ‘kupamanduka’- that persistently recurs in several old Sanskrit texts…The kupamanduka is a frog that lives its whole life within a well, knows nothing else, and is suspicious of everything outside it.
It talks to no one, and argues with no one on anything. It merely harbours the deepest suspicion of the outside world. The scientific, cultural and economic history of the world would have been very limited indeed had we lived like well-frogs. (Sen : – )