My parents migrated from Odisha via Chennai to Mumbai over fifty years ago. I speak both Odia, language of my roots, and Marathi, language of my domicile, fairly fluently. So it was with great delight to learn that both these languages are now deemed classical languages in India, because both are over a thousand years old for sure, and maybe even 2,000 though evidence for the latter can be deemed speculative.

Languages are like rivers, transforming and changing as they enter new terrain, mingling and merging like tributaries, and breaking out as branches. We must be wary of indulging the ego by declaring a particular language is ‘older’, ‘purer’, and ‘original’ as we may be tempted to by the qualification of ‘classical’. However, we must also not stop acknowledging the history and geography of a language.