The Formation of India 5 speaking other, extinct tongues. Even if glotto-chronology is to be taken with some reserve as to the precise dating it suggests, the time-limits set by it cannot be stretched very much farther back. Nor is the fact that Hittite and Albanian are linguistically the oldest languages in the Indo-European group, congenial to the thesis of an Indian home for Proto-Indo-European. Our recognizing that as human beings our ancestors probably came from Africa, and that the languages most of us speak are descended from languages originally spoken elsewhere in Eurasia, need not imperil our self-respect in any way whatsoever. Human history, after all, forms a unity; and our present territorial limits are of relatively recent creation, so that when speakers of external languages moved over them in bygone ages they could hardly have felt that they were violating any sacrosanct boundaries. When 'the idea of India', to borrow from the title of Sunil Khilnani's book, arose is, again, a historical question of some importance, for only then could have arisen a consciousness of what is Indian and foreign. Such 'Indian' consciousness is alien to the Rigveda and other Vedic texts whose geographical and cultural worlds intersect so much with those of the Avesta. The listing of the sixteen Mahajanapadas that existed in the 6th century B.C., in early Pali texts, begins to suggest the notion of a country to which all these principalities belonged. In the celebrated Mauryan emperor Asoka's Minor Rock Edict I (c.260 B.C.), there occurs one of the early names of India, Jambudipa, where men had now been "mixed" with gods. The lands of the "Yaunas" (Greeks) appear duly as foreign lands in his Rock Edict XIIII, where it is said that these lacked both the Brahmanas and Sramanas (Buddhist and Jain monks). At that time the entire Iranian world bordering India was under post-Alexandrian Greek rulers, and it is, therefore, likely that Asoka's "Yaunas" comprehended both Greeks and Iranianas. He must have known them well enough, because he had Greek and Iranian officials who rendered his edicts in literary Greek and Aramaic and carved them in inscriptions that have been discovered within the last forty years. His distinction between Indians and foreigners was, then, one essentially of culture: foreigners do not have the same priesthoods. One is reminded of the saying attributed to the Buddha in early texts to the effect that there are no castes among the Yaunas, but only masters and slaves. We have in the Manusmriti, the Brahmanical legal text composed probably in the 2nd century B.C. or so, a loose definition of the boundaries of present day North India as Aryavarta, "where the black antelope naturally roams", contrasted with the lands of the "Mlecchas" where Brahmans could not perform sacrifices or the 'twice-born' dwell (II, 22-24). The hostility to Mlecchas is shown by their being classed as Dasyus, having not been created out of Brahman (X, 48). Such statements show that the perception of India as a country marked by certain social and religious institutions begins to be present only by the time that the Mauryan empire (c.320-185 B.C.) was established. That empire embracing most of India, doubtless reinforced the process of cultural integration at least in the upper strata of the country. The recognition of the "foreigner" in friendly terms in Asoka, and hostile in the Manu, was a necessary complement of this vision of India as a country. To achieve such a