ABSTRACT
In any long-settled area, the names of places embody a great deal of the history of the inhabitants – past inhabitants as well as present ones. In South Asia, where even small villages have often been found to have histories measured in millennia, and where ancient records abound, this statement is more true than in many other parts of the world. And yet this great historical resource has not been adequately exploited. This chapter will examine some Maharashtrian place names, following up a suggestion made by Raymond and Bridget Allchin in the following passage from The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan:
It has been suggested that the placenames of Maharashtra show a substratum of Dravidian elements, and these we may expect to relate to an earlier culture phase, such as that represented by the Malwa ware or the as yet little known pre-Malwa Neolithic phase which was akin to that of the south. We may therefore postulate that the original population of agricultural settlers was Dravidian speaking, and that the changes associated with the Jorwe period coincided with the arrival in the area of immigrants from the north speaking an Indo-Aryan language. This language must have been the ancestor of modern Marathi.
(B. Allchin and R. Allchin, The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 352) The suggestion of a Dravidian substratum in Maharashtra is of interest for several reasons. I have suggested elsewhere (Southworth 1974) that a number of linguistic elements in Marathi point to the probability of such a substratum. 1 If it can be shown that Maharashtrian place names contain a significant Dravidian element, this would provide further support for the hypothesis of an earlier Dravidian-speaking population in this region, and might also make it possible to locate this population more precisely in place and time. Another major reason for interest in this subject is that toponymic studies, in India as elsewhere, have often been carried out in isolation from other types of linguistic and historical studies. Thus in the context of the present work, an investigation of this particular question will provide an opportunity to integrate the evidence of place names with other types of evidence used in linguistic archaeology.