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Evolution and Theories of Communication | 67

extend forward into the distant future as long as humans, who talk, laugh,
and cry are people of this planet. The childhood games that we played have
been passed on to us down the generations, and will live on without the aid
of literacy and reading. The artist Bruegel has preserved a vignette of the
childhood games for posterity through his well-known painting. From the
earliest times most communications have been by word of mouth, including
the Indian scriptures. If this chain of communication is broken, the pas-
sage of time will dilute traditions and cultures, and unless these are retrieved
through artifacts and excavations and symbolic structures, they will be lost.
On the other hand, the reach of oral communication in space is lim-
ited by distance reached by human voice. In ancient Persia important news
was transmitted at the rate of fifty miles a day. As late as the beginning of
the nineteenth century diplomatic bags from London to Washington took
60 days. The invention of telegraphy changed all this drastically. The tech-
nology of information transmission was advanced through the transistor
and the computer by leaps and bounds. Man today has overcome the natu-
ral messages for later retrieval. Man has at once removed the dilution of
the messages by the mere passage of time. By speeding up the transmission
of messages man has effectively reduced the time gap between the actual
happenings and the news transmission. In live transmission the raw event
is witnessed through its images the same instant. By bridging any spatial
gap man has effectively crunched the distances between the event and the
spectator, the communicator and his audience, the creative artist and his
patrons, the scholars and their material to be examined, the physician and
his patent, and the tutor and the taught.

Written Communication
Indians knew the art of writing as early as 2500 BC. Their earliest decipher-
able records do not go beyond the 3rd century BC. Ashoka’s edicts were
scattered all over the country except the down south—and were scattered
even in Afghanistan. The Vedic literature is considered to be the oldest in
India—1500 BC, but the earliest manuscripts were not older than the 10th
century AD. The Vedas were something that has been heard. In the writ-
ten forms of communication the earliest period witnessed the prevalence
of the Vedic style (shlokas) in law books, epics and Puranas. The two epics,
Ramayana and Mahabharata were similar in this aspect.

Inscriptions

A record carved in stone and set in a public place had the advantage over
the spoken word. The spoken word is a means of communication only to
those present at a given occasion. The tree inscription declared its message

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