Origins of Hindi as delineated on Wiki, show it as being about 2500 years old, that makes it older than English and Tamil.
Tamil chimp whose main hobby is to spread hate against NI due to his being humiliated in north India due to being ugly and ill mannered, was still evolving as a reptilian (later Tamilian) in early B.C.

Hindi belongs to a branch of Prakrit which later got divided in to Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Braj, bhojpuri, awadhi, etc. the other branch Pangal is the mother language of Bengali, maithili, Asamese etc.
Hindi vocabulary or derivatives dominate vocabulary of all languages found from Persia to Orissa - this makes Hindi a natural candidate for being a unifying language (400 Million) , like Bengali , which covers good 200 million people.

The Indo-European Family
(with the isolates Basque, Burushaski, and Nahali)

The single largest language family, Indo-European has about 150 languages and about three billion speakers.  Languages include Hindi and Urdu (400 million), Bengali (200 million), Spanish (300 million), Portuguese (200 million), French (100 million), German (100 million), Russian (300 million), and English (400 million) in Europe and the Americas.  With English, one can reach approximately one billion people in the world.

There are three language isolates represented on this map, unrelated to any of the language families:  Basque thrives between France and Spain. Burushaski and Nahali are found in the Indian subcontinent.

The history of the Hindi dialect continuum (including Urdu), i.e. the Central zone dialects of Indo-Aryan.

These dialects emerge out of Apabhramsha in the 7th century and by the 10 century become identifiable as the predecessors of the contemporary Indo-Aryan languages (Old Hindi).

Braj was the popular literary dialect until it was replaced by khari boli in the 19th century.

Since the 1947 partition of India, a Sanskritized version of khari boli has become a major lingua franca of the Republic of India, known as Standard Hindi, and a Persianized version of khari boli has become the major lingua franca of Pakistan, known as Urdu.

• 600 BCE: late Vedic Sanskrit.
• 500 BCE: Prakrit texts of Buddhists and Jains originate (Eastern India)
• 400 BCE: Panini composes his formal Sanskrit grammar (Gandhara), reflecting transition from Vedic to formal Paninian (Classical) Sanskrit
• 322 BCE: Brahmi script inscriptions by Mauryas in Prakrit (Pali)
• 250 BCE: first records of Classical Sanskrit. [Vidhyanath Rao]
• 100 BCE-100 CE: Sanskrit gradually replaces Prakrit in inscriptions
• 320: The Gupta or Siddha-matrika script emerges.

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The Dravidian Family

These are the "old" languages of India, with about 25 representaties and 150 million speakers.  Best known are Tamil and Telugu.