Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

by Peggy Mohan

One of India’s most incredible and enviable cultural aspects is that every Indian is bilingual, if not multilingual. Delving into the fascinating early history of South Asia, this original book reveals how migration, both external and internal, has shaped all Indians from ancient times.

Through a first-of-its-kind and incisive study of languages, such as the story of early Sanskrit, the rise of Urdu, language formation in the North-east, it presents the astounding argument that all Indians are of mixed origins. It explores the surprising rise of English after Independence and how it may be endangering India’s native languages.

Genres: History, India, Nonfiction, Linguistics, Language, Indian Literature, Anthropology

303 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 5, 2021

Reviews

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is Indian culture indigenous, or is it the result of the mixing of two or more cultures? To anyone who approaches the question with an open mind and academic honesty, it is very clear that the second is true - the first is a romantic dream nurtured by the traditionalists, and nowadays used by the Hindu Right as a political tool.

The bone of contention here, of course, is the "Aryan Invasion" - the colonial era theory of a "master race" which invaded India and destroyed the indigenous culture. Most traditionalists will tell you that this theory has been disproven, and that it is now established that "Hindu" culture is indigenous; the "Sanatana Dharma" (Eternal Faith) which has no beginning and end. They would be half right.

There was indeed no invasion, in the sense of a concerted move by an organised group of people to take over a country. In fact, there was no Aryan race even - "Arya" in Sanskrit means cultured, the term which these people who came to India from the steppes used to refer to themselves. However, there were migrations spread over a period of time, where these hardy people encroached the lands of the indigenous inhabitants, fought with them, mingled with them, married their women, and ultimately became a composite culture which is extremely diverse but with a very faint thread of commonality running through it.

How do we know this? Why should it not be that "Hindu" culture evolved in India as a monolithic entity, and the similarities and relationships we see outside the subcontinent are evidences of Indians moving out? (This is the basis of the almost discredited "Out of India" theory held by a handful of hardcore right-wingers.) Well, we have several evidences that go against this argument, the strongest ones being genetic and linguistic.

With the advance in DNA research, scientists have been able to map the exact course of human migration over the globe, after homo sapiens first evolved in Africa. This enchanting tale is described in Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From by Tony Joseph - a fascinating book which I have reviewed here. In this book, Peggy Mohan does the same thing with languages. While Joseph talks about the journey and transformation of the gene through the generations, Mohan talks about the travels, evolution, and disappearance of Indian languages over space and time.

At the beginning, the author talks of a strange creature called a 'tiramisu bear', with cream-coloured fur on top and coffee-brown paws - the progeny of male grizzly bears and female polar bears. These hybrids happen because grizzlies wake up early from hibernation because of rising temperatures due to global warming and move north; and they meet and mate with female polar bears who have come ashore due to shrinking ice. She uses this as a metaphor for migration, interbreeding, and the formation of evolution of language among human beings. Perhaps she can identify with it, because of her Trinidadian Indian-origin father and Canadian mother.

Peggy Mohan then takes us to the Caribbean sugar-plantations of yesteryear, populated by slaves from West Africa speaking mutually unintelligible languages. The only way they could connect is through a highly simplified language containing very few words from the language of their masters - and this was how pidgin originated. Their children, however, with the innate ability of children to learn new languages, made it into a proper language with grammar and structure called a creole.

The first slave languages to appear were pidgins—stripped down, unstable codes made up on the spot. It was just adults throwing new words together—words they heard from the white people who owned the estates. But it was children, with the genetic ability to pick up a first language out of all the talk they hear, who pieced together the pidgin words and made them into creoles that could do everything natural languages did. When parents, and indeed a whole community, is reduced to connecting through a pidgin, that pidgin becomes the only input the children get for working out their first language. Fortunately, children are able to take this raw material and impose a regular structure on it, with rules for grammar and syntax and a standardized vocabulary, turning it into a creole. A creole, according to this model, is simply a pidgin that has—due to the innate ability of young children—evolved into a native language and, in the process, fleshed out and become stable. Creole languages were like evolution happening before our eyes.

Mohan uses this model to analyse the evolution of Indian languages, from the Sanskrit of the Aryan settlers and the tongue of the people indigenous to the subcontinent. There is an interesting process happening here, by the way; while the vocabulary is mostly borrowed from the language of the dominant group (in the case of the creoles, the European languages), the grammatical substratum is from the subaltern group (African languages). In India, the dominant language is Sanskrit and the language of the "little people" (as the author terms the subalterns), various indigenous Dravidian languages.

In all migrations, it is usually the men of an aggressive race who migrate - and they take women as wives from the submissive race. In the process of "going native", these people elevate their children by their "alien" wives to the same race. This aspect is evident from genetic evidence, through certain DNA which gets preferentially passed on through the matrilineal and patrilineal routes.

All the genetic code that makes us what we are are packed into twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that we all carry in the nuclei of our cells, plus the mitochondrial DNA or the mtDNA that stays outside. This is called a person’s genome. In the twenty-three pairs, one of each pair inherited from each parent, exactly one pair – the sex chromosomes – will differ. If the type is XX, the person will be female, and if the type is XY, the person will be male. The Y-chromosome is passed relatively unchanged from male parent to male progeny, while the mtDNA is passed on without change from the female parent to both male and female progeny: but it gets further transmitted only through the female line. Thus, the mapping of these two over the human population spread across the globe helps us to get a genetic map of the world’s population. And since there are minor mutations to both the Y-chromosome and mtDNA that get accumulated over time, it provides us with the genetic history of the changes over time, too – combined with the DNA analysis of skeletal remains. (This info is from Early Indians.)

Thus, the presence or absence of mum's or dad's DNA can tell scientists, where the migration happened, and in which direction. It is similar with languages.

What we are on the lookout for are the two distinct parental streams we saw in the Caribbean creoles: the vocabulary layer, on the one hand, which is the superficial legacy of the more powerful group in the fray, and the more intrinsic sound system and grammar, which tell the maternal side of the story—the ‘mother’ in ‘mother tongue’.

And the investigative journey through this linguistic DNA is an absorbing one. In six chapters, Peggy Mohan takes us through various stages of this language evolution though the metamorphosis of Sanskrit by its marriage with the Dravidian language; the development of Malayalam (my native tongue!), where the process started relatively late in history; the evolution of the 'Indo-Aryan' languages; the formation of Hindi and Urdu - more of a political process than linguistic; the tale of the languages of the Northeast, the so-called 'Magadhan' languages, taking as example Assamese and Nagamese; and the invasive species called English, which is slowly killing off our native tongues by being enshrined as the language of the elite. It's a bit complex, and one will have to read slowly, trying to articulate the words and capture the dramatic nuances - but it is worth one's time to do so. In fact, this is one book which repays multiple readings.

It's not a complete history of Indian languages in any sense. Prominent tongues like Bengali and Tamil are conspicuous by their absence. Rather, this is a primer for any layman interested in the culture and literature of our mind-blowingly diverse nation.

[Chandana Kuruganty · Rating 5 out of 5]

" In the very form of the mixed languages we speak, as we go about our daily lives, are encoded unwritten parts of our long, long history."

This was my 100th book of the year and also the most immersive read of the year! I'm still trying to figure out the causation and correlation there, but hands down my best book of year 2021.

What is so amazing about the book:

1. Utilizing the language evolution route to take us through Indian History
2. Breaking down linguistic jargon into simple examples and analogies
3. Providing linguistic explanations for Author's view point on history
4. Comparison with global language evolution models to provide understanding
5. Leading us to the conclusion on probable fate of Indian languages in era of globalisation and homogenity

Because of its information content, this is not a short read, but a challenging and intellectually simulating read that will take time to completely sink in. Also certain points seem repetitive and over stressed but they help us remain with the author through her thoughts and research work.

Recommended read for history lovers and linguistics subject enthusiasts.

P.S.: * I spotted one error on page 230 where there is year mistype of 1876 for Lord Cornwallis which is in actual 1786. Hopefully this gets corrected in further editions/prints.

[Supreeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm having hard time to find any other linguistic history book for subcontinental languages. For that alone, this should be held a bit higher. Although, in no way, this can be considered as introduction to subcontinental lingusitic history given that it misses out on many popular tongues (Kannada, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu etc). It serves it's purpose as any non-academical, pop-history book does. Starting from Dravidian retroflex sounds infiltrating sanksrit to the recent Hinglish phenomenon, Peggy Mohan has picked few instances of language-from-history/history-from-language to fit in this short book including Malayalam, Sanskrit, Nagamese, Hindi, Urdu, Caribbean creoles. For the ones who wouldn't want to read the whole thing, the last chapter of the book 'Confluence' has the exact summary of the whole book condensed to 20 pages. The chapter on Indian English is just too cliched, and all the communism metaphors are weird. Still, for someone who could at least relate to Indian sounds, this is very engaging

[Jyotsna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because of my intense love for languages (I speak five) and my fascination with linguistics.

Urdu, like Uzbek in eorlier times, claimed Persian as an illustrious ancestor, though it was just a family friend. And Hindi clutched at Sanskrit, that language with familiar words but a totally unfamiliar system of grammatical cases, singular-dual-plural contrasts and bewildering 'samdhi' rules that only the most linguistically inclined ever loved. In a grandiose sweep that demolished history itself, Sanskrit was put forward as the ancestor of not just this brand new Shuddh Hindi, but the Mother of all languages.

This book takes you on a journey starting with the Aryan migration, and the way our Indian languages are designed in terms of multiple verbal connotations like retroflex and dental sounds. What it really ends up tracing is a history of Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Nagamese, Marathi and many other Indo-Aryan languages that saw a steep change in the way they were written and spoken over a period of time.

The book may come across as radical to many who have been taught Indian history, but Peggy Mohan is straight and to the point busting all the old-fashioned myths.

The first 6 chapters deal with history, migration and changes in the way we speak our mother tongue, the 7th deals with how English is influencing how we speak them and the 8th summarizes the book in a compact form.

This is an academic read, which takes a lot of your time and is very challenging to get through, but at the end, you would have learnt something new about the language you speak for sure.

The tongues we have travelled with since we know ourselves are no different from the other creatures we have been sharing space with on this planet, living things that have been vanishing faster and faster. Language extinctions are like those other extinctions: they happen not because something is wrong with our flora, fauna and languages, but because our environment has begun to go sour. The only way we can survive this age, with all the other living things that are part of our world, is to pause, look back and see where we came from, and think hard about where we are headed.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

An interesting look at the history of India through linguistics. I found the chapter on the first major topic—how the sound systems of ancient Indian languages became part of the language of the Sanskrit-speaking migrants—a struggle, but most of the rest of the book quite compelling, as it discusses how various languages have influenced each other, and the geographic spread of specific language features. The book doesn’t assume a background in linguistics, though some prior knowledge helps. It does assume some knowledge of Indian history and languages, and will probably be best appreciated by those with a connection to the subcontinent, though it is still a worthwhile read without.

I put off reviewing this too long, and the book is not easily distilled into factoids, but a few interesting points:

- Mohan returns repeatedly to the question of pidgins and creoles, and whether any Indian languages were formed this way. She comes from a pretty fascinating background herself, having grown up in Trinidad with a father whose family migrated from India, and a Canadian mother, and speaking Trinidadian Creole English as well as Trinidadian Bhojpuri. (She ultimately relocated to India and has lived there for 40 years.) So she compares language formation in India with the arrival of successive waves of migrants to creole formation in the Caribbean. While the social circumstances were quite distinct, there are similarities in the way features of the mother tongue of the disadvantaged majority, forced to learn some other dominant language, can wind up making their way into that language. In the Caribbean, creoles tend to have similar grammar across islands and regardless of the European language involved, because their grammar came primarily from (mutually incomprehensible, hence the need for the creole, but structurally similar) West African languages. In India, retroflexion (a way of making sounds that I’m still not sure I understand, the written word not being the ideal way to demonstrate this) seems to have originated on the subcontinent and become part of almost all languages spoken there, even those that originally came from somewhere else. There’s a similar story with grammatical features like ergativity, where the subject of a sentence changes when put in the past tense.

- There’s a big difference between bilingualism and diglossia, the latter referring to a situation where someone speaks multiple languages, but each only partially and in its own distinct sphere, meaning that translating between the two is actually quite difficult. This commonly happens when someone learns one language very young, but goes to school in another; rather than fully grasping their “mother tongue,” it can wind up becoming a language only used to discuss household matters and talk to children and the elderly, while discussion of anything more complex requires the dominant language.

- So many places and cultures here I’d love to read more about: the ancient, pre-Vedic Harappan civilization, which was apparently peaceful and egalitarian despite having developed agriculture and cities. The Nairs of Kerala, who were matrilineal, so that the women lived and raised their children at home while engaging in long-term sexual partnerships with Brahmin men who never moved in with them. Nagaland, the mountainous home to many different tribes with their own languages, residing in fortified and often booby-trapped hilltop villages. And more—so many stories I’ve never heard!

Like seemingly most linguistics books, this one ends on a downer, as the English-language invasion is putting other languages at risk. And it doesn’t purport to be a catalog of Indian languages: there are major ones referenced mostly in passing and through comparisons of specific features. But this book is definitely an interesting investigation of Indian history through language and worthwhile reading for the interested.

[Appu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peggy Mohan, the author, is a linguist. She shows that History leaves its imprints on languages. Therefore, languages function as living artifacts through which history can be reconstructed. She traces the meta-events of Indian history through the study of Indian languages.

The intellectual Right wing in India has been peddling the theory that the peoples of India have an indigenous origin. They reject the Aryan invasion/migration into India from central Asia. Instead, they claim that migrants went out from India and peopled central Asia and Europe. This heterodox theory of Indian history is repeated ad nauseum and threatens to enter school and college textbooks. It is of little concern to its proponents that their theory cannot explain the social reality of India, be it differences of caste, racial differences between peoples of North and South India and the plurality of language families in India.

In a recent book, Tony Joseph showed that genetic studies vindicated the conventional ideas about the history of ancient India. Peggy Mohan through her analysis of modern Indian languages shows that India has been shaped by wave after wave of migrations from West and East of the Subcontinent.

Around 60,000 years ago, out of Africa migrants moved into India. They eventually reached all parts of the subcontinent. Circa 3500 BCE, a group of migrants from the Zagros valley of Iran moved into northwest India and created what is now known as the Indus valley civilization, a vast bronze age urban civilization. Around 1500 BCE, this civilization gave way to the Aryan migrants from the central Asian steppes. The Harappan people moved to central India and south India and mixed with the out of Africa migrants and created distinct linguistic communities. The Aryans eventually moved eastward along the Ganges River. They obviously mixed with Harapan people. Meanwhile eastern India also witnessed the migrations from Southeast Asia mainly in two waves. Munda people of central India represents a mixture of SE Asian migrants and out of Africa migrants. The people of Brahmaputra valley represent an inter-mixture of the eastward arm of Aryans and the East Asian migrants. Tony Joseph uses the metaphor of a pizza to explain genetic mix up of the Indian populations. The base of the pizza everywhere is the out of Africa migrants the top layers are the Harrapans, the Aryans and the east Asians. But their relative proportions vary from region to region.

Languages of India tell us the same story. Creole languages are formed when two distinct racial groups mix; vocabulary may be of the dominant group, but the underlying language structure will be of the majority group. Indo-European languages in India are basically creole languages, vocabulary is Sanskritic, but grammar is Dravidian. Retro-flexion or sounds made when the tongue touches the upper palette is a feature of Dravidian languages. But retro-flexion is present in all Indo-European languages of India, including Sanskrit, proving that Aryan Dravidian inter-mixture occurred. Mohan argues that Aryan migrants to India were probably all male, thus necessitating an inter-mixture with the native population.

Compound verbs are another feature of Indian languages, including Indo-European languages. But compound verbs are missing from Indo-European languages outside of India, suggesting that once Indo-Europeans entered India, their languages underwent a profound change because of racial inter-mixture.

Kerala represents an area where the Aryan (Indo-European) influence occurred somewhat late. In the 9th century CE, Namboodiri Brahmans moved into Kerala carrying with them the Sanskrit language. This ultimately resulted in Malayalam acquiring a large Sanskrit vocabulary. But unlike most Indian languages (Sanskrit included), verbs don’t change with the gender of the subject in Malayalam.

In Eastern India, Assamese language though an Indo-European language, lacks retro-flexion, thus indicating that Dravidian influence has not occurred. Munda languages of east central India also lacks retro-flexion. This confirms the view that these people emerged out of an inter-mixture of out of Africa migrants with an early group of migrants from Southeast Asia.

Although English has been present in India for centuries, no creole version of the language has emerged, indicating that there has been little racial mix. However English as spoken in India has also acquired retro-flexion. Peggy Mohan characterizes Indian English as an 'invasive species' that threatens to undermine Indian languages. She draws a distinction between ‘bilingualism’ and ‘diglossia’. When the British were in India, the Indian elite learned the English language for professional or academic reasons. This was a situation of bilingualism. Two languages co-existed side by side, each performing its specific function. However now English has a more dominant role in India and is increasingly used for transactions earlier reserved for Indian languages. The Indian languages are getting marginalised. This is a situation of diglossia. “Diglossia then is a slow variant of language death. India is on its way to becoming by a few orders of magnitude, the largest English-speaking nation on Earth”. Mohan warns that unless education is imparted in local language, decimation of the local language is inevitable.

This is a fascinating book, even for those with little or no knowledge of linguistics or intricacies of grammar.

[V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially found this book a bit difficult to read, partly because of the actual content (the differences between a pidgin and a creole, retroflexions etc etc) and partly because of the book's style, but it grew on me. What a fascinating book - a lens into how languages evolve and how language is a good mirror into societal forces overall. My only "funda" about languages has been the Sapir Whorf hypothesis through some other books, but I'm super noob

Regardless - highly highly recommend. Some things that stood out below. Caveat: I'm sure a lot of Peggy Mohan's theories are debatable, and I'm not deep enough in this space to know theory v/s fact, so take it fwiw

- Fundamentally, the idea that the evolution of a language is linked to interaction between communities, implicitly bakes in relative power and interaction, is related to the specifics of the interaction (e.g., whether a migrating group was all men, v/s included both men and women). Made me think about languages as more of a reflection of culture and society...

- The distinction between change in a language's substratum v/s a language's vocabulary. Have heard a lot more about the latter, but found it revelatory that it's helpful to look at the former to see where a language comes from e.g., looking at what South Asian languages have retroflexion vs not to figure out what has Dravidian roots

- The distinction between bilingualism and diglossia. This was big for me -- I've struggled with explaining how I can speak 3 languages (Tamil, Kannada, English) with varying degrees of comfort, but the more accurate description is "triglossia" -- my ability to use Kannada and Tamil is restricted to specific contexts, a reflection of the contexts in which I used these languages. To my dismay, I am not multilingual. Ugh

- On Sanskrit, the multiple phases of Sanskrit. The first phase with with a slow adjustment with a variety of Prakrits, close to Sanskrit and the second phase of homogenization of Sanskrit linked to when the Kuru tribe emerged victorious.

- On Namboodiri Brahmins and Malayalam/Sanksrit - how the oldest Brahmin son had to marry within their caste, while younger sons could have "sambandams" with Nair women, and how that affected Malayalam, especially in the Manipravaalam era.

- On the development of Hindi and Urdu, how Dakkani became a distinct dialect in Hyderabad, and Hyderabad became a center of literary Urdu, so much so that you could easily believe that Urdu developed in the South, i.e. Hyderabad. On Rekhta, an early form of Hindi and Urdu, and how Persian started getting infused with Indian Prakrits. How for a long time, Persian remained the language of government and the courts of law in British India, but was deliberately and forcibly changed after the revolt of 1857, to "replace Persian with the local vernaculars", as part of the British Raj's larger Divide and Rule strategy. How a section of Hindu society realized the political utility of the British recognizing Hindi without the Persian vocabulary of Urdu. The deliberate attempts to "Sanskritize" Hindi, similar to how Rekhta derived value from its Persian influence.

- On Indian English and Hinglish, the nature of how British women also traveling to India affected the nature of language evolution in the subcontinent, retaining English as a language of power. How Indian English behaves like just another Prakrit. How Indian English reveals diglossic tendencies, there is likely a class of people in India who may have an ability with Hinglish without full bilingual capabilities in either Hindi or English. The thesis that the current prevalence of diglossic Hinglish is one instance of a larger societal movement towards English, the accepted language of power and capital

- The broader question of what it means to retain tradition, including languages. What do we lose when we lose a language? If you believe we lose a lot, are we okay with force from a state (e.g., mandatory first language being Kannada till high school), at the cost of other considerations?

Great book for me, glad I labored through it.

[Dr Aneez A · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some chapters are written clumsily , and many repetition.

Creole,Pidgins,koine,
Retroflex consonants , voiced aspirations are genetic signature of south asian language(except assam)
Study the Y chromosomal DNA and not mDNA since only males came in
Tiramisu bear .. only one way to make it!
Tamil brahmins -sambandam (primogeniture)
We have no way of understanding what illiterate people spoke in past. (No records .. everything is conjecture). The minority (literates/victors) leave their impression
Grammatical structure from locals and words from visitors
Malayalam compared to tamil (no person markers in verbs, so needs a pronoun njan tinnunnu.
Bilingualism vs diglossia
Buddhists and kanina were downgraded to ezhava and thiyyar , after brahmins defeated them.
St Thomas came to kerala 70CE-syrian christian/Antioch in Iraq(Armaic->Syriac)
Manipravalam and old pattu tradition
Semitic languages-
Mappila= son in law.. ‘respected visitors from abroad’: Juda Mappilas (Jews), Nasrani (Christian, or ‘Nazarene’) Mappilas, and Muslim Mappilas.
Purity is a convenient political myth(Aryans stopped intermixing after the got enuff females , british stopped intermixing after Suez opened)
Politics between hindi urdu (and english)
In children tv , why should the charecter face u and not sideway/profile
Why Macaulay introduced english in india

Khusru, Ghalib, Zatalli,
Ergativity
Naga language is a tone language(like chinese)
Where does preying of language doesn't happen? Mountain/island, poor people,

[Pratik Rath · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5

This book was perfect for someone like me: no formal education in linguistics, well versed with about 5-6 languages from different regions and interested in the history and culture of India.

Peggy does a fantastic job of conveying the mechanisms of language development and change, emphasizing the role played by migrations and political upheavals.

She gives examples from all around the world beginning with the Caribbean where creoles developed quickly through the brutal process of slave trade. She then explores the different languages of India contrasting features of Indo -Aryan languages in the north with Dravidian languages in the south to the Magadhan sub group in the east and the Austro asiatic languages sprinkled around the subcontinent.

I had a lot of fun understanding linguistic concepts like retroflexion, ergativity and other such things that I've known subconsciously through the languages I speak. The book made me consciously aware of why I was struggling to translate certain sentences from Odia to Hindi, or how certain features of Marathi derive from the Dravidian languages and seem alien to Hindi speakers.

The book ends with an extremely interesting and relevant discussion of Hinglish, something that has grown exponentially in the last few generations. She puts language evolution in the context of similar processes that took place in multiple segments of history and makes one think about the future of languages.

[Harsha Raghuram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read. Highly recommended if you are interested in Indian languages and/or sociolinguistics. The author uses analogies and parallel examples to paint a picture of how series of migrations to the Indian subcontinent shaped its languages. She provokes the reader to think about things before continuing to answer them. Some parts of the book read almost as if she's taking you along her train of thought in trying to decipher the origin of a language as we know it today. The number of references from Wikipedia and other not-strictly-academic sources are a bit unsettling given the seriousness of the topic, but I would like to believe that they don't impact the main story all that much. I read Tony Joseph's book "Early Indians" just before this one and it unexpectedly set a great context for this book.

[Rohini Murugan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Language has always been a thorny topic in India. Partly, due to the sheer number of languages in the subcontinent. But another equally compelling reason is simply that language plays a major role in anchoring a person to their identity. We find ourselves more often than not, naturally gravitating towards people who speak our own tongues. It might be because they are easier to communicate with, they are more likely to understand where your ideas come from or they would just have more things in common with you. Be what it may be, language evokes strong emotions.

This book revolves around that strong cultural force and traces the growth and change of certain Indian languages. And by tracing language, the author also deftly traces the historical migratory roots of Indians, including major events like Aryan migration, the establishment of the Sultanate, the Mughal era and ending with the colonisation. The number of touchy topics keeps increasing, don't they?

The author gets credit for her navigation through all these thorny concepts subtly through the veil of language evolutions. She goes into great detail about how Hindi as we know it today came to be. How Malayalam, a Dravidian language absorbed the components of Sansrit from the North. The Magadha family of languages. The curious case of Nagamese. She manages to describe as many major language families as she could. The prose is littered with sentence exemplars from various languages and the linguistic details in which they each vary. Though it felt a bit too heavy at times, these exemplars helped navigate the otherwise linguistics-heavy text, easier. This book is a great lay-man introduction, with a bit of heavy handedness, to the history of India and its languages.

With that being said, I have bones to pick with the author. Firstly, I felt like the book was written with the North Indian audience in mind. I might be wrong, but even if I am correct, it is not wrong to write a book to only a subset of the population - that's okay. But, it jumps out of the text, especially when it goes something like 'since we have grown up thinking our language (Hindi) is da-da-da...', and when your language is not Hindi, you take a pause and feel a bit annoyed.

Second, the writing. The prose is linguistics heavy, at times. I lost track of how to pronounce the transliterated phonemes (like the r with a dot overhead) just 20% into the book, so I would recommend a paperback so that one can at least turn the pages back. It was hard to do so with my Kindle. The author's jokes also don't land. I am sorry, but I know she tried and maybe it is a personal quirk, but I did not find them funny. Places where she talks passionately about language truly moved me, sometimes to even tears. But, humour, not so much.

Taken together, this book did not move me as much as 'Early Indians' did. Or rather, it moved me in other ways. Towards the end, I felt a wave of despair pass over me as she described how India was moving towards the possibility of a large-scale language extinction event, with most of us gradually transforming to English. I felt moved to do something about it. It really made me think of possible pedagogical solutions to this serious problem. It made me miss speaking in my mother tongue for a greater proportion of my day.

So yes, this book did move me. Despite some prose difficulties, I not only learned a lot about my country's languages but also felt alarmed at the very many snowballing effects that colonialism has had on us.

[Sucheta · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Book review as a form of nostalgia):

I grew up on the Chhotanagpur plateau, listening to the locally accented Hindi of everyone around me, the Bhojpuri of my father’s family, the Magahi of my mother’s family, the Bengali of many of my neighbours and some of my own family, the English of my schooling and our aspirations, the Oriya of my adolescence, the Punjabi and Urdu of our movies.

In kindergarten, I remember asking my parents of the Bhojpuri “nearay baa” and “lauka taani” were linked to the English “it is near” and “I am looking”. I remember it elicited a laugh. I remember my father correcting the dental “s” sound I had picked up for the Hindi word for evening- “Saam nahi Shaam”. I remember him telling me how the Hindi alphabet moves slowly with each set from the back of one’s throat to the lips - “Ka Cha Ta Tha Pa”. Like a linguistic Sargam.

The Turkish Chorba (for soup) rang familiar to my ears because I had known the Urdu Shorba. “Bahasa” Indonesia sounded like “Bhasha” in Hindi. I knew that languages could connect cultures historically but like most lay people, was merely aware of superficial similarities in words I came across. Peggy Mohan’s book made the deeper reaches of language extremely accessible, and put it all in beautiful historical perspective.

The linguistic substratum that allows us to have the retroflex “Ta” links us to the pre-Vedic Dravidians. The substratum in Magadhan languages where there is no “Sha” (hence the “Saam” of my childhood) tells me that Magadhan languages aren’t simply “dialects” of Hindi but quite independent cousins.

I remember a slight discomfort when I moved to Delhi with my linguistic heritage, of “Bihari” being considered a lower form of Hindi. Self respect came to me in the form of correcting the ignorance of people who thought “Bihari” was a language. The way I would later correct people abroad who thought “Indian” was a language.

I later heard the phrase “language is dialect with an army”, and Mohan demonstrates this so beautifully, drawing from history, genetic studies, even evolutionary biology to fuel her linguistic narrative of our history. She tells us about how the gentle little people, whom history tends to ignore, actually gave us the substratum, the deeper roots of our language. While the conquerors and victors may have made their mark in history books and languages of governance, the roots of what we speak, their scaffolds belong to the little people who carried on just living through history. We carry them within us and have a choice to cherish their gentleness.

The linguistic baggage of my childhood came along with my own migrations. I always prided myself in being multi-accented, my Hindi took on a Delhi, Bihari, or Oriya accent depending on where I was. Now in England and raising a child, it is more Hinglish than it has ever been. More than anything, the book highlighted to me how the right environment makes or breaks a language. How do I keep my words from dying? By creating a home for them, the home in which my daughter will grow up. No pressure.

[Harsh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Logic is somewhere inaccurate and approach is also biased.

[Manu]

For a while, I have been fascinated by the similarity in words across languages - from the simple biradar-brother to the slightly more elaborate Agni-ignite. I even started a Twitter thread to keep track of these 'discoveries'. Linguistics per se, the theory of it though, is less of a fascination. I started reading it with the notion that it would be this, but was pleasantly surprised. I love history and that's what Peggy Mohan has actually done using language(s) and their evolution as her tool.
She gives us a quick introduction with Creoles in the Caribbean, and points out the appearance of the vocabulary layer, which is influenced by the more powerful group (usually male) and the more intrinsic sound and grammar, which is the maternal side of the story - mother tongue. With this background she brings the narrative to India and creates a storyline using different languages.
She begins with the presence of sounds of Dravidian origin in the recitation of the Rig Veda, and with supporting historical & DNA evidence of a male-driven migration about 3500 year ago when the Harappan civilisation was in decline, traces the Vedic male - local wife combination which led to the Dravidian sounds in the Rig Veda. To be noted that this didn't happen in the beginning when they were orally preserved and transferred, but around 700 years later when they were formally compiled, edited and written down, reflecting a Sanskrit which by then had vernacular sounds. This was also when the Kuru super-tribe spread east and south, from Kabul to Andhra, taking Sanskrit along. This Sanskrit then mixed with the language of the elite in these regions and created the first versions of Prakrit. As the language trickled down from the elite to the masses, or rather, locals moved up in lifestyles and hence words used, the influence of the latter's native tongue became stronger and around 1000 CE marked the beginning of the Indo Aryan languages, first as dialects in small areas, and then gradually expanding their domain.
Meanwhile, in my little state of Kerala, around 800 CE, brahmins relocated from the north - Namboodiris, at the behest of local kings. As with the story up north, male-driven migration + local women and an elite happened. The brahmins' original Apabhramsa language (a 'corrupted form of Sanskrit that didn't follow Paninian rules) faded because they had to pick up Malayalam in the long-term, and centuries later, a new language Manipravalam emerged - Sanskrit nouns in (erstwhile) Malayalam sentences. Interesting that a sociopolitical tumult also happened here around the same time - the rise of the Second Chera Empire and the beginning of a strong Malayali identity distinct from Tamil/Cholas. In parallel, a resurgence of Hinduism at the expense of Buddhism and the re-emergence of Brahminical Hinduism.
Similarly, the Central Asian influx into the north (Delhi Sultanate, Mughals) brought with it Uzbek, which quickly vanished as the Central Asians started using the dialect in the region (Hindi) as their vernacular. It was only in the late 1700s that they moved from using Persian as the official language and started writing in Hindi - then renamed Urdu, with an infusion of Persian nouns.
She then takes us to the contemporary example of Nagamese - the grammar of Assamese and a small portion of Naga. It grows even as the both Assamese and the Naga languages continue to exist. The flashback on Assamese is Ahom, courtesy migrants from Burma. This itself is a later episode of the SE Asia + Munda people of the Magadha region. This combination, and the presence of the Vratyas, a pre-Vedic Arya group, is what makes the Magadha languages different from Dravidian.
The most recent play- British and English. The British not only created a Hindi-Urdu divide which hadn't existed before, but also, thanks to having Indian employees, got the latter to pick up English, though mostly in 'Prakrit English' form in the beginning. Ironically, English really spread only after Independence, because the elites wanted to retain their hold on power using language as an access point, and were helped by the fact that no single language had the heft to cover the entire country. And that's where we are now. 'What had started as a code to identify the elite snowballed into something set to replace our older languages and cultures as it trickled down, forging a new homogeneity.'
I have to admit I glazed over some of the parts where she decided to go a little deep (by my standards) on technicality of language, but I found the book to be mostly accessible, and definitely fascinating. If you're even vaguely interested in history, this is a must-read.

Interesting points
Cows as a metaphor for women in the Rig Veda.
The uncanny resemblance between Panini, and the Phoenicians (Poeni in Latin)
Ditto Turkic Ordu (army) and horde
Urdu got its name in the Deccan in 1780, and in its later usage was practically the same as Hindi, both belonging to Hindus and Muslims, until the British decided to cause a split by trying to create a shudh Sanskritisedversion of Hindi, and in addition the use of Devanagari script. The idea being that they wanted to undermine Urdu, written in Persian script, because it was associated with the Mughal empire.

[Madhulika Liddle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peggy Mohan begins Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages by referring to what she dubs the 'Tiramisu bear': a newly evolved (and very rare) hybrid bear species produced as a result of male grizzlies having travelled further north than their usual domain, and ending up mating with female polar bears.

Mohan uses the ‘Tiramisu bear’ idea to explain creolization in languages (males travel to new areas in search of greener pastures, mate with local females, and the offspring of the match ‘invent’ a new language, a pidgin, derived from the languages of their parents). Starting with a brief history of creolization and how pidgins developed in the Caribbean, she goes on to show how similar processes of language development have taken place in India.

The book is divided into eight chapters, of which A Tiramisu Bear is the introduction and Confluence is the conclusion. The six chapters between these each take a close look at some of India’s languages that are important as milestones not just in India’s linguistic history but otherwise too: as a marker of socio-political or economic history, for instance. Sanskrit, Malayalam, the ‘Indo-Aryan’ languages, Urdu and Hindi, Nagamese, and English: for each of these, Mohan goes deep into how the language arose, how it evolved, what it has reflected (through its evolution) of the people who contributed to it.

This book is an eye-opener. There was so much here that I hadn’t known, hadn’t even imagined. Of course, one realizes that languages borrow from each other, but just how much, where and when and how—fascinating. Mohan writes with authority, and yet in a clear, friendly way, often providing everyday examples that help explain the point she makes. I have to admit that the very complex nature of these many histories means that the finer details had, to some extent, deserted me by the time I ended the book, but still. At least I learnt something, and at least this is a great place to do some research into Indian languages.

Highly recommended.

[হাঁটুপানির জলদস্যু · Rating 4 out of 5]

বইটা ভাষাপ্রত্নতত্ত্ব নিয়ে। বেশ কিছু অনুমানের (hypothesis) সুতো টেনে লেখিকা একটা কামকাওয়াস্তে জাল বুনতে চেয়েছেন; উদ্দেশ্য: অতীতের অনশ্মীভূত কিছু ঘটনার ব্যাখ্যা সে জালে পাকড়ানো। সব অনুমান নিশ্ছিদ্র-প্রমাণসমর্থিত নয়, তাই এ জালে ছোটবড় ফোকর আছে। তারপরও বইটা চিত্তাকর্ষক।

কৃষ্ণসাগরতীর ছেড়ে পশ্চিম ভারতে হাজির আর্যদের সাথে ভারতবাসী দ্রাবিড়ের কায়িক ও ভাষিক মিশ্রণ নিয়ে বইটিতে কিছু অনুমান (যেমন প্রাক-ঋগ্বেদিক সংস্কৃতে মূর্ধন্য ধ্বনিগুলো ছিলো না, দ্রাবিড়দের প্রভাবে এগুলো কয়েকশ বছর ধরে কথ্য সংস্কৃত/প্রাকৃতে প্রবেশ করে) আছে, যেগুলো ভাষাপ্রত্নতত্ত্বে আগ্রহী পাঠকের মনে চিন্তা আর জিজ্ঞাসা উসকে দেবে। আর্য-দ্রাবিড়ের সাক্ষাৎ এবং/অথবা সংঘাতের দৃশ্যকল্পটিকে (কমবেশি সাড়ে তিন হাজার বছর আগের ঘটনা) পরবর্তী সময়ে কেরালার নাম্বুদ্রি ব্রাহ্মণ আর নায়ার রাজবংশের সম্পর্কের সাথে তুলনা টেনে (তেরোশ বছর আগের ঘটনা) লেখিকা দেখাতে চেয়েছেন, অনশ্মীভূত অতীতেও অমনটা ঘটে থাকতে পারে। পাশাপাশি হিন্দি-উর্দুসহ পশ্চিমভারতীয় আরও কয়েকটি ভাষায় আর্গ্যাটিভ কেইসের (বাংলায় প্রয়োক্তাকারক বলা যেতে পারে; বাংলা ভাষায় এ বৈশিষ্ট্য অনুপস্থিত বলে ব্যাকরণে এর জন্যে পরিভাষা অন্তত আমার জানামতে নেই) উদাহরণ টেনে মোহন দেখিয়েছেন, এটি এমনকি সংস্কৃত বা দ্রাবিড় ভাষারও বৈশিষ্ট্য নয়; বরং প্রাচীন ইরানের যে অভিবাসী কৃষকসমাজ সিন্ধু সভ্যতার যুগে ভারতবর্ষে এসেছিলো, তাদের ভাষায় এ বৈশিষ্ট্যটি আছে। হরপ্পাইয়া ভাষা (কেউ জানে না সেটা আদপে কেমন ছিলো) সে বৈশিষ্ট্যটির ধারক হয়ে থাকতে পারে। পশ্চিমভারতীয় ভাষাগুলো তাই আর্য-দ্রাবিড়-হরপ্পাইয়া তিনটি ভাষা থেকেই কাঠামো আর ধ্বনির সংশ্লেষে বেড়ে উঠেছে, এমন একটি অনুমান উঠে এসেছে বইটিতে। হিন্দি আর উর্দু যে আদপে অভিন্ন দেহলভি ভাষা, এবং কীভাবে ইংরেজদের প্ররোচনা আর হিন্দু-মুসলিম রাজনীতির কোপে পড়ে এক ভাষা দুই লিপির ওপর ভর করে দুটি ভিন্ন রূপ নিলো, তা নিয়ে চমকপ্রদ বর্ণনা আছে বইটিতে।

ভারত রাষ্ট্রে ইংরেজির স্ফীতি আর তার চাপে ভারতীয় ভাষাগুলোর বর্তমান-ভবিষ্যৎ নিয়ে আলোচনায় বইটি শেষ হয়েছে অসহায় বীক্ষকের মৃদু ক্ষোভ নিয়ে। আমি নিজে সে ক্ষোভের সরব অংশী বলে বইটির জন্যে একটি তারা বাড়তি দিলাম।

[Prabodh Sharma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peggy Mohan was born in Trinidad to a Canadian Mother and a Trinidadian father of Indian origin. West Indies or Carribean islands are one of the best places to analyze how new languages develop due to the growth of creoles (new languages picking up broad contours of many others) in the last 500 years. Peggy's focus here is not on the languages themselves, but on what language can tell us about migrations and the fusion and change they bring. As she says in the book, "Language, or rather linguistic archaeology, could be another useful tool for studying a people’s history."

Some excerpts from the book...

Creoles in West Indies: During the times of slave trade from 1600's to late 1800's, Africans from different nationalities were brought to the West Indies. With no means of understanding each other or their white masters, the people developed Pidgin. It was just adults throwing new words together—words they heard from the white people who owned the estates. But it was children, with the genetic ability to pick up a first language out of all the talk they hear, who pieced together the pidgin words and made them into creoles that could do everything natural languages did. When parents, and indeed a whole community, is reduced to connecting through a pidgin, that pidgin becomes the only input the children get for working out their first language. Fortunately, children are able to take this raw material and impose a regular structure on it, with rules for grammar and syntax and a standardized vocabulary, turning it into a creole.

How Sanskrit of Central Asian migrants imbibed Dravidian Retroflexions
Peggy begins with the fact that retroflexion is more or less an exclusive feature of the languages of Indian subcontinent. Retroflexion is the usage of sounds like T (as in Lota), Dha (as in Dhakkan), Tha (as in Thakur) etc. This is also present in the Rig Veda (For eg. in agnisuktaṁ, the first hymn in the first maṇḍala of Śākalya’s Rig Veda, the first word has a Dravidian sound) . But if retroflexion is exclusively Indian feature, how did Sanskrit of Rig Veda come to possess it?

Peggy resolves this conundrum through 2 studies - one in 2008 revealed that basis Mitochondrial DNA analysis (which is passed from mother only), no influx from Central Asia happened in India. However, another one in 2017 revealed basis Y-DNA (which is passed from the male line), there was a huge influx during the bronze age period in India. This means that the ‘Aryans’ had truly existed, but, like most explorers anywhere, they had almost all been male! Hence they had to mate with local women and produced children of mixed genes (and so goes all misplaced notions of ethnic purity in many Brahmans) . Now the local populace and females were Dravidian speakers and hence the mother tongue of the child was Dravidian (containing retroflexion). When after the age of around 5, the child was taught the father's language (or Sanskrit), the recitation acquired the Dravidian accent. Rig Veda was part of Shruti tradition - recited and passed orally through various sage families. It was eventually compiled (the only extant version produced by Sakalya) during the Kuru wave of migration which engulfed whole of North India, and this retroflexion became part of Rig Veda. This points to a tradition of linguistically mixed families, with women speaking an older language still prevalent in the local community, or a mixed Prakrit variety, passing it on to their children before the boys were weaned away to focus on their ‘father tongue’. Sanskrit was handed down at some early period by a majority of speakers who learnt it as a second language, their first language being Dravidian.

In Kālidāsa’s play, Abhijñānaśākuntalam, composed in the post-Rig Vedic period somewhere between the first century BCE and the fourth century CE, the men speak in Sanskrit and the women speak a local Prakrit. The book also throws light on how Prakrit looked like. Peggy says, "It is too close to Sanskrit, just as the English spoken by Indian bureaucrats, bābus, during the British Raj was actually standard English, though with a strong Indian accent."

Phases of development of Sanskrit
Sanskrit had two distinct phases. The first was when small groups of Vedic men appeared and settled in the North-west, coming in over generations, or even centuries. It was not an invasion scenario that called for major adjustments from the local people. This phase would have had, in its earliest days, a Sanskrit that did not yet have retroflexion, and almost immediately the early Prakrits—vernacular languages close to Sanskrit but spoken with a strong local accent by the local women who became Vedic wives, their half-Vedic children and a number of elite local men. The existence of Prakrits, close to Sanskrit in their words and grammars, tells us that the communication impasse was easily handled. Prakrits were languages that were close enough to Sanskrit in their grammars to have been approximations of Sanskrit itself, though spoken with a local accent.

The second phase of Sanskrit started hundreds of years later, when the Kuru tribe emerged victorious from a long spate of battles between the Rig Vedic tribes, becoming a super-tribe and starting an expansion covering ‘all of northern India, from the Kabul river (Gandhāra) to Aṅga, Puṇḍra (Bengal), and to Vidarbha (N.E. Mahārāṣṭra), [and] Andhra in the south’. This phase would have been militaristic, a capture of territory, and it saw the emergence of what grew into a caste system, with the Rig Vedic hymns collected and arranged into saṁhitās because the new regime required the śrauta rituals to formalize the status of kṣatriyas, the warrior class.

Interesting tale of Namboodiri Brahmans in Kerala
Malayalam, the language of Kerala, is part of the Dravidian language family, though it has grown a thick top coat of Sanskrit. These Sanskrit words have been adapted to the sound system of a Dravidian language in exactly the way the first Prakrits spoken by the earlier people of the Rig Vedic North-west were. The presence of Sanskrit in Kerala traces back to the arrival of Namboodiri Brahmins in the region around the eighth century CE, on the invitation of local kings who offered them tax-exempt land grants under a system called janmi if they performed śrauta fire rituals, rooted in the Vedas. These rituals were done in order to legitimize the kings’ status as rulers.

Namboodiri Brahmins were patrilineal, and they also followed rules of primogeniture. That is, the eldest son was to marry a woman of his own caste and keep strict control of the family land as it passed from generation to generation. However, the younger Brahmin sons were not allowed to marry within their own caste and have Brahmin children, as that would fragment the landholdings. They could instead have sambandams, marital arrangements with Nair women, who were from the same caste as the kings, while the Nair men were engaged in battle far away. Nairs were matrilineal, so this allowed younger Namboodiri men to go on living as Brahmins in their own homes and never actually move in with their wives, while these women stayed on in their original family homes and brought up the children of the relationship as Nairs. In time, nearly all the kings of Kerala had Namboodiri fathers, though they themselves were Nairs.

Phoenicians in India
When the Vedic people reached the north-west of the subcontinent, they found other people there besides the local Dravidians. One group that they mention was the Paṇi, who were traders with possible links to the Phoenicians, whose name in Latin was Poeni. These Paṇi would have spoken Phoenician, a Semitic language that originated in Syria and Palestine (or ‘Canaan’) related to Hebrew and Aramaic, and which was written from right to left. There are Aramaic stone markers in Taxila and Afghanistan of Emperor Ashoka. Aramaic was the official language of the Achaemenid Empire that covered present-day Iran and Afghanistan. If the Paṇi were the Phoenicians, they would not have had a retroflex sound like ṇ in their name when they first came to India, just as earliest Vedic Sanskrit did not: it would have been an n. In other words, the story of the Paṇi is like a precursor to the Vedic people’s story. They had to have intermarried with the local Dravidians, as male explorers are prone to do. Soon the community itself became local, with the final stamp of belonging being the n in Poeni mutating into the ṇ in ‘Paṇi’. Their original language has been lost, though we get signals of their presence in a possible mercantile need for writing in order to keep records.

Meaning of Mapilla
The word ‘Mappila’ is interesting, as it means, simply, ‘son-in-law’, and it is still used in Malayalam with that meaning in situations unlinked to Mappila Muslims. It is a word that recalls an old matrilineal society where a son-in-law was something of a guest in the family, approved but somewhat transitory, as the Arab sons-in-law in their dhows were. Syrian Christians and Arab sailors were all, in early times, sons-in-law in the sense that they were outsiders who married local women, thereby creating a community that grew further by adding converts from the rest of the local population. All three communities were referred to as Mappilas because they were started by ‘respected visitors from abroad’: Juda Mappilas (Jews), Nasrani (Christian, or ‘Nazarene’) Mappilas, and Muslim Mappilas.

Development of Hindi
There is a huge distance separating Hindi from Sanskrit. The language that grew into early Hindi traces a murky path alongside early Prakrits, Middle Indo-Aryan and the Apabhraṁśas to what it was when the Central Asians set up the Delhi Sultanate. Hindi goes back, on its paternal side, not to Sanskrit, which was a perfected gem and, as such, an evolutionary dead end, but to the Prakrits, and all its words came from this source. The twelfth-century Dehlavi dialect was very close to modern Hindi. Braj and Awadhi were older, and had important literature, but in the end, it was the as-yet-unnamed newcomer that prevailed. This new dialect had the amazing good fortune to be based in Delhi, the city where the first Central Asians set up their Sultanate. There is nothing like being situated in a large urban centre of commerce and political power to give a language an edge, even if the inner circle of power is speaking something else. Over time, as the size of its shadow grew, more and more of its one-time competitors found themselves relegated to being seen as just ‘dialects of Hindi’.
The Central Asians took early Hindi (not yet named Urdu) as their new vernacular, the way the Namboodiris adopted Malayalam. When, in the 1700s, they began to write their ghazals in Hindi, soon renamed Urdu, they infused it with nouns from Persian in exactly the same way as the Namboodiris had brought Sanskrit nouns into Maṇipravāḷam, leaving verbs and other parts of the vocabulary untouched.

Separation of Urdu and Hindi
A section of Hindu society was waking up to the advantages that would accrue to them personally if the British recognized Hindi as a language separate from Urdu without all the Persian vocabulary and written in Devanagari (Kaithi had been a writing system developed by the Kayasths, the scribe caste, and it was a script known to both Hindus and Muslims. This is what made it unpopular with the Brahmin lobby when, in British times, a candidate was being sought to replace the Persian script, which the British wanted to phase out as it was a reminder of the Mughal Empire. The Brahmins wanted in its place a script and a variety of Hindi that they would know better than anyone else and thus came Devnagari).

Urdu, like Uzbek in earlier times, claimed Persian as an illustrious ancestor, though it was just a family friend. And Hindi clutched at Sanskrit, that language with familiar words but a totally unfamiliar system of grammatical cases, singular-dual-plural contrasts and bewildering saṁdhi rules that only the most linguistically inclined ever loved. The notion that a Sanskritized Hindi restored an earlier age of glory was a seed that did not fall on barren soil. It was as easy as that to bury the fact that Hindi and Urdu were a single language, a twelfth-century Delhi dialect already blinking its newborn eyes before Qutbuddin Aibak came and made Delhi his home, a shared language that fell victim to divide-and-rule politics during the British Raj. What had once been a single language was splitting into two, in the manner of a living cell becoming two separate life forms. Divide and rule reached its inevitable culmination when the British were about to leave, and the erstwhile British India split into two sovereign independent countries: India and Pakistan.

On Urdu
We wish we had taken the time to know it better, because whenever we go to an evening event where it is let out of its golden cage, we feel we are in touch with a better world we should have kept safe. We hear scattered voices in the audience murmuring in appreciation, or chuckling at arcane humour, marking themselves present as ones who still understand, willing themselves back into that magical age. Then they walk out the door trying to extend the dream, speaking to each other in the old, old tongue they remember from another life.

What is Koine?
The term ‘koine’ dates back to Greece around 600 CE, when a ‘fairly uniform’ variety of Greek emerged and served as a link language between Greece, Macedonia and the parts of Africa and the Middle East. In that sense, a koine is not a hybrid at all, just a local dialect, but because it is located at the centre of a new market economy or a new political order, it gets upgraded, acquiring a top layer of words that it needs for its expanded role, besides the basic vocabulary that it retains from its original dialect form. The Maoist political party in India, for instance, wanting a local language for its serious work, has arrived at its own koine variety of Gōndi, a language spoken by nearly twelve million Gōnd Adivasis in the states of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Madhya Pradesh by upgrading one of the Gōndi dialects and giving it all the roles of a modern language.

I had a few doubts while reading the book:
1. The structure of Malayalam changed during Manipravalam era due to the impact of Sanskrit of the Namboodiri brahmins. However, we have seen that the substratum is something that unconsciously remains when a less advantaged community tries to learn a new and elusive prestige language. How did the substratum changed with the contact which should have only changed the superstratum at best?

2. Author states that in the West Indies, the creoles that sprang into existence built their grammars not around the stripped-down pidgins, but around West African notions of grammatical order that had never gone away. However, earlier the author also stated that the pidgin grows into a creole with the help of very young children using genetically guided intuition as pidgin is the first language they hear. How did very young children made grammar rules for pidgins similar to West African notions when they were only acting on genetically guided intuition?

[Shyamal · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very nice introduction to linguistics and language evolution in India.

[Anubhav Chattoraj · Rating 3 out of 5]

Are the Indo-Aryan languages creoles?

To anyone with a passing knowledge of Indo-Aryan languages and creoles, the answer is obvious: No, they're not.

Peggy Mohan nevertheless decides to pose this question in the opening chapter of her book - and then meanders through 300-odd pages to conclude with the obvious: No, the Indo-Aryan languages are not creoles. Of course not.

I don't wish to imply that this book is useless. It contains much useful information - I, for one, had never before pondered the difference between bilingualism and diglossia, or known that Babur's mother tongue was Uzbek or that he wrote in a Turkic literary language called Chagatai, or that the common Urdu words "apa" (sister) and "khala" (aunt) are borrowings from Babur's native tongue.

But then again, is any of this true or did Mohan get all of it wrong?

The book is about historical linguistics, but Dr Peggy Mohan is not a historical linguist (but she is a linguist). It also isn't clear if she's currently active in the linguistic academia; at present, she's a schoolteacher of music.

None of this is a problem, of course. The problem is that Mohan's level of erudition doesn't seem to be commensurate with the book she's tried to write. She repeatedly resorts to citing Wikipedia (which is a no-no) and still gets very basic facts wrong. For instance, she says Christopher Columbus "followed his hunch that the world was round". This is, of course, a common misconception; the fact is that every educated person in the entire Old World already knew the world was round. Columbus's sales pitch was that everyone else had messed up the calculations and Asia was much closer than anyone thought. He was, of course, utterly wrong about this, but had the good fortune of stumbling upon an undiscovered continent just where he'd though he'd find the east coast of Asia.

Mohan's ignorance extends even to linguistics itself. She repeatedly asserts, without further comment, that Turkic is part of the Altaic language family. The very existence of such a language family is a fringe theory, not too far removed from the Nostratic family, the phantom time hypothesis, or aliens building the pyramids. (This video is a reasonably good summary of the controversy around Altaic, although it mixes up the chronology a bit.)

The second problem I have with the book is that it's too long for what it's trying to communicate. The Christopher Columbus aside mentioned above adds nothing to the book. The glib moralizing about English replacing the Indian languages and canaries-in-the-mine is uncalled-for. The whole framing device of creoles and whether Indo-Aryan languages are creoles is irrelevant and could have been stripped out. I could list a dozen more unnecessary digressions.

Returning to the positives, it bears mentioning the book does a great job presenting one particular way features of one language can "leak into" another, which is "substrate influence": people whose native language is X start speaking language Y as a court language / literary language / high language or whatever, but their Y isn't perfect and over time they introduce features from X into it. Mohan gives multiple examples (whether provable or supposed) of this happening through Indian history, and this is the crux of the book.

All told, I think that this is a book worth reading. It is, however, deeply unfortunate that its contents need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

Indian linguistics deserves better. India deserves better.

We deserve homegrown Michael Witzels, Colin Masicas, Asko Parpolas, Sheldon Pollocks, and John McWhorters. Where are they?

[Adwaith S S · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave up. To tough for me. Probably this will benefit those who are interested in linguistics or know linguistics.

[Suman Srivastava · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read. I never thought linguistics could be so interesting. The book reads like a detective novel in places.


Along the way I learnt a lot about grammar too. English grammar as well as Hindi and other Indian languages.

[Sudipt Roy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book appears to be recycled PhD thesis. The book will find it difficult to hold the interest of a reader who is interested but is not academically trained in linguistics or related fields.

[E.T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5 One of my best reads of the year !
Wanderers, Kings, Merchants - the title suggested that it was another book with a single idea too dear to the author. And that everything had been hammered to fit in with that idea. Somewhat like Niall Ferguson. But forgive my prejudice, the name "Peggy" too sounded like a nickname of an oversmart historian. And so, despite hearing her speak on my favourite podcasts, I ignored the book. Not to mention the small matter that it had received positive reviews by a couple of loony Leftists not known for being objective. But a friend's review led me to pick it up finally.
This is actually a confident, well-researched and convincing book. With some very interesting takes on India's history through the evolution of its languages. By accident of birth in Trinidad and her ancestry, the author was able to do a comparative analysis of Creole languages in the Caribbean and various Indian languages.
A no. of languages - Creole(s), Sanskrit, Malayalam, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Nagamese and the cherry on top Hinglish have been discussed in sufficient depth. Although I did find a few of the implications too far-fetched and some yawning gaps unanswered, I still found it to be a damn good read ! Highly recommended !
PS:- I have always been a little uncomfortable with Hinglish - believing it to be a corruption and/or snobbery - but this book made me see otherwise.

[Kaustab Choudhury · Rating 4 out of 5]

All of us are aware of the trite adage that "history is written by the victors," but not all of us are aware that history does not need to be explicitly written for it to be preserved. The fact that the history and geography of a people are embedded into the very linguistics of the languages they speak was an idea that came to me as an epiphany. I had known about the Romani people ("Gypsies", which is a misnomer, since they are not actually from Egypt), who are historically one of the most persecuted classes of people in the world. They have no written historical records or stories of their origin, and so we had no clue whence they came and how they lived as early as one thousand years into the past. This changed when linguists soon noticed that the language spoken by these people were a distinctly Sanskritic Proto-Indo-European variety. Through an inquiry done on the linguistic architecture of the Romani language, it was concluded that they must have begun their migration from northwestern India around the medieval period, and over a period of centuries landed themselves in the Balkans (their origin was later confirmed with genetic evidence). The Romani people found a voice that was hidden in plain view in their language itself.

Hindi, the language often mischaracterised as the national language of India (there is no such thing, except, if anything, English), and its twin language Urdu, are the lovechild of one dialect of a particularly northern 12th-century variant of Prakrit (Prakrits were non-standardised Sanskritic tongues) and the centuries of Persian influence it has been subjected to. The Persian influence in Hindi is so significant that it simply cannot be ignored. There is, thus, quite a bit of historical information encoded into the language. Even if we had no written record of the Khiljis and Mughals and had forgotten about them, some clever linguist somewhere in the world may have been able to figure all of that out just by looking at the structure of this instrinsically Sanskritic language.

Most of the languages of India belong to the Proto-Indo-European family of languages (the other major family is the Dravidian language family), a hypothetical connection first drawn by Sir William Jones of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in the late 1700s. The proposition has since withstood all linguistic criticism. Yet, the corollary of this theory is that the people of the subcontinent and the people of Europe have a common origin somewhere in between these two locations. This was a proposition capable of frightening Indians then as much as it does people like me now -- for these are sensitive subjects. But recent genetic findings seem to agree with this hypothesis. The people who migrated to (and not invaded) India roughly 4000 years ago had their origins in the Eurasian Steppe; the same origin point from which people also migrated to Europe. This is how the oldest languages of these common-origin people there (Latin, Classical Greek) and here (Sanskrit) have so much in common, and, consequently, all the languages that took birth from the cradle of these old languages have so much in common. [Some interesting examples: Argentina was named so because of the silvery objects that the region was known for before it got colonised ("argentum" is Latin for silver); "Arjun", a fairly common name in India, also the name of the subject of Krishna's sermon in the Bhagavadgita, is also the Sanskrit word for "shiny" or "silvery". "Atma" is Sanskrit (and the term thus finds its way into all modern Indian languages) for "soul", which literally comes from "breath of life" (since the soul is the essence of life); in modern German, "atmen" means "to breathe". "Pater", "father", "pita", etc. all have a common origin, as do "mater", "mother", "matri", etc. More examples here.]

This origin story was hypothesised (seemingly correctly) by linguists centuries before it was looked into genetically, and before we found any concrete evidence hinting at such a migration. Our cultural fright in this regard arises from how this implies that so many of the elements we hold so dear and central to "our" culture are, actually (or, so it seems), not native to the subcontinent in the first place. But such obsession with an origin story that lacks evidence cannot and should not change knowledge, nor should it affect our natural inclination to inquire what the true origins are.

It is primarily to answer this question that I picked up Peggy Mohan's book. In short, I needed a brief linguistic survey of the languages of India. I had endless questions about the origins and syntactic qualities of all the languages I have been hearing around me as I grew up. And I had more questions about what these features tell us about the history of the people who bear some language as a symbol of their culture. (Having read the book, I have even more questions now; but at least some of my earlier ones have been answered.)

Languages are living, breathing, evolving entities. They respond to the environment and the sociopolitical shifts around them. These changes are then recorded into the linguistic structure of the language in question. Observing the tapestry of patterns in a language, therefore, can yield much of value about the people who speak the language. This becomes especially relevant when there are gaps in the (written) history of the people. Many of those gaps can, and do, get unveiled with this kind of a linguistic inquiry. This exercise also enables somebody, even perhaps somebody not experienced in linguistics, to examine their own language and at least ask the impartial analytical questions that can lead to answers of value about one's own past.

Languages can die, too. Many are already dead -- much like extinct species on earth. Without level-headedness and belief in the beauty and sanctity of every language around us, we will end up killing more of them. It is our negligence that will lead to the loss of such wealth of history -- uninfluenced by any one "author" (the hypothetical victor in the adage) -- but we must try to prevent that. All of India is now converging unchecked into planned homogenisation in English, which is gradually becoming our (only) national language. Despite the make-believe truisms about our diversity and strength of unity therein, very little has been done or is being done to protect the very thing we claim to be proud of and that which strengthens us as a collective unit.

Indians unanimously hate Thomas Macaulay for being naive enough to not see the merits in Persian and Sanskrit, he instead forced English down our throats. But even Macaulay was always in support of Indian children undergoing their primary education in native/local Indian languages, and only shifting to English after they gained proficiency in their own native tongues. English in India truly began to thrive after the British left, when the Macaulayian primary education system was uprooted by our government in favour of a wholly English setup (where a student starts and completes their education entirely with English as the medium of communication). It was partly inevitable, due to the fact that there was no other unifying language connecting all of us (and so we had to resort to this entirely foreign language, the very symbol of our lack of freedom). This new setup took many decades to take proper effect, but now it is exactly what stands in full view, everywhere around the country, blocking our own view at the information that remain concealed in our own local languages. I completed my own education under this setup. I was never taught Bengali (my native tongue) in school. I had to learn it at home.

The bleak dystopia that the youth of our nation are now headed towards is one where they promptly forget (or, not even learn) to read and write, and sometimes even speak, their Tamil or Punjabi or Bengali in exchange for an English taught in school -- a language implicitly promising them (and, more importantly, their parents) a better future, under the condition that they gain native-like proficiency in it. Is this really where we want our nation to head?

"The technological advances that expand the distances in our lives -- turning us into perpetual commuters, always on the road from our suburban homes to our distant workplaces, creating wider and wider ribbons of asphalt and concrete across our landscape -- are bundling us together into a single global mega-community. This, in turn, pushes us towards homogeneity, and a politics that seeks complete control of land, resources and people. Today when we speak with concern about our little languages -- more as relics than as living systems that could challenge our smooth-running world, just as we wish the tigers tamely alive but far away on their reserves, not prowling our city streets -- the name of the game is inclusion. Large numbers of people outside the system are a threat to order. So we fantasize about the poor keeping our little languages warm for us, on their 'tiger reserves', and we sustain the illusion that we have not changed, while the mega-system pushes everyone, even these poor people, towards connectivity in English.

Languages are like those canaries that go with miners into dark paths that are full of danger. Like those canaries, they die first, long before we humans can sense that the air has begun to go bad. When languages die, it is an omen, of things to come that are still beyond our range of vision. In our desperate chase after that last bit of treasure, we have become like the children we see at Diwali time with masks over their noses, bursting their last firecrackers into the polluted air.

The tongues we have travelled with since we know ourselves are no different from the other creatures we have been sharing space with on this planet, living things that have been vanishing faster and faster. Language extinctions are like those other extinctions: they happen not because something is wrong with our flora, fauna and languages, but because our environment has begun to go sour. The only way we can survive this age, with all the other living things that are part of our world, is to pause, look back and see where we came from, and think hard about where we are headed."

[Ananda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though linguistics as a field can be daunting, with its own system of notations and technical terms (ergativity, for example), Peggy Mohan does an admirable job in not bringing in jargon unnecessarily. She also provides simple, comparative examples as needed.

This is probably the book of personal journeys [in linguistics] that Peggy Mohan wanted to write (I think she says as much in the book). Part of her roots are in Trinidad and the study of Trinidadian Bhojpuri has been her research domain. 

The title of the book points to the agents who cause changes to languages when they - as wanderers, merchants and kings - set in motion the movement and contact of human beings - and their languages.

As the author states in the opening chapter, this is not a book about (all) languages in India, but about "language mixture" in India and the glimpse that mixing provides of the "backstory" of the Indians.

In the Indian/South Asian context, the story of language-mixture in the book starts with the story of  Sanskrit - and that too, it seems, spurred chiefly by a research paper by linguist-Sanskritist Madhav Despande (formerly of Uni. of Michigan, also Mohan's alma mater). In that paper, Deshpande had reflected on the presence of "retroflexes" in Sanskrit, because, it seems, there was a time in its development that Sanskrit did not have retroflexes. As a recap, retroflexes in Indian languages - Hindi/Sanskrit here for example - mean "sounds"/letters/alphabets like  ट, ड [represented as ṭ, ḍ in English] etc which are "harder" versions of त, द. These are also called cerebrals or murdhanya in Sanskrit/Hindi. 

With the hitherto unexplained presence of retroflexes in Sanskrit as her jumping-off ground, Mohan then starts her probe into possible scenarios that could have led to the adoption and inclusion of these retroflexes. Where and from whom did they come from? Since the journey - or the path - of Sanskrit in the subcontinent is considered to be the same as that of the "trickling in" of Indo-Aryans - it was their language - this leads to a bit of historical linguistics. Mohan delves into the contentious areas of Aryan immigration into South Asia. 

Mohan puts forth impressive scenarios of possible early contacts of the incoming Aryans with local populations, especially those who might have had retroflexes in their own languages. She utilizes more recent examples to test her hypotheses and this often leads us to various kinds of contacts people have had in the world and also how new languages or lingos have emerged. 
The different chapters of the book are her explorations of her initial quest to look at language mixture in Sanskrit. 

One can really not argue with the depth of scholarship that Mohan brings to bear on the issues at hand. She also has a very easygoing and engaging style, never hitting the reader over the head with her scholarship and learning. There is something reassuring about a master in a field, be that genetics or cosmology or linguistics, explaining difficult concepts in easy-to-understand language and manner.

--
That said, the whole journey of language mixture does seem a little tentative. It seems Mohan too anticipated such questions, especially about the start of the journey located in the story of Sanskrit and the phenomenon of retroflexes. In the concluding chapter of the book, titled "Confluences" she takes up these issues. "Retroflexion in the Rig Veda may not have been our best entry point into language mixture but we had no other," (262) she says. Fair enough.

One observation is that chronology in the subcontinent, especially for its prehistory is still quite tentative. The recent genetic studies have added another reference point to earlier archaeological records (BMAC, Harappan etc), especially of civilization in the northwest, but the immigration of the Indo-Aryans is still debated. Scholars like Michael Witzel have proposed certain dates for very long now, based mostly on linguistic and textual studies but there is no real consensus (Edwin Bryant's book is a good start for a summary of the various positions).

Neither is there any consensus on the interaction of the incoming Aryans with local people, though scholars have endlessly debated about the non-Aryans like dasas, dasyus, panis etc. Though Witzel has tried to actually trace some Vedic priests' family-names back to Iran, there is no definite agreement on such connections. Also, Mohan depends quite heavily on the Kuru "supertribe" theory of Prof. Witzel for her explanation of the redaction and final settlement of the Vedic samhitas. As another reviewer has written, she does seem to jump to conclusions a little conveniently. But I guess a good scholar will take such chances, will work with hypotheses. 

Her observations regarding Magadhan are certainly fascinating and one wishes she could have dwelt longer on Magadhan and Pali, say. Her observation that the vratyas as non-ritual-following Aryans who fled to Magadha is still in the murky realms of research. More productive might have been the strand of investigation of the Magadhans as Austro-Asiatic (AA) people. Maybe linguist John Peterson's work on "contact scenarios" between AA languages and MIAs could have come in handy.

Also, the issue of retroflexes has been engaged with quite extensively for over a century now as Heinrich Hock has documented. While there is a preponderance of the Dravidian influence theory, some scholars have also proposed an internal development of the retroflexes within Old Indo Aryan. Others have proposed that retroflexes developed in Sanskrit and the contact language side by side.

Though the retroflex problem suggests an insinuation by the local population - and maybe that is the subaltern politics of the book because Mohan often refers to "little people" who are bystanders in the grand course of history - it seems an odd way to begin the book on languages in India. Yet, as Mohan skillfully demonstrates,  the so-called Language of the Gods is not as pure and unsullied as it is made out to be; that it is possibly of mixed parentage, Aryan and non-Aryan at the same time. [Prof. Deshpande's recent NIAS lecture on outside influences on Sanskrit, available on youtube, is worth a look].

Is her story of retroflexes and the hybridity somehow the ancient backdrop to the narrative encapsulated in U.R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara; one of mixture, interbreeding, Brahmin-male-local-female, and creolization; the Samskrita - the perfected one - really Asamskrita, the imperfect one? That seems certainly worth it.
--

[Utkarsh Sankhla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found my my assessment of this book divided into two parts.

The first half of the book was tedious reading, with very deep incursions into structures and strata of languages during the Vedic period - I would think only a budding linguist would enjoy such depth and not an average reader. While I could appreciate Mohan’s efforts to make a strong (not watertight, since we are in the realm of linguistics) case for showcasing how Vedic languages had Dravidian influences and the connections between languages of the subcontinent, there were too many times I found myself shaking my head in exasperation at the repetitiveness I encountered through the process.

To be clear, the first half is great reading, but too academic and in the weeds for a reader like me who found the best part of the first half to be the mention of a work called ‘Gaandunama’ (The Life and Times of the Anus). Sue me for being like this.

The second half of the book though is a completely different thing. This is where Peggy really brings in her emotions and thoughts to us readers. The book becomes riveting, partially also because it is now describing the eras that are recent (the Mughals, Ahoms, Nagas, Britishers) and the language flux in these times are far more relatable.

My favourite lines from the book were when Peggy describes her experience of working with endangered languages. “Watching languages fade away… is heartbreaking. It feels like you are walking through a carnival which is over, though all the stalls and rides are there in place, but no one is there any more to enjoy them”. Proper heart tugging stuff, this.

The last chapters which talk about how English has become an invasive species in the subcontinent is something we all know but seem to be unable to do much about, given the socio-economic and political machinations that have been underfoot since centuries. There is a sense of poignancy as the book winds to the last pages, and it inspires me to pick up another vernacular literary piece this year - this is my own small act of rebellion in keeping the literary traditions of the subcontinent alive.

What I liked: The second half

What I didn’t like: The first half

[siriusedward · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well researched book written beautifully.. with a good narrative voice.. the language used , the words are woven together to make lovely images in your head.. I don't have words enough to praise the writing .
We start from the decline of the Harappas and the slow migration and eventual take over of the remnants of a declining , near to death Harappan civilization people by the immigrating male , arya or the Iranian people's and the introduction of sanskrit.. to the eventual diglossic hinglish.. and the question of where it journeys next...
Such a melting pot of culture and languages , beliefs was what our history was made of.
Layers and layers of rich cultures assimilating here by different means... the languages that were brought in or the languages that adapted or the languages born by such mixing.. what a journey we have been on... and with all the turbulence going on now.. in which direction will we move forward...?

This is a book I would want to turn back again and again..

[Viplove Tyagi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing!

[Henrikas Kuryla · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating dig into history of India based just on comparative analysis of languages.
The results are amazing having in mind there's basically no other information.
I can only regret I don't know any of languages discussed in the book, but still the general principles outlined made the read very enjoyable.