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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peggy Mohan
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June 16 - September 18, 2025
William Jones had burst upon the scene in the mid-nineteenth century positing the existence of a family of Indo-European languages, of which Sanskrit was the jewel in the crown,
Michael Witzel, the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, places the entry of the Vedic people after the end of the Indus Valley Civilization:
kh, gh, ćh, jh, ṭh, ḍh, th, dh, ph and bh.34 The difference between the Hindi word bāt, ‘thing’ or ‘word’, and bhāt, ‘boiled rice’, is the hiss after the b that we call aspiration. These aspirated sounds do not exist outside the Indian subcontinent, and they are also not found in any of the Dravidian languages, except in Sanskrit loanwords,
Ārya is not ‘racial purity’, but an influx of population into the north-west of the subcontinent between 2000 and 1500 BCE who have a feature in their Y-DNA that tells not who they were at the time they got to India, but of one direct male ancestor along the paternal line at the place where the migration began.
Y-DNA descent line could end abruptly if a man along the thread had only daughters, though his daughters could recover it and pass it on to sons from husbands who had this Y-DNA tag.
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.
Did the British become bilingual when they ruled India? No: it was local Indians, the ones whose work put them in contact with the British, who felt the need to learn English.
Pāṇini composed the Aṣṭādhyāyī, an eight-part grammar of Sanskrit made up using phonetic set-theory and set out like an algorithm in lines of code. This infinity-l symbol that we find in Marathi, ळ, and in Dravidian languages, is absent from Pāṇini’s list of Sanskrit sounds.
Harappan Civilization, had great cities with no traces of palaces or temples, no evidence of any military activity, and no sign of ever having been attacked. It looks to have been the sort of egalitarian society that would put much of the present world to shame.
tempo of evolutionary change as not a smooth gradient, but as a step-jump landscape of long periods of stasis, when species are adapted to a stable environment, interspersed with short chaotic bursts of change following an ecological shock, with new species appearing while some existing ones go extinct.
The last dodo bird must have closed its tired old eyes one day, with no younger generation to take its place, because all the dodo eggs had been eaten by a new predator species: the rats that had come to Mauritius on the great ships with the explorers.77
Extinction happens not because a species is diseased or unfit, or following an inbuilt timetable that defines its lifespan. It happens because the environment has changed too fast and too drastically for the species to adapt.
Malayalam, the language of Kerala, is part of the Dravidian language family, though it has grown a thick top coat of Sanskrit.
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.
The mitochondria we have been talking about when we refer to mtDNA, for example, began as bacteria that invaded living cells about three billion years ago, but which neither ended up killing the cell, as bacteria often do, nor did they get expelled. Instead they stayed on and were harnessed to become the energy powerhouses that allowed cells to grow in size and complexity and eventually make all the larger life forms on this planet.
Arab traders, too, had been coming to the Malabar Coast of Kerala even before the time of the Prophet Muhammad, when they were not yet Muslims but were nonetheless speakers of Arabic. They later converted their families in Kerala to Islam right after this new religion appeared in Arabia and they themselves adopted it, creating the very first Muslim community in India, one
Aśoka used Middle Indo-Aryan, not Sanskrit, in the inscriptions he ordered written throughout his kingdom
Ashoka ruled from 268–232 BCE,
Genetic studies tell us that farmers from Iran came into the Indus Valley and mixed with hunter-gatherers indigenous to South Asia between 4700 and 3000 BCE,23
writing was not in Devanagari, though that is the script that is used to write Hindi and Marathi today. There were other local scripts: Kaithi in the north, and Mahājani and Moḍi
Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.
Turkish used the words Ramızān for the holy month of fasting and Namāz for the five-times-a-day prayer, just as Urdu did in India, rather than the Arabic words Ramadan (with its cavernous pharyngealized d sound) and Salat.
poet Mus’hafi, writing in Lucknow in 1780,8 who called the language ‘Urdu’ for the first time in writing: Khudā rakhe zubāN hamne sunī hai Mīr-o-Mirzā kī KahīN kisī mūNh se ham, e Mushāfī, Urdū hamārī hai. May God preserve this language that I first heard somehow From the mouth of Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Sauda, oh Mus’hafi! Urdu belongs to all of us!
The first conquest by an Arab army was in the year 712 when Muhammad bin Qasim conquered the province of Sindh, in the north-west, and made it a province of the Umayyad Caliphate.10 The next major conquest was in the tenth century, when Mahmud of Ghazni, from southern Afghanistan, conquered Punjab and made it a part of his Ghaznavid Empire.
Ghori’s conquest of Lahore in 1186 paved the way for Qutbuddin Aibak, his lieutenant and a former Mamluk slave from Turkic Central Asia, to become the first Sultan of Delhi.
Ghalib was born Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan in Agra in 1797. His father’s family had originally come from Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan,
Ghalib wrote 11,340 couplets in Persian, but only 1792 in Urdu.
A pidgin is only needed if there are diverse groups of little people who have no shared language, people who need to be integrated into a single group.
The story of Assamese—the language the Naga traders encountered—is like a prequel to the story of Nagamese. The Ahom people trace their origins back to the Tai-Ahom, who migrated from South East Asia and settled in the Brahmaputra Valley in the year 1228.
4000 years in the past, an encounter between Austroasiatic migrants coming from South East Asia and early Indians—Mundas—who were a separate culture from the Harappans.
For Europeans, India was the land from where all their spices came—cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, turmeric and, most important of all, black pepper—spices needed for preserving meat before the days of refrigeration.
Vasco da Gama, however, reached India from Portugal by a less fanciful route, following the coast of Africa and crossing the last stretch of ocean to make landfall in Calicut, in 1498.
Macaulay claimed that there was no higher education in Indian vernacular languages; and noted that the educational institutions supported by the East India Company were teaching either in Sanskrit or Persian medium.
British had begun the work of actively dismantling all things associated with Mughal rule, promoting a new-look Hindi, written in Devanagari script and stripped of all its Persian vocabulary, in place of Persian and Urdu (as
the Suez Canal opened in 1869, allowing smaller and faster ships to get to India by way of the Mediterranean, connecting straight to the Red Sea and then south along the coast to Bombay,
