Wanderers, Kings, Merchants Quotes

“for a language to acquire retroflexion is for it to become South Asian.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands. Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“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’. We still find otherwise thoughtful Indians asking: Well, if not Hindi, which other modern Indian language came directly from Sanskrit? It is hard to let go of a crutch we have grown up with—one every bit as powerful as the myth that all of us mixed people in the north are actually Ārya, or, more crudely put, The Master Race.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“More important than any ‘language problem’ is the need to protect the elite and keep it separate and more entitled than everyone else. English is the perfect tool for apartheid.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“Bilingualism and diglossia are different. Bilingualism is about two languages you know having essentially the same functions, such that it is easy to translate from one to the other. Simultaneous translators are bilingual, or even trilingual as the United Nations requires, because they need to be able to say exactly the same things in their different languages.

With diglossia, however, what you find is a child first learning one language and speaking it at home, and then later on, maybe at school, transiting to another language which is used for less basic things. The end result is not two separate languages that exist in parallel, but a single competence, where ground-level things are done in the first language and things to do with school, or the modern sector, in another. And since each of these languages is bound to its context, translation is not easy.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“The word Alexa! that switches on your household electronics is simply called a ‘wake word’: which makes Sanskrit Oṁ an early ‘wake word’ for getting the gods to sit up and listen! And you need not be ‘enlightened’: you can simply be ‘woke’.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“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.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“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.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“In many elite Hindu families in the Delhi region and the North-west, until about the time of Partition it was the custom for boys to learn Persian and Urdu and be literate in the Persian script, while the girls were taught Devanagari. Among elite Sikh families too, the boys would similarly be schooled in Persian and Urdu and know the Persian script, while the girls were taught Gurmukhi, the Punjabi script in which the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, is written.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“Alok Rai in his book Hindi Nationalism says that ‘till but a century back, this [Kaithi] script was better known and much more widespread than Nagari’. In the mid-1800s, the schools in the ‘North-west Provinces’ using Devanagari were ‘outnumbered’ by those using the Kaithi and Mahājani scripts. 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.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“Finding these mixed languages blooming around us, then, is a cause for celebration. What it means is that the little people were able to take on a suitable camouflage while tucking deep into the grammars and sound systems of their new languages precious relics of an earlier life. There is a truly ambidextrous feel to this achievement, one that reaffirms our bond with an older world while asserting our intention to take on the new. The link between Indo-Aryan languages and the Prakrits they got their words from is something dynamic, something negotiated by the little people with the new political entity that they had to face, a group that was not able to snuff out their old languages and hand them down a new operating system, wiping their memory clean of any other traces of their past. In the very forms of the mixed languages we speak, as we go about our daily lives, are encoded unwritten parts of our long, long history.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“Is it a step down for our language to be a mixed language, not really different from a creole? Shouldn’t highly evolved people like us be speaking a language that is . . . pure? That is a loaded question. If we believe in evolution, we should welcome adaptation. Languages are living things, and they live in ecosystems; they are highly responsive to signals from the environment, and there is a battle for survival going on out there, with new neighbours and new threats. Languages that refuse to adapt, languages that hide from the light, tend to go extinct. Their speakers pick up other languages to manage the daily grind, and over a very few generations those new languages take over. The”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“Variation in Retroflexion in South Asia (the white areas are areas without retroflexion)54”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“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.31 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; Emperor Ashoka also wrote his Prakrit edicts in the Aramaic script in this region, since Aramaic was the official language of the Achaemenid Empire that covered present-day Iran and Afghanistan.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“This avoidance of voiced aspirates in the languages of the North-west suggests that modern Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi and Pashto have what looks like a Dravidian substratum. Even Burushaski, a ‘language isolate’ with no known relatives from the remote Hunza Valley, has aspirates, though not voiced aspirates, and a dental-retroflex distinction.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“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.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“The Hinglish continuum, then, is an exit strategy. It is not a way of keeping one Indian language alive forever in parallel with English. The destination in India, for language, for the economy, and for politics, is the swift-flowing current taking us into the global arena. The only countries that have held off the decimation of their languages as they tread the neoliberal waters are those where all education has been firmly kept in a local language.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“What the Hinglish continuum does is draw out the time it takes for the last bit of Hindi to make its exit, with the Hindi in the mix lingering because it has become as much an expression of who we are as the English that tells which way we are headed. But the direction of flow is clear.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“When we make films for young children, we use point-of-view shots, with close-up frontal images of people talking directly into camera. If the shots on the screen are profile shots, of people speaking to each other but not directly to children who are watching, their eyes stray away from the screen. They do absorb what is happening, but they do not give it their full attention. They have a clear idea of when they are being spoken to, and what speech can be treated as background noise.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“Sreedhar noted that there needed to be more than two languages in contact for a true pidgin to be born: if there are only two languages in all, there is no language problem, as each of the two groups already has a language. 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. A pidgin does not emerge in order to facilitate conversation with the rulers. The people who would eventually speak the pidgin had to come from ‘two or more different and mutually unintelligible language backgrounds’, and there needed to be a ‘dominant (and usually alien) language which supplies much of the vocabulary’.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“...the emergence of new hybrid languages is not, per se, because new languages have come into the area, but because of upsets in the power structure caused by incomers who come with the intent of rising to the top of the food chain. Mixed languages are about power shifts, not about little people migrating as individuals.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages