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In the process, she bursts the bubble of purity of language - and race - as a construction, a political myth. Mohan impresses that ergativity exists in all languages, as she moves on to explore the caravan of Marathi, Bhojpuri, Balochi, Punjabi, Sindhi and many more tongues. In fact, in India boys are still educated, or at least parents try their best to do so, in the language of the economy while girls study in ‘native’ language(s), bearing the role of preservers of culture, which itself is decided and constructed mainly by powerful men. Such elucidation brings out the correlation between the patriarchal enterprise of power-shift and language mixing. But local women/wives continued speaking in the local language variants with their children. She found that women and men spoke different tongues wherein the language of the menfolk - the “father-tongue” - became the language of prestige and power, which boys were meant to learn to maintain patrilineal kinship. Probing the hidden story of Sanskrit, she chronicles how it was the result not of an Aryan invasion but of an influx, with male-only small groups entering from northwestern India in search of resources and mating with local women, speaking local languages.
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Her quest to seek answers to her questions on language takes her across oceans and countries without losing sight of her objective. For instance, when she mentions Babur, the first Mughal emperor who took on as his title the Persian word for tiger, it rang a bell in my head, resonating with ‘Babbar’, a north Indian surname, and ‘ babbar sher’, tiger in Hindi.Ī unique feature of Mohan’s narrative is that it seems autobiographical in many places, such as the conversation with her grandmother while trying to decipher her recorded notes. The interconnections among languages are unravelled delicately and lucidly. In the process, Mohan examines bilingualism, diglossia, Sanskritization, creolization and pidginization. She substantiates this with research findings from genetics, linguistic archaeology, anthropology and a web of connecting phonetics and syntaxes. These are a result of mixing and interaction between different variants of languages, especially the local and the native tongues of the travelling migrants. Questioning the notion of ‘purity of languages’ and showing it to be an illusion, Mohan begins her journey of India through its languages.
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Her writing style combines her personal journey, full of rich anecdotes from travels and interactions with scholars, with historical-linguistic research, making this book a fascinating read for anyone interested in studying the history of languages in India. Encapsulating the millennia-old historical evolution of languages in India - starting from the Vedic times of Prakrit, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Tamil to Nagamese and, eventually, bringing the story to its conclusion with Arabic, Persian, Turki, Urdu and Hindi, while also touching upon Rekhta, Hindavi and the impact of English on India’s language scenario - all in 300-odd pages is a tough task, which Mohan ambitiously undertakes and arduously advances in this book. How would you feel if someone put you in a time machine, whirled you into the past and then brought you back to the present, again and again, without losing the connection? That’s how I felt while reading Peggy Mohan’s Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through its Languages. Book: Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through Its Languages