Peggy Mohan's Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages offers a fascinating linguistic journey through Indian history, examining how migrations, conquests, and cultural exchanges have shaped the languages of the subcontinent. The book provides a unique perspective on Indian history by using language as a lens to understand complex social, cultural, and political developments. Through detailed analysis of linguistic evolution, Mohan challenges conventional narratives about Indian languages while illuminating the deep connections between language, migration, gender, and power throughout India's history.
This is an excellent book, highly readable, full of illuminating metaphors, rich insight into how languages have been deployed and evolve in the subcontinent, with a light but valuable stream of the author's own personal journey that helps hold the narrative together. The insights and points that directly or indirectly illuminate the Indus civilization are many. For one thing, there is retroflexion and its amalgamation into languages in the northwest after Sanskrit and the Indo-Aryans arrived that suggests a proto-Dravidian connection to the ancient Indus language or languages. But there is also the use of ergativity that remains in the northwest and elsewhere that points to a feature of languages from western Asia and the Iranian plateau that might have played a role, and which points to an elusive "Language X" in the region. There are no clear answers around the ancient Indus language issue, but a lot to consider.
Yet it is the models for language introduction that Mohan describes happening time and time again in the Indian region over millennia that are the most interesting, the way a new language is brought by males from one region or another (there was also significant migration into the Gangetic plain from Southeast Asia, something often overlooked in all the focus on Aryans or not). These invading or newly settling males mate with women in the region, whose language structures are often preserved and weave their way into the newcomer's language. Nouns in particular are replaced but less so sentence structure and verb positions. This is because the children learn a mother tongue, and then a new language that works for religious observances as well as other needs, political and economic, in a new era. It is all about hybrids, and Mohan shows how these hybrids follow certain rules. Language changes are hastened or slowed depending on the suddenness of change, the political and economic circumstances in an area, something she discusses with great effect in the story of Namboodiri Brahmins moving into Kerala and the changes this wrought to Malayalam. She carries her analysis forward to the present, and the introduction and continuing story of English's dominance and its link to class and economic prospects since British times, yet nothing is entirely simple either: "So labels like English-based and French-based, like Indo-Aryan, are actually misleading, because they give importance to the people least active in the making and using of the new language" that forms in these interaction writes Mohan, and unpacking the many dimensions of this bold statement is what this book successfully does. "Language, or rather linguistic archaeology, could be another useful tool for studying people's history" (pp. 12,13) writes Mohan. With Wanderers, Kings, Merchants she delivers.
Parts of the book are a little complex, but most discussions are enlightened with solid metaphors like the "Tiramisu bear," a hybrid creature born when male grizzly bears migrate northward and mate with female polar bears, resulting in offspring with distinctive cream-colored fur on top and coffee-brown paws. This metaphor serves as a framework for understanding how languages form in layers through migration and interbreeding, similar to the Italian dessert tiramisu. Examples abound from the mixed Bhojpuri and Carribbean languages the author grew up around and must have been bewildered by to attempt such a wide and deep analysis while helping to keep the reader engaged and able to find resonance in their own experiences. The many chapters that lay out how Sanskrit came to the subcontinent and was woven into an existing tapestry of communication are most revealing, and Mohan is able to show how recent genetics supports the linguistic archaeology she is attempting and supports with a close reading of select texts in the Rig Veda.
The fact that she carries it so far forward and is able to connect it with modern experience makes this book outstanding. Along the way, many false beliefs are also exposed. For example, "Urdu" or what was then known as "Hindavi" was alive and kicking as a spoken language even as the first Delhi sultanate was being established. It did acquire Persian words in this process, but the substratum and an abundance of vocabulary were already there. Who knew that apa and khala were originally Uzbek words, and this itself was largely a Turkic language, which seems to be from a completely different language stream than Persian that originates with the Turkish people in Siberia – even as the Uzbeks adopted some Persian structures? A set of these Turkic words survive in Hindi today. Austro-Asiatic languages also have and continue to leave their impression on the subcontinent, and in this and many cases one feels that India "was like some ancient palimpsest upon which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously," as she quotes in the frontispiece from Nehru's The Discovery of India (1946).
"English has stayed because elite Indians wanted to preserve the old idea of a ruling class that lived far above in the stratosphere. And it continues to spread because the dream of independence and self-rule has inspired the poor, who see in this language the surest way to rise above sea level and gain their share of the sunlight" (p. 257) says Mohan. One could stretch the analogy and say that these some of these elite Indians have also been able to use English to help them vault their way on to the world stage by succeeding so well in other English-speaking countries too, even while, at home, Indians have evolved English with their own idioms and rules that give it new vigor and flavour.
The discussion of bilingualism and diglossia is also very relevant; the latter describes a "single competence that spans two (or more) languages, with the first language optimized for things to do with childhood, or interaction with the poor, and the second language with a less limited role. It is like the relationship between a local tree stump and the exotic graft strapped on to it, which will yield more marketable fruit and flowers" (p. 242).
A highly recommended detective story that spans wide slices of time and space, truly a tour de force that invites readers to reconsider conventional understandings of Indian languages and to recognize the complex, layered nature of linguistic development around the world. Nothing is simple when it comes to language evolution, but Mohan makes it fascinating and relevant.