THE WORLD WITHIN THE WORD

WITH A NEW BOOK, PEGGY MOHAN HAS HELPED CREATE A BRIDGE BETWEEN HOW WE SPEAK AND WHO WE ARE

- Alok Rai

WANDERERS, KINGS, MERCHANTS

The Story of India through Its Languages

by Peggy Mohan

PENGUIN VIKING

I have always been struck by the contrast between the seductive mystery of language and the kind of sterile stuff that emerges from traditional linguistics departments. Language is endlessly exciting. Philosophers wrestle with its elusive and irreducible ambiguity, poets make love with it, and linguists, they itemise the body parts! Happily, Peggy Mohan’s Wanderers, Kings, Merchants is an outlier in this dreary academic universe. A formidably trained linguist, Mohan recognises that the stories that language can tell go well beyond the tedious categories of formal linguistics.

India’s linguistic diversity is well-known. It is of a piece with the other kinds of diversity—sartorial, gastronomic, godly—and is similarly infuriating to tidy-minded puritans. The task that Mohan sets herself here is to ask “how did these languages come to mix and what does it tell us about the people who speak them?” Innocent enough, one would have thought. But this falls afoul of the “Aryans are us” hypothesis that, for mysterious reasons, commands great loyalty from a certain kind of Indian. This hypothesis affirms, basically, that the Aryans, bless them, originated in this blessed land and spread the light of their divine language and culture over the whole ungrateful, unknowing world. And, of course, it is our sacred duty to resume the role of vishwaguru and make this universal message better known. Anything that threatens this with talk—worse, evidence—of mixture, hybridisation, etc. is likely to be resisted.