Living Ramayanas

Title: Living Ramayanas – Exploring the Plurality of the Epic in Wayanad and the World
Author: Azeez Tharuvana
Translator: Obed Ebenezer S
Publisher: Eka, 2021 (First published in Malayalam: 2014)
ISBN: 9789390679737
Pages: 252

Ramayana is one of the original sources that make up the soul of India. Irrespective of the caste, creed, ethnicity or language of the people, this epic is known to every Indian worth the name. What is astonishing is its wide circulation even among societies which stay aloof from the mainstream such as Adivasis. Quite naturally, when an idea seeps down to every nook and cranny of the country, especially when the means and quality of communication were sparse and unreliable, a lot of subtle changes occur in the narrative as it changes hands across speakers spanning generations. Before the advent of writing or with illiterate people, the transfer of ideas happens only through the storage medium of human memory which is fallible. Besides, story tellers with a flair for the job embellish it to rivet the attention of the listeners. As a consequence, numerous variations of the Ramayana core tale occurred over the millennia. Ramayana continually adapted itself to the nature of the times, the people and the culture in which it has been produced. This work is translated from the Malayalam text ‘Wayanadan Ramayanam’. It examines the different versions circulating among tribal communities of Wayanad, in other states of India and also among overseas countries. This work is a partial record of the author’s research conducted under the guidance of Dr. A. Nujum. Azeez Tharuvana is a native of Wayanad and served as assistant director of the Institute for Tribal Studies and Research. He is currently professor and head of the department of Malayalam at Farook College, Kozhikode.

Among the tribal communities of Wayanad, there exist unique beliefs relating to the Ramayana story. Even within the same tribe, there are many different versions of the same legend. The tribal people use these versions of the Ramayana to justify their ritual beliefs, to trace their ancestry and to glorify their lineage. The book introduces three variations in common use in Wayanad and condenses the stories. There are similarities between them. The Adiya Ramayana, popular among the Adiya community, places the characters in Wayanad and the story unfolds there. Lanka is also in Wayanad. Ordinary human emotions and actions are attributed to the divine characters. In one of these, a dispute breaks out between Ram and Sita when the former discovers stones and sand in the gruel prepared by the latter! The native narratives link various locations like Sitakulam, Ashramkolly, Sasimala, Ponkuzhy, Thirunelli etc. in Wayanad to particular episodes in their version of the epic. Sitayanam and Wayanad Chetty Ramayana are also examined, where the latter is not much different from the standard version. In various regions of Wayanad, Lava and Kusa (Ram’s children) are called by different names such as Lavakuchan, Muriken, Atharvalar and so on. Many legends exist that link geological features such as streams, waterfalls, natural springs and rocks with the characters of Ramayana. There is a tributary of Kabani named Kannuneerpuzha (stream of tears) which is believed to have been formed by Sita’s tears at her abandonment by Ram.

Even though the author constantly endeavours to portray Dalits and Adivasis as separate from the Hindu fold, the nature of their beliefs and rituals scatter his arguments to the winds. Eventually, he helplessly concedes that savarna gods were incorporated by the Adivasis into their songs, but still raises a feeble caveat that these were modern. On the ground, the influence of Ramayana is genuine and rock-solid. The folk interpretation of mythological tales in Wayanad are inseparably linked to its landscape. This is similar to the relationship Indian epics have with Mount Kailash and the Himalayas and with the forest and forest-dwellers. Each tribal community appears to be a part of the Hindu caste hierarchy and aspires to rise higher by using legends, exactly like other castes do. Each community believes themselves to be noble. The genesis myth of Kurichyas claims that the Brahmins and Kurichyas are the noblest of Brahma’s creations. They are the only two pure castes on earth (p.61). Kurichyas believe themselves to be Ram’s soldiers. The Adivasis further believe that the traditional healing methods they use were taught to them by Shiva himself. And, Azeez treats them as non-Hindus! The book notes that Kerala was a stronghold of Buddhism in the ancient times and Wayanad was especially raised under the umbrella of Jainism. If these assumptions were true, we should have seen the Ramayana stories in Wayanad interspersed with Jain themes or at least influenced by them as seen in other parts of India. However, Azeez fails to mention any specific sway in the Wayanad folk tales that can be attributed to Buddhism or Jainism.

The book is very informative and provides many original snippets of knowledge regarding how Ramayana is so closely woven into the social fabric of Wayanad tribals. In spite of this, a wicked agenda is clearly discernible in the narrative. The author treats Dalits and Adivasis separate from Hindus and lets out comments like ‘the Hindus and Adivasis here both believe that this is the place where Sita devi disappeared into the earth’ (p.45). There are several references like this inserted casually into the text which try to drive a wedge right through the heart of Hindu society. In another instance, the book observes that several insertions have been added to the text of the Valmiki Ramayana to buttress and reinforce the concept of caste or Brahmin supremacy. Even though couched differently, the objective is the same. This is no wonder if you look back to the pre-partition days in India when the Muslim League was using the same technique using the same words. According to the author, the Adivasis seem to be oppressed and exploited only by the upper caste Hindus whereas all religious communities, including the Muslims and Christians in Wayanad do so. The foreword provided by K N Panikkar praises the author for ‘conducting the study by closely interacting with the tribal-Dalit-religious communities’. See the Left-Islamist cabal of historians harping on the same disruptive tune again and again? The author’s project guide for the research was Dr. A Nujum of the Aligarh Muslim University. He concludes that ‘when a dominant society gains the tendency to swallow up other smaller civilizations and sub-cultures, they resist by producing a thousand oral traditions’. The author is employed as a teaching faculty of the Farook College which is managed by the Islamic Rouzathul Uloom Association. Being so, Azeez should have shown a bit of decency and courtesy in denigrating the religious sensibilities of Hindus with statements like ‘Ramayana is not a historical text. It is a myth’.

The book introduces multiple versions of the Ramayana in vogue in other countries such as China, Japan, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Whichever land had any interactions with India, possess a piece of Ramayana story as a relic of the relationship. It is interesting to learn that Muslim communities in these nations also have internalized this story. In Malaysia and Indonesia, Allah, Adam, Gabriel and others from Islamic lore and faith figures are seen in the Ramayana versions. They assume the positions of Brahma, Vishnu and other deities of the Hindu faith (p.157). The chapter titled ‘Muslims and the Ramayana’ tries to reconcile Islamic tenets with Hindu ones to suggest a syncretic product. In a veiled reference to the famous Gita couplet sambhavami yuge yuge, the author claims Muslims believe that ‘whenever righteousness is threatened and society suffers moral and spiritual decay, prophets make their appearance in different parts of the world’ (p.149). This appears to be a deliberate falsehood to gain acceptance among other communities. Finality of the prophecy of Muhammad is a fundamental and irrepudiable concept of Islam. This means that there will be no prophets after Muhammad even if righteousness or morality is compromised.

Azeez provides a good simile to the spread of Ramayana far and wide. As water flowing through different lands mingles with the colour of soils along the way, our legends and myths too, as they travel across lands and communities, mingle with their environs and sensibilities. True to the title, the book surveys Ramayanas in the major Indian languages as well as Persian and Urdu. Ramayanas composed by Muslim poets in Kerala’s mappilappattu style and Arabic are also introduced. A determined effort was made in the Mughal times under Akbar to translate Hindu holy texts to Persian. He employed Badauni to translate Ramayana who modified some parts of it with the result that it came to be called ‘Akbar Ramayana’. Azeez describes the project as a happy labour of love but hides the real purpose of Badauni who undertook the work and his personal motive behind it. Without going into the details, let me say that it is not at all music to the ears and reflects exactly what we would expect from a bigot even today. To know more about Badauni’s attitude, see my earlier review of Audrey Truschke’s book, ‘Culture of Encounters – Sanskrit at the Mughal Court’.

The included creation legends of various tribes indicate the presence of Muslims in their midst and appear to be quite modern (p.58). Anyhow, the trait of inclusivity which it witnesses is compatible with the Pan-Indian spirit of tolerance. Even then the author uses his argument to find holes and widen the fault lines in Indian society. The focus of the book centres on the unfinished agenda of the Left-Islamist nexus to project the Ramayana not as a religious text with an authentic version, but instead as numerous versions of secular folk literature that reflect the life of the communities in which these tellings are created. Azeez tries to harp on the differences and variations in the narrative and claims the reason to be the exploitation of these communities by upper castes. He fails to see – or more probably, pretends not to see – that these slightly different versions unite them all together with the main text since these modifications are the earnest effort of these communities to partake a share of the epic poem that binds the nation together on the cultural sphere. This is also an attestation that whether hill or dale, tribal or city-dweller, every part and person in India is tied one way or the other to the national psyche through the Ramayana legend. It’s somewhat amusing that the author still believes in the Aryan invasion theory which speculates that the Aryans invaded India and destroyed the Dravidian-built Indus Valley Culture. This notion is long discarded by eminent academics, particularly in the wake of genetic analyses. Moreover, he treats Dravidian as a human race, rather than a language group – another capital mistake on the part of a serious scholar. The book includes a big glossary. Apart from the chapters on Wayanad and its tribal groups, the other parts feel like a handbook where the information is simply copied from other texts without any value addition.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

A Walk up the Hill

Title: A Walk up the Hill – Living with People and Nature
Author: Madhav Gadgil
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9780670097043
Pages: 424

In Kerala, Madhav Gadgil’s fame is similar to the character of Mr. Frankland in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ – he is ‘either carried in triumph down the village street or burnt in effigy’. The report of the Western Ghats expert panel which he chaired recommended stringent rules on human habitation in the ecologically sensitive spots and as a consequence became a harbinger of bad times for the settler community in these zones who have been carrying on agriculture for a living for decades. Meanwhile, he is a hero of the environmental activists and the Left-leaning science awareness body called Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP). Madhav Gadgil is a scientist well-versed in theory and quantitative methods and is an excellent field ecologist-cum-field anthropologist fascinated by the natural world and people and culture. I had initially thought that this book was an autobiography but this is only a memoir and that too, practically devoid of any kind of personal facts. In fact, this is a summary of the projects undertaken by the author – effectually a curriculum vitae. The book is graced with a foreword by M S Swaminathan.

The first few chapters of the book are biographical and tells about the author’s education in India and the US. On return, he joined the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, as a faculty along with his wife. This association (with IISc, of course!) lasted for 33 years till his retirement. Gadgil was very keen in field work unlike most of our established scientists. He initiated his career as a field anthropologist-cum-ecologist working on the sacred groves of Ambi Valley in Pune district, his home town. His greatest contributions came while working as a faculty at IISc, which the author says remains to this day the only place conducive to the serious pursuit of science in a free atmosphere and in the company of many bright and committed scientists. Gadgil developed contacts with the tallest political leaders soon after. He was a member of the small group of people invited by Indira Gandhi to discuss the modalities in setting up a new department of environment in her cabinet. What made the author controversial was his association with conservation of ecology in the Western Ghats. He chaired an expert panel to examine the status of the Western Ghats and recommend appropriate conservation and governance mechanisms in 2010. Unlike the other projects of the author, this book is silent on the recommendations of this committee. But we know that the panel submitted its report containing severe restrictions on economic life in the sensitive areas. Jairam Ramesh, who was more militant than a street activist as far as environment was concerned, was the minister who constituted the panel. But he found himself too big for his boots and was shunted out of the ministry. When the final report was submitted, the climate ‘changed’ and the government refused to accept its findings. Then it constituted another high-level committee headed by Kasturirangan to re-examine its findings. The new committee watered down the recommendations and the author alleges methodological faults in its working.

The author is wary of forest departments of all states in India. He is pessimistic about the officials, their policies and functioning. The book claims that village communities in the pre-British times maintained village woodlots and grazing lands in good condition. Britain had the distinction of wiping out its own forests and wildlife and abolishing community-based management well before any other country in the world. After 1857, the need of forest management was felt and the British half-heartedly copied some European methods. The powers of the forest department to subjugate the common people of India were enhanced by the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. This act criminalized hunting, which surprisingly Gadgil opposes, claiming that hunting for meat was very much a part of human evolution. However, this act criminalized the livelihood of many hunter-gatherer tribes. The human-wildlife conflict in the form of wild animals raiding human habitats is precipitated by this act. At this point, the author notes with relish that Kerala’s forest officials are much more upright and spoke to their superiors somewhat as equals. This was recorded in 1975 and says that he instantly fell in love with God’s own country (p.82)!

This book consistently argues that we have been implementing a system of passing on the benefits of development to those already well off and costs of development to the weak and the poor. This forms the basis of the author’s quite openly visible tendency to oppose and create obstacles to every developmental project on environmental lines. He even objected to the EIA study of the Konkan Railway alignment in Goa. The reason cited for this resistance was that the project would ‘merely protect vested interests, damage the environment, hurt the poor and divide the society’ (p.172). Did it? After several decades of the Railway’s successful operations and the revolution in transportation it had brought to India’s western coast, we can conclude with certainty that the author’s observations were wide off the mark. For some other projects, the role of Gadgil was to act as part of an arbitration on the desirability of a project which he usually used to scuttle. He served in the advisory committee set up by Indira Gandhi to scrutinize the Silent Valley hydel project in Kerala. The committee promptly decided to shelve it. The book includes a chapter on the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad and its early leader M K Prasad, who were dead against the Silent Valley project. The author had a long and fruitful association with both. The author’s staunch objection is most vociferously directed against mining projects in the Deccan. However, his reasons for opposition to mining is laughable. He claims that mineral resources are non-renewable and cannot be replenished once they are exhausted. The value of these ores will only increase in future with mounting worldwide shortages of mineral resources and we lose nothing by not exploiting them in a great hurry (p.177).

Even though informative and providing guidance, it is to be suspected that the book might serve to radicalise young, impressionable minds on hard-line environmental activism. It addresses pollution in a big way and demands stringent rules. The logic is that if pollution is allowed to go unabated, the industry would make undue profits but remain inefficient in the global market. However, this legitimate concern turns very sensitive and intolerant even to minor offenses. Sound pollution from running trucks when they carry mined produce on the road and formation of waves in water bodies due to barge movements (p.309) are raised as big concerns the administration should address immediately. As an alternative, he suggests mining rights to be given to the local community with government’s financial support that should also be labour intensive. Can such ventures compete effectively in the market? As usual, economic viability is not a concern for the author. In the 1970s, the author and his wife Sulochana Phatak were among the very few Indian students at Harvard and MIT choosing to return to India. The reason he gives is a bit funny though: they did not want to further strengthen the white-supremacist American government by helping enhance its scientific abilities! There are some peculiar aspects of the author’s food habits which would surely amuse the readers. He was always willing to consume whatever his hosts ate. This was sometimes extended to strange preferences. Gadgil’s mother was raised on donkey’s milk as an infant because her six elder siblings had died within a week of birth. The author took inspiration from this and went to a donkey bazar near Pune and tasted fresh donkey’s milk. He claims that it was pretty good (p.344). On some other subjects, the book demands unnecessary secrecy in what should have been open knowledge. Government rules on People’s Biodiversity Register stipulate that the knowledge be made public. This is opposed on the flimsy pretence that ‘the communities may not wish to make public the knowledge of the medicinal use and properties of biological resources’ (p.230). His real concern is that pharma companies may utilize them.

The harsh wildlife protection act is causing animal numbers to go up considerably, leading to attacks on human habitats on the fringes of forests. The stringency of the act was conceptualized by urban nature conservationists who are alienated from the common villager and having an elite mindset. The author notes that even Salim Ali shared this prejudice. The system criminalizing activities in wildlife parks was set in place by Ali and some maharajas of erstwhile native states who were entrusted by Nehru to formulate rules on wildlife in the 1950s. Mainly because hunting is banned for almost half a century and animal numbers have greatly increased which lead to raids on farmland and conflict with people, Gadgil boldly suggests legalization of hunting on a limited scale as in Sweden where wildlife is deemed a renewable resource that should be managed through regulated systematic hunting while consuming the meat and utilizing other products of economic value such as hides or antlers. No country other than India bans hunting outside national parks or wildlife sanctuaries except for endangered species. Since the author is much interested in anthropology, we get to know some interesting facts as well. A study under the well-known Harvard leader of human population genetics Cavalli-Sforza found that there was a large overlap of genetic makeup of two groups from Uttara Kannada district in Karnataka, namely the Brahmin Haviks and Dalit Mukris (p.47). The study found that it is impossible to assign any particular individual with certainty to one or the other group. All talk of any one caste group in India being genetically different or superior to others is just nonsense.

Each chapter in the book begins with a short poem of four or five rhyming lines, related to the topic which is discussed in that chapter. Nothing is mentioned about their authorship, but it’s possible that Gadgil himself has penned these lines. The book is somewhat large with around 400 pages that focuses on technical aspects on ecological conservation that demands readers’ unwavering attention. It includes long explanations involving technical terms about the projects coordinated or assisted by the author while at IISc. This becomes a trying experience for ordinary readers after some time. In one such instance, the book lists out 21 problems specific to the Chilika lake in Odisha along with solutions proposed by the local people. Such elaborations are frequent and tiresome for the readers.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Autumn of the Matriarch

Title: Autumn of the Matriarch – Indira Gandhi’s Final Term in Office
Author: Diego Maiorano
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2015 (First)
ISBN: 9789351774709
Pages: 261

Just as Margaret Thatcher is called the ‘Iron Lady of UK’, Indira Gandhi more than deserve the epithet ‘the Iron Lady of India’. In fact, the five major policy changes she had initiated – termination of privy purses, bank nationalization, Bangladesh war, the Emergency and Operation Blue Star – ended up with far more consequences for India than what Thatcher had made in her tenure for her nation. Most books and articles on Indira Gandhi concentrate on the Emergency and how she stifled free speech and put democracy on ventilator for eighteen gruelling months. This book concentrates on the final five years in her office which she won by sweeping the polls in 1980 which, in a sense, was an indication that the populace had forgiven her for the excesses of the Emergency. The research for the book is part of a PhD scholarship of the University of Torino, Italy, granted to the author. Diego Maiorano is a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. He has written several articles on Indian politics and society. He was associated with very prestigious academic institutions where his main topic of interest was contemporary Indian history and politics.

It feels like Maiorano have no exposure to India other than academic or personal interactions with the prominent personalities who had a role to play during the period under discussion. This brings in a refreshingly neutral feel to the narrative while exhibiting a few glimpses here and there of the ‘white man’s disdain’ of India and its society. A primer on Indian politics after 1947 is condensed into a brief section which covers Indira Gandhi’s ascent to power. This was different from that of her father and first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. A combination of genuine popularity with the party’s remarkable ability to extract votes in exchange of patronage distribution ensured the Congress’ dominance over India’s political system in the first two decades after independence. However, after Indira became prime minister, corruption was institutionalized in the early-1970s. Industrialists factored in the cost of ‘donations’ to Congress party as any other cost involved in an investment. Indira was riddled with a sense of insecurity right from her childhood, which made her look at her rivals – whether in politics or party – with unease and hostility. She destroyed her own powerful party leaders who could eventually turn into enemies. State chief ministers were handpicked and nominated by her. With the suspension of internal party elections in 1972, she controlled the key positions in the party apparatus. Loyalty to the Gandhi family was an essential pre-requisite to guarantee a plum position in the party as well as the state.

The early-1970s was a restive period both in terms and national and global politics. The oil shock had set in motion a huge inflation. In Nehru era, higher education had received a disproportionate amount of resources as compared to primary and secondary education. This led to high enrolment of students in colleges. Employment for these became a problem and large scale student protests erupted everywhere. The quality of Indian democracy had steadily deteriorated since Indira came to power and the Emergency was only just another nail in the process. Indira destroyed her own party as an instrument for information gathering at the local level and was not aware of the resentment brewing in the countryside in 1977. She lost the election and was even jailed for misuse of power. However, the internal dissensions in the Janata party was unmanageable. Everyone wished to have a slice of power and had no compunction to backstab anyone who obstructed their way. Within two years, the Janata experiment failed and the party exploded into several fragments. Hence in the 1980 election, Indira and her party was the only alternative to chaos. She offered stability in the face of the disastrous economic and social situation brought on by the mismanagement of her adversaries. The electors bought her argument and she swept the polls. Her modus operandi remained the same as before. Most of her colleagues in the Cabinet were long on loyalty and short on original thinking and administrative ability.

Then comes the first half of the 1980s which is the area of focus of this book. The pyramidal system of corruption that had come into being in the early-1970s scaled newer heights. Many chief ministers were removed because their incompetence and corruption had become too much even by the prevailing permissive standards. The party high command continuously intervened in provincial affairs and direct involvement of central ministers in the administration of a state became quite common. They were haughty towards local leaders as exemplified in Andhra where Rajiv Gandhi’s chiding of state chief minister T. Anjaiah provoked N T Rama Rao to float a regional party to restore ‘Telugu pride’. Law and order situation severely deteriorated in the early-1980s. Punjab and Assam erupted into violence. The irony was that the rebel sponsored by Congress as a counterweight to Akali Dal in Punjab, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, turned a Frankenstein that ultimately led to the assassination of Indira herself. High-handed tactics employed in removing Farooq Abdullah in Kashmir might have had a role in fomenting militancy. The personalist conception of the Congress party became clear when following Sanjay Gandhi’s death, his brother Rajiv was inducted into politics. From that moment on, dynastic succession became the universally accepted rule, not only in Congress, but in most other parties too. A whiff of fresh air was also felt on the economic side. Indira took a radical departure from the past as she gave up efforts to bring about social changes through land reforms, progressive direct taxation, measures to restrict conspicuous consumption and control over monopoly. Seeds of liberalization were thus sown in this term.

Maiorano presents a closer picture of the socio-economic transformation Indira Gandhi was attempting to bring about. She tried desperately to woo the middle class. The party proclaimed her as a strong leader the country invariably needed. It also tried to substantiate the modernisation dream of the middle class and to stimulate its sense of national pride. Then she promoted the interests of the upper castes (p.121). The book alleges that the RSS actively supported Indira in her final years. Its workers campaigned for Congress and refused to support BJP (p.134). The author claims that her political message on the country’s unity was in many ways identical to that of the Hindu right-wing. The support of big businesses and kickbacks on foreign contracts ensured a huge availability of funds for the prime minister’s party (p.136). The author observes that the Punjab problem was completely avoidable and easily manageable if Indira had negotiated with those parties who did not share her own political objectives. To break Akali unity, Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi financed and promoted a hard-line preacher Bhindranwale who in fact campaigned for Congress in three constituencies in the 1980 elections. He was arrested for the murder of Lala Jagat Narayan but ignominiously released soon after, because the Delhi Gurdwara management committee threatened to withdraw support of the Congress in Delhi.

The book focusses on the somewhat irrevocable damage Indira Gandhi had inflicted on democratic institutions of India. The judiciary strenuously fought for its independence and eventually resisted to a large extent the attacks of the executive. Indira superseded the seniority of three judges and appointed A N Ray as the Chief Justice of India in 1973. All the three judges promptly resigned in protest. However, the parliament and the president surrendered without fighting. The author remarks humorously that the bureaucracy split into three groups – ‘the wives’ (those officers who are attached to only one party), ‘the nuns’ (officers who remain unattached to any party) and ‘the prostitutes’ (who attach themselves to whichever party is in power and switch when there is a change of government), the share of the last being quite high (p.167). Indira left behind three destructive legacies – she institutionalized corruption as a key feature of India’s polity; entry of criminals into politics which was started and legitimized by Sanjay Gandhi (p.211); and state institutions became a vehicle for pursuing personal and partisan ends coupled with the institutionalization of dynastic politics. The book concludes that Indira left behind a divided nation, though not in the physical sense of disintegration. India’s social fabric was badly cracked in the mid-1980s.

The author’s unfamiliarity to India is almost tangible in the narrative as he relies solely on newspaper reports and personal interviews. This is accentuated by lack of comparison to modern Indian politics which he seems not to have followed in detail. At some points, the coverage is totally dependent on interviews with some of the prominent figures held a quarter century after the incident. It feels like the opinions they expressed are taken at face value. Indira’s attempts to subjugate India’s institutions for personal domination is a self-professed recurring theme in the book. Maiorano focusses only on politics and leaves out the economic aspects of her rule. This is a great drawback as her U-turn from the socialist path is not sufficiently elaborated. It is true that the author has provided some coverage on this topic and remarks that the government’s focus shifted from the rural poor to the urban middle class in the 1980s. Indira’s encounter with the judiciary is also only glimpsed at. This may be because the most dramatic period of the tussle happened before the Emergency. The lack of coverage on the personal aspects of the prime minister such as her itinerary in the final weeks and the repercussions in the country after Operation Blue Star are glaring. Written from a typical European perspective, the author trivializes the aftereffects of illegal immigration from Bangladesh into India’s northeast, specifically Assam. For the Assamese middle class, he says, what was at stake was control over the state institutions which in turn were the key to the allocation of most middle class jobs (p.114). The grave Assamese concerns over the takeover of their state by illegal Bangladeshi Muslims goes above the author’s head probably because he was not aware of the deeply religious nature of India’s partition and how the district of Sylhet was taken away from Assam to merge with Pakistan because the Muslims had by then become a numerical majority in the district as a result of unchecked immigration.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Father Tongue, Motherland

Title: Father Tongue, Motherland – The Birth of Language in South Asia
Author: Peggy Mohan
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9780670099740
Pages: 361

There is a famous truism called the ‘Law of the Instrument’ which says: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. Though unfortunate for the author, this book is a shining validation of the unedifying principle in that ‘law’. The author is a person of Indian origin residing in Trinidad and is an expert on the mixed or creole languages spoken in those islands. She very clearly understands how these languages originated and developed through the murky episodes of plantation slavery. However, she falls into the trap of believing that the same mechanism was repeated everywhere else in the world and churns out high-sounding theories on how the modern Indian languages came into being from a local substratum that mixed with Sanskrit of the elite newcomers. Essentially, she uses Trinidadian creole English as a compass to hold on to for the journey into language evolution in the Indian subcontinent. Needless to say, she tries miserably to clothe her outlandish concepts in the straitjacket of social dynamics among Trinidadian slave colonies. In the meanwhile, several prejudices of the author also tumble out of the closet. Peggy Mohan was born in Trinidad and studied linguistics at the University of the West Indies. She has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ashoka University and Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Mohan assumes without any rational justification that what happened in the Caribbean, associated with slave labour from Africa, occurred in India too. This posits an all-male migration of settlers arriving one fine morning from the land to the north without their womenfolk and going on to have children from local women creating a bilingual generation that knew both its mother tongue and Sanskrit. This produced a number of intermediate languages called prakrit which remained in vogue till the twelfth century when Muslim invaders occupied India. The author claims that the Muslim occupation did well for the underlying languages when it suppressed Sanskrit and its associated prakrit varieties. This led to the development of modern languages. Mohan tries to establish two points here – that the modern Indian languages are totally delinked with Sanskrit in the initial stages and that the Muslim sultans deserve the credit for the growth of modern languages in India. The basic presumption is that the north Indian languages have words drawn from local prakrits, but their grammar had a number of features that are derived from older languages of the area.

Theories of Dravidian origin of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) flourished in India till DNA analysis came in vogue which convincingly ruled out any sudden variations in genetic material in the entire subcontinent, including Pakistan. A Dravidian language called Brahui is still spoken in Baluchistan while a language called Burushaski is spoken in an isolated outcrop of Swat region. The author accepts that the speakers of these languages are not genetically different from their neighbours (p.113). But she again claims that it always made sense that the route used by the early Dravidians into the subcontinent should run from the Northwest to South India via the Indus valley (p.90). Again, this attests to her fallacious intuition that the Dravidians are a human race and IVC was their creation. Both these wrong concepts are long discarded by the academic community. Ignoring the glaring inconsistencies in her argument, she proceeds to test her creole model on India. All-male migrants arrive in a new land and marry local women. Their children and some elite local men pick up a close approximation of the migrants’ language with essentially no change in the grammar. Later on, other local people join the community and soon a version of the language develops with a number of grammatical features from the local languages. Grammar comes from local, but vocabulary is from the migrants. This is the significance of the book’s title, Father tongue, motherland. At this point, she presents another inconsistency in her theory that the IVC was Dravidian. A grammatical feature called ergativity is strongly seen in the Northwest where IVC once flourished. This is conspicuously absent in all Dravidian languages in the South and Magadhan languages to the East, including Sanskrit and all Aryan languages.

A major weakness in the book’s research is the highly subjective nature of the references and the casual way of obtaining information that does not stand up to the minimum rigour expected from a serious academic treatise. Some of the author’s observations are self-delusional and outright misleading. She discusses Brahui and Burushaski languages in the guise of an expert, but her only source of info regarding the latter is a Japanese ‘expert’ who himself did not have much grounding in that language. One of his replies was that he doesn’t ‘think’ that there were compound verbs in Burushaski. Such is the level of understanding among the sources! She further claims that a lady software developer from Bengaluru has deciphered the Indus Valley script which she claims to be notes concerned with currency and the sort of license documents that allowed them to practice their trade. It is not literature at all (p.100). She in fact likens it to a QR code. Another mistaken comment is that the old IVC did not have a sense of social hierarchy (p.143). The findings of archaeologists suggest a contrary picture in the presence of citadels in many Indus sites such as Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Dholavira. Apart from wishful thinking, isn’t it naïve on the part of a scholar to assume a civilization which existed several millennia ago that did not have social hierarchies? Another erroneous inference – either accidental or deliberate because of the author’s association with the Jamia Milia Islamia – is that the Islamic occupation of India was some sort of a blessing in developing the modern languages by destroying Sanskrit influence and Islam offered a path to equality to the country’s downtrodden masses. Both are maliciously crafted perfidies. Forced conversions were the norm during Islamic expansion in South India, but the author asserts that lower castes were attracted to Islam because of the equality it offered through the teachings of Sufis (p.47). She seems to have no sense of what was going on in India. This observation was made regarding the appearance of a mixed elite in Hyderabad in which the lower castes in fact did not find entry.

The author then attempts to make a guess on the basic features of a primitive language X which was spoken at IVC sites when the supposed Aryan invasion took place and which was the prototype that mixed with Sanskrit. She compiles thirteen features of the hypothetical language, compares these to Tamil and appears surprised to find that Tamil matches them. Again, this is just another vent to her overheated fantasy that IVC was Dravidian. Then she emits the offensive and unsubstantiated observation that ‘Punjabi, Tamil, Burushaski, Bhojpuri and Brahui, together with Language X look like one big extended family and Sanskrit the foreign guest who came to stay’ (p.150). Read that sentence again and note with consternation the lethal venom this Trinidadian scholar conceals in it. She goes on further to claim that Language X would sound like a hypothetical Punjabi song with Tamil words. Between the tenth and twelfth centuries CE, Prakrit languages were replaced and our modern languages are claimed to begin appearing in the documents. Never for a moment she considers the rather plausible alternative of the prakrits metamorphosing to the modern languages. Sultanates are said to be the reason for giving space to local languages in place of Sanskrit and related prakrits. However, this is just another hallucination as there were no sultanates that spread across the whole of India in the tenth to twelfth centuries. The author’s conclusions are often shocking because of their glaring disconnect from objective truth. One of her references clearly state that the Turks destroyed the Buddhist Pala kingdom in Bengal and the religion declined. But she demurs and asserts instead that Brahmanism assimilated the people and Brahmins imposed taxes in the kingdom at Malda (p.203). She then turns the screw a bit tighter and claims that the ‘Sufis arrived in Bengal well in advance of the new rulers (Muslim sultans) and encountered a restive population of Buddhists, unhappy with Brahmins and orthodox Hinduism and ready to turn to Muslims for protection’.

Peggy Mohan’s idea of India’s pre-history is childishly simple which can be summarized as follows - 65,000 years ago, people speaking Munda languages left Africa and settled in India. About 9,000 years ago, there was a migration of farmers from Zagros mountains in Iran and they interbred with Mundas, creating a hybrid race called Dravidians. Around 4,000 years ago, a large number of Austro-Asiatic men reached Gangetic plains and introduced a hybrid variety of rice that enhanced productivity of cultivation and population levels. Then came Vedic men with Sanskrit. The ridiculousness of this argument is on what happened next. After all these encounters, the Mundas promptly retreated into forests and became tribal!

What is remarkable throughout the narrative is the author’s inveterate hatred towards Sanskrit and Hinduism though she cleverly vails it in attacks against ‘Brahmanism’. The fundamental premise of the book that only males form migratory bands does not hold water and the entire logical edifice is built up on this shaky ground. Her example of gazelle herds in Masai Mara in support of this ridiculous proposition is made all the more comic by the fact that she found this idea about gazelles during one of her pleasure trips to that place, probably from a tour guide. Fact and truth are at a discount in the entire text and hearsay and opinion of dubious academics are assigned utmost credibility. An email from a correspondent is enough to convince the author to declare some preposterous idea as gospel truth. Her conjectures are marked by their weirdness and naivety. She once remarks that ‘perhaps Brahmin men had begun to secretly dislike the verb conjugations in early Sanskrit’ (p.81. This is the only reason she can think of regarding the disappearance of this feature in Sanskrit!

This book lacks sincere research and is a pure waste of time. Hence it is not recommended to any class of readers.

Rating: 1 Star