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
