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

Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism

Title: Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism

Author: Shrikant G. Talageri

Publisher: Voice of India, 1993 (First)

ISBN: 8185990026

Pages: 408

 

According to Semitic tradition, it was in Babylon that God cursed humanity to split into mutually incomprehensible language groups so that no cooperation would be possible among them. Bengali, the language spoken on the east coast of India would sound like gibberish to a Lithuanian speaker in northwest Europe. However, as the Europeans began their explorations around the world in the Renaissance period, they began to notice similarities in words or their roots cutting across continents and mountain ranges. After the colonization of India, British scholars learned Indian languages and an unmistakable relationship between Sanskrit and European languages were established. Though confused at first, they postulated that an ancient language, called proto-Indo European, flourished somewhere in south Russia from where it spread across the entire landmass of Eurasia through migration. In the case of India, it was assumed that an invading group, calling themselves Aryans, annexed India and defeated the local inhabitants called Dravidians. This Aryan invasion theory was given recognition and support of the Indian historical establishment that was keen to put down Hindu nationalism, the consensus being that all major racial groups of modern India came to the land as invaders. However, modern historical research and its methodology firmly reject the concept of ‘Aryan’ as denoting a human race. Now it is well established that the terms Aryan and Dravidian refer to language groups. Moreover, genetic data point to the fact that the people of India essentially belongs to a single race, of course with miscegenation over a large period of time. This book analyses the features of the Aryan invasion theory and pinpoints its illogical conclusions and false claims. It no doubt tries to vindicate Indian nationalism, but the encyclopedic nature of facts and powerful insight make it a unique one. Shrikant G. Talageri is a Mumbai-based scholar who has made a special study on Aryans and Vedas. He lives and works in Mumbai and has studied his mother-tongue Konkani in much detail.

 

Talageri begins with a critical evaluation of Indian historiography after independence. During this period, Indian history was formulated, taught and propagated by leftist intellectuals who were more interested in proving Marx right than weaving a narrative that bound the newly-built nation together. Since destruction of national identities is one of the basic tenets of Marxist ideology, it has been falsified on a grand scale, with the sole aim and intention of uprooting and destroying India’s national awareness and ethos. Nehru reached a symbiosis with them and placed them at the highest levels of academia. In return, they sang his praise as long as his actions did not inconvenience them. Nehruvian vision of Indian history was nothing more than a mix of various imperialist versions that play their politics with impunity and self-righteous aggressiveness. These historians accepted the consensus among European historians of the nineteenth century that India witnessed an Aryan invasion around 1500 BCE which devastated the indigenous culture and languages and replaced it with the Indo-European language of Sanskrit. At one time, the prestige of the European scholarship was so overpowering that even eminent nationalists like Tilak and Savarkar had subscribed to this theory. Their intention was to prove that just as the British and Muslim invaders had come from the outside, so also were the Hindus. By corollary, it was also claimed that Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are all equally foreign or equally native to India.

 

Leftists always negated India’s nationhood. Mirroring Churchill’s claim that India was only a geographic term like the equator, rather than a nation, they granted each language group a claim for nationhood like what we see in Europe. Eminent leftist thinkers in the British era professed that India was a collection of up to sixteen nationalities and hence they wholeheartedly supported the Pakistan demand. The author strongly refutes this argument and comes up with self-evident examples from India’s ancient past to prove that it always had a consciousness of being one nation. Even a dry compendium on grammar like Panini’s Ashtadhyayi provides a nearly complete count of all the janapadas in ancient India. Panini was a native of the region around Peshawar in today’s Pakistan. The Vanaparva in Mahabharata gives details of the pilgrimages undertaken by the Pandavas to numerous places all over India.

 

Talageri has studied in detail all the hypotheses and conclusions of his opponents before demolishing them ideologically. The invasion theorists were forced to make compromising concessions to account for the widespread inconsistencies in what they predicted to what is actually practiced in society. Indra and Brahma were prominent Vedic gods, but nobody worship them now. Besides, there are no references or collective memory of any places outside India in the Vedas. Even according to invasion theorists, most of the aspects of Hinduism like the use of religious marks on the body, the idea of transmigration of souls, enumeration of the days by phases of moon (tithi), zoomorphic aspects of worshipping deities, most gods and goddesses except Brahma and the concept of holy places and rivers are all pre-Aryan. The Aryan invaders are credited only with the authorship of the Vedas and development of Sanskrit. But this looks more like assimilation rather than conquest. Close relationship of the language spoken in North India and Europe can be explained by other means as well. The author then presents the role of Hindu nationalists in safeguarding the national well-being. Hindu nationalism is not concerned with the ancestry of communities. It believes only in identifying the de-Indianizing elements and doing whatever has to be done in this matter.

 

This book firmly points out that the term ‘Aryan’ denote a language group and definitely not a human race. Even Max Muller had discounted the idea of there being an actual race of ‘Aryans’. After the racist orgy indulged in by the Nazis, the concept has become even more taboo. The Brahui language spoken in Baluchistan belongs to the Dravidian group, but in racial features, the speakers are identical to their neighbours and anthropologically Iranians. Similarly, Sinhalese language belongs to the Aryan group, but its speakers do not show any racial affinity to features traditionally assigned to Aryans. Philologists have reconstructed a proto-Indo European language based on cognate words found in all of them. On this basis, they found that modern Lithuanian preserves this archaic general language structure. Hence, the original homeland of Aryans cannot be far from Lithuania, so the logic went. South Russia was eventually postulated as a likely place. The entire Aryan invasion theory pivots on this claim. Talageri analyses a lot of linguistic principles and concludes that Sanskrit is the closest to the proto language in respect of both vocabulary and general linguistic form. This book claims that Sanskrit was born in India and it is the original homeland of the Indo-European language group. The author’s arguments are so brilliantly technical that readers are not competent enough to judge their acceptance among other learned peers of Talageri.

 

There are no references to any places outside India in the Rig Veda and it is certain that it was composed in the region of Saptasindhu or Punjab. However, there are mentions of the eastern and western seas in it. The sun is said to rise from and set in the sea. This is not valid in Punjab and shows a familiarity to the southern peninsula. There are indications that they were familiar with places as far east as Bihar and as far south as Maharashtra. Surprisingly, this is the geographical extent of the Indo-Aryan languages even to this day. Contrary to what is made to believe today, the enemies of Aryans, called Dasa/Dasyu are not non-Aryans of India, but instead, a section of Aryans in ancient Iran. According to Iranian texts, Asuras are their gods and Devas demons. The supreme god is Ahura Mazda. Minding the interchange of the sound ‘h’ with ‘s’ in the Persian language, this is similar to Asura Mazda. Their supreme demon is Angra Mainyu, whch is derived from Angiras, the major rishi family in Rig Veda. Mainyu in Rig Veda is a particularly destructive form of Indra which is represented as anger or passion personified. This and a set of detailed arguments prove that the conflicts mentioned in Rig Veda were between the Vedic people and Iranians.

 

This is a very well-researched book with startling conclusions. It posits the origin of the entire Indo-European languages in India by proposing three centres of influence in pre-historic India. What became the European group was prominent in the northwest of India. The Vedic language and Iranian group formed the centre in Punjab and all present Indo-Aryan languages spoken in India formed the inner group. This also explains why they are more familiar with non-Aryan languages whose speakers somewhat constituted the areas where they are spoken now. The book begins with a goal-setting foreword by Sita Ram Goel, the stalwart of Hindu nationalism. The book makes some deep phonetic and philological analyses which most readers would find cumbersome. The text is often firmly fixed on the target and readability suffers in some chapters. Absence of an index is a serious concern. Another drawback is that the author accepts the genealogical tables of kings given in the Puranas at face value. He questions their regnal years and arrives at a reasonable value, but the number of kings is simply acknowledged as true.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star

 

Mother Tongue

Title: Mother Tongue

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: Penguin, 2008 (First published 1990)

ISBN: 9780141037462

Pages: 270

English is the most ubiquitous language used in the world. Even though the number of people who use it as their mother tongue is really small, the rapidly expanding clientele who employ it as a second language make it the world’s most common tongue. It is the most global of languages, the lingua franca of business, sciences, education and politics. Other countries excel the US and UK in many aspects of the language’s everyday usage. In India, there are more than 3000 newspapers in English while there are more students of English in China than there are people in the US. Even this humble blog is the contribution of a person who uses English as a second language and the fact that it has used some 600,000 words so far makes him a little smug! This book was published in 1990, but its point has become further relevant with the spread of computers and the internet. Bill Bryson needs no introduction and he remains one of my favorites.

Bryson’s humour is legendary, but it is strangely subdued in this volume. Anyway, the very first sentence of the book carries the author’s signature with the candid assertion that “more than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to”. This book is not a history of the language nor can it be termed a thorough study in the linguistic sense. Bryson examines many aspects of the tongue’s everyday usage like spelling, American and British varieties, pronunciation, origin of common names, word play and even a chapter on swearing. The narrative is liberally suffused with wit, but not as much as Bryson’s other books.

English now dominates the world beyond doubt, but there was a time when it hung tenaciously on to its home country base whose political power had changed hands many times to foreigners who didn’t even speak a word of it. England remained for a long time under external occupation. The Roman conquest brought civilization to the island, but Viking invasions transformed its structure. Then came the Norman Conquest when the French ruled the roost. No king of England spoke English till 1399 CE when Henry IV began to use it. As recently as the eighteenth century, England chose to install George I, a German, even though he didn’t know English but reigned for thirteen years. The language assumed an inferior position in the Norman society in which the aristocracy was French-speaking while the peasantry spoke English. Linguistic influence of Normans tended to focus on matters of court, government, fashion and high living. That’s why we still see a lot of French-derived words in these domains. However, Bryson points out that it is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

There are about 2700 languages in the world, of which India leads with 1600 languages and dialects. English has borrowed without any let or hindrance from most of them. Bryson reviews the pathways in which foreign words accrued into his mother tongue. Probably, this makes the English extremely reluctant to learn other languages. The author wonders at the staggering quantity of words accrued. Bryson does not elaborate on one important source of words for English – India. A good number of Indian words have entered the lexicon of the colonial masters after nearly two centuries of imperialist rule over India. Great literary figures have also contributed to the language in the case of new words. Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings of which at least a tenth had never been used before, which is an astonishing display of ingenuity. It is also true that the great dramatist and poet lived in an age when words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since.

The book hints at the powerful urge for standardization when a language loses its insularity and whole societies start to handle them simultaneously. This process began in the fifteenth century with the invention of the printing press. This brought a measure of much needed uniformity to English spelling. Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. London spellings became increasingly fixed and standardization was achieved by 1650. With television, the differences between the two most favorite flavors of English are disappearing fast. Since this book came out just before the internet boom, its effect is not analysed.

This book includes a delightful array of words, phrases and comparison with other languages which is ideal for novices and experienced readers of English. This book is a page-turner, but the chapter on names and pronouncing place names is rather clumsy and uninteresting to non-US and UK readers.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star