Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story Of India Through Its Languages, by Peggy Mohan

This book provides a textbook example of how a book can be almost great. Its subject matter is quite interesting to me and quite relevant to the fate of many languages throughout the world, as the importance of learning prestige languages has greatly diminished the health of many local languages in the contemporary age. If this book had focused more on linguistics and less on politics, it would have managed to be a great book, but like many books written and published in this present age, its failures are largely due to the political bias of the author, which makes itself seen in several ways. For one, the author states erroneously that American schools are socialist in nature with poor kids and rich kids studying in neighborhood schools together, which shows a marked ignorance of magnet programs that are officially public but often full of children of wealthier families as well as ambitious poorer sorts like I was, to say nothing of the way that school districts are often managed to avoid integration, or the popularity of homeschooling, parochial education, and private schools to avoid the worst sort of mediocrity and left-wing bias that one finds regularly in contemporary education. In addition, the author goes out of his way to praise Maoist cadres for their linguistic behavior, not willing to admit that the forces of the left are just as authoritarian and considerably less legitimate as any sort of capitalist elite that the author rages against in India in their goal of using English as a means of preserving their elite status.

Despite these flaws, this book has many interesting elements. The author’s background as part of the Indian diaspora with a Bhojpuri-speaking father and a Canadian mother is a clear influence in her interest in India’s linguistic situation, where she sees the loss of distinctive languages in the face of choices by people all over the world to learn English and do their best to speak as natives do, except when they need to speak local to impress their own neighbors by adding more Creole elements. The author’s idea that India’s languages themselves sprang from the mixture of an Indo-Aryan superstratum on top of more local substratum languages that nonetheless influenced key elements in pronunciation and grammar seems pretty sound. The book is full of references to sanskritization, a slow process by which languages are transformed by contact and by the ideal of people rising in social status by learning a prestige language. This process appears to have created Sanskrit itself in a world of ethnic mixing between Aryan fathers and local mothers, where identity was a bit fluid, for a while, before hardening into caste boundaries. If the author’s Marxist bias is limiting, the author has a broad knowledge of Indian languages and their situations and can demonstrate at least some of the useful examples of mixing that occurred in Southern and Eastern India as being a historical model for the unseen mixing that created the languages of India’s north and northwest. If you are a language nerd and not someone offended by the understanding that human beings have always done a good bit of mixing, unless it was in the interests of someone to try to prevent it (usually in vain), this book has a lot to offer, once you account for the author’s worldview error.

This book is almost 300 pages and is divided into very large chapters. The book begins with a note on diacritics and symbols, as this book is not written for linguists, but contains a lot of references to terms that spring from Indian languages as a way of describing other languages, which can be a bit jarring. The author begins the book with a discussion of the hybrid of polar and grizzly bears as a model for how mixing tends to occur inevitably when populations combine under the right circumstances (with a high degree of gender segregation) (1). The author then spends a considerable amount of time theorizing about the hidden story of sanskrit and how it came to develop from the contact between two different languages over centuries of time, with two periods of intense creativity before the golden age wore off (2). This is followed by a discussion of how the Namboodiri Brahmins changed Malayalam by adding a Sanskrit vocabulary to an exiting Dravidian language that served to beautify a language without making drastic grammatical changes–nouns travel well between languages, after all (3). The author then returns to the ancient past to discuss how the Indo-Aryan languages were born with an Indo-European superstratum and a local substratum that remains of interest to linguists today (4). After this, the author discusses how Urdu and Hindi came about due to the influence of Turkish, Uzbek, and especially Persian (5), a process that was deliberately thwarted by English imperial interests that split Urdu and Hindi apart. This is followed by an interesting story of the relationship between the trade language Nagamese and the Magadhan languages (6). The author’s most critical comments come in the following chapter, as she insults Indian English as an invasive species that threatens the viability of India’s native languages, born out of millennial of subtle local compromises and gradual drift (7), before talking about the confluence of languages worldwide (8). The book ends with acknowledgements, notes, a bibliography, and an index.