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Every time you say something, you should be amazed. It's a miracle. No, I'm not remarking
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on the quality of your words. I'm not even mocking you in some passive aggressive way.
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I'm just pointing out that the fact that we can speak to each other, that we have language
#
is so remarkable. Part of the wonder of this is what our brains can achieve in terms of
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learning how to communicate in this manner. And part of this awe I feel is because of
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language itself. Our languages were not formed out of nothing in a language lab somewhere.
#
They were not designed by committee. Instead, they arose over centuries, formed by millions
#
of interactions, shaped by other languages and cultures that are no more. Every time
#
we say something, no matter what it is that we say, we are in a sense expressing all of
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human history before us. From the first migrants out of Africa to the last thought that you
#
had, our very words are shaped by the inner lives of the dead and the undead, by the past
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and the present, by the seen and the unseen.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My guest today is Peggy Mohan, linguist, music teacher
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and author of a remarkable book called Wanderer's King's Merchants, the story of India through
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its languages. This book was an eye opener for me in revealing how language evolves and
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also of how India evolved through the story of its languages. We've heard simple narratives
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about Indian language before, how Sanskrit is part of a larger family of Indo-Aryan languages,
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sharing an ancestor called Proto-Indo-European with Latin and Greek. I was taught in school
#
that a bunch of Indian languages like Hindi, Marathi and Bengali are derived from Sanskrit,
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while the South Indian languages are in a separate language family. Well, the truth
#
is far more nuanced and our languages are even more of a khichri than you'd imagine.
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For example, Sanskrit has a bunch of sounds called retroflex sounds, the th and d as opposed
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to the th and d, which are not there in any of the other Indo-Aryan languages. Retroflex
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sounds are unique to South Asia. So what happened here? What was the landscape of languages
#
here when the Aryans came to India? How did Sanskrit evolve within that landscape? Why
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is a language like Marathi so similar to some of the Dravidian languages? Is there a clue
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in the evolution of more recent languages? For example, Peggy writes in a book about
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how new languages evolved in the Caribbean due to the slave trade. Slaves were brought
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to the Caribbean from West Africa. They formed a Jogaru kind of language, borrowing nouns
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from their masters, called Pijin languages. And then the next generation gave these Pijin
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languages a structure, an operating system as it were, which had more in common with
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West African languages than with the French or English or Spanish from which they borrowed
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nouns. These languages were called Creoles. In a similar way, Indian languages often have
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an external dressing of a particular type, but an underlying operating system from somewhere
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else. How much can we understand of this now? How much can we tell about our past from the
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way our language is in the present time? What deeper truths about our society and culture
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can language reveal? Peggy's book is a fundamental book if you want to begin exploring these
#
subjects and I love my conversation with her. Before we get there though, let's take a quick
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commercial break. This episode is about language. Peggy Mohan's wonderful book is about language.
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And if you want to learn even more about the history and evolution of languages, I have
#
a recommendation for you. Head on over to the sponsors of this episode, Wondrium at
#
Wondrium.com and check out this great program called The Story of Human Language. In 36
#
fascinating episodes, the brilliant professor and writer John McWhorter takes us through
#
the journey of human language from the single language spoken 300,000 years ago to the thousands
#
of rich and diverse languages we speak today. He speaks about the birth of language, the
#
evolution of languages, how dialects form, how pigeons lead to creoles, how languages
#
die and even the birth of artificial languages in these modern times. Now, Wondrium used
#
to be known as the Great Courses Plus who have sponsored many episodes of The Seen and
#
the Unseen. I love browsing through Wondrium because it has all the great courses from
#
the Great Courses Plus and videos and documentaries created in partnership with National Geographic,
#
the Smithsonian, the Culinary Institute of America and so on. It's such a great place
#
to learn. And you can get 14 days of unlimited free access if you use the following URL Wondrium.com
#
slash Unseen. Let me spell that out for you. W-O-N-D-R-I-U-M dot com slash Unseen, U-N-S-E-E-N.
#
Sign up now for free and free your mind.
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Peggy, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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Thank you. Glad to be here.
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I love reading your book and I was especially struck by something in the first chapter where
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you talk about a tiramisu bear. So I'm just going to read that little bit out because
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I love that passage where you say, quote, travelers to the Canadian Arctic have been
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coming back with tales of a new kind of bear in the wild that one could almost call a tiramisu
#
bear. It has a layered look like the Italian desert with cream colored fur on top and coffee
#
brown paws. Its snout is slender like a polar bears, but it has a broad and muscular shoulders
#
of a grizzly. Its feet are something in between the furry soles of a polar bear, which give
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good traction on snow and ice and the planar pads of a grizzly, which can withstand the
#
fiction of walking on barren ground. Stop quote. Now this has many resonances through
#
your book with different subjects like migration, conquest, language, all of that. But what
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I was particularly intrigued by is when you say that you are a tiramisu bear. So let's
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start by talking about the personal. Tell me a bit about your childhood and why are
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Well, it's an interesting thought because when I start with a Canadian polar bear and
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the idea of a grizzly bear, it's almost humorous metaphor of my parents because my mom was
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from a place in Canada where you could possibly conceivably find a polar bear. And it was
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an island off the coast of Canada, Newfoundland, and she went as a student to Canada. And that's
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where my father, who was Indian from the Caribbean, met her. And like migrants in early days,
#
he was a student and planning to go back home. He didn't see anything strange about falling
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in love with her and marrying her because the first migrants generally do only find
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women from the local community. And I think both of them were so averse to anything that
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could be considered racist that they wouldn't hesitate for a moment to think that they should
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get married. And then my mom went back with him to the Caribbean. And as I said in the
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book, never ever saw snow again. So in a funny way, even my story repeats because I've left
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the Caribbean and gone to India. And here's my daughter, who's with me, who's left India
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and gone to California. So it's like we are all migrants in my family. And tiramisu bear
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gives the sense of a very predictable kind of mixing. So the mixing in languages, as
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with bears, always has the male as the migrant, the female as the one encountered there. And
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when you look at the languages, you find the men are sperm donors of vocabulary, not very
#
hands on parents. And the women are the ones who incubate and raise the offspring and perhaps
#
even see the words all change from what they taught the child in the early years. So you
#
have these kinds of languages where if you're not looking for it, you will miss it. But
#
the entire grammatical structure and a lot of the sounds are there from the woman because
#
they raise the children until about the age of five, after which men might say, I want
#
the boys, the boys are us, the girls are not. So if you look at the languages, you'll find
#
this pattern in so many parts of the world, not just India, India is just the latest one
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I found, where you find a huge grammatical infrastructure, we could say operating system,
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which is installed, where words can shift. And the words tend to come from whoever's
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in power who initiated the contact who, well, who created the need for a hybrid to come
#
into existence at all. So okay, on the one hand, yes, I'm talking about myself, I'm talking
#
about migrants, I'm talking about languages, because when you look at languages, you can
#
almost forensically say, this is what has to have happened because I'm seeing the grammar
#
from one place, which seems very local. And I'm seeing the words from another place. So
#
you have a tendency to say that I can completely reconstruct the story of how the contact took
#
Yeah, that's that's fascinating. And there are, you know, in your book, you even talk
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about this tribe in Africa, where, you know, the men speak one language and the women speak
#
another language entirely in Africa. That's in the Caribbean. And in fact, I have
#
had to study that language. It was a very strange experience because, and I made friends
#
with the person who was teaching it. But it's something that happened in the island of St.
#
Vincent back in, oh, the year 1200, that's before Columbus. So on this, apparently, it
#
happened very often, because you have things like men, or shall I say marauders going from
#
island to island, doing away with the men, even a book I'm reading now about the conquests
#
of Alexander, they talk of things like slaughtering all the men taking all the women. So you have
#
these kinds of hybrid situations. So this is actually a carib language, carib and Arawak
#
from the Caribbean. Yeah.
#
Fascinating. Let's, you know, all of these themes are things that I want to explore in
#
great detail, both migration, how languages come into being, all of that. But let's kind
#
of go back to your personal journey. So you know, you're you're kind of growing up in
#
the Caribbean as a kid. What are you interested in as a kid? What are you reading? What are
#
you doing? Like later on, of course, you go to study linguistics. But how does that interest
#
develop you? You're also a teacher of music. Are you a musical kid? A lot of people will,
#
of course, know you through your books and your work and all of that. But give me a sense
#
of the person beyond that, you know, your early phase as it were.
#
Okay, let's see if I can reconstruct that too. I grew up in what you would call a joint
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Indian family in the countryside in Trinidad. My great grandfather was alive, my grandmother
#
and some of her younger siblings and so on. And my another generation, it was just a huge
#
amount of people. And my mother, who was the youngest daughter-in-law and who'd come from
#
abroad. And everyone spoke Creole English, which is somewhat similar to Jamaican English.
#
And I would hear whiffs of Hindi and of course, Bhojpuri. Now, my grandmother, great grandfather,
#
all these older people were educated, they'd studied Hindi. So they made it a point that
#
they want to speak Hindi. They didn't want me to learn it because there was a very strong
#
feeling that that was something we were leaving behind. The whole identity of having come
#
as migrants from India. Okay, that too. We were migrants from India. In between 1849
#
and 1919, quite a lot of Indians, mainly from Eastern UP, a small number from Western Bihar,
#
a small number from the South, went as bonded labour to the plantations in Trinidad because
#
slavery was over. And Trinidad was one of those islands where any Africans who were
#
freed had other options. This was a large enough place. It wasn't like, say, Barbados
#
where there was nowhere to go. So you stayed on the estate. So whenever there were options
#
and Africans could either set up their own communities in other parts, more remote parts
#
of the island, there was no labour. So Indians were brought over, among them, my family.
#
And in fact, when I think of where we came from, when I went to India, I used the word,
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I said, okay, I know it's somewhere, Fazabad, but the town mentioned is Ajodhyapur. Is there
#
a place near Fazabad by that name? Ayodhya, that you're from Ayodhya? Yes. And I still
#
can speak like that. And that was some of my earlier work. But let's see if I can get
#
you back to what it was like in a joint family where you're hearing Hindi, you're hearing
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Hojpuri because the old ones would speak to older people who came in, in this dialect.
#
Spanish was very close. You could see Venezuela from some parts of Trinidad. In fact, if you
#
had logged on a few minutes earlier, you'd have heard me speaking in Spanish to someone
#
here. I'm in Mexico. And it's just sort of like going from being right handed to being
#
left handed. French I studied, but my mother was, spent part of her life in Quebec, so
#
I knew French also. So there were all these things going on. I studied Latin. My father
#
loved Latin. So the European type languages and Creole were very accessible to me. I could
#
understand them. That's my first language was Creole. Hindi and Hojpuri were less so.
#
They were kept away from me. And I was somewhat resentful. I kept wondering why can't I learn
#
these things. And they were desperately trying to see that I moved ahead into the modern
#
world and not backward into whatever life we'd had before. And it's only when I started
#
doing linguistics and opting to study Hojpuri and learning Hindi a little bit here and there
#
from courses that they kind of figured that I wasn't going to backslide into being a
#
bonded labourer. And they helped me a little. And so much so that my great grandfather said
#
to me, okay, you can learn the Devanagari if you want. Learn it on your own. I'm going
#
to teach you something else. And he taught me an almost extinct script called Kayathi,
#
which you might have heard of, which is very little seen in India. And I would sit there
#
forming the letters as a child and thinking that India was something that I knew about
#
from my grandmother and great grandfather. So all of this was going on. I did linguistics
#
and that was a time in the West Indies when the whole Creole thing was coming up. And
#
the language that we thought was just bad English or bad French was suddenly being seen
#
as an interesting hybrid. And since we knew the history on the one hand of slavery, and
#
on the other hand, we could look at these languages and we could see exactly what was
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the tiramisu bear look that I had mentioned in the beginning. So this was going on all
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around me. And as I did linguistics in the West Indies, and then I went on to University
#
of Michigan to do my PhD in linguistics, I just, what should I do? So I'd done a lot
#
of linguistics courses. So one of the things I thought I might as well get in with, you
#
know, as it is a scoring subject, Sanskrit. So I got into Sanskrit, it was scoring, but
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I mean, I worked nonstop at it. I had to actually pull myself away from it to get on with writing
#
a dissertation myself. And then I decided that I would get back to the Caribbean, work
#
on the language that Indians are taken there, and first describe it and then look at something
#
completely different from how languages are born. I looked at how they died. Do they all
#
die in the same way? Do they die quickly or do they die gradually? All these were questions
#
that were coming up, and they were linked also to do languages come up gradually or
#
do they just within a generation emerge into the sunlight? So these were the kinds of things
#
that were going on in my mind growing up. I must have had some interest in language
#
because as a child, I remember the moment standing in our backyard when I first pronounced
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her and I knew that I was not a baby anymore. It was not actually her that was being passed
#
off as and you to remember that you're about six or seven years old. And the first time
#
you make a difficult sound. So clearly I was on my way to being a linguist.
#
You have many fascinating strands. And by the way, you mentioned Cathy and in your book,
#
you've got a lovely sort of illustration of what Cathy is like and you point out how Cathy
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at one time was the most popular script for writing Hindi and it wasn't Devnagri. Devnagri
#
kind of came later. And one of the things I realized when I read about history is how
#
much it seems to us that everything that is perhaps a convention in the present time,
#
it almost feels in our mind as if it must have always been the case. Whereas actually
#
what we are looking at is just a snapshot. The things have changed radically so fast.
#
And if you just go a little bit back in time, things were actually incredibly different
#
and everything we take for granted was almost came about through a variety of different
#
accidents coming together and creating a perfect storm, which kind of brings you here. Before
#
I get back on asking about your personal arc, a broader question also about language, which
#
I have thought about a bit, but I've never actually managed to speak with an expert and
#
actually bring this question up, which is that just as someone who reads a lot and mostly
#
in translation, obviously, except, you know, I can read Hindi, but otherwise I'm reading
#
all other languages translated into English. It strikes me that different languages have
#
different essences, so to say, which makes them almost in a sense untranslatable. I did
#
an episode on translation with the translator Aruna Vasena, who translates from Bengali
#
to English. And this is one of the things we discussed where it strikes me that if you
#
look at the literature in some languages like Japanese and Korean, they'll tend to be very
#
kind of stark and minimal and spare. While if you look at other languages like Urdu and
#
Bengali, you know, they're very expressionistic and maximalist and all of that. And if you
#
were to just do a direct word for word translation into a language like English, which kind of
#
has values of its own and all of that, it would seem incredibly odd. So the question
#
that sort of strikes me is that one, I'm sure you'd agree that languages do have different
#
essences and all of that. But where does that arise from? Like does sound play a big part
#
in that just the way that they sound? And does that then have consequences down the
#
road? You know, because of the character of what you can express is shaped by the language,
#
then you would expect that the character of a society or a people is also shaped by that.
#
And we often don't think about this. Now, you're someone who's not only grown up in
#
a very multilingual environment, but you've also traveled a lot, lived in different parts
#
of the world and studied language. So what are your sort of thoughts on this?
#
See, I wouldn't go so fast to say it's the sounds. The sounds are there, of course. But
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it is true that languages have a very different, I think you use the word essence sort of that.
#
That's a good word, because today on my Facebook feeds came up something I'd written some years
#
ago for Biblio. And I was it started with me comparing what I had read as a 17 year
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old in Spanish as part of being a student of BA Spanish French Linguistics, 100 years
#
of solitude. I read it. And it seemed like every other book I read in Spanish, because
#
I was just very familiar with what everybody exalts over now and calls magic realism. It
#
just seemed like since the 15th century, that's the kind of stuff that they have been writing.
#
So I read through it and didn't think much. And then my daughter many years later said
#
it's an awesome book, and she had read it in English. And I decided to read it in English.
#
And the strangeness of the eeriness came out only in the translation, because until then,
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it was just a simple normal way that one writes in Spanish, be it writers from Cuba writers
#
from Spain, writers from different parts of Latin America, he just got very spotlighted.
#
And the normalcy of that kind of style, or the way he expressed himself, just didn't
#
come out in English. In fact, it came out as a plus. It looked wow, magic, and it wasn't
#
magic. It's just the way everyone seemed to write. So that's very hard to put across
#
to people that the first time I read 100 years of solitude, it was just, it was a pale echo
#
of some of the other writers I had liked from Latin America, because they all had this quality
#
of the grotesque in the writing and that had to do, I think it's more to do with the kind
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of social situation you grew up in, a sense of hopelessness at times. You see, for example,
#
why did Ghalib write the way he did? I mean, don't you now, in a fraught political situation,
#
find yourself writing cryptically, and not completing words, or using allusions rather
#
than direct words. So a lot of this has to do with the milieu you're writing in, as to
#
speech. I can't say, of course, there are a lot of other things going on. Why do some
#
languages sound different from others? Well, there are lots of reasons for it. Why does
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Bengali sound different from Hindi? Completely different antecedents, because the migrations
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into Bengal were quite different from the migrations that made their way towards Delhi.
#
So all of that colours the kind of character language you'd have. I would say the sounds
#
start it. The sounds may capture a bit of it, but it starts from a much more complex
#
place. Yeah, I mean, multifactorial. And just speaking of, you know, Hundred Years of Solitude,
#
I think it was translated by Gregory Rabassa, and a lot of people hold Rabassa sort of in
#
tremendous regard, because they feel that the translation is almost like a new creation
#
of its own. And I often see that in, you know, a lot of the some of the Indian translators
#
who translate from languages, which I would have thought that, you know, how do you even
#
translate it? But if you look at, you know, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra translating Kabir or
#
Ranjit Hoskode translating Lal Dade, and it's just as if they've created some magic of their
#
own. They haven't just done a literal translation, because that would simply not work. But they've
#
created a magic of their own with what they've done, which is fascinating. So just kind of
#
going back to your personal journey, again, growing up, what was your conception of yourself?
#
And how did it differ from the other kids around you with whom you're going to school?
#
Because obviously, you've got kind of more influences coming in from different places
#
where your mother is a polar bear, as you say, metaphor, to take the metaphor forward.
#
And your whole family has that history of speaking Bhojpuri Hindi there from a different
#
place. And you're there in the Caribbean. And does it shape your view of the world in
#
a way that is then conducive towards becoming the sort of person that you would later become
#
where you're traveling the world and an international citizen of sorts with a curiosity towards
#
other cultures? So did you feel that there was that difference and that difference was
#
a fortuitous thing in terms of shaping what you would go on to do and all of those things?
#
That's hard to say. Maybe the final outcome, yes. As a young child, I would look in the
#
mirror and say that what I saw didn't look like any of the things that are supposed to
#
be there. I didn't see an Indian. And I definitely did not want to see a Canadian. I was Caribbean,
#
but I didn't look like a lot of other Caribbeans. So I had to put the whole question in a box
#
and hide it away for some years until I was able to deal in any way with it. Maybe I haven't
#
even taken it out of the box. I've just let it continue. And in India for a long time,
#
I have an Indian passport and people would ask me, where are you from? And I'd say Delhi
#
because I've lived in Delhi for what? More than 40 years. And I feel hurt when people
#
would say, no, but where are you really from? You know, everywhere I'd go, I would try to
#
blend in in some way, which is why like when I hear people telling me in Mexico, your Spanish
#
has no accent. What do you mean no accent? My Hindi has no accent to some extent, I guess.
#
I'm told that my objective has always been to try to find a home for myself wherever
#
I go to fit in. Until one day, my daughter said to me, why are you doing this? You know,
#
when people ask you in India, where are you from? Make their day. It's the first time
#
they've met a foreigner from an exotic place who can speak to them. So just tell them you're
#
from the Caribbean that will satisfy them. And so people think, okay, she's from the
#
Caribbean and then they meet someone else from the Caribbean who's not like me at all.
#
So it's not one of those things that's easy to resolve what my identity is. Except that
#
because I've tried so hard, like I took my time learning Hindi. I didn't want to ever
#
make any mistakes. I didn't want anyone to listen to it and say, be able to make out
#
that you're from somewhere else. So perhaps it made me a little bit more cautious. There
#
are people who just bluster in and just start speaking, mistakes and all. That wasn't for
#
me because it was something much more complex going on. It was a bonding with the place
#
and you can't bond with the place making mistakes. So you have to really have the operating system
#
properly in the head. It took time. Hindi doesn't give itself up very easily. And worse
#
yet, Malayalam, I've reached a stage where I could pronounce Malayalam and not have everybody
#
Yeah, no, my mind was actually blown by some of the things in your book because I know
#
Hindi and I understand Marathi and I was actually learning things about grammar and looking
#
at things a new way from some of the illuminations in your book. So that was great. You know,
#
the thrust of my question or my observation or whatever also came from this notion that
#
people who are certain of their identity are often also straight jacketed by it, not just
#
straight jacketed by it in terms of who they are, but also in terms of how they look at
#
others, which is why it will be a common question for them to ask others, where are you from
#
or what is your village as the case might be. And in one sense, I can of course understand
#
the angst of not being certain of one's identity, but I feel like it is also in other
#
ways liberating and liberating in ways that you don't realize it because a lot of the
#
people who are straight jacketed by identity in different ways may not realize that they
#
are constrained in some way that, you know, they contain multitudes, but they are thinking
#
of themselves as only one thing. So how did you get into linguistics from here? Like when
#
you were a kid, what did you want to be? And was it just the case that, you know, you went
#
to college and you found this an interesting subject and it wasn't?
#
When I was 12 years old, I think Time Magazine ran an issue on Noam Chomsky. And I decided
#
right then and there that all my interest since about the age of eight or so in languages
#
and how they looked alike could be something far more serious than just philology and knowing
#
languages or translating. I saw what he was talking about. Deep structure was one thing.
#
I started reading up a bit about him and you have no idea what it's like to read Chomsky
#
as a young person. Sometimes I would end up reading a page five times to get what he was
#
saying. He's not a great writer actually, but his ideas are very good. So somewhere
#
around then I decided that I was going to be a linguist. And my mother said, but from
#
the sound of what these people are doing in MIT, don't you have to be a science student?
#
And I said, maybe not. Let's see. But if I need to learn some science for it, I will.
#
And as it is, you do have to learn some physiology to learn the whole vocal tract. You have to
#
learn a certain amount about the brain because it's all processed in the brain. So suddenly
#
you find yourself very comfortable talking to medical people or the notion of an operating
#
system and understanding how computers work because the brain does have a number of those
#
features. So from the time I was 12, I knew I was going to do linguistics. And my father
#
worked at the University of the West Indies and told me a lot about the linguistics department
#
there. And I knew who the professors were going to be and everything. And I knew that's
#
where I was headed. And then afterwards, I wanted to go abroad and do a PhD. And I'm
#
actually glad it ended up being the University of Michigan. Because if I'd gone somewhere
#
like Stanford or Harvard, I might have been pushed into much more theoretical work which
#
didn't draw on the things I already knew about, which is like hybridization, Creole languages,
#
Indian languages, dying languages, languages being born. So I always wanted to do this.
#
And I veered away from it for a while in India, because job wise, until I got an Indian passport,
#
it wasn't really possible to get a permanent job as a linguist. So now I'm putting out
#
all the things that I've been thinking of all these years. And it's just sometimes surprising
#
to me that all these questions didn't occur to a whole lot of other people because many
#
people are working on all these issues to do with Indian languages. And somehow they
#
don't ask that bold question, why? Why are they like this? Not what are they like, but
#
why? What does this tell us about the past? It's a bit of a leap. And I think you just
#
have to be a little bit brave or foolish to jump into these questions.
#
So what I loved about your book was about how through language, almost carrying out
#
a forensic act as it were, how through language you've looked at history, you looked at humanity.
#
It reveals so much about us, not just about our history, but perhaps even about our essential
#
nature and so on and so forth, how we respond to incentives, how politics plays a part.
#
You contrasted Amir Khusro and Ghalib, which is quite a sort of stunning and revelatory
#
contrast there. And my question is that when you started out in linguistics, at that time,
#
what was the field like? Like I discovered Chomsky's work through reading Steven Pinker's
#
The Language Instinct and then went down that kind of rabbit hole where I read up a little
#
bit and all of it was very fascinating, the innate structures and how we deal with language
#
and all of that. But I haven't really come across much work of the kind that is in your
#
book, which is possibly just an illustration of how ill-read I am. But tell me a bit about
#
the linguistics profession itself and how it has evolved. Because one of the things
#
that strikes me and certainly in fields that I know a little bit more about like economics
#
or political theory or whatever, one of the things you do realize is that within academia,
#
there are often these trends and fashions and leitmotifs of the time which carry through
#
and there's a subtle pressure on new people coming into those fields to do certain things
#
and not do other things and to follow certain lines of inquiry and not follow others. Was
#
there something like that in linguistics? What were your natural interests? Did you
#
feel constrained at any point? Give me a sense of the evolution of the field over the last
#
30-40 years. Okay, our first year was very simple. You have to learn the nuts and bolts
#
of phonetics, phonemics, morphology. They throw you problems with languages you've never
#
seen before like Turkish or Swahili. Those are favored ones because they're easy enough
#
to cut and segment and see this ending refers to this. So we learned the nuts and bolts
#
of linguistics first and by the second year, we were getting exposed to the kind of professors
#
who were working on hybridization, creolization. And various aspects of it, how the languages
#
came into existence was one and the other one was how they were changing in real time.
#
Something similar to the English continuum you're getting in Hindi and English in North
#
India. We get that in the Caribbean. So trying to understand how people make slow transitions
#
from simply one language to another. So these were two big things that were happening in
#
the Caribbean at that time. One got sucked into it and I don't think I resisted it because
#
I found it very exciting because all of a sudden here you are, a young student, undergraduate
#
with the kind of people who are shaping an important part of the field and here you are
#
in it. And I got out of it in a way by getting into the Indian language that we spoke, which
#
is Bhojpuri. And that had to be done. But to eventually be able to back off and pull
#
the whole thing together was something that I dreamed of doing for all these years. I've
#
been sitting, doing other things and looking at it out of the corner of my eye. The field
#
of linguistics has undergone all kinds of changes from the excitement of Chomsky and
#
that language was very much associated with how the brain functioned and located in various
#
parts of the brain. All of that was a season. And then came the cutbacks in the budgets
#
and all sorts of things stopped being done. In the U.S. you were pushed towards very functional
#
things like how to teach English to foreigners or how to deal with language for computational
#
purposes. It got a little bit dry, but there was one beauty to linguistics which kept me
#
in it, which is it doesn't cost much. If you have to do research, you don't have to set
#
up a Hadron Collider or something. There's no huge budget involved. And while travel
#
could be an issue, nowadays it isn't really. You want to find out a paper about an obscure
#
language of the Native Americans in the west of Canada. You just go online. You go on Facebook,
#
you find someone who's actually done the work. When I wanted to crack a few sentences in
#
Malayalam from a YouTube thing that I had, I had a friend who knew Malayalam and was
#
helping me. We just went on WhatsApp. We were able to do it, sitting each in our own homes,
#
going on to voice recording. When I wanted to crack the opening bits of Babur Nama, I
#
had a friend in Delhi who is from Azerbaijan, and she and I sat again on WhatsApp. And she
#
said, I don't know how to describe this sound, but I'm going to just record it for you. And
#
she said, oh my God, is this how he spoke? I thought this was extinct in that part of
#
Central Asia. Wow. So there's so much that you can do without leaving your desk, without
#
spending a paisa. You could really continue doing this kind of work. And it was wonderful
#
because given that in India, grants for social sciences are sort of closing. You're getting
#
less and less possibility of doing this kind of work. What was nice is that you could do
#
it on your own dime. So I continued. So it didn't matter that this kind of linguistics
#
was not being done much or not being encouraged by the granting system. I just knew that I
#
could continue and that in a way the field was open because a large number of people
#
had simply left. You go by where the grant money is taking you. Wow. And by the way,
#
everything that you said about communicating with your friend on WhatsApp and she recording
#
the sound and sending it to you, it's just so amazing. Just feels so magical and beautiful
#
to me connecting like that and almost kind of bringing the dead alive through that, you
#
know, when you kind of realize how Babur spoke. During this time while you were involved in
#
all of this, what kind of similar work are you looking at from your own field or from
#
other fields where, you know, a lot of the joy, I suppose, comes from your own love of
#
different languages and just the intellectual excitement of figuring out how they work and
#
how they evolve and all of that. But equally, there is also that sense of opening doors
#
through language. So were they precedents? Were there, you know, books or research that
#
really excited you and you said that, you know, this is the kind of thing I want to
#
do, whether using language or whether using other forensic tools or other frames of looking
#
at it, like in a popular writing, you know, Jared Diamond's book, of course, you know,
#
Guns, Germs and Steals comes into play or different people have looked at the past through
#
different prisms. Most recently, you've had, you know, all the work of looking at the past
#
through genetics. So, you know, both in language and in other subjects, were there people who
#
kind of inspired you and said that's the kind of thing I want to do? This opened my mind,
#
you know, I want to, this is the work that inspires me.
#
Yes, but they generally weren't linguists. They were all the people you're talking about,
#
the geneticists, historians. There were even people like Stephen Gould, who worked on punctuated
#
equilibria because I was finding my data on language death impossible to understand. I
#
wasn't seeing a slow gradient, which we were told was there. I was finding people either
#
spoke a language or didn't speak it. And the only thing that helped was understanding evolutionary
#
biology and why species would decline within a generation or come into existence within
#
a generation. Languages were doing that too. So the metaphor of a lot of other fields,
#
evolutionary biology, now genetics. There are a few others, little things of archaeology.
#
I didn't get so much history, trying to understand patterns. The Vedic era is quite far back,
#
but we have so many other things in India, which were more recent, like the migration
#
into Assam, the migration into Kerala, that you could see that there were patterns somewhere
#
that if similar things happened and similar inputs were there. Now, this was not even
#
strictly linguistics. I don't even know how much of it is history, how much of it is genetics.
#
But linguists were not writing about this sort of thing. They were writing in smaller
#
little compartments. Even some of the exciting work in Sanskrit was linked only to Sanskrit
#
and the Prakritas. And so it wasn't looking beyond that, that, hey, this happened subsequently
#
in India. You could get something out of looking at that too. So I was looking at a number
#
of linguists who were working in their tiny citadels and trying to bring it all together.
#
It's hard. The specialization is something that's pretty much pushed on you. But I felt
#
that what was more interesting to me is to see how the whole thing worked as a pattern
#
and how the moving parts functioned. And for that, I couldn't stick with just Sanskrit
#
or look at, I didn't really look at Assamese except to say that a very similar thing took
#
place or in various other parts of India. But these were all very different things that
#
happened. Yeah, you mentioned Stephen J. Gold. And the first time I read something by Gold
#
was he had written this fabulous book on baseball statistics, which is very odd. You won't imagine
#
an evolutionary biologist writing about baseball stats, but it was just sort of a new way of
#
looking at that, which I found interesting. Though in the Gold versus Dawkins debate,
#
I kind of usually found myself sympathizing more with Dawkins. But the question here is
#
that what people like Gold demonstrate and so many other polymath thinkers demonstrate
#
is that they can talk about different subjects because they can take a frame from one subject
#
and apply it to another subject. Even in your book, you've got all these lovely metaphors.
#
You talk about Gold's concept of punctuated equilibria and how languages show the same
#
kind of thing, which is going to be my next question to you. But before that, my broader
#
question to you is that is this something that is inherent to you that taking frames
#
from one subject and applying it to look at the world in general and therefore having
#
a kind of a broader view? Or is it something that you feel necessary to cultivate? And
#
is it something that you feel other thinkers and researchers necessarily don't do enough
#
of that you would advise young people to do that? Don't just focus on your field and get
#
really granular, but step back a little bit, take the broader view, look at society, look
#
at this, look at that, you know, and things will begin to make sense. What are your thoughts
#
Two thoughts. One is just as a dog walks around and perceives the universe through smell,
#
I can walk around on the barren landscapes of Mexico and see a replay of the Indus Valley
#
civilization, which we know nothing about. Really, we don't even know what they call
#
themselves. And then earlier cultures of Mexico, they don't even know what these people call
#
themselves. So you have this sense that everywhere you go, you sniff. And what you sniff is this
#
huge pattern in this universe. As to whether people should get out of their boxes and do
#
it. It's hard to say. Everyone does what they can. And perhaps you just need to see one
#
person do it and be brave enough and not get slaughtered for it. I am astonished that I
#
haven't had more blows for some of the bold things that I've said. Young linguists would
#
see that and probably feel, well, they've been thinking similar things too, but haven't
#
written them down because what kind of trouble will they get into? That is an issue. And
#
if you're in academia, to write a book like mine might not get you the promotions you
#
want. Although when you're my age, to have a book that's much more accessible to the
#
public is considered a good thing, but not for a young person. So as to whether they
#
should do it, well, can they do it? You have no idea how much work has been done in India
#
on the past tense in all the Western parts of India, starting with Goa, Maharashtra,
#
all the way up through Rajasthan, Gujarat, the Hindi belt, and separately all through
#
Pakistan with no contact with each other. People have studied these languages with this
#
unusual past tense, where the verb agrees with the object. And nobody sort of asked
#
why this belt? What is it about this phenomenon? People have said, yes, it's not the passive.
#
Food eaten, that's the favorite phrase there. But nobody's tried to see why just this area
#
and almost nowhere else. So to take it further back requires the kind of thing that maybe
#
academia wouldn't reward you for doing. Stick with the facts and just plod a little bit
#
here and there. They're good. I mean, these people, they've done wonderful studies, but
#
to make that leap to say, and add in Southern Iran, which no longer has it, you're talking
#
of the Harappan people. And it's a wonderful, exciting thought that all the things in Hindi
#
that make no sense in terms of Sanskrit come from these same people that we have no way
#
of finding. We are them. I found that just so mind blowing. And then putting it up there
#
right where you can shoot it down and nobody shot it down. It's an exciting thought. But
#
now there are many more linguists in India, I see all the time, who could write all these
#
sorts of things and probably were a little bit timid, but they know enough to do it.
#
You'll probably see more of it.
#
That's really interesting. And it's heartening. And it's a valid point that you make that
#
people are, after all, driven by incentives. So on the one hand, I can imagine someone
#
who's in academia, you have the incentives of whatever the fashions and trends of the
#
academic world are. But on the other hand, if you're a linguist in India, do you really
#
want to get into trouble at this point in time by talking about how the Arya came into
#
India, for example, and the stuff that then went down, or the fact that there is a Dravidian
#
belt which actually extends all the way from Southern Iran, all the way through Afghanistan,
#
Pakistan, and all the way to the South, kind of bypassing Delhi, which is such a...
#
Not quite. Delhi's in it.
#
Delhi's in it. Yeah, you kind of said it's like shading Delhi slightly, if I remember.
#
Glanced at Delhi. And they're not exactly the Dravidians you know from the South. There's
#
something different again about them. We don't know who they are.
#
Yeah. But that is so counterintuitive. And just saying something like that, I imagine
#
present-day India would kind of get into trouble. Like I just think of all the controversies
#
poor Tony Joseph got into after writing Early Indian, so it is based on such solid science.
#
But why? I mean, I'm surprised that he did. I think that anyone... Okay, I'm going to
#
take a little bold step here now. I'm surprised I have gotten into no trouble. I think partly
#
I've just gone step by step and only stuck with what I can verify. I wasn't... Yes, like
#
Tony Joseph here and there, it's other people's research that one is dependent on. But I have
#
not overtly expressed a political position. I have not tried to bait anyone. I have not...
#
If anything, I've offered you something better. Do you want to be Arya? I think that's a real
#
small time. I'm so excited at being Harappan. I've given you something better, you know.
#
And when you say, did the Vedic people come to India or leave India? And I show a pattern
#
of small settlement in the Northwest beginning to spread eastwards and southward. And there's
#
a time dimension on it, that something doesn't spread into India if it's the thing that...
#
And over time, if it's actually on the way out. But I don't have to actually say it.
#
All you have to do is show the time that from 3,700 years ago until when it reached Assam
#
and then it's going further into Nagaland, you're beginning to see things going up into
#
Sikkim. It's an ongoing process. So if it's not even stopped, how can you say that this
#
was something that was always there in India and going out? It doesn't make sense. But
#
at the same time, I've been very clear that until the genetic studies came, and of course
#
looking at it in the way I just looked at it as an ongoing thing, until all these genetic
#
studies came, there really was no idea where these people had come from. And people were
#
just throwing words around. They were saying Caucasus, Caucasians. What a stupid idea.
#
Because the Caucasus has 50 languages, of which only three are very iffily related to
#
the Indo-Aryan languages. Why the Caucasus? And then they start saying maybe Anatolia,
#
modern Turkey. All of these were guesses. And they talked about Indo-Germanic. Come
#
on. Come on. No, there was this strong feeling of the colonial era where white people wanted
#
to say that if there was something interesting about India, it has to have come from Europe
#
or somewhere like that. So why should one accept that? And then later comes the idea
#
of genetic studies, which somewhat resolves it. I think it pretty much resolves it. For
#
me, the icing on the cake being that it's still ongoing and trickling inward into India.
#
So having put it that way and not tried to bait anybody, because I understand why they
#
would be angry with the earlier notion that there were white people who came down into
#
India and that they took over a huge belt of India. That's racist stuff. So I suspect
#
that that may be why I've seen people who are known to be supporters of out of India
#
actually nodding as you're nodding now when they talk of some of what I've written. And
#
I'm just completely overwhelmed because it means that they're thinking about it and they
#
don't feel in any way excluded or insulted, which I don't mean them to be. Does that make
#
a kind of sense? I'll come up with a counterpoint to that. But before that, a quick note for
#
my listeners that, you know, I'd done a great episode with Tony Joseph, who's written the
#
book early Indians a couple of years back. So I'll link it from the show notes and that
#
kind of talks in great detail about what we have learned in the last few years about our
#
history through looking at genetic evidence and which is pretty hard to argue with and
#
a very powerful that's an illuminating book and an illuminating episode as well. But my
#
sort of counterpoint to that is when you say that I only wrote about what I can verify,
#
the truth is not really the point here. The point here is narratives that there is a narrative
#
based on nationalistic pride and it's got a xenophobic element to it also, where the
#
whole narrative is, you know, that somehow Aryans are supreme and the out of India theory
#
that you referred to, of course, is that there weren't Arya people coming from outside to
#
India, but instead everything began in India. Sanskrit is the mother lode and we went out
#
and everything comes from us and all of that, which, you know, is there is a sort of narrative
#
of national pride and all that. And anything that strikes us narrative is immediately looked
#
upon very harshly. Like I have seen the sort of internet responses that poor Tony got on
#
social media where he clarified many times in his book that don't call it the Aryan
#
invasion theory. You talk about Aryan migration and essentially all of India is, you know,
#
everyone here is a migrant. If you go far back enough, you're a migrant from Africa
#
and then from West Asia and then you have the Harappans and then you have the Aryans
#
and everything's a big party till a certain point in time where politics takes over and
#
we have endogamy and all of that and a certain strand of thought wins out and all of which
#
Tony has explained in a very fascinating way. So in that sense, I'm, I'm really glad that
#
you haven't gotten into trouble, but when you talk of people who believe in out of India,
#
but they're nodding away and agreeing with you, I think that's probably a selection bias,
#
which might have to do with the kind of genteel people and reasonable people you might encounter,
#
but the environment out there is far uglier than that. I know. Yeah. And, and I mean,
#
nevertheless, there's a part of me that is hoping that your book actually gets into some
#
kind of controversy because that would mean that more people have read it. That's the
#
only reason people would find it worthy of attacking. And I'd love everyone to kind of
#
read the book, but that's my little counterpoint that the rigor of your research or the truth
#
of what you're saying or the really obvious logical strand that runs through all your
#
investigations have nothing to do with what the political response will be. Okay. Then
#
let me add another counterpoint. I can't speak for Tony. I can't exactly remember how he
#
started his book, but I do remember Wendy Doniger and Audrey Trusker both spent the
#
first few pages snapping wildly at the present government of India. And if you think that
#
trolls read the whole book, they probably are very swayed by what they see in the first
#
few pages. My first few pages were about a grizzly bear and polar bear. They must have
#
said, is it, is it a ball? So it's the kind of people who might be trolls were probably
#
not sure what to make of the book initially. And this is not the first time that's happened
#
to me. Like when I wrote a book about Gujarat in basically the Tiffin bomb trial in which
#
I was actually a expert witness. And at my book launch, there were two guys or three
#
guys who I went up to and I said, well, I don't know you and thank you for coming. And
#
soon they said, we're from the BJP. So I said, oh, very nice. And because it's all a description
#
of Gujarat before that, 2002 as well, starting the book in the train carriage. And then they
#
asked me, but would you be willing to write a similar book about 1984? And I said, sure,
#
I probably know more about it than you do. They backed off. They treated a book which
#
went into incredible detail about what happened in Gujarat in a fictionalized way, even down
#
to what happens in the jail cells. It was treated with just hands off, leave it alone.
#
I don't know why. And in this case, again, I don't know why there's enough in my book,
#
I think, which is more controversial than some of what Wendy Doniger says. But then
#
I'm not looking to fight the government. I'm just looking to explore a bunch of theories.
#
And maybe the kind of people who would troll were disappointed or satisfied with the first
#
chapter and left the book alone. I can't tell, but it is interesting. I still don't know
#
why. I think I kind of know trolls in the social media ecosystem well enough to say
#
that, listen, trolls don't read. So they would not have read your first chapter and they
#
would not have read Tony's first chapter either. And all they would know is the one line takeaway
#
they would have been told on WhatsApp that, oh, Tony is saying that Tamil is older than
#
Sanskrit, which alone would be enough to make them mad, I guess. But why wouldn't people
#
be mad? Because there are ways of arguing back that when do you say Tamil becomes Tamil
#
and how old is Sanskrit really? And that's a, I mean, that's the sort of thing I would
#
also attack, but not as a troll. Too much kind of nuance. Let's start talking about
#
some of your really fascinating insights into language. And we were talking about gold earlier
#
and you mentioned punctuated equilibria. And of course the insight there is that we tend
#
to think of evolution as something really gradual, things change slowly, incrementally
#
and so on. And gold's whole point was that often it is not like that. Often the massive
#
changes can just happen. Usually it's not like that, that massive changes can just happen
#
suddenly a species can die out overnight and a new species can just come up. And your points
#
sort of was that that's what happens to languages also, that within a generation a language
#
can die out and equally, and this is a process I found so incredibly fascinating and want
#
you to elaborate on, equally a new language can come up within a generation through the
#
process of first like a pigeon language and then that becomes Creole. And I'm familiar
#
with these terms. I've had a vague idea of what they mean, but I've never had it explained
#
to me in such a historical and political sense before. And something that you're speaking
#
of through your personal experience of actually speaking one of the Creole languages, growing
#
up speaking that and then to go back into the past and figure out how the slave trade
#
led to so many new languages coming up. Tell me a little bit about this, about how these
#
Okay. When you want to think about languages or a lot of phenomena, species coming up immediately
#
in a generation's time or dying soon, you're talking about not something wrong with the
#
species itself or the language that causes it to be weak and ready to die. These are
#
all environmental impacts. So the environment changes when it does, usually fairly fast.
#
If for example, there's climate change, you will find species going extinct because at
#
a certain point they'll either migrate away or they'll go extinct. And those are both
#
very radical changes. If a country is overrun by the kind of people who make it very difficult
#
for men folk to live, but take the woman, that's a very sudden environmental impact.
#
If you're captured, taken to the coast of West Africa and spirited across the Atlantic
#
to live almost forever, generation after generation, estranged from Africa, that's a sudden environmental
#
impact. So these are the kinds of impacts that tend to be very difficult for communities
#
to adapt to. And when you can't adapt to something, you get extinctions or totally new things
#
coming up which suit the new environment. So the key word here would be environmental.
#
There is the perception that things die gradually because humans die gradually, but the human
#
is not the correct metaphor. The metaphor is a species and it's always in response
#
to an environmental impact. So where Stephen Gould came up with this idea, though it has
#
many more applications, was when people ask, well, why aren't there more missing links?
#
The only missing link I could think of is like the duck-billed platypus, which behaves
#
like a bird, has no breasts, but it gives milk. There are very few such things in the
#
natural order. So why don't we get many more of those? The answer being because the time
#
frame in which the change took place is so sudden that it doesn't give scope for enough
#
skeletons. It's not like thousands of years. If it's just a few generations, then there
#
will be far fewer of the kind of fossils, relics left behind. And that seemed very good
#
because there are a lot of other fields of chemistry, mathematics, which talk about sudden
#
changes and leaps and the difficulty of transition between two states. And then suddenly you're
#
in a different phase altogether. This is the sort of thing that's slightly hard to analyze.
#
In my book, I also talk about children, the fact that how much learning takes place invisibly
#
and then it suddenly appears fully formed. These kinds of sudden leaps are hard to understand,
#
analyze. They go against our wish to see daily progress or daily decline. So you'll find
#
probably less work being done on it. How do you reach inside the black box of a child's
#
mind and what do they know when they're not telling you? So I like the idea of what they
#
call saltational change, so jumping from one state to another. Or you see it in the case
#
of Hindi, when I talked about looking at the kind of Hindi you see in some of Amir Khosrow's
#
dohas. It could be written today. And people say, well, it would have to have been different
#
because it was so many hundred years ago. No, it doesn't have to be. It's quite possible
#
that things were so stable in a fundamental way that except for little details of some
#
words getting added or lost, Hindi has been fairly stable for the last nine hundred to
#
thousand years. Nice thought. Fascinating thought. To get back to the question of languages
#
evolving, you know, suddenly within a generation you have a new language and you spoke about
#
the slave trade to the Caribbean, leading to first Pidgin languages and then Creole
#
languages and so on. So tell me a little bit about what that process was like, because
#
we all know the three way trip, right? That you have ships going down West Africa, you
#
know, picking up slaves, and then you have them going back to the Caribbean and making
#
that particular journey. And then they go with sugar back to Europe to provide cheap
#
calories to the new masses of labor out there. But what's happening to these slaves is also
#
fascinating that how do they learn to communicate not just with their new masters, as it were,
#
but also with each other because they can be from different places. How does that first
#
generation learn to communicate and what does that what that then becomes? And what this
#
tells us, because it seemed to me that this is what you describe happening here, the new
#
languages coming up through the slave trade, what you describe happening here in a couple
#
of generations is really an accelerated version of how languages do come into being with some
#
differences, obviously, as you've pointed out. But tell me a little bit about this,
#
about how you get to a pigeon language and then to a Creole language.
#
Okay, I wish I could be as, what shall I say, unequivocal as I sound. My thinking has been
#
changing over the over time. And even as I've looked at India, and even as I've looked at
#
the Caribbean too, because every time I hear West Africans speak, I hear something that
#
sounds totally familiar from the Caribbean. The normal story is that slaves were brought,
#
they couldn't communicate with each other. They had similar grammars to their languages,
#
and that they picked up in a garbled form words from the master's house. And that got
#
onto the grammars. I don't buy that so much anymore. I find it a little bit too much,
#
so much of a coincidence that places in Ghana, Nigeria, and even other parts, okay, Liberia,
#
Sierra Leone, how does they fit in so neatly into the picture? It's not just something
#
that happened on the boats. Something was either happening before, because after all,
#
the people who went to Sierra Leone and Liberia were basically Africans freed from the high
#
seas and brought back to Africa, but to where? So they have this new land of refuge. How
#
is it that they sound so much like Caribbeans? They've never been to the Caribbean. How
#
do Nigerians, when they talk, I hear something that could be Trinidadian, and then I hear
#
a name like Babatunde, which is Yoruba. Of course, Yoruba is in it. Something bigger
#
is happening. And that's when I started thinking that something similar could have happened
#
in India, that this thing called the pigeon didn't happen in such an atmosphere of chaos.
#
There was a little bit of time, and that time was probably taken on the West African coast
#
itself, and that this language existed. It existed in the ships. And if life should be
#
long enough for me, that's the next thing I want to work on, because these ships went
#
to a large number of places, and you see this very African type of language, which is also
#
there in Africa with people who never left, sounding similar. So something more is going
#
on than just the disruption and chaos of transportation and being on the other side. I'm not very
#
certain that the words came so suddenly. There are a lot of Portuguese words used in pigeon
#
in West Africa and in parts of the Caribbean, too. Why Portuguese? What are they doing there?
#
So obviously, it's a very complex thing to do with the setting up of slave factories,
#
the whole shipping industry. I want to study that next. So unfortunately, instead of giving
#
you a simple answer, giving you an unfinished answer, because I think there's a lot that
#
we need to know. Why is Hawaii so similar to the Caribbean? That's a big question, a
#
burning question. So I suspect that it has to do not with the genetic code, as Derek
#
Bickerton once said, but we have to look at migration patterns.
#
That's fascinating. And I'm already while we're still talking about this book, already looking
#
forward to talking about the next book when it's done. But for the sake of my listeners,
#
let me quickly summarize the narrative that is in your book and why I find that so interesting.
#
And after I finish, you can add layers to it and add the kind of nuance that you've
#
just been adding. And it's a very fascinating narrative of how the slave trade leads to
#
these different languages that you have Africans thrown together on the boats and how to communicate
#
they pick up words from their masters. And those words form a kind of pigeon language
#
where you'll have these basic words like food, toilet, eat, water, whatever you have all
#
these words, but there's no structure to them. And these are known as pigeon languages. And
#
then what happens in the next generation is that as their kids grow up and absorb these
#
languages, they put what you call sort of a substratum to it, where they give a grammatical
#
structure to it that is similar to the West African structure. So when somebody, you know,
#
this Creole English, Creole French, various Creole versions of all these languages, but
#
a Creole is not just a smattering of Jogaru words as a pigeon is, but it's actually a
#
language with an architecture and an operating system of its own. And while to the outside
#
observer, it might seem that, hey, these are words from English, so is derived from English,
#
or these are words from French, so is derived from French. Actually, those are, you know,
#
that's the surface stopping and the base, the basic architecture and so on is from their
#
original languages, which is really fascinating. And the journey of your book is then examining
#
whether a lot of Indian languages have evolved in a similar way and not to give anything
#
away. But one of the conclusions you came to, at least as I read it, is that there wasn't
#
necessarily that pigeon phase, because there was no need to learn, you know, words overnight,
#
that urgency wasn't there, there wasn't that sense of chaos and the world thrown into turmoil,
#
you could evolve over decades and centuries. So whereas that pigeon phase wasn't there,
#
the Creolization is there, where you take language, where you take, you know, nouns
#
and all of that from a particular source, say Sanskrit, for example, but your underlying
#
substructure, normally Prakrit, which itself came from Sanskrit, which was like a vernacular
#
form of Sanskrit, as you point out. And then you put that substructure, which is possibly
#
from the Dravidian languages, going back to the Harappans and all of that. So I found
#
this explanation quite fascinating as, you know, an explanation of how languages can
#
evolve in different ways, where one, something sudden happens and two, something sudden doesn't
#
really happen. But it's the same kind of structure where you have an architecture and an operating
#
system that is there from before, and you're putting other things on top of it. But what
#
you seem to be saying now is that that early narrative of, you know, the slave trade leading
#
to a pigeonization, leading to Creole languages coming up within a generation, are you saying
#
that that's a little too simplistic as well, that there's more to that?
#
I feel so. In fact, I, when people say first came the pigeon, and then came the Creoles
#
and that children brought the Creoles. I could put a very different storyline to this. The
#
pigeons only existed as a makeshift thing to transfer the vocabulary. It was not necessary
#
in India because there was time and vocabulary was known in some manner of speaking. But
#
I never think of the pigeon as a very important thing above and beyond handling the very first
#
generation and getting the first words across. Now, it isn't that the children, we are told
#
that the children developed it into a proper full-fledged language, full-fledged operating
#
system, which coincidentally was exactly like the one that they had before. Now, just think
#
of the logic of that. We developed something absolutely new out from scratch, which was
#
identical to what was there before. What is your normal reaction to that? That, in fact,
#
the thing from before never went away and that it isn't a brand new thing and that it's
#
just like the Indian situation, a coat of paint comes on top of an old operating system.
#
As for why, maybe there was more chaos. But I don't think there needs to have been a lot
#
of chaos in the Caribbean because from the way the slave trading was done, there was
#
one phase when it was Ghana, one phase when it was further up the coast, towards the very
#
end it was Nigeria, the Yorubas. How could you say they don't understand each other?
#
The coastal Ghanaians pretty much can understand each other. So it isn't that they couldn't,
#
but that perhaps they were already exposed to something that was beginning to be spoken
#
on the coast, which involved English words, and then on the estates. So this idea that
#
they reinvented the African operating system, it just never went away. So exactly as in
#
India a coat of paint a little more hastily was put over something very old. It's a nice
#
thought because we tend to think only of our paternal line and that, you know, you say
#
that the North Indian languages are Indo-Aryan, which means proctored based, not actually
#
Sanskrit based. Sanskrit was sort of like the Mona Lisa on the wall. You don't take
#
pieces of paint from the Mona Lisa to paint. You can get paint somewhere else. The same
#
colors are there. That's proctored. But that this could happen in India very slowly. We
#
think of these languages as we call them Indo-Aryan, but that's just one side because there's the
#
other side that we completely ignore. And to me, that's the exciting side, maybe because
#
we never thought about it before, that something much older in India has been preserved.
#
That's fascinating. And we'll turn our attention to India next because like I was, you know,
#
literally while reading your book, I was actually making many of the sounds that you spoke about
#
and yeah, the tongue is hitting my teeth and yeah, the tongue is hitting the top of my
#
mouth. And I never knew that only in South Asia do we do something like that. And it
#
was quite fascinating thinking about languages, especially because a lot of your examples
#
are from Hindi and Marathi, two languages which I kind of know, though I don't speak
#
Marathi, but I can understand it quite well. And that was eye opening for me. But before
#
we get there, let's take a quick commercial break. And then on the other side of the break,
#
we'll start talking about our languages and what they reveal about us.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer. In fact, chances are that many of you first
#
heard of me because of my blog India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009 and
#
became somewhat popular at the time. I love the freedom the form gave me. And I feel I
#
was shaped by it in many ways. I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced
#
to think about many different things because I wrote about many different things. Well,
#
that phase in my life ended for various reasons. And now it is time to revive it. Only now
#
I'm doing it through a newsletter. I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com,
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy. I'll write about some of
#
the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else. So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com
#
and subscribe. It is free. Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land
#
up in your email inbox. You don't need to go anywhere. So subscribe now for free. The
#
India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com. Thank you.
#
Welcome back to The Scene In The Unseen. I'm chatting with Peggy Mohan about her wonderful
#
book, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants, from which I learned so much about not just language,
#
but about India and in a sense about humanity as well. While we start talking about the
#
way language evolved in India, let's get really specific. And one of the things that really
#
struck me in your book and had me making different sounds, which had surrounding people look
#
at me wondering what the hell is happening, is your section where you talk about the difference
#
between dental and retroflex sounds, where, you know, just to sort of demystify it for
#
the reader, you write at one point that quote Sanskrit has, besides the consonants like
#
t, t, h, d, d, h, and t, d, d, d, d, d, n, s, s, that are produced with the tip of the
#
tongue touching the upper teeth, a parallel series of retroflex consonants produced with
#
the tip of the tongue turned upwards, t, t, h, d, d, h. So I hope I don't get any of that
#
wrong. And it's very interesting. Like you talk about, for example, the words dhant and
#
dhant, right? And dhant is the dh and the t in dhant. When you make those sounds, your
#
teeth, your tongue is touching the top of your teeth. But when you say dhant, which
#
is to scold someone, the dh and the t, your tongue is curled back and that is what is
#
called as a retroflex sound. And you point out that nowhere in any of the Indo-Aryan
#
languages do these retroflex sounds exist. They exist only in South Asia as it were.
#
In fact, at one point you say that, you know, gaining retroflex sounds is basically a sign
#
of becoming South Asian. So now when we say that Sanskrit is one of the Indo-Aryan languages
#
and it came from there, but the fact of the matter is that the Sanskrit that was, you
#
know, first written down in the Rig Veda, which is, you know, a subject we'll also
#
come to, but that was first written down had these retroflex sounds, which none of its
#
sort of forebears or ancestors or sister languages from Indo-Aryan had, which means that there
#
were already local influences kind of creeping in. And this is just one of the many sort
#
of forensic lines of inquiry that you take to figure out what really happened. So tell
#
me a little bit about that. In fact, tell me a little bit about your sense of discovering
#
this. Like, I think you point to a 1974 paper by Madhav Deshpande who talks about the Sanskrit
#
in the Rig Veda and all that.
#
Yes, 1979 it got published. But in 1976 he was talking about writing it.
#
Ah, okay. Okay. So I must have got the date wrong. Apologies. So tell me a bit about what
#
is that moment of discovery like for you? You know, what are the implications of it?
#
The fact that, you know, people think of Sanskrit as this pure codified language. In fact, some
#
people here will think of it as a mothership of all languages, but, and there are all these
#
things people say about how it's a perfect computer language and all of that sort of
#
the WhatsApp forwards of the past as it were. Yeah, absolutely. But those are the myths
#
around it. But here you find that in a sense it was also evolving and living and breathing
#
in a manner of speaking till again, it rectified after it took a written form. But tell me
#
a bit about one, your sort of sense of discovery and what windows did this open for you? And
#
two, what are the directions that a discovery like this can logically lead to? Like if you
#
ask yourself the question, why, why are these retroflex sounds there? What are the different
#
competing theories that come up and what was your exploration of those like? Okay. When
#
I started, I was at a very different place from when I finished writing about all of
#
this. So I'll go backwards for you. When I, I had to draw the map of India because I had
#
to do my own drawings because the government of India doesn't allow you to use maps in
#
your book without permission. So I drew my own maps and they were linguistic maps. And
#
what came as a shock to me is that almost all over South Asia, all of Pakistan, half
#
of Nepal, all of Sri Lanka, the Andamans, all of the Indian mass, except for the Northeast
#
and two little areas, two little tribes in the center of India. All these areas have
#
a distinction between ta-tha-da-da-na and ta-tha-da-da-na or may not have na and nowhere
#
else really on earth. There may be places where you think you hear a da or a ta, but
#
we're not very sure whether it's important in the way it is in India. So I discovered
#
that India, the place that contains this M haplogroup as Tony Joseph would put it, is
#
the same place that contains all these retroflex sounds. So it is almost like a hallmark of
#
a language being Indian. What Madhav Deshpande started with was the certainty in his mind
#
that original Sanskrit at the time that the Rig Veda, the main body of the Rig Veda was
#
composed, not written, composed and memorized, did not have these sounds. Now, what is interesting
#
is that in the Sanskrit story, in the story of the Nambudris in Kerala, in the story of
#
the Mughals and the Sultanate coming into India, you always had people with one high
#
language. Okay, Jews going into Kerala, you also have, that's another migration, always
#
they preserve their sacred language, but they speak something else when they come and they
#
throw that away very quickly. So you find that all people going into Kerala speak Malayalam
#
as a regular thing, but they preserve their sacred language. And similarly with Sanskrit,
#
we know very little about how the people were actually speaking when they came. We tried
#
to reconstruct, but if we imagine that almost the first generation was a mixed generation,
#
you start seeing that the Vedic children are already beginning to absorb a lot of local
#
influences because their mothers speak a different language. So their first language is probably
#
by their not quite Sanskrit. So Sanskrit is kept almost as a literary language and as
#
a literary language, it can retain its older form. So what Professor Deshpande was basically
#
saying is that the earliest Rigvedic verses did not have this, but that over time, since
#
it was memorized and recited, it crept in and it's only when the Samhitas were made
#
about 700 years later that the people who actually sat and listened and memorized and
#
put together the Samhitas were already the sort of people who had all these features
#
in their colloquial speech. And when they heard it here and there in the Rigveda, they
#
argued among themselves which word has a ta or which word has a ta. And they came to some
#
kind of decision about it. And the final Sanskrit that was kept, the Rigvedic verses in the
#
Samhitas contained this feature, but that wasn't there originally. So this was a big
#
debate. Now, how could it have taken so long? Answer being, well, this is a document. It's
#
a almost literary document. The Mughals never brought it into Persian. So why would the
#
original Vedic people have made an effort to bring it in? But you have this parallel
#
strands of the colloquial form, the Prakrit type languages that they spoke, and this very
#
pristine Rigveda, which over time started getting garbled here and there. And so here
#
is an interesting upshot of it is that by the time it was ready to be used for practical
#
purposes, namely for the Shrauta rituals to bring in Kshatriyas, you began to find that
#
it was already a very different kind of a much more Indian language. And it all links
#
to all kinds of politics. It wasn't so needed earlier because it was just verses written.
#
But then when it had a political purpose to solidify a new empire, the thing was put together
#
and it acquired, it was formally given a more Indian form. But see, Sanskrit was not written
#
down and even to this day, most of the people who traditionally work with the Vedas or work
#
with any of the Sanskrit texts use memorization. So there's much more scope to see things slip
#
in and then it makes sense to you that they should be there. And it didn't end there because
#
the very first word you could say of the Rigveda has an extra sound, which is there in Marathi
#
and Malayalam, which is not in Sanskrit, but it's there in the first verse. So the change
#
is something that's ongoing. It happened later.
#
So let's take a step back. And one of the things I want to take a step back and talk
#
about is how the Arya came into India in the first place. And something that you point
#
out, which people may not realize until it is pointed out, is that most of the initial
#
migrants were men, that these were men who were coming in. And what typically would happen
#
is that they would get together with local women, as it were, to use a euphemism. And
#
often that could happen through violence where they get rid of local men and they take the
#
local women and all of that. But regardless of how exactly what the methodology is happening,
#
they supplant the local men and they're coming on horseback and all of that. So they are
#
just stronger and they're like a superior class of people coming in and sort of taking
#
over a land. And what then happens? And violent. So they are coming in with their language,
#
which one assumes is what you call the Ulrigvedic Sanskrit. We don't know what that is like,
#
but that is like some pure thing that is out there. And when they get here, the language
#
that they use in their everyday lives is Prakrit, as you say, which is not exactly a creole.
#
It's not comparable to any of them. It's like Indian English. It's like good Babu English.
#
It's correct, but it has a strong accent. Yeah. So it's not a new language of its own.
#
It's just a kind of a variation of Sanskrit, as it were, and not taking anything from too
#
many local influences. But the women speak a different language. And this is a point
#
that you make that the women speak a different language. In fact, I think at one point you
#
talk about Vyasa and you point out how when you look at sort of Vyasa's parentage, his
#
father, grandfather and all that, all of them are Arya, but mother, grandmother, all of
#
those are not. So you have these different influences where the women are speaking one
#
language and the men are speaking another language and what you would expect to happen
#
over time. And you know what you pointed out, the whole Caribbean process was something
#
becoming creolized is that the language of the woman, the substructure that it has, the
#
operating system as it were, takes in the words from the language of the men and it
#
all kind of starts blending together. And it's also interesting that there are, you know,
#
some things about the early Rig Veda that kind of seem to make sense in the light of
#
this process. For example, you talk about in your book, how early on in the Rig Veda,
#
you quote Madhav Deshpande saying, quote, the attitude of the Vedic Aryans towards the
#
non Aryans are seen in the Rig Veda is also very significant. The general attitude is
#
characterized by a strong hatred towards the non Aryans, whether they are Spani, Sabaras
#
or Dasas. Very rarely are there any references to them as friends. Stop quote. And you also
#
talk about how they distrust the women at one point saying that beware of the women.
#
They can be like hyenas, which on the one hand is sexist and misogynist, but on the
#
other hand would be natural caution given that perhaps those women are there because
#
they got rid of all their men to begin with. And there's an element of coercion to all
#
of this. And then you talk about how the Rig Veda sort of is something that is not written
#
down to begin with. And the reason we don't quite know what the Sanskrit of that time
#
when these men came on horseback is like is that it was not written down and therefore
#
it did not become ossified. So the Rig Veda becomes this oral tradition which carries
#
on through the centuries, which, you know, different Shakas or clans kind of remember
#
in their own tradition. And then it mixes with the local language and those kinds of
#
habits come in like retroflex sounds, I presume. And then by the time it's written down, these
#
variations make their way into what is written down. And once it is written down, of course,
#
it becomes ossified because nobody really speaks it in their everyday language and it
#
becomes ossified and it is there as it is. And that's kind of the process. Is this an
#
accurate summation or have I left out something important?
#
I don't think you've really left anything out, no. By the time the Samhitas were there,
#
you think of the Sanskrit as the Mona Lisa. It's a completed work. And soon after this,
#
the kind of people who worked in Sanskrit, or even by then, were speaking something else
#
in their daily lives. So Sanskrit had become sort of like a literary language, though not
#
written down. Yeah, I think you're pretty accurate on that.
#
And tell me about what we know about the languages that existed before that. Like one of the
#
things that we do know, and which you have kind of pointed out in your book, is that
#
the Harappan people were way more advanced than the Vedic people in many ways. Like you
#
talk about, quote, the Harappan people had intelligently planned cities, blow up agriculture,
#
central granaries, craft production, an advanced system of civic drainage, homes with indoor
#
plumbing. The Vedic people were pre-urban and essentially pastoral, stop-quote. And
#
of course, we haven't kind of deciphered the Harappan language yet, but there is enough
#
reason to believe, and Tony also talks about this, that all the Dravidian languages kind
#
of come from there. We're guessing, partly. Yeah, we're guessing.
#
So tell me a little bit about what we can guess about or what we know about the language
#
landscape before the Arya come riding in with their Sanskrit and, you know, and their alpha
#
male attitude. Okay. Well, first thing is that the only people
#
who tend to bring women on migrations are hunter-gatherers. So once you get past that,
#
you're really talking of explorers. Explorer is actually a good word to use because you
#
don't get into the sense of contentious words like invader or so. These were definitely
#
violent people. The general feeling is that the Harappan civilization crumbled shortly
#
before the Arya came. There was no conflict where one defeated the other or invaded. They
#
came into a land which had space for them, but they were pretty violent people. As to
#
what their languages sound like, we can either say we draw a complete blank because we cannot
#
decode in the script. I don't know if it's a script. There are linguists like Witzel
#
who say he doesn't think so. I'm not sure I agree with him because I think that something
#
like seals or a language of what my instincts tell me about this language is really full
#
of nouns. So there's no reason why you should be looking for a sentence structure in the
#
seals. These are probably labels and probably nouns. However, what do we know about the
#
language? Very, very little. I mean, here and there you might find a word used in Sumerian
#
or something which refers to this place. But my way of looking back at it is a more subtractive
#
way. What is there in all the languages west of Banaras? Because once you go east of Banaras,
#
it's a different family. West of Banaras all the way across Pakistan and all the way south
#
down to Goa that cannot be explained by Sanskrit and perhaps also cannot be explained by anything
#
Dravidian or otherwise tribal in India. And when you start finding those features, then
#
you start getting what I think of as a glimpse of the people who were there before. And then
#
the question is, who were the people who were there before? The Harappans or their relatives.
#
It's very unlikely that all the peoples living around the Harappan area who were not directly
#
in the citadel would be vastly different in terms of language. But and the way this one
#
particular feature, the past tense being food eaten rather than I ate. Kana khaya not as
#
in Bhojpuri would say hum khairi, you know, or in Bengali would have a very different
#
way of Sanskrit. Later Sanskrit actually began to incorporate this. But you begin to get
#
a sense of something that is in the mindset, a language which is heavily full of nouns
#
does not like finite verbs, avoids them here and there, treats verbs as something that
#
can have a gender. You know, there are other things in Hindi and all the languages of India,
#
which are not in Sanskrit, like the difference between Hogeya and Hua. That's not in Sanskrit.
#
There's no way to express that in Sanskrit. That's older. And it's definitely something
#
that was there. Otherwise, why would it be in modern Indian language? But it's all over
#
India. That's one that's different from the strange past tenses, which are only in the
#
area fed by the Harappan family. So, okay, what else do we know about the Harappan people?
#
If you look at Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi, Pashto, you get languages which are very similar to
#
the Dravidian ones in their avoidance of bha, dha, jha. In Punjabi, if you wanted to say
#
ghar, it becomes kar, and it is a ka with a tone. Sindhi uses, they would instead of
#
saying dha becomes dha, and dha becomes dha. So, they're different, but they're not different
#
because of this age thing that you get in bha, dha, jha. They basically are avoiding
#
the same sounds that are uncomfortable for South Indians. And nobody's really said it
#
in this way, that this is a Dravidian type feature because it's not there in the Northeast.
#
I mean, Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, they're comfortable with these sounds, but this particular
#
area is not. So, these are little glimpses you have of what could be features of the
#
old languages, though we can't even say what the words are.
#
And if you are to, for a moment, get a little more meta, like you're talking about, I mean,
#
these are, of course, aspirated sounds, the dha, kha, kha, which as you've pointed out
#
that is something that this Dravidian belt seems to avoid, but it does exist somewhere
#
else and some people are comfortable with it and some people are not. Or even when we
#
look at, you know, the sort of the retroflex sounds which some people are comfortable with
#
or some people are not, you know, as half Bengali and I grew up speaking Bengali at
#
home, I sometimes get mocked because in Hindi, I can't say the ra as it, you know, I can
#
say ra, but not the ra. I don't even know if I'm saying it properly now.
#
No, I had the same problem for on until I lived in Delhi for a while. I know. And that's
#
something that blew my mind. I couldn't do it as a kid. I tried because we didn't have
#
it anymore. We lost it in Bhojpuri and Trinidad.
#
So here's my question, you know, and maybe this is too meta to really be able to answer,
#
but why do these evolve like this? Why do some languages evolve in a sense that retroflex
#
sounds are natural and you're using them and, you know, and aspirated sounds come easy to
#
you and in some other languages, some other people, like if you've grown up speaking Punjabi,
#
for example, you simply won't say, you can't say, you'll just say car. It's just with that
#
tone and that inflection. So is there a deeper meta? Why behind that? That why do some languages
#
have some sounds which other languages don't? Why should a sound evolve in a particular
#
way? And, you know, why should some people have this practice of it hitting their tongue
#
at the top of the mouth, you know, or in some places, like you've pointed out in your book,
#
people won't mix vowels, you know, either it comes from the front of the mouth or the
#
back of the throat and they won't mix them. That's Turkish. Yeah. The Turkish languages.
#
So is there a deeper why behind that? I can't actually say that. Why does this happen? But
#
I can give an idea that it goes all the way back to initial conditions and initial conditions
#
are who were the original people in the mix? Who were the mothers or the substratum layer
#
in the mix? That's the layer we never think about up to now. And that's probably where
#
your answers come. What was comfortable for them in terms of what they spoke before? Clearly,
#
as you know, that there are certain sounds Bengalis are not very happy with, but at the
#
same time, they're extremely happy with aspirated sounds. It's just super easy for Bengalis.
#
Why I can't tell you, except it does give you an idea of the boundaries of larger groups
#
that the entire Magadhan area, we call it Magadhan now, maybe it had another name or
#
maybe it had no name, or maybe it goes back to the time of quite a separate civilization
#
from the Indus Valley one, which got its input from Southeast Asia rather than from the Eurasian
#
steppes. So you have the Southeast Asian component coming in. As to why that mix to create something
#
like Bengali, there are too many steps that I can't trace as to, there are a lot of unknowns,
#
but except to say that there is a family of languages in the East, which includes Assamese,
#
Odia, Bengali, and the Bihari dialects into UP. And that there's almost like a tectonic
#
plate that is in collision between that area and the area to the West where there's gender,
#
there's funny past tenses, and which seems to coincide with the people who were there
#
before the Vedic people came.
#
I'm going to continue digressing and ask you another meta question because it's on a subject
#
that interests me a lot, which is I discovered this term in your book called ergetivity.
#
Yeah, which is there in a bunch of Indian languages, where I'll quickly quote you. Ergetivity
#
is a tricky thing to explain because it involves subjects and objects exchanging places when
#
the sentence goes into the past tense. Not I did not work, but by me, work done. Stop
#
code and you give various examples. And an example of this, of course, is that, you know,
#
you could say that mai khati hu, or you could say khana khaya. And khana khaya is, of course,
#
the other way around. Now, I teach an online writing course, which is, of course, on writing
#
in English, where I will often tell my students why you should always use the active voice.
#
So you should have a construction which is subject plus verb plus whatever. And the reason
#
for it flows to how readers will process language and comprehend language, which is that you
#
want them to move forward all the time. So if it is active voice, they're always moving
#
forward. So when you say Peggy enlightened Amit, the reader hears Peggy, they're like,
#
okay, what about Peggy? Peggy enlightened. Okay, who did she enlightened? And then you
#
go on. Whereas if you were to have it backwards, if you were to do it in passive voice that
#
Amit was enlightened by Peggy, then there's that moment where the reader is kind of going
#
backwards. And it's just an unnatural structure. Now, this is something that is very standard
#
and almost cliched writing advice that use active voice, use subject plus verb, go forwards.
#
And it's interesting that there are exceptions to it that occur naturally. For example, Steven
#
Pinker gave a great speech where he made the same exhortation that please use active voice.
#
But then he pointed out why people sometimes use passive voice in the sense that if I end
#
a sentence with the emphasis on something, I might begin the next sentence talking, you
#
know, with that and that can make it passive. But even if that the passive voice comes naturally,
#
ideally, one sticks to active for the very good reason that you want the reader moving
#
forward. Now, one thing that I keep pointing out and it amuses me is that in a bunch of
#
Indian languages, including Marathi and Urdu and there are specific reasons I use these
#
two examples comes from what follows that the passive formulation is quite common. So
#
for example, in cricket commentary, you'll often have Sanjay Manjrekar whose native tongue
#
is Marathi or a Rameez Raja whose native tongue is Urdu saying things like beautiful cover
#
drive was played by Shorav Ganguly, right, which I think of it as speaking backwards
#
and it just makes a listener work harder to process what is happening. Now, my question
#
is this that why does agitivity even exist then? Whatever spoken language evolves, evolves
#
for a reason because it is optimal to speak in a particular way, which is why you have,
#
for example, iambic pentameter being such an effective form in English because 10 syllables
#
is about the, you know, what we can say naturally without needing to take a breath. So that's
#
a form of the language which is dictated by physiology as it were. What is your lung capacity?
#
So this is something I can't figure out that why do we speak backwards as it were or use
#
these passive formulations in some of these languages. Again, I know that it's like a
#
question that might be too meta and no one can really know. Well, let's see. I'll answer
#
you first by saying why is a very difficult thing to say, except that we know that Marathi
#
is one end of this, of the continuum and into Pakistan, Urdu, all the languages of Pakistan
#
contain this feature. It's not exactly passive. It's something a little different because
#
we are cautioned not to call it passive because there is a passive in all these languages
#
is a little bit different. But at the same time, the example I use is that if you are
#
the sort of language which prefers to use what's called participles eaten instead of
#
ate, or done instead of did, you were going to find that it's going to have a passive
#
form to it. You know, the eaten food, it's not, I'm not the one who's eaten. The food
#
is what's eaten. So in a way, this structure, if you favor saying eaten instead of ate,
#
you're forced into a somewhat passive type formulation. And then the person who does
#
it, it's by him, food eaten by him. It seems to be something that goes all the way into
#
at sometimes southern Iran, it's lost, it's vanished from modern Farsi. But this, you
#
see it in the Ashokan pillars, you see it in Kali Dasa, you see it with exactly the
#
same thing in these languages, it ends in ta. Even in Urdu, the word reht, the ta is
#
the same, en ending, eaten, broken, thrown, you know. These languages like to imagine
#
the past in those terms, only when there could be an object. You couldn't, gone, you, I gone,
#
obviously this kind of thing can't happen, there's no object. So the answer, the simplest
#
answer is that it's an area phenomenon. And the deeper answer is that the very nature
#
of a past participle is this going to be passive. I don't know about Bengali, but I know in
#
Bhojpuri, when we use those past participles, we do something to make them unpassive. Like
#
you want to say, you don't say ukral ba, he has done it. You have to take out the passiveness
#
from it. It's not he was not done, he has not done. So you could do this in Bhojpuri,
#
and I imagine in Bengali and all these other languages too, whereas you stuck in the whole
#
western belt that you prefer a past which by its very nature has a passive flavor to
#
it. And that's the way they have imagined the past. And it leaked into Sanskrit. So
#
by the time of Kali Dasa, by the time of the Ashokan Pillars, you're seeing this sort of
#
thing all over the place. And there are people who know Sanskrit very well, and have read
#
a lot of more modern literature, who think it's perfectly good Sanskrit. It's just like
#
it's perfectly good Indian English to throw in passives everywhere. It's the same sort
#
of thing. It's not wrong, but it's a little awkward, but it begins to be acceptable. But
#
it comes from underlying conditions. I'm very certain it's because of the people who were
#
there before, and the way their grammars and their original languages worked.
#
Yeah, and to be clear, I wasn't necessarily passing a value judgment. I am not at all
#
one of those language snobs who thinks that there is a purity to a certain form of expression
#
and anything else is bad. So language evolves, it's a living, breathing thing, and that's
#
what it is, as in fact your book demonstrates more than any other. But I was kind of curious,
#
and I guess a certain kind of way of using a participle could evolve as sort of just
#
an evolutionary accident, and then it determines other things like the passive voice which
#
flows from there. And there isn't necessarily a deeper structure to that, a deeper purpose
#
to that particular thing. Let's kind of go back for a moment to the Vedic invasion. I
#
was reading a passage that you quoted from Jared Diamond, in fact, in Guns, Jumps and
#
Steel which you quoted in your book, and a question struck me after reading that. So
#
first I'll sort of read that out and then I'll ask my question. Where he's talking
#
about what happens when a technologically more advanced group enters a new territory,
#
as would be the case with the Arya on their horses. And he writes, quote, where the population
#
densities are very low, as is usual in regions occupied by hunter-gatherer bands, survivors
#
of a defeated group need only move farther away from their enemies. Where population
#
densities are moderate, as in regions occupied by food-producing tribes, no large vacant
#
areas remain to which survivors of a defeated band can flee. The victors have no use for
#
survivors of a defeated tribe unless to take the women in marriage. The defeated men are
#
killed and their territory may be occupied by the victors. Alternatively, because many
#
such societies have intensive food production systems capable of yielding large surpluses,
#
the victors can leave the defeated in place but deprive them of political autonomy. Like
#
turning them into slaves or assigning them place at the bottom of a caste system. That
#
last line is your comment after his quote ends. And it kind of struck me that this also
#
shows that events that happened thousands of years ago, literally, can lead to a structure
#
that is pervasive to this day that affects how we live our lives today, number one. Like
#
Tony in his book, for example, though his timeline is slightly different, talks about
#
how essentially all of these people who migrated to India from West Asia or the area were basically
#
intermingling freely till about, you know, the common era started. And then for the last
#
2000 years has been strict endogamy because a particular vision of society, which is the
#
Brahmanical vision of a caste system has kind of won out. Now, one, this seems pretty incontrovertible
#
that this is kind of how it's happened. But I'm more keen on the role that language plays
#
in this because in language almost seems to play a role in perpetuating these. For example,
#
Sanskrit was denied to women at one point. Women weren't allowed to learn it. It was
#
something that was there for the Brahmans, you know, and they would learn the Vedas by
#
heart and so on and so forth. And equally in modern day times where we've been invaded
#
at different times by different people. And in modern day times, it seems that English
#
has now become that marker of class, which also you have a wonderful chapter on where
#
you speak about that. And in fact, it's something I bemoan because English being, you know,
#
in our postcolonial times, English has become a marker of class. And it's almost become
#
a signaling device for people to show their sophistication by speaking in fancy English,
#
which means that a lot of the language that we use contains, you know, these old archaic
#
British pomposities, which the British themselves have discarded. But we will still kind of
#
use language like that, like instead of saying stop, we'll use a phrase like put an end to,
#
you know, and so on, which is disrespectful of whoever's reading you or listening to you
#
if you use that kind of language. I was shocked once to discover on YouTube that there are
#
actually these really popular videos, supposedly teaching better English to Indians and what
#
they're really saying is don't use simple words, always use a more complex word. So
#
instead of say, use the word articulate, which is exactly the opposite of the advice I'd
#
give where the language becomes a signaling device, where the language becomes a marker
#
of class, a marker of social status, and so on. So how does this affect everything that
#
is happening in sort of a subterranean sense where languages are changing, even Sanskrit
#
is getting retroflex and all of that from the language of the conquered people as it
#
were. And in later times, under the Mughals, you have sort of, you know, all the khichris
#
that are popping up, including Hindi slash Urdu. How does language play a part in this
#
and what are your sort of observations of language and these sort of social structures
#
that are around us? I wouldn't say that language does it. I would say language reflects it
#
because basically this is something that's happened again and again in India. At the
#
simplest level, I could say once upon a time, certain people spoke Sanskrit and others didn't.
#
Women didn't. Once upon a time, certain people spoke Persian and everyone else spoke other
#
things. The word Urdu wasn't used yet. It was just basically Hindi. And now certain
#
people speak English and others are kept away from it. It's basically about a society that
#
has a tolerance for inequality and a perception that the elite can exist with a code that's
#
completely different from what other people speak. So it's something that's just been
#
continuing. So it isn't that Hindi has done it or English has done it. They merely have
#
been selected to represent a way of expressing inequality and hierarchy. In fact, in the
#
book, I even found that to this day, we have among, say, families in Punjab and Haryana.
#
You could see Manmohan Singh. You could see that the minute the teleprompter is in Urdu,
#
he becomes an orator. And the minute he's reading Devanagari, he's uncomfortable. He's
#
just struggling to read the words. He didn't grow up with it. But his wife would have grown
#
up with Gurmukhi or Devanagari. And that part of India, Haryana, Punjab, and maybe even
#
parts of UP, you'll find that men were brought up with proudly saying that I studied Persian,
#
I can read Urdu, but I just don't know this Hindi thing. And their wives are very different.
#
And you'd even find it going further into the families that the men are non-veg, the
#
women are veg, the men like ghazals, the women like bhajans. This kind of thing is about
#
a fragmentation in so many ways that language is not responsible for it, except it captures
#
it so very well. It's so easy to tell who is who using language instead of having to
#
show papers and things like that. So as long as India has this perception that the elites
#
need to be kept apart and privileged by having a code that will guarantee that they and only
#
they can access the best jobs, this kind of thing is going to happen. I think it's sad
#
because it's going to mean that all the local languages are in danger because poor people
#
are not stupid. They understand that English is what is going to give the goodies to everyone.
#
And they're willing to see their languages decline or they haven't given it a thought
#
if their kids can have what we have. I think that's a particularly fair thing to think.
#
If we had earlier on found some other route of maybe very decentralized education up to
#
a certain point and so on, our languages might have survived better. But for that, what would
#
have happened is our kids would have been mixing with poor kids. And that was something
#
that the elite didn't want.
#
So here's my sort of next broader question. One of the themes that kind of comes through
#
your book is this jostling between languages where some languages evolve and then gain
#
prominence. And one classic example being Hindi gaining prominence while other languages
#
like I grew up thinking that, for example, Bhojpuri and Avadhi and whatever are dialects
#
of Hindi. And later on you get to realize they're not dialects of Hindi, they're completely
#
separate languages with their own rich history and literature and all of that. And somehow
#
one kind of becomes prominent. Now there is a process which one can see in your book,
#
one can see through history, that smaller languages gradually die out and get absorbed
#
in bigger languages. And this can happen in two ways. One way, of course, is it can just
#
happen through either through conquest or one social class get becoming dominant in
#
a particular place. Like, you know, after this, we'll talk about, you know, Kerala and
#
the Nambudiri Brahmins and how they along with the Nair's kind of they had a lucky victory
#
in conquest. And after that, their language and whatever kind of takes over and that that shapes Malayalam.
#
So one way can be through that sort of social dominance, whether by coercion or not. But
#
the other way is simply through following incentives. Like today, if you're a young
#
kid who's brought up, say, in a family in rural Maharashtra and you're speaking a particular
#
kind of rich dialect of Marathi with its own history. And like you said, like you've pointed
#
out, Marathi is like a Creole language which has taken from Sanskrit, from Dravidian, from all over.
#
It's not just a simple case that it's a, you know, a child of Sanskrit. There's much more
#
that has gone into it. Each of these so-called dialects will also be so rich. But the incentive
#
for this kid in Maharashtra is not necessarily to go deeper into his own language, but into
#
this language he's born into, but to number one, learn English. And number two, even if
#
he's, you know, if he's moving to a big city and he's communicating in Marathi with fellow
#
Maharashtrians, to then learn and adopt the kind of standardized Marathi which everybody
#
else speaks, which then, you know, he or she will teach to their own children. And in this
#
way you have a sort of a consolidation happening where bigger languages take over and people
#
move from smaller languages to bigger languages and then the smaller languages die. And part
#
of that is through sort of conquest and coercion and all of that, which is a problem. But part
#
of it is through people just making rational choices and following incentives and saying
#
this is what I got to do to get ahead. And it's hard to fault those individuals for making
#
those choices. So, you know, how do you sort of think about all of this? And do you think
#
this process is inevitable? Because I think whatever value judgment we pass on the process
#
that hey, diversity is good and we need it and so on, do you think that it is simply
#
inevitable and we can't do anything about it? Like just to take another digression,
#
I did an episode with Vikram Doctor once on Indian food and how rich it is and how so
#
much of it has actually come from outside. And he pointed out what has happened to Indian
#
bananas, which is basically there was something called, you know, we imported a certain kind
#
of banana outside and that became popular elsewhere as a Cavendish banana and then that
#
got brought back to India. And then the Cavendish banana just spread like wildfire because economies
#
of scale and all that kicked in and then it kicked out a whole bunch of these indigenous
#
bananas which otherwise existed. And therefore now we have the fact that one strand of bananas
#
which we only exported is now killing all the other bananas we have, not because it's
#
necessarily a better banana as it were, if they can be anything such as a better banana,
#
but simply because, you know, economies of scale and all those other factors have kicked
#
in and you're losing that diversity. So in the context of language, is it inevitable
#
that we lose that diversity? See, this all is slightly again, well, like the banana.
#
One thing I must say, I don't like it either, but it has shelf life. So you'll find that
#
when it comes to fruits, shelf life becomes an important thing when distance between the
#
farm and the final consumer is so much. So you're talking about this huge size of the
#
economy that now surrounds us. What makes a language do well? You said conquest, but
#
that was earlier. Now it's very simple that the language, why did, why did Hindi survive
#
and older or more pedigreed illustrious literary languages like Braj, Avadhi, not do so well?
#
It's a very simple location. Hindi came up in Delhi and Delhi was in all sorts of ways
#
a capital even from the time of the Sultanate. So which variety of Marathi is going to prevail
#
the one that is around the Bombay area? So cities are very, very implicated in the choice
#
of which language is going to survive. And that also has to do with the fact that we
#
in a mega economy and we are trying more and more to force a kind of convergence because
#
anybody who's left out of the communication loop is out of your control. So you want more
#
control of people. You want them to speak the language. Even if the elite may not want
#
the poor to speak English, the internet world does. So you're suddenly finding people pulled
#
in into an ethos that is not because of language, but it's definitely reflected in language.
#
So we are becoming more and more a global community and not necessarily in a very great
#
way. It's nice that we can speak to just about anyone anywhere, but I don't think it is people's
#
choice that is making them do it. If there were any other way, I don't think people would
#
put their children in English medium schools and have them staring out the window, yawning,
#
dead silent for years in class. It's not something that they would regard as pleasant experience
#
for the child, but they don't have control over the way in which the economy is running
#
and the fact that we are getting more and more interconnected, networked. So that is
#
what has this impact. Now, which language, our language will be chosen, which one will
#
be chosen, the one that's most associated with the large cities. So that's the way it
#
goes. It's really not linguistic actually.
#
Yeah, yeah. It's kind of poignant. I have a friend who writes in Kannada and wants to
#
be a Kannada writer and he feels most comfortable in a dialect of Kannada that a lot of Kannada
#
speakers won't even recognize that very few people speak in. And he is like, what should
#
I do? Because if I write in that, I will naturally have less readers, less chance of getting
#
published, less whatever. And I don't know what to say because the heart says that write
#
in what you know best, but the head says that, you know, you also want to be read. I would
#
just say, you know, picking off on some phrase that you use that even if the elite don't
#
want the poor to learn English, I don't think that would be the case. I think the elites
#
on the contrary would want the poor to learn English because it increases their sort of
#
networks. Like in a similar way that Macaulay wanted students to learn English so that they
#
could be, of course Macaulay's reasons were exploitative and very zero sum. But I think,
#
you know, within India, the more people that know English, the more the markets, the more
#
the chances for prosperity, because that is what English does.
#
If my child is brilliant, it really does not matter who competes with my child. My child
#
will do well. But if my child is a very ordinary mediocre child, I need something that is own.
#
And if you put something as a gatekeeper, like a language, which my child has, which
#
is not a sign of greater intellect, but it can be posed as a important attribute of some
#
of requirement for a job. My child will always do better than a brilliant child who doesn't
#
have this language. Doing is the ultimate reservation system of the elite for the kids
#
they have who probably could not compete in a fair fight.
#
I guess it comes down to whether you have a zero sum mindset or a positive sum mindset.
#
And a lot of Indians sadly do seem to be stuck in the zero sum mindset. But that said, I
#
think, you know, English has become such an aspirational language in India that you and
#
you, of course, also point out in your chapter on English, how, you know, English has become
#
so pervasive that even people who think that they speak only in Hindi actually don't that
#
they are using a lot of English words. And, and I would argue that's not necessarily a
#
bad thing. Those English words have just become part of the language. You know, it's an Indian
#
language. But do you bemoan it because of the danger that some languages may die because
#
of this because of English ization of everything? Or, you know, because on the whole languages
#
evolving in this way is just the way history goes. And it's not necessarily something bad.
#
See, again, it's not about language. It's about political choices, economic choices.
#
If we live in a world that's more controlled by the tech world of Silicon Valley, or global
#
enterprises, you're going to find a wish for streamlining into a single language. So I
#
don't sit and worry about languages dying because people will survive. But I think that
#
the entire idea of having a single language for such an enormous community as the global
#
community is flawed. And I'm, I'm not very convinced that what we're doing in terms of
#
the way the world is moving is the right one, or it's even in our control anymore. So, so
#
these are very political things I'm saying, or political or socio economic, but they're
#
not linguistic. Language follows from this. So to preserve languages, you can't preserve
#
a language that you don't really use. As long as you don't get your medical reports in Hindi,
#
you're preserving it for what? To have it as a pretty thing like a tiger in a zoo to
#
say we haven't killed the last tiger. Whereas I don't like the word preserve. I think that
#
anything is in, if you have a fair situation, things will thrive on their own. The point
#
is we don't have a fair situation. So that's why these languages are all under threat.
#
And as to where this is going to go, it's, in a sense, it's another mass extinction,
#
like what we're seeing that the only animals left are going to be livestock and pets, you
#
know, and the only languages left are the ones that are convenient to the world of tech
#
and big business. So ultimately, all these things that we've been talking about all my
#
answers to you in the last half an hour or so have taken it away from linguistics and
#
into socio economics and politics, because that's where the real fight is.
#
Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, what you're really pointing out is that, listen, you know,
#
if there is, if society is ill, then language is just a symptom. It is not the cause it
#
you can look at it and say that, okay, languages follow in this way, or one language becomes
#
dominant because of something else that's wrong. There's nothing inherent in the language,
#
which of course is a case. If I might pose a slight counterpoint to the not even a counterpoint,
#
I agree with you entirely. But another way of sort of looking at this is that while everybody
#
in India, for example, would want to know English for functional reasons, and more and
#
more people also are talking about, you know, learning Mandarin, or at one point, learning
#
Spanish would be a thing elsewhere in the world. And all those are for functional reasons
#
because you want to be part of that wider economy and be able to communicate. But I'm
#
not so sure that it is always at the expense of languages dying out like all our cinemas
#
are regional cinemas are flourishing. I used to be a big fan of tik tok. I even taught
#
a brief course on tik tok in Indian society. And there it wasn't that people were expressing
#
themselves in English or anything, you could make out from their clothes and whatever that
#
there was a lot of aspiration there. But they were expressing themselves in local languages
#
where sometimes even if I didn't understand the language, I could still make out what's
#
going on. And I would find it hilarious. And in a sense, I would say that the more diversity
#
you have in terms of entertainment and platforms and being able to express yourself, the more
#
chance the more diversity of expression you will have. And therefore the chance that languages
#
may survive. Like I think in your book, if I remember correctly, you also point out your
#
surprise that Bhojpuri, which was once not a major language has actually now become a
#
big language in its own right. Is that correct? Do I remember correctly?
#
Up to a point. In fact, that's a very good example, because Bhojpuri has managed to command
#
politics and entertainment. But that's only half the battle. The big battle for a language
#
is does it command technology? Does it command the banking sector? Does it command government?
#
That's easy, of course. But technology and science are the things that really tell you
#
if there's no scientific discourse in the language, it's a body blow to it. Like you
#
look at places like the Philippines and South Africa, there's entertainment in local languages,
#
but they are visibly traumatized, because it's only reached the level of entertainment.
#
The really tough thing is whether futuristic stuff like science and technology are done
#
in the language. You can do any amount of bureaucracy. You could pass a law and say
#
all government memos in whatever language, but science and technology. Once they're not,
#
China is way ahead. It's in Chinese. Japan, it's in Japanese. Iran, it's in Farsi. Turkey,
#
it's in Turkish. All the Scandinavian countries, but in India, this is an important point.
#
Even something like doing mathematics, any Indian educated in English adds a column of
#
figures in English. Nobody else in the world can do that. A Swede will add in Swedish and
#
tell you the answer in English. So in a way, there are features of a language which give
#
it a little bit of a lease on life, entertainment, literature even is one, but without those
#
top layers which reach into the future, you are, you know, riding for bad times. And that's
#
true of every Indian language. That's my worry. We're not seeing it because just to see so
#
much literature, so much stuff in print, so much entertainment, pop songs, it's a small
#
part of the journey. Yeah, no, very wise points. And thinking aloud, like if I look at a country
#
like China, for example, it strikes me that this can both be a feature and a bug that
#
on the one hand, yes, they have kind of managed to get where they are without relying on English
#
to the point that now people in the West are saying, hey, we got to learn Mandarin and
#
we got to figure this out in China is a big bar. But at the same time, they've been very
#
insular. And this also kind of comes at a cost that insularity is obviously again, not
#
a good thing. You want to open yourself up to influences from everywhere. The danger
#
in opening yourself up to influences from everywhere is that you can get run over by
#
them, especially when, you know, economies of scale come in as they do in the case of
#
the Cavendish banana, which like you said, there are rational reasons for people to prefer
#
the Cavendish bananas to other bananas, that they last longer. But nevertheless, what happens
#
is that diversity suffers and those other bananas go out of play. And with India, I
#
think it's kind of a unique situation because English was a dominant language for a long
#
time under colonialism, that the hangover of that sort of remained and other languages
#
were kind of, you know, driven into different directions. You know, I mean, how do you even
#
reverse that now? You can't, for example, tell people that no, your children must only
#
be schooled in your local languages. You can't do that because you'll be denying them opportunities.
#
It would again come down to the same thing of the elites creating a new kind of sort
#
of apartheid, as it were, through language. So I think in modern times, it's good that
#
everyone learns English, but I completely get your sort of worry about what happens
#
to the other languages. I mean, I'm optimistic enough to hope that there'll be enough ways
#
of people expressing themselves and for all of these to stay alive. But you're shaking
#
your head and you know, I don't see it. I believe that it's a myth that bilingualism
#
is a sustainable thing. In the old days, when in India we had a very stable social structure
#
and you could know three or four languages in parallel, we got the illusion that that's
#
something that Indians were very good at. But the modern world is a little different.
#
When people learn two languages or learn another language in India, English or the main regional
#
language, it's not quite the same as it used to be before, because there's an arrow of
#
direction with it. It isn't that we plan to live our lives and our children's lives and
#
their children's lives in three languages. We are in transit to a new one language. We
#
already have children coming into the schools in India who only know English and who might
#
pick up a local language as a subject, never read a single piece of literature in it. So
#
can it be reversed? Is it good? If you have ever been in a class where 25% of the kids
#
don't really know English, you find that there's a terrible illusion that just by spouting
#
gibberish at them, they will learn it, they will not. So it's a very inefficient way to
#
teach English. In fact, if what you wanted to do was teach English, the best way to teach
#
English is to not teach it in its medium, but to allow children to learn about the world
#
and separately learn English. Now, where that's going to take us is probably not even a terribly
#
different place. As long as the world is centralizing more and more, language will do the same thing.
#
Is it a good thing? Well, for that, you just have to answer the question, is it a good
#
thing that we have no more wild animals and it's only pets and livestock? Is it a good
#
thing that we have less and less wild plants, but only crops and gardens and lawns and lawn,
#
the most absolutely useless thing? So these are choices that ultimately are not about
#
language. So in my book, I do say that when languages die, it's like a canary taken into
#
a mine, that it will die long before you can even feel that the air has changed. So it's
#
another one of those marks of a mass extinction. I don't have a strong position on it and what
#
we should do except to say that the word mass extinction is a scary word. It should give
#
us a moment of pause to think about where we're going. And the answer, of course, is
#
not going to be linguistic. I agree with all of that, except that I think I'm less pessimistic,
#
but that could just be from my own sort of availability heuristic, where I can look around
#
me and I can speak multiple languages, so can the people around me. But it would be
#
dangerous to assume that that is always necessarily going to be the case. So we'll see how that
#
pans out. Now, one chapter that I really found fascinating in your book was about the Sanskrit
#
words in Malayalam, because my assumption was that, hey, listen, the South Indian languages
#
are completely separate. They won't let Sanskrit in. But then you point out how deeply Malayalam
#
is Sanskritized. And in fact, Malayalam is a beautiful language in that sense, though
#
I don't know it, but because there's so many influences from so many places, from Arabic,
#
from all the different kinds of traders, Jews, Arabs, and Syrian Christians who kind of landed
#
up there, all of whom shaped the language in their own way. But the Sanskritization
#
is really interesting because it really begins with what the happenstance of the way that
#
a particular military battle works out. Like you quote K. Sugandhan in a book that he wrote
#
in Malayalam, writing about how, quote, at just about this time in Kerala, Buddhists
#
were defeated by the Brahmin community and the Nair forces fighting on their side. Buddhist
#
and Jain groups who did not accept the dominance of the Brahmins saw a sharp decline in status
#
and were assigned to Ezoa and Thirukas. Ezoa, I'm so, apologies to everyone who might be
#
offended by this. Ezoa and Thirukas within a resurgent caste system while groups like
#
the Nairs who had supported the Brahmins remained secure. Stop quote. And later on you write
#
quote, Sanskritized Malayalam appeared at exactly the same time that Brahmanical Hinduism
#
was being reestablished in Kerala and when the Nammudiri Brahmin community had every
#
reason to celebrate its good fortune. So tell me a little bit about what happened here.
#
Like was it a case of sort of a creolization of a new Malayalam coming up or was it just
#
a sort of very superficial series of loanwords being taken from Sanskrit into Malayalam?
#
What exactly was the process by which a new Malayalam which was distinct from the old
#
Malayalam came about and what was the nature of this distinction?
#
Okay, I'll do it by comparing another language in a southern part of India, which is Urdu
#
in the Deccan. In both of these languages, Dakini, Urdu and modern Malayalam with Sanskrit
#
words, the people who first started it were people who knew Sanskrit or Persian. So for
#
them, it was not a question of adding in Sanskrit. They knew the language. They were getting
#
away from Sanskrit by putting Sanskrit in a matrix of the local language or putting
#
Persian words in Dakini in the matrix of the local language. So it's not an addition. It's
#
a subtraction. It taking out all the verbs. Yeah, also notice that in Malayalam and in
#
Rehta, Urdu, only nouns. So that whenever they stuck for a noun, they went to Persian
#
or they went to Sanskrit. Sanskrit itself. In the north, we tell ourselves that we have
#
Sanskrit words. They're actually Prakrit words. But in Kerala, it was actually Sanskrit, where
#
we read Tatsama Sanskrit. The point is that people who always wrote in Sanskrit or always
#
wrote in Persian took the decision not to do it. But they did a English kind of thing.
#
They kept adding in all these words when they were stuck. So it was not creolization. It
#
was obviously something else. But I didn't have a word for it. But here I see two parts
#
of India where nouns have come into something that is local. And the nouns have come from
#
somewhere else. No, no, no verbs, no endings, nothing, no grammar, just the nouns. So Malayalam
#
is still very much a South Indian language, but it has a bunch of nouns which come from
#
Sanskrit. So what to call that? I haven't given it that name. Somebody should give it
#
a name, but it's not a Prakrit.
#
It's so fascinating how sort of nouns are the easiest thing to kind of transplant and
#
the structure remains what it is or might adopt slightly. But nouns are just easiest
#
But it's like clothing. Like you, if I saw you in a kurta pajama or I saw you in what
#
you're wearing now, there would be a stark difference in how you would look, but it would
#
be the same you. Whereas if there had been actual body transplants or you had a child
#
who was half from a completely different community, there you would see big differences. But this
#
If my child was a tiramesu bear, for example, let's move on. In fact, I'm not going to talk
#
about any more of the chapters individually because we've already spoken for two and a
#
half hours and I just want to ask broader questions now, but implore all of my listeners
#
to go and read the full book. I mean, the chapters on the Indo-Aryan languages and then
#
on Hindi and Urdu were absolutely fascinating. So I'm going to now kind of move on to my
#
next broad question. But before that, you mentioned Khosrow earlier, Ameer Khosrow.
#
And Ameer Khosrow is, of course, this fascinating character who was born in the year 1253 and
#
he seems to sort of be a metaphor for what is happening in the Indian languages itself.
#
As you point out, quote, as a young boy, Khosrow is said to have learned Turki. The language
#
was not yet called Uzbek, Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. And he also picked up various
#
dialects spoken in the Delhi region, such as Avadi, Brajbhasha, Bhojpuri in the new
#
language of the urban gentry known as Khariboli or Dailavi or simply as Hindi. The name Urdu
#
would only come with the poet Mushafi by the late 18th century. Stop quote.
#
And then you quote this beautiful lines by him where he writes about his peer, Hazrat
#
Nizamuddin Auliya, where he says,
#
Mahto aiso rang aur nahi dekhire, Mohi peer payo Nizamuddin Auliya, Nizamuddin Auliya,
#
Nizamuddin Auliya. And very resonant words and easy for me to understand even now in
#
this current time. But when I later read Ghalib, and as you point out, most of Ghalib's work
#
is in Persian and only some of it is in Urdu. But even though what Ghalib writes in Urdu
#
is very heavily Persianized, very cryptic, very Persianized. And you've pointed out about
#
how during this time his mentor initially was Bahadur Shah Zafar, who himself was like
#
a pensioner kept captive in the Red Fort by the British. So Ghalib did not want to piss
#
the British off. And therefore he kept it cryptic. More Persian went into his poetry
#
as it were. And at this point in the 19th century, over a period of a few decades, what
#
happens is that Urdu gets more and more Persianized, and Hindi gets more and more Sanskritized.
#
Because at the same time, there is this political movement happening where, you know, Alok Rai
#
has written a book called Hindi Nationalism on this, where the whole movement is that
#
Hindi is our pure language, and we must strip foreign elements from it, which is not of
#
course the case. It was never a pure form. It just evolved as a combination of all these
#
various things. So Hindi is Sanskritized in the way that nobody actually speaks, like
#
that kind of Shudh Hindi is not spoken anywhere per se. And equally Urdu gets Persianized
#
for a variety of different reasons like that. And they diverge, even though to begin with,
#
they are the same language fundamentally, and they diverge. In fact, you've pointed
#
out how Munshi Premchand's son Amrit Rai wrote a book about criticizing Ghalib and
#
what he did with this beautiful language that he just Persianized it heavily, which seems
#
at some level to me to be the equivalent of if someone was to take regular spoken English
#
and just put in a lot of big Latinate words, and it would be like, I think a similar kind
#
of effect would happen. And some people will of course do that to signal that, you know,
#
I know this language so well and all of that, but a similar kind of thing would happen.
#
It just shows how politics plays such a huge part in language. And independent India has
#
also of course grappled with that. And in that sense, perhaps, you know, the fact that
#
we have English at least is a blessing because otherwise, you know, people might have tried
#
to impose Hindi on the southern states, which would not have gone down well with good reason.
#
Couldn't have happened, yeah. Not the kind of Hindi that they were going to impose, definitely
#
not. Notice that the Hindi that came up in the Shudh Hindi was like in Malayalam, Tatsamah
#
Hindi. It was never the case in the past. The kind of words that came were from Prakrit,
#
never from Sanskrit. So to just barge in there and put Sanskrit words was a failure to notice
#
how language had formed in the past. And it wasn't done by Indians initially. It was done
#
by the British because they were very unhappy with, well, the importance of the language
#
spoken by their predecessors. So they were trying to break these languages and they managed
#
to do it. However, when you talk of Ghalib, let's remember he didn't only write ghazals
#
and poetry. He also wrote, I remember going in fact into the Ghalib Institute, they have
#
a library, to get out his collected letters and which were collected actually 50 years
#
after he died. And they give a bit of an overview of how we felt in those days because they
#
were not published as such. And you would understand most of the Urdu. It's nothing
#
like his poetry. His poetry is difficult, not because of the language per se. He's being
#
very devious in how he frames his thoughts. It's a puzzle. He's writing like Zen quans
#
for you. And in fact, if you live with a ghazal in your head for years, its meaning is going
#
to change depending upon the things that are happening in your own life. So he did have
#
another Urdu, which was much more normal, much more down to earth. But that gets lost
#
because that's not what many people look for in him. But yes, it's very hard to imagine
#
that the British were successfully splitting the old Mughal elite from the modern Hindu
#
citizens of their empire without it having a repercussion on the language. So they managed
#
to split the language and people began to think that this strange thing written in Persian
#
script is not the same thing as what we have that has borrowed a whole lot of new Sanskrit
#
words. So again, politics and somebody intervening and the famous term divided rule, they did
#
that. Language was just one area.
#
No, and you've actually reproduced in your book one of Ghalib's letters, which reads
#
so differently. Like someone is asking him about the destruction of Delhi and he begins
#
with the words, bhai kya puchte ho, kya likho. And then he goes on in language that anyone
#
sitting today can really understand and relate to. And we might use some of those, some of
#
the same language ourselves while his ghazals and all are quite different, which is fascinating.
#
So this is very interesting how the British create this sharp political divide and so
#
on. So when we look at modern day politics also, for example, especially in these trying
#
times, you know, and this is not just a question purely about language, but as someone who's
#
observed society over a while, who has seen larger political trends play out, in fact
#
through the centuries. So in that capacity, like it is very easy, for example, to sit
#
in the present moment and be despondent about the current trends that are going on. But
#
equally, someone may just sit back and say, no, listen, we've been here before, it's
#
okay, we'll get through this. There are things within society that are stronger than these
#
currents that are there right now in our politics. So how does one think about it? Like earlier,
#
you were a little more pessimistic than I was about the survival of some of these languages
#
and what was being done to them. Because being an expert in languages, when you write the
#
kind of book that you have done also means that you are also writing about politics and
#
society and all of that. So I'm going to take a step outside language for a moment and just
#
ask you on what is your feeling about all of this as someone who is from Delhi, as,
#
you know, as you tell people who you've been here for more than 40 years. But equally,
#
you have a wider view of the whole world. But you also have a deeper view of India itself
#
because of all your incredible insights in this, as your incredible insights in this
#
book indicate about both the language and the society. What is your sense of what is
#
going on? And what role does language play on it? Like as an aside, like sometimes when
#
I see our prime minister's speeches on TV, it seems to me that he's speaking a certain
#
shoot kind of Hindi, not to the same extent as someone like watch by did a couple of decades
#
ago, but he's speaking a certain shoot kind of Hindi and not an everyday lingo kind of
#
language where, you know, he would famously say Mitro instead of those two, as people
#
would say in common speech. And, you know, and I don't understand how that goes down
#
so well among so many people who don't speak the language. But anyway, that's a digression.
#
But in general, you know, with that wider understanding of history and with all the
#
frames that you've gathered, when you look at this present time, how do you feel?
#
See, since I told you earlier with language, what worries me is that it's all the all the
#
tributaries are coming to one single river. In the past, there were many tributaries going
#
to many rivers. And we said, we've seen this before. We can go ahead. But when it's all
#
coming into one, we're seeing something a little bit scary. And as to where this goes
#
in the future, I think we're beginning to see pushback. I don't regard the whole covid
#
experience as a one off. It's just the first thing that's being done to shake our entire
#
notion of where we are going. And they're going to be others. There's no way they will
#
not be pushed back against this roller coaster we're on, taking us towards a more and more
#
centralized world with a few billionaires and others completely on the outside. I'm
#
not even talking about just India. This is the world we are in for a lot of surprises.
#
If you think of what Zoom classes have done to education, you suddenly realize that I'm
#
not very sure how we stepping out of the world we've constructed in the last two years. So
#
a lot of things are going to people are going to be ripe for thinking afresh about a lot
#
of things. Is it nice to travel all the way across Delhi to school? Maybe some local things
#
are a better way. Maybe it's nice to be able to be going places in your daily life where
#
you can walk or cycle, where maybe it's nice for children to be able to be close to school
#
and to go without their parents intervention. In fact, the more centralized the world has
#
been the more children have needed their parents to completely shepherd them through it. So
#
what I'm trying to say is we've reached a point where the surprises are going to start
#
coming and we are not really primed for them. We're going to have to react in some way.
#
So on the political front, what's happening now is similar to what's happening in many
#
parts of the world. And what's going to happen next? I am thinking it's going to be surprises
#
because it cannot continue. We cannot have more and more inequality, more and more strife
#
among communities. Something has got to give and it's going to give as Steve Gold would
#
have said in a punctuated sort of a way, sudden things are going to happen and we're going
#
to have these shocks. And how language will respond to that is to what extent these shocks
#
force us to fragment into more manageable zones. Remember the 12th century in India
#
and Europe, both places were about breaking up over large expanses of power, Latin, Sanskrit,
#
all fragmented into smaller manageable units. It happened then. So I don't know what will
#
happen in the future except that this is one of the possibilities. But we are, as I said
#
in the book, racing towards a stop sign.
#
That's fascinating. The notion that we might be heading towards a kind of punctuated equilibria
#
where everything just sort of changes. And I would hope it changes. I mean, there is
#
a possibility that it changes for the better. Otherwise, looking at our politics, I tend
#
to be more pessimistic than optimistic. But when you think of language, I think the biggest
#
pushback is actually coming from our artists and writers. I think of Hussain Haidari's
#
poem Hindustani Musalma, Varun Grover, Kagaz Nahi Dikhayenge, where they are using language
#
in a beautiful, relatable way to express dissent. You see the amazing work our cartoonists are
#
doing, in fact, where language is not even such a big part of that. So I think there
#
is hope in art and there is hope in common people. But who knows? Let's see.
#
I'll end by sort of asking you a question I often ask all my guests. It's almost become
#
a meme of the show that people want to know what books to read about particular subjects.
#
So when my guest recommends books, they'll often go out and buy those, post pictures
#
of those on Twitter. All of that happens, which is something I absolutely love and encourage
#
because we all should really read more. So what I'm going to ask you to do, and I don't
#
want to restrict you to books about language, which is the obvious thing, because your book
#
is not just about language. It is about so much else. I mean, it's, I mean, it's one
#
of those books which, you know, I was telling you before the show that I often say that
#
to understand India's history, two books that you must read by authors I've done episodes
#
with are, you know, early Indians by Tony Joseph and India Moving by Chinmay Tumbe on
#
the history of migration. And I absolutely include your book now as a third prong of
#
that. And I'm sure there are many more prongs and much for us to discover. But I felt that
#
in so many different ways, which I couldn't even touch the surface of during this episode,
#
your book opened my eyes to so many things and gave me so much to think about. So on
#
similar lines, if somebody reads your book and says that, hey, this was great, I want
#
to read more books like this, what would you recommend? Like, are there any books which
#
change the way you look at the world? What are the sort of books that you feel so enthusiastic
#
about that you want to throw it at people and say, read it now?
#
Okay, they will not be in linguistics. But there is a style of writing, which I think
#
all these people, Tony Joseph, probably, I would say, me, I hope, it's called science
#
narratives, where you're posing very complex scientific issues. But writing it in somewhat
#
accessible style, which involves a certain amount of walking around the corridors of
#
your hospital, you see it with somebody like Siddhartha Mukherjee. I particularly liked
#
his first book, The Emperor of All Maladies. That's a style. But for stuff that gives me
#
a lot of food for thought, there's a writer I like and his name is David Kwamen. And he
#
writes on issues to do with the biology. And the earlier books, of course, the first one
#
that I would say I really love is the Song of the Dodo. It's looking about extinctions
#
and comparing extinctions in that situation to the extinctions of language that I work
#
on. And then of course, his latest book, unless he's written after that, is called The Tangled
#
Tree. So you're looking at how genes are influenced by invading viruses, bacteria, et cetera.
#
And in a way, it's not just a style of the science narrative that I'm hoping I am trying
#
my best to get to. But the issues are very similar. Extinctions are something we worry
#
about. Predators are things that we worry about. Predator languages. And he has written
#
a number of books. So you can go through that and read about quite a number of things that
#
impact language or are parallel to the problems that we have. So just as I went to Stephen
#
Jay Gould to read about what would be a natural life cycle for a language, I go to somebody
#
like Kwamen to see how this is posed in a style that makes a decent book, that somebody
#
can actually read extremely difficult things in and still not be overwhelmed by it. You
#
see the kind of style that I'm thinking of. I remember reading books by Rubella Thapar
#
and Irfan Habib. And there was this lovely feeling at the end of the book of just going
#
through the notes, just as a standalone thing, because I felt the book was not enough. I
#
wanted more. And there was more. There were the notes. So that was another thing that
#
I think in my own book, I tried to get because these were also people who were looking at
#
the same kinds of issues in terms of history. So I'm looking at style and patterns, content.
#
These are the kind of people I would want to recommend.
#
And that's such a lovely thought, the thought of looking at the end notes of a book or looking
#
at the bibliography and entering rabbit holes, which I keep doing a lot of the time. And
#
you mentioned David Kwamen. I mean, the only book I've read of his is Spillover, which
#
actually came out a few years ago, but it's about zoonotic viruses. So the moment sort
#
of COVID struck, I started reading up on it. And that's a lovely book as well. So Peggy,
#
what can I say? Thank you so much. I know that you're traveling right now. You're in
#
Mexico right now on the way to San Francisco. Yeah. So it's so kind of you to share your
#
time and insights with me. And I'm deeply grateful and deeply grateful not just for
#
the episode, but thank you for writing this book because it's just so eye opening and
#
wonderful. So thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to your nearest bookstore online
#
or offline and pick up Peggy Mohan's wonderful book, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants, the story
#
of India through its languages. Do also check out the show notes where you can enter plenty
#
of rabbit holes. Peggy doesn't happen to be on Twitter, smart woman, but I am. You can
#
follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes of The Scene
#
and the Unseen at www.sceneunseen.in. Thank you for listening.
