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Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia
How do languages mix? Does it begin in chaos, new migrants and old inhabitants needing a pidgin to communicate? Or does it happen more smoothly, in stages? And what is a prakrit? Why do we hear only of prakrits, and never of pidgins, in South Asia?
In Father Tongue, Motherland, Peggy Mohan looks at exactly how the mixed languages in South Asia came to life. Like a flame moving from wick to wick in early encounters between male settlers and locals skilled at learning languages, the language would start to ‘go native’ as it spread. This produced ‘father tongues’, with words taken from the migrant men’s language, but grammars that preserved the earlier languages of the ‘motherland’.
Looking first at Dakkhini, spoken in the Deccan where north meets south, Mohan goes on to build an X-ray image of a vanished language of the Indus Valley Civilization from the ‘ancient bones’ visible in the modern languages of the area. In the east, she explores another migration of men 4000 years ago that left its mark on language beyond the Ganga-Yamuna confluence. How did the Dravidian people and their languages end up in south India? And what about Nepal, where men coming into the Kathmandu Valley 500 years ago created a hybrid eerily similar to what we find in the rest of the subcontinent?
One image running through this book is of something that remains even when the living form of language fades. Tucked away in how we think and speak now are echoes of our history, and the story of ancestors who lived hundreds and thousands of years ago.
In Father Tongue, Motherland, Peggy Mohan looks at exactly how the mixed languages in South Asia came to life. Like a flame moving from wick to wick in early encounters between male settlers and locals skilled at learning languages, the language would start to ‘go native’ as it spread. This produced ‘father tongues’, with words taken from the migrant men’s language, but grammars that preserved the earlier languages of the ‘motherland’.
Looking first at Dakkhini, spoken in the Deccan where north meets south, Mohan goes on to build an X-ray image of a vanished language of the Indus Valley Civilization from the ‘ancient bones’ visible in the modern languages of the area. In the east, she explores another migration of men 4000 years ago that left its mark on language beyond the Ganga-Yamuna confluence. How did the Dravidian people and their languages end up in south India? And what about Nepal, where men coming into the Kathmandu Valley 500 years ago created a hybrid eerily similar to what we find in the rest of the subcontinent?
One image running through this book is of something that remains even when the living form of language fades. Tucked away in how we think and speak now are echoes of our history, and the story of ancestors who lived hundreds and thousands of years ago.
360 pages, Hardcover
Published May 20, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 13, 2025
[More of a 3.5]
I liked the book. It made me wonder why I didn’t get into linguistics or history, like often happens whenever I read a book about India’s history.
I only have an amateur interest in languages currently, so I cannot really pass a judgment on the book’s accuracy*. Anyway, a lot of the book relies on Mohan dismantling an older language model of pidgins and creoles and creating her own, based on a process of migration and intermingling thereafter. This model forms the core idea that becomes the engine for the entire book, and to be honest, it was enjoyable in that light. The chapters on forming a skeleton of the IVC language as well as a history of the Munda languages were most interesting to me and mainly the meat of this book.
I also appreciated that this did go beyond the northwestern coverage of most books about India’s history. This does look at Dravidian and a few Austro-Asiatic languages too, and with the latter also deconstructs the idea of whether some should actually be called Austro-Asiatic at all. I do wish though that it had covered more Northeastern languages. Assamese and Bodo get a few pages but that’s pretty much it. There are mentions of Nagamese, but mostly in relation to its presence in Mohan’s previous book, which by the way is referred to quite a bit and I think it’s a good idea to read that book first before reading this one.
I also have to caution potential readers that Mohan expects an understanding of basic linguistic terms. Newer concepts like ergativity or retroflexion are explained, and in fact elaborated on repeatedly whenever they come up, but at the beginning of the book, she mentions creoles and pidgins and prakrits pretty much full speed ahead, and I had to do a Google search to jog my memory, as these were terms I learnt in college. Even something like natural gender vs grammatical gender was something I had to look up.
*I also want to link to Karthik Malli’s review of Peggy Mohan’s previous book (https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/...), which I suggested above that y’all read before this one. A lot of problems that Malli finds in that review are issues that I would say are present in this one too, from an extreme focus on the migration angle (which might not be a major issue with the present book, because it does deal with ancient history in a much more major way than the previous book) to a tendency to use historical terms haphazardly (somewhere in the initial chapters, I found the term “Vedic families of the Indus Valley”, which gave me pause, because generally that’s an angle pushed by right-wingers. As the book goes on, it becomes clear that what Mohan was referring to was Vedic families that eventually came to be residing in the areas that were formerly the Indus Valley, but that’s not something that an academic just misses, especially in an India that is playing willy-nilly with its history). This carelessness also extends to using Wikipedia as a reference quite often. I understand that Wiki can be a good source of info, especially when footnoted well, but an academic’s book using it strikes me as negligent.
All in all, I’m not disappointed I read the book and I really found a lot of interesting stuff, like the few chapters I mentioned above, and even the bit about why lower-caste Hindus in areas that were once heavily Buddhist may have peacefully converted to Islam in the medieval ages. Additionally, I’m just delighted because it’s nice to have read my first book in two years and to know that I can still read a book quickly enough.
I liked the book. It made me wonder why I didn’t get into linguistics or history, like often happens whenever I read a book about India’s history.
I only have an amateur interest in languages currently, so I cannot really pass a judgment on the book’s accuracy*. Anyway, a lot of the book relies on Mohan dismantling an older language model of pidgins and creoles and creating her own, based on a process of migration and intermingling thereafter. This model forms the core idea that becomes the engine for the entire book, and to be honest, it was enjoyable in that light. The chapters on forming a skeleton of the IVC language as well as a history of the Munda languages were most interesting to me and mainly the meat of this book.
I also appreciated that this did go beyond the northwestern coverage of most books about India’s history. This does look at Dravidian and a few Austro-Asiatic languages too, and with the latter also deconstructs the idea of whether some should actually be called Austro-Asiatic at all. I do wish though that it had covered more Northeastern languages. Assamese and Bodo get a few pages but that’s pretty much it. There are mentions of Nagamese, but mostly in relation to its presence in Mohan’s previous book, which by the way is referred to quite a bit and I think it’s a good idea to read that book first before reading this one.
I also have to caution potential readers that Mohan expects an understanding of basic linguistic terms. Newer concepts like ergativity or retroflexion are explained, and in fact elaborated on repeatedly whenever they come up, but at the beginning of the book, she mentions creoles and pidgins and prakrits pretty much full speed ahead, and I had to do a Google search to jog my memory, as these were terms I learnt in college. Even something like natural gender vs grammatical gender was something I had to look up.
*I also want to link to Karthik Malli’s review of Peggy Mohan’s previous book (https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/...), which I suggested above that y’all read before this one. A lot of problems that Malli finds in that review are issues that I would say are present in this one too, from an extreme focus on the migration angle (which might not be a major issue with the present book, because it does deal with ancient history in a much more major way than the previous book) to a tendency to use historical terms haphazardly (somewhere in the initial chapters, I found the term “Vedic families of the Indus Valley”, which gave me pause, because generally that’s an angle pushed by right-wingers. As the book goes on, it becomes clear that what Mohan was referring to was Vedic families that eventually came to be residing in the areas that were formerly the Indus Valley, but that’s not something that an academic just misses, especially in an India that is playing willy-nilly with its history). This carelessness also extends to using Wikipedia as a reference quite often. I understand that Wiki can be a good source of info, especially when footnoted well, but an academic’s book using it strikes me as negligent.
All in all, I’m not disappointed I read the book and I really found a lot of interesting stuff, like the few chapters I mentioned above, and even the bit about why lower-caste Hindus in areas that were once heavily Buddhist may have peacefully converted to Islam in the medieval ages. Additionally, I’m just delighted because it’s nice to have read my first book in two years and to know that I can still read a book quickly enough.
March 5, 2025
Peggy Mohan does a remarkable job of making a complex and jargon-heavy subject like linguistics accessible to the lay reader. Terms like ergativity, aspiration, and retroflexion took some getting used to, as did the intricate analysis of verbs, tenses, and nouns in tracing the historical evolution of languages. Yet, despite its technical depth, Father Tongue, Mother Land is an engaging journey through the linguistic landscape of the Indian subcontinent.
Mohan skillfully guides readers into fascinating yet often overlooked linguistic enclaves, from Brahui and Andamanese to Newari, using these languages to weave a broader narrative about India's linguistic heritage. While I found Wanderers, Kings, Merchants to be even more engaging and somewhat less technical, this book is still an enlightening read, packed with Today I Learned moments that make it both educational and entertaining.
Mohan skillfully guides readers into fascinating yet often overlooked linguistic enclaves, from Brahui and Andamanese to Newari, using these languages to weave a broader narrative about India's linguistic heritage. While I found Wanderers, Kings, Merchants to be even more engaging and somewhat less technical, this book is still an enlightening read, packed with Today I Learned moments that make it both educational and entertaining.
November 13, 2025
There is a famous truism called the ‘Law of the Instrument’ which says: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. Though unfortunate for the author, this book is a shining validation of the unedifying principle in that ‘law’. The author is a person of Indian origin residing in Trinidad and is an expert on the mixed or creole languages spoken in those islands. She very clearly understands how these languages originated and developed through the murky episodes of plantation slavery. However, she falls into the trap of believing that the same mechanism was repeated everywhere else in the world and churns out high-sounding theories on how the modern Indian languages came into being from a local substratum that mixed with Sanskrit of the elite newcomers. Essentially, she uses Trinidadian creole English as a compass to hold on to for the journey into language evolution in the Indian subcontinent. Needless to say, she tries miserably to clothe her outlandish concepts in the straitjacket of social dynamics among Trinidadian slave colonies. In the meanwhile, several prejudices of the author also tumble out of the closet. Peggy Mohan was born in Trinidad and studied linguistics at the University of the West Indies. She has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ashoka University and Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.
Mohan assumes without any rational justification that what happened in the Caribbean, associated with slave labour from Africa, occurred in India too. This posits an all-male migration of settlers arriving one fine morning from the land to the north without their womenfolk and going on to have children from local women creating a bilingual generation that knew both its mother tongue and Sanskrit. This produced a number of intermediate languages called prakrit which remained in vogue till the twelfth century when Muslim invaders occupied India. The author claims that the Muslim occupation did well for the underlying languages when it suppressed Sanskrit and its associated prakrit varieties. This led to the development of modern languages. Mohan tries to establish two points here – that the modern Indian languages are totally delinked with Sanskrit in the initial stages and that the Muslim sultans deserve the credit for the growth of modern languages in India. The basic presumption is that the north Indian languages have words drawn from local prakrits, but their grammar had a number of features that are derived from older languages of the area.
Theories of Dravidian origin of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) flourished in India till DNA analysis came in vogue which convincingly ruled out any sudden variations in genetic material in the entire subcontinent, including Pakistan. A Dravidian language called Brahui is still spoken in Baluchistan while a language called Burushaski is spoken in an isolated outcrop of Swat region. The author accepts that the speakers of these languages are not genetically different from their neighbours (p.113). But she again claims that it always made sense that the route used by the early Dravidians into the subcontinent should run from the Northwest to South India via the Indus valley (p.90). Again, this attests to her fallacious intuition that the Dravidians are a human race and IVC was their creation. Both these wrong concepts are long discarded by the academic community. Ignoring the glaring inconsistencies in her argument, she proceeds to test her creole model on India. All-male migrants arrive in a new land and marry local women. Their children and some elite local men pick up a close approximation of the migrants’ language with essentially no change in the grammar. Later on, other local people join the community and soon a version of the language develops with a number of grammatical features from the local languages. Grammar comes from local, but vocabulary is from the migrants. This is the significance of the book’s title, Father tongue, motherland. At this point, she presents another inconsistency in her theory that the IVC was Dravidian. A grammatical feature called ergativity is strongly seen in the Northwest where IVC once flourished. This is conspicuously absent in all Dravidian languages in the South and Magadhan languages to the East, including Sanskrit and all Aryan languages.
A major weakness in the book’s research is the highly subjective nature of the references and the casual way of obtaining information that does not stand up to the minimum rigour expected from a serious academic treatise. Some of the author’s observations are self-delusional and outright misleading. She discusses Brahui and Burushaski languages in the guise of an expert, but her only source of info regarding the latter is a Japanese ‘expert’ who himself did not have much grounding in that language. One of his replies was that he doesn’t ‘think’ that there were compound verbs in Burushaski. Such is the level of understanding among the sources! She further claims that a lady software developer from Bengaluru has deciphered the Indus Valley script which she claims to be notes concerned with currency and the sort of license documents that allowed them to practice their trade. It is not literature at all (p.100). She in fact likens it to a QR code. Another mistaken comment is that the old IVC did not have a sense of social hierarchy (p.143). The findings of archaeologists suggest a contrary picture in the presence of citadels in many Indus sites such as Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Dholavira. Apart from wishful thinking, isn’t it naïve on the part of a scholar to assume a civilization which existed several millennia ago that did not have social hierarchies? Another erroneous inference – either accidental or deliberate because of the author’s association with the Jamia Milia Islamia – is that the Islamic occupation of India was some sort of a blessing in developing the modern languages by destroying Sanskrit influence and Islam offered a path to equality to the country’s downtrodden masses. Both are maliciously crafted perfidies. Forced conversions were the norm during Islamic expansion in South India, but the author asserts that lower castes were attracted to Islam because of the equality it offered through the teachings of Sufis (p.47). She seems to have no sense of what was going on in India. This observation was made regarding the appearance of a mixed elite in Hyderabad in which the lower castes in fact did not find entry.
The author then attempts to make a guess on the basic features of a primitive language X which was spoken at IVC sites when the supposed Aryan invasion took place and which was the prototype that mixed with Sanskrit. She compiles thirteen features of the hypothetical language, compares these to Tamil and appears surprised to find that Tamil matches them. Again, this is just another vent to her overheated fantasy that IVC was Dravidian. Then she emits the offensive and unsubstantiated observation that ‘Punjabi, Tamil, Burushaski, Bhojpuri and Brahui, together with Language X look like one big extended family and Sanskrit the foreign guest who came to stay’ (p.150). Read that sentence again and note with consternation the lethal venom this Trinidadian scholar conceals in it. She goes on further to claim that Language X would sound like a hypothetical Punjabi song with Tamil words. Between the tenth and twelfth centuries CE, Prakrit languages were replaced and our modern languages are claimed to begin appearing in the documents. Never for a moment she considers the rather plausible alternative of the prakrits metamorphosing to the modern languages. Sultanates are said to be the reason for giving space to local languages in place of Sanskrit and related prakrits. However, this is just another hallucination as there were no sultanates that spread across the whole of India in the tenth to twelfth centuries. The author’s conclusions are often shocking because of their glaring disconnect from objective truth. One of her references clearly state that the Turks destroyed the Buddhist Pala kingdom in Bengal and the religion declined. But she demurs and asserts instead that Brahmanism assimilated the people and Brahmins imposed taxes in the kingdom at Malda (p.203). She then turns the screw a bit tighter and claims that the ‘Sufis arrived in Bengal well in advance of the new rulers (Muslim sultans) and encountered a restive population of Buddhists, unhappy with Brahmins and orthodox Hinduism and ready to turn to Muslims for protection’.
Peggy Mohan’s idea of India’s pre-history is childishly simple which can be summarized as follows - 65,000 years ago, people speaking Munda languages left Africa and settled in India. About 9,000 years ago, there was a migration of farmers from Zagros mountains in Iran and they interbred with Mundas, creating a hybrid race called Dravidians. Around 4,000 years ago, a large number of Austro-Asiatic men reached Gangetic plains and introduced a hybrid variety of rice that enhanced productivity of cultivation and population levels. Then came Vedic men with Sanskrit. The ridiculousness of this argument is on what happened next. After all these encounters, the Mundas promptly retreated into forests and became tribal!
What is remarkable throughout the narrative is the author’s inveterate hatred towards Sanskrit and Hinduism though she cleverly vails it in attacks against ‘Brahmanism’. The fundamental premise of the book that only males form migratory bands does not hold water and the entire logical edifice is built up on this shaky ground. Her example of gazelle herds in Masai Mara in support of this ridiculous proposition is made all the more comic by the fact that she found this idea about gazelles during one of her pleasure trips to that place, probably from a tour guide. Fact and truth are at a discount in the entire text and hearsay and opinion of dubious academics are assigned utmost credibility. An email from a correspondent is enough to convince the author to declare some preposterous idea as gospel truth. Her conjectures are marked by their weirdness and naivety. She once remarks that ‘perhaps Brahmin men had begun to secretly dislike the verb conjugations in early Sanskrit’ (p.81. This is the only reason she can think of regarding the disappearance of this feature in Sanskrit!
This book lacks sincere research and is a pure waste of time. Hence it is not recommended to any class of readers.
Mohan assumes without any rational justification that what happened in the Caribbean, associated with slave labour from Africa, occurred in India too. This posits an all-male migration of settlers arriving one fine morning from the land to the north without their womenfolk and going on to have children from local women creating a bilingual generation that knew both its mother tongue and Sanskrit. This produced a number of intermediate languages called prakrit which remained in vogue till the twelfth century when Muslim invaders occupied India. The author claims that the Muslim occupation did well for the underlying languages when it suppressed Sanskrit and its associated prakrit varieties. This led to the development of modern languages. Mohan tries to establish two points here – that the modern Indian languages are totally delinked with Sanskrit in the initial stages and that the Muslim sultans deserve the credit for the growth of modern languages in India. The basic presumption is that the north Indian languages have words drawn from local prakrits, but their grammar had a number of features that are derived from older languages of the area.
Theories of Dravidian origin of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) flourished in India till DNA analysis came in vogue which convincingly ruled out any sudden variations in genetic material in the entire subcontinent, including Pakistan. A Dravidian language called Brahui is still spoken in Baluchistan while a language called Burushaski is spoken in an isolated outcrop of Swat region. The author accepts that the speakers of these languages are not genetically different from their neighbours (p.113). But she again claims that it always made sense that the route used by the early Dravidians into the subcontinent should run from the Northwest to South India via the Indus valley (p.90). Again, this attests to her fallacious intuition that the Dravidians are a human race and IVC was their creation. Both these wrong concepts are long discarded by the academic community. Ignoring the glaring inconsistencies in her argument, she proceeds to test her creole model on India. All-male migrants arrive in a new land and marry local women. Their children and some elite local men pick up a close approximation of the migrants’ language with essentially no change in the grammar. Later on, other local people join the community and soon a version of the language develops with a number of grammatical features from the local languages. Grammar comes from local, but vocabulary is from the migrants. This is the significance of the book’s title, Father tongue, motherland. At this point, she presents another inconsistency in her theory that the IVC was Dravidian. A grammatical feature called ergativity is strongly seen in the Northwest where IVC once flourished. This is conspicuously absent in all Dravidian languages in the South and Magadhan languages to the East, including Sanskrit and all Aryan languages.
A major weakness in the book’s research is the highly subjective nature of the references and the casual way of obtaining information that does not stand up to the minimum rigour expected from a serious academic treatise. Some of the author’s observations are self-delusional and outright misleading. She discusses Brahui and Burushaski languages in the guise of an expert, but her only source of info regarding the latter is a Japanese ‘expert’ who himself did not have much grounding in that language. One of his replies was that he doesn’t ‘think’ that there were compound verbs in Burushaski. Such is the level of understanding among the sources! She further claims that a lady software developer from Bengaluru has deciphered the Indus Valley script which she claims to be notes concerned with currency and the sort of license documents that allowed them to practice their trade. It is not literature at all (p.100). She in fact likens it to a QR code. Another mistaken comment is that the old IVC did not have a sense of social hierarchy (p.143). The findings of archaeologists suggest a contrary picture in the presence of citadels in many Indus sites such as Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Dholavira. Apart from wishful thinking, isn’t it naïve on the part of a scholar to assume a civilization which existed several millennia ago that did not have social hierarchies? Another erroneous inference – either accidental or deliberate because of the author’s association with the Jamia Milia Islamia – is that the Islamic occupation of India was some sort of a blessing in developing the modern languages by destroying Sanskrit influence and Islam offered a path to equality to the country’s downtrodden masses. Both are maliciously crafted perfidies. Forced conversions were the norm during Islamic expansion in South India, but the author asserts that lower castes were attracted to Islam because of the equality it offered through the teachings of Sufis (p.47). She seems to have no sense of what was going on in India. This observation was made regarding the appearance of a mixed elite in Hyderabad in which the lower castes in fact did not find entry.
The author then attempts to make a guess on the basic features of a primitive language X which was spoken at IVC sites when the supposed Aryan invasion took place and which was the prototype that mixed with Sanskrit. She compiles thirteen features of the hypothetical language, compares these to Tamil and appears surprised to find that Tamil matches them. Again, this is just another vent to her overheated fantasy that IVC was Dravidian. Then she emits the offensive and unsubstantiated observation that ‘Punjabi, Tamil, Burushaski, Bhojpuri and Brahui, together with Language X look like one big extended family and Sanskrit the foreign guest who came to stay’ (p.150). Read that sentence again and note with consternation the lethal venom this Trinidadian scholar conceals in it. She goes on further to claim that Language X would sound like a hypothetical Punjabi song with Tamil words. Between the tenth and twelfth centuries CE, Prakrit languages were replaced and our modern languages are claimed to begin appearing in the documents. Never for a moment she considers the rather plausible alternative of the prakrits metamorphosing to the modern languages. Sultanates are said to be the reason for giving space to local languages in place of Sanskrit and related prakrits. However, this is just another hallucination as there were no sultanates that spread across the whole of India in the tenth to twelfth centuries. The author’s conclusions are often shocking because of their glaring disconnect from objective truth. One of her references clearly state that the Turks destroyed the Buddhist Pala kingdom in Bengal and the religion declined. But she demurs and asserts instead that Brahmanism assimilated the people and Brahmins imposed taxes in the kingdom at Malda (p.203). She then turns the screw a bit tighter and claims that the ‘Sufis arrived in Bengal well in advance of the new rulers (Muslim sultans) and encountered a restive population of Buddhists, unhappy with Brahmins and orthodox Hinduism and ready to turn to Muslims for protection’.
Peggy Mohan’s idea of India’s pre-history is childishly simple which can be summarized as follows - 65,000 years ago, people speaking Munda languages left Africa and settled in India. About 9,000 years ago, there was a migration of farmers from Zagros mountains in Iran and they interbred with Mundas, creating a hybrid race called Dravidians. Around 4,000 years ago, a large number of Austro-Asiatic men reached Gangetic plains and introduced a hybrid variety of rice that enhanced productivity of cultivation and population levels. Then came Vedic men with Sanskrit. The ridiculousness of this argument is on what happened next. After all these encounters, the Mundas promptly retreated into forests and became tribal!
What is remarkable throughout the narrative is the author’s inveterate hatred towards Sanskrit and Hinduism though she cleverly vails it in attacks against ‘Brahmanism’. The fundamental premise of the book that only males form migratory bands does not hold water and the entire logical edifice is built up on this shaky ground. Her example of gazelle herds in Masai Mara in support of this ridiculous proposition is made all the more comic by the fact that she found this idea about gazelles during one of her pleasure trips to that place, probably from a tour guide. Fact and truth are at a discount in the entire text and hearsay and opinion of dubious academics are assigned utmost credibility. An email from a correspondent is enough to convince the author to declare some preposterous idea as gospel truth. Her conjectures are marked by their weirdness and naivety. She once remarks that ‘perhaps Brahmin men had begun to secretly dislike the verb conjugations in early Sanskrit’ (p.81. This is the only reason she can think of regarding the disappearance of this feature in Sanskrit!
This book lacks sincere research and is a pure waste of time. Hence it is not recommended to any class of readers.
April 25, 2025
Mohan writes in an easily accessible style so that it’s clear to a non specialist reader without losing the nuance of her central argument.
The grammar and syntax of modern Indian languages share features and resemblances that defy easy categorisation as Indo-European, Dravidian, Munda etc. According to her, the grammar of substratum languages in say modern Indian “Indo European” languages as diverse as Punjabi and Marathi retain features of the older languages and that they are actually mixed languages, “creoles” reflecting how non Indo-European, Dravidian and other speakers adjusted to speaking the new Indo-European Prakrits creating new communities of languages. They did this retaining most of the grammatical features “bones” of their original languages whilst borrowing much of the lexicon “flesh” from the Indo-European Prakrits.
She further suggests that these new creoles are formed when Indo-European migrant men intermarry with non Indo-European women and create a new community of speakers with other local people joining these newly founded communities.
Having established the unique substratum grammatical forms that are shared by these new creoles she speculates on the what the original language underlying all of the new languages of the “Indus Valley Periphery” is and it’s possible connection to the language/s of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
So far so good.
Peggy Mohan is a much better linguist than a historian. The book is marred by jarring ahistorical narratives, amateurish speculations and personal anecdotes that do nothing to further her linguistic arguments.
She suggests without any apparent irony that white British colonialism in her native Trinidad ( Mohan is of white Canadian heritage on her mother’s side ) offered her Indian origin father a way to escape inequality by embracing the beliefs of the white enslavers of black Africans and indentured Indians.
She carries this model further as a reason for language shift In medieval India citing the Deccan as an example. That somehow the potential for being enslaved by the supposedly egalitarian central asian/Turkic conquests of India offered a way to liberation and out of “caste” inequality and thus forming new communities of languages.
Quite forgetting the mountains of historical evidence provided by central asian Muslim historians of the period of the violent nature of these conquests (Malik Kafir etc ) and the opportunity for the mass enslavement of people of the Dar -Al-Harb that these new frontier provinces provided to the slave markets of Bukhara, Khiva and Sultanate Delhi.
It seems to have escaped her notice that the least capable of defending themselves may indeed take the religion of their masters as a way of escaping chattel slavery. Needless to say others like artisanal communities might have done it for economic gain in order to gain access to new colonial patronage as well as for genuine ideological reasons.
One only needs to read the Domesday Book in Norman England ( where unfree peoples and chattel slaves were tied to the estates they worked and would effectively be bought and sold as the estates changed hands ) or Marx that oppressive social constructs were not unique to India. In the case of serfdom in medieval Europe it had church sanction. Chattel slavery was condoned in medieval Islam. Prominent people in the founding of islam are attested to have owned and traded in human beings according to contemporaneous Muslim accounts ( Hadiths )
Unfortunately the amateur history and ideological bias casts a long shadow on the overall veracity of what might otherwise been an interesting set linguistic observations.
The grammar and syntax of modern Indian languages share features and resemblances that defy easy categorisation as Indo-European, Dravidian, Munda etc. According to her, the grammar of substratum languages in say modern Indian “Indo European” languages as diverse as Punjabi and Marathi retain features of the older languages and that they are actually mixed languages, “creoles” reflecting how non Indo-European, Dravidian and other speakers adjusted to speaking the new Indo-European Prakrits creating new communities of languages. They did this retaining most of the grammatical features “bones” of their original languages whilst borrowing much of the lexicon “flesh” from the Indo-European Prakrits.
She further suggests that these new creoles are formed when Indo-European migrant men intermarry with non Indo-European women and create a new community of speakers with other local people joining these newly founded communities.
Having established the unique substratum grammatical forms that are shared by these new creoles she speculates on the what the original language underlying all of the new languages of the “Indus Valley Periphery” is and it’s possible connection to the language/s of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
So far so good.
Peggy Mohan is a much better linguist than a historian. The book is marred by jarring ahistorical narratives, amateurish speculations and personal anecdotes that do nothing to further her linguistic arguments.
She suggests without any apparent irony that white British colonialism in her native Trinidad ( Mohan is of white Canadian heritage on her mother’s side ) offered her Indian origin father a way to escape inequality by embracing the beliefs of the white enslavers of black Africans and indentured Indians.
She carries this model further as a reason for language shift In medieval India citing the Deccan as an example. That somehow the potential for being enslaved by the supposedly egalitarian central asian/Turkic conquests of India offered a way to liberation and out of “caste” inequality and thus forming new communities of languages.
Quite forgetting the mountains of historical evidence provided by central asian Muslim historians of the period of the violent nature of these conquests (Malik Kafir etc ) and the opportunity for the mass enslavement of people of the Dar -Al-Harb that these new frontier provinces provided to the slave markets of Bukhara, Khiva and Sultanate Delhi.
It seems to have escaped her notice that the least capable of defending themselves may indeed take the religion of their masters as a way of escaping chattel slavery. Needless to say others like artisanal communities might have done it for economic gain in order to gain access to new colonial patronage as well as for genuine ideological reasons.
One only needs to read the Domesday Book in Norman England ( where unfree peoples and chattel slaves were tied to the estates they worked and would effectively be bought and sold as the estates changed hands ) or Marx that oppressive social constructs were not unique to India. In the case of serfdom in medieval Europe it had church sanction. Chattel slavery was condoned in medieval Islam. Prominent people in the founding of islam are attested to have owned and traded in human beings according to contemporaneous Muslim accounts ( Hadiths )
Unfortunately the amateur history and ideological bias casts a long shadow on the overall veracity of what might otherwise been an interesting set linguistic observations.
April 25, 2025
This book was part engaging and part annoying. Engaging, when it traverses the origins and journeys of Indian languages, and annoying when it plunges into the depths of comparing different languages through concepts of retroflexion, ergativity and other grammatical nuances, the details of which can only be appreciated and comprehended by a linguist or a philologist. I can’t claim to be any of them, so for me those portions threw me completely off track.
But the book is neatly tied up at the end with a crisp summary that makes you feel as if you have certainly learnt something new. For example, I was introduced to the concepts of creoles, pidgins, prakrits and how each of them start developing in areas when migrants start interacting with the local community. Basically, the author’s (Peggy Mohan has Indian roots but was raised in Trinidad) conclusion is this: Whenever there is a migration of people (mostly men) from some remote part of the world into another community, the concocted language that eventually lives on most likely is one that retains the grammar of the local language and vocabulary from the newcomers’ language.
It was also fun (albeit mildly confusing) to read about a brief history of the Dravidians and Indo-Aryans nicely intertwined with the enigma of trying to decode the language(s) spoken at the time of the Indus Valley Civilization.
But the book is neatly tied up at the end with a crisp summary that makes you feel as if you have certainly learnt something new. For example, I was introduced to the concepts of creoles, pidgins, prakrits and how each of them start developing in areas when migrants start interacting with the local community. Basically, the author’s (Peggy Mohan has Indian roots but was raised in Trinidad) conclusion is this: Whenever there is a migration of people (mostly men) from some remote part of the world into another community, the concocted language that eventually lives on most likely is one that retains the grammar of the local language and vocabulary from the newcomers’ language.
It was also fun (albeit mildly confusing) to read about a brief history of the Dravidians and Indo-Aryans nicely intertwined with the enigma of trying to decode the language(s) spoken at the time of the Indus Valley Civilization.
May 22, 2025
Engaging, insightful and erudite. A must read!
March 10, 2025
TL:DR ~4.5 stars, really recommend it if you’re interested in Indian languages. Would suggest reading Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages [Wanderers] first though.
Although Father Tongue stands on its own, I’ve read Peggy Mohan’s first book and am thus inclined to compare the two when thinking about this one. The most apparent difference I felt is in the structure — while Wanderers is a bunch of case studies of Indian languages (with the effects of migration being a connecting theme), Father Tongue is clear about its aim of setting into practice a proposed model about how Indian languages may have developed.
This focused approach is Father Tongue’s biggest win, for it results in a neatly laid out journey across the chapters. The proposal is a revised creole model where pidgins aren’t at play; where during male-dominant migration, languages arise that have the maternal grammar and form as the substructure and the paternal lexicon present in the basic vocabulary (the “father tongue” may also be able to leak grammatical features into the newer languages). We first use Deccani/Dakni to see how this model fares for a relatively recent language. Then we go into a very interesting section on how we could use this model to figure out features on the Language X that would’ve been used in the Indus Valley civilization. This is followed by using this model on Magadhan languages, and then shorter write-ups on Dravidian languages and (the special) Nepali. Peggy Mohan states and restates the fundamentals of her model as we investigate each region, and how they manifest in each case. This may come across as too repetitive for some, but I feel that doing so has its merits in a non-academic work that delves into many languages and linguistic features.
Father Tongue didn’t leave me with as many questions as Mohan’s first book, which could be a benefit of its tighter narrative. However, I’d still recommend Wanderers to be read first; one straightforward reason is that there are ideas discussed here that are referenced in Wanderers. Another reason is that Father Tongue gets into the thick of things at a faster pace (maybe assuming that the readers have some familiarity through the previous work). In fact, I now want to read Wanderers again to see how ideas across the two books contrast each other. I also hope for detailed reviews from linguists on this one.
My only gripe with the book was that some historical statements had fewer sources cited than I'd wanted or used tertiary sources like Britannica Encyclopedia.
Although Father Tongue stands on its own, I’ve read Peggy Mohan’s first book and am thus inclined to compare the two when thinking about this one. The most apparent difference I felt is in the structure — while Wanderers is a bunch of case studies of Indian languages (with the effects of migration being a connecting theme), Father Tongue is clear about its aim of setting into practice a proposed model about how Indian languages may have developed.
This focused approach is Father Tongue’s biggest win, for it results in a neatly laid out journey across the chapters. The proposal is a revised creole model where pidgins aren’t at play; where during male-dominant migration, languages arise that have the maternal grammar and form as the substructure and the paternal lexicon present in the basic vocabulary (the “father tongue” may also be able to leak grammatical features into the newer languages). We first use Deccani/Dakni to see how this model fares for a relatively recent language. Then we go into a very interesting section on how we could use this model to figure out features on the Language X that would’ve been used in the Indus Valley civilization. This is followed by using this model on Magadhan languages, and then shorter write-ups on Dravidian languages and (the special) Nepali. Peggy Mohan states and restates the fundamentals of her model as we investigate each region, and how they manifest in each case. This may come across as too repetitive for some, but I feel that doing so has its merits in a non-academic work that delves into many languages and linguistic features.
Father Tongue didn’t leave me with as many questions as Mohan’s first book, which could be a benefit of its tighter narrative. However, I’d still recommend Wanderers to be read first; one straightforward reason is that there are ideas discussed here that are referenced in Wanderers. Another reason is that Father Tongue gets into the thick of things at a faster pace (maybe assuming that the readers have some familiarity through the previous work). In fact, I now want to read Wanderers again to see how ideas across the two books contrast each other. I also hope for detailed reviews from linguists on this one.
My only gripe with the book was that some historical statements had fewer sources cited than I'd wanted or used tertiary sources like Britannica Encyclopedia.
June 3, 2025
Relatable, academic, and narrative in equal parts, Peggy Mohan's second book was even more enjoyable than the first. The most incredible part, of course, was the attempted reconstruction of the grammar of the Indus Valley Civilization languages, touching upon linguistic, historical, geographical, genetic, and cultural evidence. I learned how some interesting features of Hindi (such as ergativity, retroflexion, light verbs) might have derived from a substratum from (pre-Aryan) Indus Valley times. It answers an itch I always had about why Indo-Aryan languages "feel" or sound more Dravidian than other Indo-European languages.
The book goes beyond Indo-Aryan languages though—it is pan-Indian, or as pan-Indian as anything relating to India can get. Fascinating facts and imaginations of the origins of Dravidian and Munda languages complete a comprehensive take on India's linguistic heritage.
The book goes beyond Indo-Aryan languages though—it is pan-Indian, or as pan-Indian as anything relating to India can get. Fascinating facts and imaginations of the origins of Dravidian and Munda languages complete a comprehensive take on India's linguistic heritage.
February 3, 2025
I am an instant fan. I loved the book from the very first chapter, when we're convinced to consider creoles and pidgins as a useful rubric to also examine the development of modern languages in India - which recalibrated some fundamental ideas I had never thought of questioning as an untrained but keen language enthusiast. And then, chapter after chapter was full of such brilliant insight, such commendable depth of knowledge and analysis - my copy is all underlines, decked with flags like a Republic Day parade. The presence of Telugu-inspired calques in Dakhani Urdu, the insight to be drawn from split ergativity in modern Indian languages.
Peggy Mohan's other title on the linguistic history of India is referenced often throughout this book, and I feel like a giddy kid on a Christmas morning that I get to look forward to that.
Peggy Mohan's other title on the linguistic history of India is referenced often throughout this book, and I feel like a giddy kid on a Christmas morning that I get to look forward to that.
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