Mandar Gite

“Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“Finding these mixed languages blooming around us, then, is a cause for celebration. What it means is that the little people were able to take on a suitable camouflage while tucking deep into the grammars and sound systems of their new languages precious relics of an earlier life. There is a truly ambidextrous feel to this achievement, one that reaffirms our bond with an older world while asserting our intention to take on the new. The link between Indo-Aryan languages and the Prakrits they got their words from is something dynamic, something negotiated by the little people with the new political entity that they had to face, a group that was not able to snuff out their old languages and hand them down a new operating system, wiping their memory clean of any other traces of their past. In the very forms of the mixed languages we speak, as we go about our daily lives, are encoded unwritten parts of our long, long history.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“Variation in Retroflexion in South Asia (the white areas are areas without retroflexion)54”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“When the Vedic people reached the north-west of the subcontinent, they found other people there besides the local Dravidians. One group that they mention was the Paṇi, who were traders with possible links to the Phoenicians, whose name in Latin was Poeni.31 These Paṇi would have spoken Phoenician, a Semitic language that originated in Syria and Palestine (or ‘Canaan’) related to Hebrew and Aramaic, and which was written from right to left. There are Aramaic stone markers in Taxila and Afghanistan; Emperor Ashoka also wrote his Prakrit edicts in the Aramaic script in this region, since Aramaic was the official language of the Achaemenid Empire that covered present-day Iran and Afghanistan.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages