'Wanderers, Kings, Merchants' by Peggy Mohan

Reviewed by Pranav Minasandra

27 Apr 2023

What is the best kind of science? Is it the science that is most rigorous? The science that is most applicable? Or maybe, some might argue, the science that is most entertaining? I feel the best kind of science is that which is most easy to do, which requires the least equipment, and the laboratory for which is all around us. Numbers, music, the sky, language… these constitute laboratory equipment accessible to everyone.

Peggy Mohan starts Wanderers with a beautiful metaphor, that of a Tiramisu bear. Mohan then proceeds to tell the story of India through its languages, just as the book’s subtitle claims (which is a rare achievement). We start with creoles, languages that have arisen from the chaotic, sudden, and unexpected mixing of other languages, typically as results of jarring geopolitical changes. Mohan then makes the surprising (to me) case that several Indian languages, including Sanskrit, show creole-like tendencies. Using several examples, Mohan draws attention to peculiar linguistic features (such as retroflexion) that distinguish Indian languages from the other languages of the world. Her explanation of the evolution of languages is so coherent and intuitive that it made me question why I did not know this stuff right from the start. Giving credit wherever it’s due, the text is full of notes and references to relevant sources that might be of help.

One fascinating result of reading this book is that it made me pay tenfold the attention I used to, to the languages in which I converse with people. At this point, I speak 6-7 languages:

• Kannada, as I grew up in Karnataka and spoke in it with most of my friends;
• Tamil, since half of my family (my father’s side) speak it at home;
• English from school, the after-effects of colonialism;
• Hindi, also from school, arguably also an effect of colonialism in progress;
• Sanskrit, (in a broken way), because I was really interested in it and for a time nursed ambitions of pursuing it professionally;
• Urdu, learned only after reading a tonne of shaayari and listening to even more qawwali music by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; and
• German, since I’ve been living here for a few years now.

With knowledge of where these languages came from, who made them, and what they have been through, one starts admiring words, and pausing before peculiar constructions. Why is it that, in Hindi, kaam ho jaayega and not just kaam hoga? Why is the past tense in kannada so straightforward (naan kelsa maaDtene -> naa kelsa maaDde) compared to Hindi (mai kaam karta hoon -> maine kaam kiya) Where did the retroflexive consonants (T, Th, D, Dh, N; like in “Taang”, “Thak”, “Damroo”, and so on) come from, and why are they so uniquely Indian? Reading Peggy Mohan’s book awoke in me the same kind of excitement and enthusiasm that was once instilled in me as a child, when someone told me that the earth was but one very very tiny speck in a vast void of nothingness. Then, the black boring sky overhead was transformed into a beautiful sandbox full of things to be explored, an emptiness that still makes me uneasy, which still calls to me every time I look at the night sky. Now, it is much the same with languages: Every word I speak makes me ask where it came from? Which language was it forged in? What was it originally meant for? Which traveller first brought it here? Which king made it commonplace? Which merchants breathed life into it?