“I go to Banaras (in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) and play a song I wrote half in Trinidad Bhojpuri and see students’ eyes shine,” she says. “I’m writing in their language.”
These are the words of Peggy Mohan, a Trinidad-born linguist now based in New Delhi, the daughter of an Indian Trinidadian father and a Canadian mother from Newfoundland.
Mohan studied linguistics at the University of the West Indies before completing her PhD at the University of Michigan in 1978. Mohan, who has taught at Howard University in Washington, DC, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ashoka University, and Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, now lives and works in India.
“It’s a curious feeling, being a Trinidadian writing about language in India,” Mohan says. “I have memories of the world on the other side, where the air is clear, and you can see straight into a past that isn’t so remote. I started writing late, feeling the pressure of so much to say and not that much time left to say it.”
Mohan’s first novel, Jahajin, linked to the migration of Indian indentured labour to Trinidad, “stayed in my head for maybe 30 years, imagined first as a film, and then … I realised it needed to be a book.”
“My next book, The Youngest Suspect, was linked to the events of the early 2000s in Gujarat, and work I had done as an expert witness analysing the confessional statements of young men in jail,” Mohan says.
Mohan is referring to the 2002 Gujarat riots, which followed the burning of a train coach in Godhra and left more than 1,000 people dead, the majority of them Muslim, according to official figures.
“Both books were ultimately about language: Jahajin was about Trinidad Bhojpuri and my dissertation fieldwork in Trinidad, and The Youngest Suspect went into how language could be a forensic tool in a legal trial,” Mohan says.
Two major works of non-fiction followed. Wanderers, Kings, Merchants (Penguin Random House 2021) won the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award. Her latest book, Father Tongue, Motherland (Penguin Random House 2025), won the Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Award for Non-Fiction.
By the time Mohan wrote Father Tongue, Motherland, her central claim was clear: women and children shaped the languages we speak. “Women were the key to it all.”
That hunch began decades earlier in Trinidad. “Could something I had learned back in the early 1970s in Trinidad explain how languages had emerged in the Indian subcontinent, with vocabulary linked to the prakrits (vernacular varieties of Sanskrit) but grammars that suggested vanished languages that seemed to go back much further in time? Could I use a model that began with creoles to reconstruct the vanished language of the Indus Valley Civilisation?”
The Indo-Aryan languages, Mohan believes, “are creoles too, because they are, as the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth might have said, ‘of woman born’.”
Living between Trinidad and India continues to shape her thinking. When a student writes up fieldwork on a local language in Jharkhand, Mohan says she is taken back to her own fieldwork days in 1970s Trinidad. “The two languages are so alike.”
“The language I think of as a memory of Trinidad is spreading through all the eastern parts of India,” Mohan says. Watching everyday life in Delhi, she reflects that India is moving “not in the direction of North America, but somewhere I have been before.”
Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Father Tongue, Motherland (Penguin Random House 2025)
“There was, in the heyday of the slave trade, a strong tradition of prakrits along the coast of West Africa, with a class of local people who learnt the languages of Europeans very well (though undoubtedly with a local accent), along with a huge hinterland of little people who were completely outside the loop, continuing their lives in older local languages. This scenario would be utterly familiar to anyone who read about the Vedic migration to the subcontinent in my earlier book, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: a male-driven migration of settlers arriving one fine day from lands to the north without their own womenfolk, and going on to have children with local women, creating a new bilingual generation that knew both its mother tongue as well as its ‘father tongue’, Sanskrit. Some boys would have learnt Sanskrit well enough to carry on the tradition of Vedic composition. But others, along with their mothers and sisters, and a few local men with an eye on the main chance, managed to get close, but not quite close enough. What they spoke were called prakrits, varieties of Sanskrit that followed the same grammar, but had a strong local flavour.
By the medieval era, these prakrits had grown into regional languages of power, differing mostly in accent and local details from Sanskrit in the same way as the Portuguese, English and French spoken by the interpreters in West Africa would have differed from the language spoken by the metropolitan elites.
The Indo-Aryan languages on the subcontinent, the actual mixtures, did not come up right away. There were long centuries when the older local languages, some of them probably linked to the vanished Indus Valley languages, must have lived alongside the Indo-Aryan prakrits (just as the indigenous West African languages carry on to this day separate from the elite prakrit varieties of English and French in West Africa). It was only in the tenth to twelfth centuries that we began to see signs in the Indian subcontinent of these mixed languages in the written record, with features of the old local languages spoken by the early mothers and their community tucked into their grammar. Over the centuries, however, these mixed languages completely replaced the older languages of the northwest, which survive only in the substratum features that we use as we speak without giving them a thought.
The Caribbean plantations, much more than the small homestead farms that preceded them, would have been worlds that included a number of African women, many more than before, newcomers fresh from West Africa who came into contact with the prakrit forms of European languages spoken by African men already there. So while the plantation system was strongly associated with the emergence of creoles, the real reason for this was that large plantations needed women, as they found it cost-effective to maintain the pool of labour by natural increase, children born on the plantations, instead of depending only on a constant supply of adult men from Africa. Women are not natural migrants; there is a reason why the overwhelming majority of migrants in the world, human or animal, are male. But the transition to a plantation economy created a demand for women, and the slave traders had to be incentivised to get as many women as possible, especially as there was strong opposition to the slave trade (which ended in the British Empire in 1807, though slavery itself went on for a long while after). If those African women hadn’t come, all those boatloads of men crossing the Atlantic would have done no better than the pidgin-speaking men on the whaling ships, and we would have ended up without any creoles.
The women in medieval India, like the African women on the Caribbean plantations, had children and nurtured them through their early years, ensuring that any mixed languages that came up would have a new generation to pass on to in the new urban environment. So in that sense, children were important in the formation of creoles, but not for the almost magical reasons we had once thought. It was not settler colonies and plantations per se that decided whether there would be a creole and not a pidgin, but the presence or absence of women able to incubate a new life form. Women were the key to it all. And the Indo-Aryan languages are creoles too, because they are also, as the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth might have said, ‘of woman born’.”
End of excerpt
Peggy Mohan’s forthcoming book will be published by Penguin Random House in September 2026.
IRA MATHUR is a Trinidad Guardian columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir Love The Dark Days.
