‘Give each major Indian written language the chance to shine as a way of expressing new ideas, especially in science and tech’

Long before India became a global economy, it had already travelled far beyond its shores. It travelled in ships, in the memories of migrants, in religious rituals, in food and music, and perhaps most enduringly, in language. Across the plantations of the Caribbean, the islands of the Indian Ocean and the distant settlements of Southeast Asia, words carried by Indians began to change as they encountered new worlds. Bhojpuri became something different in Trinidad. Hindustani acquired new rhythms elsewhere. Languages that had crossed the kala pani did not remain frozen reminders of an old homeland. They absorbed, resisted, adapted and survived.

Few contemporary writers and linguists have followed this extraordinary journey with as much curiosity as Peggy Mohan. Born in Trinidad, raised amid several languages, trained as a linguist, and living in India since 1979, Mohan has spent much of her life listening to what happens when people, languages and cultures meet.

Her books have taken her from the world of indenture and migration in Jahajin, to political violence in The Youngest Suspect, and then to the linguistic histories of the subcontinent in Wanderers, Kings, Merchants and Father Tongue, Motherland. Her latest book, Framing the Future, turns towards a question that may determine the future of India’s extraordinary linguistic diversity: what happens to languages when technology, artificial intelligence and a rapidly changing digital world begin to reshape the ways in which we speak, read and remember?

What makes Mohan’s journey particularly compelling is that language is not merely the subject of her scholarship. It is the thread that connects her childhood in Trinidad with her life in India, the history of indenture with the present, and the intimate world of family memory with the larger questions of culture and civilisation. In her work, languages are never static possessions. They are travellers. They carry traces of the places they have left behind and the places where they eventually find themselves.

Her own life, in that sense, mirrors the history she has spent decades trying to understand.

I wanted to begin this conversation, therefore, not with the books but with the child before the linguist. With the sounds, words and languages that surrounded her growing up in Trinidad, and with the gradual discovery that language could become a way of understanding migration, memory and belonging. From there, our conversation moves through the novelist, the scholar and the historian of language, before arriving at the question that increasingly concerns her: how India can preserve and renew its astonishing linguistic plurality in the technological age.

Before language became a subject

Ashutosh Kumar Thakur (AKT): You were born in Trinidad to an Indo-Trinidadian father and a Canadian mother from Newfoundland. Before language became your profession, what did language feel like to you as a child? Do you remember a particular word, phrase, voice or sound that has remained with you?

Peggy Mohan (PM): Language was always something bewildering to me. Hearing the old ones in the family speaking Hindi and Bhojpuri, intending for me not to understand, discouraging me from learning Indian languages, I felt instantly curious about a world I was not being allowed into. Hindi/Bhojpuri words were all over the Creole and English we spoke, and I kept noting sounds like bh, dh, jh, gh that other children couldn’t pronounce. And I remember a day, when I was 6 years old, standing alone in our back yard, suddenly pronouncing the bh in bhājī, our word for ‘bhujia’, and realising that for the first time I had got both the b and the h instead of turning them into ‘ph’ (and that if I whispered this word it was back to being ‘ph’). No one had ever corrected me, but at once I sensed that I had crossed a milestone. I don’t know if other children have this sort of memory. But maybe it is an early sign that I would want to be a linguist, and that Indian languages were a challenge I was not going to miss.

AKT: You grew up hearing English, Bhojpuri and Creole. Did you experience these as separate languages, or did they simply constitute one linguistic world around you?

PM: I kept them separate. I always found mixing languages, like mixing English into Hindi, something I needed to learn. It didn’t come naturally.  Maybe there was some shading between Creole and English, but I think I always knew which system I was inside of.

AKT: Your father’s ancestry connected you to India, while your mother’s came from a very different part of the world. Did you grow up with a sense of belonging to two places, or did that question come much later?

PM: Not really. Belonging is something complicated, so I always thought of it as something others had to decide. It seemed presumptuous to insist that I had a ‘right’ to be considered as Indian, and in the times when I was growing up there was a de facto sense of colonial Apartheid, so one did not claim rights in the White West. It was only, when I finally visited Newfoundland as an adult, that I found that they saw me as one of ‘theirs’ too. And even though I spoke like a Trinidadian while growing up, I knew I looked different. In the end I always saw myself as a ‘minority of one’, but am intrigued when now I am told I have a place in all three groups, Indian, Canadian and Caribbean.

The language that travelled

AKT: Your doctoral research took you into the homes and lives of elderly Indo-Trinidadians who still spoke Bhojpuri. When you began recording those conversations in the 1970s, did you realise that you were preserving something that might soon disappear?

PM: Not at first, when I did my undergraduate thesis. When I returned to do my doctoral research I did see how hard it was to get data, but once I found the right old women, who had actually come as ‘jahajis’ or worked on the estates, I just recorded them. Then when I did a post doc, the funding agency identified the issue as ‘Language Death’, not simply as change. By then I was so caught up recording whoever I could, to compare young and old speakers, that the sense of endgame did not hit me so hard. But I was, in a way, prepared for it. The old ones had been pushing my generation away from the language all our lives, ‘protecting’ us from something that had defined the early days of our community on the sugar estates.

AKT: What did those voices teach you about migration that historical records could not?

PM: The old women I recorded used to meet up by themselves often to discuss their early days, speaking in Bhojpuri. They spoke with a fluency that was almost… literary. They did not falter, or need to stop and think. That was my clue that they had not only kept the memories alive: they had also been editing them all the while, to be able to see themselves not as victims, but as pioneers. There wasn’t the sense of dejection and loss that people in India expect, or which the few educated Indian men who came wrote about, seeing the exploitation clearly. There was a sense of moving on, and of seeing estate life, or even life on the ships, from an Indian point of view, with the British as distant bystanders we did not focus on. It may seem strange to a modern academic, but it seems to me a defining feature of how our community saw its story after it left India, as people who not only survived, but thrived.

AKT: Bhojpuri travelled from eastern India across the kala pani and survived in Trinidad in a transformed form. Did studying that language change your understanding of what it means for a language to belong to a people?

PM: Bhojpuri did not change much. What happened was that one regional variety seemed to be selected and passed on to the next generation, and that was what brought a sense of it having become more homogeneous. The only big change was it being abandoned, when children started going to school. It didn’t get simplified: it just vanished. Not used, and then not being passed on. That taught me that languages lived in ecosystems. Bhojpuri was the language that had defined our first few generations. Then, as we changed, and were invited to be part of a modern Caribbean society, we joined the language of that society. The people that had once been separate from Caribbean society no longer were defined separately. An ethnic language is like a monetary currency. To have maintained Bhojpuri as our ‘currency’ was as unrealistic as keeping a separate system in Trinidad where Indian rupees were our ‘currency’. 

Arriving in India

AKT: You came to India in 1979, initially as a linguist. What do you remember most vividly about your first encounter with India?

PM: I remember the paradox that while India was the most multilingual country on Earth, there were very few people who identified themselves as translators. And there was very little translation into Indian languages: translation of the sort of non-fiction that allowed the vast majority of the population to join conversations the English-speaking elite were having. They were almost relegated into a separate existence. But I get a sense that that is finally changing.

AKT: Did the India you encountered resemble the India that had existed in your imagination through your father’s ancestry and the Bhojpuri you had heard in Trinidad?

PM: The ‘India’ I grew up was from Bollywood films, subtitled and very present in Trinidad. When I finally started meeting Indians, and then visited India, I was surprised at the existence of a group that was completely comfortable in English. I had expected to need an Indian language, not necessarily Hindi, to be able to get by. Again, my focus was on language. And slowly I saw the presence of English as linked to a divided society, where people similar to my family in Trinidad, goldsmiths, did not see themselves as part of a world of ‘tech’, dealing with metals and fine work, but on the outside of a modern age. This is something I am still looking at as I study the language scene in India.

The women who crossed the ocean

AKT: The women in Jahajin carry language, food, memory, relationships and culture across the ocean. Did researching these women change the way you understood the history of Indian migration?

PM: Well, it did not ‘change’ how I saw migration, but started my study of migration with a powerful counter-example. Because women are unlikely migrants, in India or anywhere. The pioneers are typically men, and that includes the early days of the slave trade and the early days of Indians being sent to the diaspora lands as estate labour. It is only later that women were deliberately brought in, and this stabilised communities (African, Indian, European) where the men had either been dying without children, or where their children were with local women, which brought in a new maternal culture. Bhojpuri only began to pass on to Indian children in Trinidad when there were Indian children, from Indian women. And these women were able to continue the language smoothly for a few generations. Now I see women as key not only to the maintenance of languages, but to the evolution of new languages (because without women the new generation with the new language does not get born).

AKT: Jahajin remained with you for many years before it became a novel. Why did that story refuse to leave you, and why did fiction become the right form for it?

PM: I delayed for years, as I had initially thought it needed to be a film, with the sounds of the language and the images of the ship, the old estates. But filmmaking is almost more about management than about a bright idea, and I did not see any way to make this story as a film in a way that wouldn’t compromise it beyond recognition. Writing meant that the whole thing could happen on my computer, and I would be able to go into the minds of protagonists, which is difficult in a film. And fiction would allow me to close the gaps where I either was forced to speculate, or where I was putting together many people’s stories into a single character or incident. It allowed me to present the migration story as a thought experiment.

When language becomes evidence

AKT: After Jahajin, you moved from the history of indenture to the violence of contemporary India in The Youngest Suspect. What can a linguist see in a confession that a lawyer, investigator or judge might not?

PM: My work on Bhojpuri in Trinidad gave me an early glimpse of something AI now calls an LLM. A Large Language Model, or a huge sample that is enough to give a reasonable picture of a language, its grammatical features, its vocabulary, its rules. And, as I was working with recordings, I got to know how fast the language was spoken by a normal speaker and what was involved in manually transcribing speech data. So I knew what normal speech looked like (would a suspect speak in 30-word sentences when implicating himself?). And I knew how fast manual transcription could be done, certainly not at 60 words per minute in very neat handwriting. And I knew how often I should expect false starts, sentences that trailed off, or words that were so technical that an official might know them, but not an ordinary person. My task was to cast reasonable doubt on the ‘confession’.

From linguist to writer

AKT: You were a linguist long before you became widely known as a writer. Did fiction arrive because scholarship could no longer contain the questions you wanted to ask?

PM: There are many who say that I never wrote fiction at all, only fictionalised stories taken from the real lives of people! But yes: it is a question I keep returning to: should I turn to fiction when I need to get into stories where I am taking a few leaps to join the dots? But it is an open question. I still see myself as a linguist on a journey, and that journey strays into territory where language is just a forensic tool, and the story is more important than just the language.

India’s languages and the myth of purity

AKT: A central idea in Wanderers, Kings, Merchants and Father Tongue, Motherland is that languages are born through contact, migration and mixing. Why, then, is the idea of linguistic purity so emotionally powerful in India?

PM: Purity is more of a social issue, linked to a sense of hierarchy, and a sense of ‘oldness’ as the biggest claim to fame. Some of it goes back to colonial times, when we were sold a myth that there was something ‘better’ about being ‘Aryan’, about being like Europeans. This is a way of seeing that dismisses all the other interesting things in our background, things in our languages that take us back to the earliest successful migration out of Africa, about 70,000 years ago. I don’t share this view of ‘purity’: I am far more excited by parallels between First Australian languages and the languages of India than a desperate wish to be like parts of our story, like the link to ‘Europeans’, that seem less interesting. Also, the languages that survive best are not necessarily the ones that are the ‘oldest’, or the least changed by contact with new people, but the ones most eager to engage with the modern world.

AKT: Your discussion of language formation brings migration, marriage and gender into linguistic history. Could the history of languages, in some sense, also be a history of human intimacy?

PM: There is a repeating story in India about migrations being ‘male-driven’, and of the only substantial entry of women as being at the time of the first settlement, about 70,000 years ago (not a ‘migration’, as they were simply spreading out). I tend to believe that there is something about young men migrating that is linked not so much to a wish for ‘adventure’ as them being actually driven out of lands that had deemed them surplus. These young men know that they cannot aspire to the sort of stable lives their parents had. Something has gone wrong. To this day in India it is mostly young men who migrate, within India and abroad, and this early group does find its life-partners in the new lands (there is a big community in California of the descendants of Sikh men and Mexican women). Nowadays I am more interested in studying why these young men felt the need to leave their earlier lands, than the fact that we got new male population. A 10-year old boy once asked me why the Zagros farmers migrated to the Indus Valley: weren’t they invested in their fields, their crops? That sent me on a long journey to think about what would drive a young farmer to make a permanent shift like this. What was there in our pattern of development that had this recurring outcome?

Who owns the future of a language?

AKT: You have argued that the future of a language depends partly on whether it can participate in modern knowledge, science, technology and software. Why is it not enough for a language simply to survive in literature, poetry and everyday conversation?

PM: I think we imagine language as something that exists in the present, a body of knowledge that has already been set down. We do not think of it as something that is still taking shape (just as we bring up our children for the world we know, not for the world that will be there after we are gone). In my books I have used the image of a little boy keeping a pet rat in a shoe box under his bed, and letting it out to play, and be fed and given water, once a day. For some time, the rat will remain alive, but that is not a ‘life’. The rat has things it wants to do, things that we may have no idea of. The life we live is made up of many spheres. When only the most trivial spaces are allowed to a language, it becomes like the stump of a tree where a more exotic species is grafted to provide flowers and fruits. Eventually life shifts to what are new modern concerns, and if the language is not included in that shift, it will be replaced by a language that is part of that world.

The other thing is that in India the vast majority does not want to have to learn English in order to engage in modern work. So not using their languages for science, tech and modern things is cutting some of the potentially most creative people in our society off from the work that will take us forward.

AKT: In your recent essay on AI and India’s language universe, what is the question about AI that you think India is currently asking incorrectly?

PM: Techies in India are still chasing after agenda set in the West, and not thinking about what we might need AI for. Too much of our translation activity has English at the centre, rather than Indian languages ‘talking to each other’, because our techies see themselves as English speakers. India cannot become a fully modern society (like China, Russia, Iran) with most of the population excluded. China built its AI around its identity as a society that wrote in Hàn Zì characters. We need to build our AI around an identity as a multilingual society where our languages are as alike (once you get past vocabulary and scripts) as the Chinese ‘dialects’.

AKT: Your new book Framing the Future imagines technology as something that could allow India’s languages to communicate with one another without forcing them into a single linguistic order. Is technology capable of making India more multilingual rather than less?

PM: Not if you build it around written languages, leaving orality as a safe space for diversity. AI as a translation tool would put a sort of ‘brake’ on the diversity, keeping it where it is now. The idea between AI for translation between Indian languages is to be able to share knowledge, not only from English into our written languages, but new knowledge from one Indian language into all the others as it comes into existence. My feeling is that the ‘shortest distance between two points’ is not a straight line (say, Hindi to English), but giving each of our major written languages the chance to shine as a way of expressing new ideas, especially in science and tech. I think it is unlikely that we will end up with more written languages, as the social and technological environment is not creating more division or demanding more languages to express it. It is actually doing the opposite: connecting us.

The India of the future

AKT: In your recent writings you have returned repeatedly to translation, bilingual education and the ability of people outside English-speaking India to participate in knowledge production. Do you see the coming linguistic transformation primarily as a technological change, an educational change, or a social change?

PM: I think it has started with a demand from non-English readers for reading material in languages they know. It hasn’t come from government, or the publishing industry, or the elite that speaks English. The rest follows from this demand: in a better age politics, technology and the educational system will take their cue from this primary demand.

The Indian elite is terrified of primary education in the local language, as that would remove their children’s advantage over the remaining 80-90 percent. But in Silicon Valley there is the option of primary education in English, Spanish or Mandarin Chinese: in government sector schools! What is interesting is that in the wealthiest neighbourhoods Spanish-medium schools have only two or three children who speak Spanish at home: the rest of the class are children of senior techies or billionaires who themselves may not know Spanish at all. They do not see Spanish-medium maths and science classes as putting their children at a disadvantage.

The private language of Peggy Mohan

AKT: You have lived among several linguistic worlds as a scholar, teacher, writer and observer of culture. Where, among all these worlds, do you feel most completely yourself?

PM: That depends on what I am doing. English, for interviews like this, but in a later age that might change. I remember once speaking to a friend’s children in New York. As an Indian I was uncomfortable speaking English with children. Fortunately, these children knew Spanish. Conversation with children, or garage mechanics, just wouldn’t come to me in English!

AKT: You began by listening to elderly people in Trinidad whose language carried memories of an earlier India. Decades later, you are writing about India’s linguistic past and its technological future. Do you feel that, beneath all the different books and subjects, you have actually been working on the same question all your life?

PM: Maybe, but it is a long road. The issues in Trinidad have evolved into more general questions about how languages generally take shape, and most recently why young men are driven to shift to new lands. When I re-read the last chapter of my forthcoming book I can see the ideas coming from language, but where they have gone doesn’t look very much like what you expect from a book on language. Sometimes it is unnerving: am I straying too far off a path I know? But then: if I don’t ask these questions, who else is asking them?

(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a literary critic, translator and curator based in Bengaluru. He writes on literature, culture and the shared histories of South Asia.)