Dinesh Jayaraman

“In many elite Hindu families in the Delhi region and the North-west, until about the time of Partition it was the custom for boys to learn Persian and Urdu and be literate in the Persian script, while the girls were taught Devanagari. Among elite Sikh families too, the boys would similarly be schooled in Persian and Urdu and know the Persian script, while the girls were taught Gurmukhi, the Punjabi script in which the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, is written.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This was the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth, and brought into being a city and an army with all the rich diversity of nonfictional people with deep roots in the actually existing world.”
― Salman Rushdie, Victory City

“Languages are like those canaries that go with miners into dark paths that are full of danger. Like those canaries, they die first, long before we humans can sense that the air has begun to go bad. When languages die, it is an omen, of things to come that are still beyond our range of vision.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands. 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