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A life on sail!
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As ‘Jahajin’ hits the stands, author Peggy Mohan talks of the making of the book
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Wide canvas, familiar emotions Peggy Mohan delves into the history of migration
Lilting fiction arranged to the heartbeat of facts seems to be the order of the day in the literary world. The latest to take a swim in this genre is ‘Jahajin’. Penned by Peggy Mohan, this Harper Collins novel brings alive the extraordina
ry journey across two oceans and the relocation of girmityas, the migrants, who moved from Calcutta to Trinidad to work as indentured labourers on the sugar estates. A linguist by vocation, Peggy, who once wanted to write the story as a screenplay, has used the bite of metaphors and the cadence of Bhojpuri to shape her compelling characters.
Right from the cat on the cover page to the myth of Saranga, torn between her monkey lover and her prince, Peggy has seamlessly entwined metaphors in the tale, pulling, as she says, one level of story to the other. “A cat fears water. Her presence on the ship denotes people who were crossing kalapani, prohibited by their religion, never to return.”
Peggy’s ancestors migrated from a village near Ayodhya. She studied in Trinidad, specialising in Trinidad Bhojpuri and the basic story is the offshoot of her research done in the ’70s. In fact, her lead character, Deeda, the 110-year-old-woman, is a combination of five women she interviewed for her research. The novel brings out a little known fact that many single woman also travelled on the ship.
“I interviewed women, and that too Dalit women, because as a linguist I know that it is the woman who passes on the language. Also, it is the Dalits and the Brahmins, the top and bottom of the social hierarchy, who keep the purity of the language intact. The middle class in an attempt to rise up the social ladder compromises with the culture. I allowed them to speak freely letting them share their stories and folktales.”
She insists Bhojpuri is a language, not a dialect of Hindi. “It’s certainly not broken Hindi. It is grammatically closer to eastern languages like Bengali. Bhojpuri shares a lot of word stock with Hindi because Hindi is its direct neighbour and the Hindi belt has ruled over the Bhojpuri region for centuries.”
However, she is not too perturbed about the decline. “A language thrives when it is used in subjects that are job centric. Poetry is fine, but Hindi is not used in teaching medical sciences or engineering. In such a scenario, Bhojpuri stands no chance. Only old people speak it, youngsters are not interested. The old generation doesn’t mind because it takes it as a sign of progress.”
She points out her first name is also a cog in this progress wheel. A linguist who doesn’t mind sms language, simply because it’s alive.
Optimism
Coming back to the novel, what strikes the reader is the mood, which doesn’t pull you down even when you are reading about difficult times. “This is because I am one of them. It’s not like an NRI writing about India. Things were gloomy but the only way was to ascend out of the situation. And things were not rosy back home either.”
Peggy has dabbled in painting and television as well. Perhaps that’s why she has kept the film rights to herself. She doesn’t want a Bollywood siren playing her and wants to keep the Bhojpuri flavour intact. “I don’t want somebody who is just for the limelight.” Very much like the nude painted by her. “See, she is not conscious of her state.”
ANUJ KUMAR
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