One of the best books I have read in a long time!

Peggy Mohan grew up in Trinidad and did her linguistics PhD in the US, specialising in creole languages. Her book applies that Caribbean lens to South Asia, with startling results.

Her central argument is that Sanskrit itself is a creole langauge which formed when Indo-Aryan-speaking male migrants moved into the subcontinent.

The result was a tongue with Indo-Aryan vocabulary sitting on top of a Dravidian grammatical skeleton.

She then traces the same dynamic through Malayalam, Hindi-Urdu, Nagamese, and finally Hinglish showing how South Asian languages have always been products of encounter and mixture. In the process she also has one of the best arguemnts for how Hindi and Urdu got separated from eachother.