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The Hindu : 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 extraordinary 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 freelyletting them share their stories and folktales.”She insists Bhojpuri is a language, not a dialect of Hindi. “It’s certainly…More