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Literary Review
Linguistic incursions
ANAND
LAST month's "Wordspeak" column was on Indian English, about certain characteristics of English as spoken and written in today's India.
The true Indian English was, however, what the Europeans spoke when talking with the natives during the British domination of India. Its varieties included "boxwallah English" (trade or commercial speak), "baboo English" (used in offices), and "bearer English", the sahibs' discourse with the domestics.
Hobson-Jobson was the first collection of Indian words borrowed by English. Another, imaginatively illustrated and more up to date, is Hanklyn-Janklin (1997), compiled by Nigel Hankin.
Colonel (later Sir) Henry Yule, who, with fellow Anglo-Indian A.C. Burnell, complied this dictionary in 1886, was discouraged from using a dull title by the example of a friend's book. The friend's book, Three Essays, Yule thought, might have sold more if it had been named A Book, by A Chap.
So the compilers of A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, decided to name it Hobson-Jobson, after the Anglo-Indian version of the Shia Muslim cry, "Ya Hassan! Ya Hussain!" heard in processions to mourn the death of the Prophet's grandsons.
Yule thus unwittingly gave a label to a variant of the common and ancient process of taking a word or phrase from one language into another. The "Law of Hobson-Jobson" is described in The Oxford Companion to the English Language as "the alteration of a foreign expression to fit the speech and spelling patterns of a borrowing language, usually English."
Hobson-Jobsonisms account for most of the lexical material borrowed into English from the languages of India.
Juggernaut is a good example. In English, this word is used for an irresistible crushing force or a heavy, large vehicle. It is derived from Jagannath, the name for Vishnu. The word's origin dates back to a 14th-century description of a huge procession in India where devotees were accidentally crushed under the wheels of an enormous carriage transporting the image of Jagannath.
Early handkerchiefs or scarves that the European mem-sahibs ( men=ma'am, sahib=sir or master) wore in India were probably tie-dyed. But that association got lost and all handkerchiefs, even plain ones, are now called bandanas in English, borrowed from Hindi bandhana which is a name for the tie-dying process.
Vests under the dinner jackets must have been uncomfortable to wear in the Indian heat, so the sahibs tied a bandana (bandh) around their waists (kamar in Urdu) and began calling it a cummerbund.
Terms for fabrics were among the earliest borrowed by the British. Calico came from Calicut-cloth, the city on the Malabar coast. Samuel Pepys noted in his diary in 1663: "... Bought my wife a chint (from Hindi chheent, to spray or sprinkle), that's is, a painted Indian calico, for her to line her new study." Kipling recorded in 1891 trousers made from dungari, Hindi for a fabric. Dungarees later came to denote work clothes made from a tough material.
Crimson comes ultimately from the name of a small insect from which a red dyestuff is obtained; this journey began with Sanskrit (krymi-ja) via Arabic quirmiz and Spanish cremesin. Lake, a pigment came from Hindi lakh (a reddish resin used as sealing wax), and was later adapted as shellac and lacquer.
Although it conjures up the image of an official with a Fu Manchu moustache, mandarin (a bureaucrat) is from Sanskrit mantri and mantrana. Both these terms are based on Sanskrit man (think), a distant relative of English mind through Indo-European language roots. Yellow robes worn by mandarins inspired the 19th-century English name for the loose-skinned mandarin oranges.
Punch (the drink) has nothing in common with the roots of English words meaning to hit or a tool for making holes. Made traditionally from five ingredients (spirits, water, lemon juice, sugar and spice), the term for the drink came from panch, meaning five in several Indian languages.
Many words escaped being Hobson-Jobsoned and were assimilated in their original form. Thug, a transliteration of Hindi thag (thief), was once specifically meant the bands of robbers and marauders in India who strangled their victims. It is now used in English for any ruffian or criminal. Loot and jungle have the same meaning in English as in Indian languages.
No other word evokes more memories of British rule in India than the term Raj, which goes back to Sanskrit rajati (who rules). The source is Indo-European root word reg, which also is the source of Latin rex (king), root of regal and royal.
Lest one thinks of Indian words in English as exotic and esoteric, consider shampoo from Hindi champee (knead, massage), pyjama from Urdu pai (leg) and jama (garment). Sugar was once sharkara, Sanskrit for gravel or grit, acquired by Greek as sakhharon, that passed into English through Medieval Latin saccharum as saccharin. Another Hindi word for sugar is khand, the source for candy.
How borrowings from Hindi words have changed since the end of the Raj is evident from what I once saw in London's Trafalgar Square. Right in the geographical and historical heart of the former British Empire was the sign "Samosas for Take-out." Winston Churchill would have choked on his cigar at this incursion by a language from the colonies.
E-mail the author at anand@journalist.com
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