“Goddam Goddam Dem hang Saddam;
Bush He done dismiss our Mush;
Obama done for Osama;
Now they get Gaddafy And no-one beg for Maafi
Hai Amreeka theyra kya khel! Masla kya hai?
Theyl hi theyl!”
From Oilnama
by Bachchoo

In Mumbai for a literary festival and to launch my translations of Rumi (Did you

get any help from Bachchoo? — Ed. Certainly not! This is real poetry, sir! — fd) I am invited onto a platform to speak about the stretching, distortions or innovations of Indian English. I attempt to terrify the audience with the fact that the Cambridge University Linguistics department have concluded, through the application of statistical formulae which they keep a closely guarded secret, that in 50 years time or less the whole world will be speaking and using “Indian English”.
As evidenced by the English used by our newspapers in which “miscreants” are constantly “absconding” and the public molesters of women are labelled “eve teasers” or even, in an earlier version, “roadside Romeos”, India’s spoken English has always been
inventive.
It progresses as an amalgam of English from the past —we still say “thrice” as Shakespeare would have done — and creative borrowings from Hindi, very often the acquisition of verbs — “he maaroed him, yar!” — or through plain distortions and mistakes.
My mother always called goat’s meat “mutton”. Now any dictionary will tell you that “mutton” is the word for an older lamb — it’s a sheep! Calling goat “mutton” is like calling a donkey a horse. But it probably came into use in India because the Sahib, after a hard day’s work taxing or hanging the natives would return to the residential bungalow and ask the Mem “What’s for dinner darling?” and the Mem, not wanting to acknowledge that the confection was goat would say “Mutton, my love!”
So it endures. The best restaurants will sell “mutton biryani” and never acknowledge that it is in truth, in most cases though not in Kashmir, goat biryani. So also “beef” which is in truth and in Mumbai buffalo steak... (that’s quite enough meat-prattle — Ed.)
A bewildering innovation for us alcoholics is the innovation of calling a 350 centilitre bottle of beer a “pint”. Try that in the UK and you’d find yourself before the beak charged with weights and measures violations. A “pint” is a specific measure of volume. One understands that some men try and pass off six inches as a “foot”, but that is a good measure of their feeling of inadequacy.
Old distortions of pronunciation have passed into Indian English. For instance, the fruit squeezed for its juice even on the pavements of our cities is the delicious mossambi. We commonly think that the English name for this is “sweet lime”. This is a purely Indian invention. The fruit was imported from Africa and this yellow-skinned citroid is in fact a “Mozambique Orange” — hence mossambi!
Similarly with the unfortunate Portuguese botanist who cross-bred mango varieties and came up with the queen of all of them and named it after himself. It was called the Alphonso mango, but Konkani distortion turned the word into Aaphoos and we now universally believe that it’s the Konkani name rather than a mispronunciation.
The elephantine distortion is of course Bombay Duck. Everyone who eats it or has suffered its strong odour knows it’s not a duck. It isn’t even a fish. It’s an eel. When the railways were brought to western India in the 1840s, stocks of the dried eel were packed in sacks and sent into the interior. Imagine the miasma from the train carrying them. The railway personnel, not wanting to cry stinking fish, (even they didn’t classify it as an eel), euphemised it into “Bombay Dak”: the mail from Bombay.
(Incidentally a little known fact is that Sigmund Freud’s first research paper was written on the sexual organs of eels. It wasn’t terribly conclusive, so if you observe a Parsi gentleman leaning over his plate of Bombay Duck, you’ll know what he’s doing!)
Usage makes language and the expansion of the Indian population into the world of information technology (infotech?) and then, possibly through the IITs into the business schools of America, has endowed Indian English with new concepts and words, some of them, like “leveraging”, rather ugly. A tiny percentage of our teenagers, the older young (why is there no word for those in their 20s? (“twenters”, “thirters”, anyone?) and even one or two unimaginative and imitative writers think it’s smart to punctuate their sentences with “like” and introduce reported speech with “and then I’m like... and she’s like....” And why have people in Mumbai started calling each other “dudes” when they mean to be indifferent and “losers” when they mean to be rude? Will someone, even someone American, explain to me what the adjective “cheesy” means?
The distortions and borrowings do make for more colour but the
really significant additions are of the traffic the other way, by which I mean the importation of English into Hindustani. Sample any advertisement and English words inevitably creep into the pitch. I counted the words of a Devanagari scripted advertisement on a hoarding — the grammar was Hindi but 11 of the 17 words were English. It’s inevitable that we call a computer a computer and don’t invent some Sanskrit monstrosity to describe the machine. Usage has fallen into this common sense habit and one notices that Doordarshan Hindi is in most spoken avatars in its twilight rather than dawn.
I recently talked to a friend in London, an Urdu scholar, translator and even poet. He objected, he said, to the importation of English words into modern Urdu poetry, contending that this was an outrageous intrusion on its purity and unwarranted expansion of the sublime into the mundane.
I did point out that Urdu was itself born out of the intrusion of Persian, Turkish and Arabic vocabulary into the basic common-Hindi
grammatical framework.
Blessed are the purists for they shall inherit languages that no one else speaks.