“No poison can kill poison,
Live and friend, let live.
Beware the lure of balancing
The double negative!”
From Warnings of Stale Mornings by Bachchoo
There are very many historical mistakes that won’t be corrected. The population, for instance, of the islands of the Caribbean, “pieces of dirt” in the armpit of America as my friend the Caribbean philosopher C.L.R. James labelled them, are universally known as West Indians.

They have nothing culturally or historically to do with India and are for the most part descendants of African slaves brought there by force through the great injustice of the “triangular trade” which Europe initiated in the 15th and 16th centuries.
It was Columbus who perpetrated the blunder. Working in the maritime industry of Seville, he and his cohorts knew of the existence of India to the far east of Spain, beyond the lands of the Saracens and the river Indus which, via the historic conquests of the Persians and subsequently Alexander the Damned, had given the country its name. Columbus also knew that the world was spherical and if he sailed West he would reach the East.
What he didn’t know when he sailed into the unknown reaches of the Atlantic was that there was a whole chunk of real estate and a couple of oceans beyond it before he could, even in theory, hit Chennai or Orissa. He gaily landed in the Caribbean, praised God, slaughtered a few natives and wrote home that he had discovered the east of India.
It is then even more enigmatic that these islands were named the Indies and came to be known as the West Indies when further European maritime exploration and map-making had established that India was altogether elsewhere.
The first West Indian I knew was called Vincent Bhup Singh. He had arrived to study at the college at which I was in Pune and his origins were something of a mystery, though he tried to explain that he was from the islands from which the rum came. He was, as I recall, in love with my sister and pursued her on his bicycle singing love songs from Hindi movies despite not speaking any Hindi. When we insisted that we were, technically speaking, West Indians or at least western Indians since Pune was situated on the Deccan plateau close to the Western coast of the sub-continent, he compounded the problem by saying that he was, in fact, an East Indian West Indian.
This confession led to a careful perusal of the world atlas and an elementary history lesson. I must admit that at the age of 15 my only acquaintance with the West Indies was Harry Belafonte’s song Jamaica Farewell in which he sings that he is sad to say he’s on his way and won’t be back for many a day, that his heart is down and his head is spinning around because he had to leave a little girl in Kingston Town. By this age I knew that the little girl meant not his newborn daughter but his lover, just as I had realised that “baby” when an American sang Walking my baby back home didn’t mean that he was pushing a pram across meadow and farm.
Vincent showed us where Jamaica was though he was from Trinidad, a few hundred miles down. He explained that his forefathers had been taken on labour contracts from India by the British Raj to work in the sugarcane fields of Trinidad. He also told us that since the blacks of the island, who for generations after the abolition of slavery had refused to work in the cane fields, were West Indians, he was, hence, an East Indian. There were other East Indians in the then colonies of British Guiana and next to it Dutch Guiana on the South American mainland next to Trinidad. The people of Dutch Guiana who originated as he did in India couldn’t be called East Indians as the Dutch had colonies in Java and Sumatra and those places were called the East Indies and their populations known as East Indians — so the Indians transported to Dutch Guiana were called simply Hindustanis.
All this knowledge and confusion came back to me this week on briefly visiting Seville in Andalusia, southern Spain from which place Columbus had set sail for “India” and where his tomb in Seville Cathedral is a worldwide tourist attraction.
Next to the cathedral, which till the 13th century was a Moorish mosque when southern Spain was still ruled by North African Muslims, is a building known as the Archivo de Indias. On seeing it on the city’s map one could be forgiven for momentarily thinking that it was perhaps a museum of Indian artefacts as of course it isn’t. If one came across “The Indian Archive” in, say London, one could be sure that it had something to do with Britain’s long interaction with the sub-continent. So one reminded oneself that Spain, for all her marauding in the Caribbean and South America, had had very little to do with us.
What then was in the Archive of the Indias? A history, as I discovered, of the discovery of the West Indies and America and of the discoverers such as Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. Seville hasn’t bothered to correct the grand misnomer.
It is, of course, absolutely right that Spanish children and other children round the world are taught that Columbus made this understandable blunder, but it is perhaps time that the phrases West Indies and West Indian were replaced by “Caribbean”.
It will solve another small problem. The Catholics of Mumbai, among them Darryl D’Monte, a dear and distinguished friend of mine, and his late cousin, the poet Dom Moraes, are often referred to as “Goans” and demonstrate their resentment of such classification by insisting that they are nothing of the sort, and that they are, in fact, East Indians. I have always, though I may be wrong, detected a whiff of snobbery in the dissociative correction. How Catholics from Mumbai came to be known as East Indians I haven’t yet figured. I didn’t know Dom or Darryl when I first met Vincent Bhup Singh but I now think if I had, it would be amusing to have introduced them and watched them claim and fight out this ambiguous label of their identities.