Sea of Poppies

by Amitav Ghosh

  The lines quoted in Chapter Two (Ág mor lágal ba . . .) are from a song collected by Edward O. Henry (Chant The Names of God: Music and Culture in Bhojpuri-Speaking India, San Diego State Univ. Press, San Diego, 1988, p. 288). The lines quoted in Chapter Three (Majha dhára me hai bera merá . . .) are from a song collected in Helen Myers, Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the Indian Diaspora, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, p. 307. The lines quoted in Chapter Five (Sãjh bhailé . . .) are from Sarita Boodhoo’s Bhojpuri Traditions in Mauritius, Mauritius Bhojpuri Inst., Port Louis, 1999, p. 63. The lines quoted in Chapter Nineteen (Talwa jharailé . . .) and the lines quoted in Chapter Twenty-one (. . . uthlé há chhati ke jobanwá . . .) are from songs collected by Sir George Grierson for his article “Some Bhojpuri Folksongs,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18, p. 207, 1886. In all these instances the translations are my own.

  Without the support of Barney Karpfinger and Roland Philipps, the Ibis could not have crossed the Bay of Bengal; at critical moments in her journey, when she lay becalmed in kalmariyas, James Simpson and Chris Clark blew wind into her sails; my children, Lila and Nayan, saw her through many a storm and my wife, Deborah Baker, was the best of malums: I, no less than this frail craft, owe them all a great debt of gratitude.

  Amitav Ghosh

  Kolkata

  2008

  THE IBIS CHRESTOMATHY

  Words! Neel was of the view that words, no less than people, are endowed with lives and destinies of their own. Why then were there no astrologers to calculate their kismet and make predictions about their fate? The thought that he might be the one to take on this task probably came to him at about the time when he was first beginning to earn his livelihood as a linkister – that is to say, during his years in southern China. From then on, for years afterwards, he made it his regular practice to jot down his divinations of the fate of certain words. The Chrestomathy, then, is not so much a key to language as an astrological chart, crafted by a man who was obsessed with the destiny of words. Not all words were of equal interest, of course, and the Chrestomathy, let it be noted, deals only with a favoured few: it is devoted to a select number among the many migrants who have sailed from eastern waters towards the chilly shores of the English language. It is, in other words, a chart of the fortunes of a shipload of girmitiyas: this perhaps is why Neel named it after the Ibis.

  But let there be no mistake: the Chrestomathy deals solely with words that have a claim to naturalization within the English language. Indeed the epiphany out of which it was born was Neel’s discovery, in the late 1880s, that a complete and authoritative lexicon of the English language was under preparation: this was, of course, the Oxford English Dictionary (or the Oracle, as it is invariably referred to in the Chrestomathy). Neel saw at once that the Oracle would provide him with an authoritative almanac against which to judge the accuracy of his predictions. Although he was already then an elderly man, his excitement was such that he immediately began to gather his papers together in preparation for the Oracle’s publication. He was to be disappointed, for decades would pass before the Oxford English Dictionary finally made its appearance: all he ever saw of it was a few of the facsicules that appeared in the interim. But the years of waiting were by no means wasted: Neel spent them in collating his notes with other glossaries, lexicons and word-lists. The story goes that in the last years of his life his reading consisted of nothing but dictionaries. When his eyesight began to fail, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren were made to perform this service for him (thus the family coinage ‘to read the dicky’, defined by Neel as ‘a gubbrowing of last resort’).

  On his deathbed, or so family legend has it, Neel told his children and grandchildren that so long as the knowledge of his words was kept alive within the family, it would tie them to their past and thus to each other. Inevitably, his warnings were ignored and his papers were locked away and forgotten; they were not to be retrieved till some twenty years later. The family was then in turmoil, with its many branches at odds with each other, and its collective affairs headed towards ruin. It was then that one of Neel’s granddaughters (the grandmother of the present writer) remembered his words and dug out the old band-box that contained Neel’s jottings. Coincidentally, that was the very year the Oracle was finally published – 1928 – and she was able to raise the money, by joint family subscription, to acquire the entire set. Thus began the process of disinterring Neel’s horoscopes and checking them against the Oracle’s pronouncements – and miraculously, no sooner did the work start than things began to turn around, so that the family was able to come through the worldwide Depression of the 1930s with its fortunes almost undiminished. After that never again was the Chrestomathy allowed to suffer prolonged neglect. By some strange miracle of heredity there was always, in every decade, at least one member of the family who had the time and the interest to serve as wordy-wallah, thus keeping alive this life-giving conversation with the founder of the line.

  The Chrestomathy is a work that cannot, in principle, ever be considered finished. One reason for this is that new and previously unknown word-chits in Neel’s hand continue to turn up in places where he once resided. These unearthings have been regular enough, and frequent enough, to confound the idea of ever bringing the work to completion. But the Chrestomathy is also, in its very nature, a continuing dialogue, and the idea of bringing it to an end is one that evokes superstitious horror in all of Neel’s descendants. Be it then clearly understood that it was not with any such intention that this compilation was assembled: it was rather the gradual decay of Neel’s papers which gave birth to the proposal that the Chrestomathy (or what there was of it) be put into a form that might admit of wider circulation.

  It remains only to explain that since the Chrestomathy deals exclusively with the English language, Neel included, with very few exceptions, only such words as had already found a place in an English dictionary, lexicon or word-list. This is why its entries are almost always preceded by either the symbol of the Oracle (a +) or the names of other glossaries, dictionaries or lexicons; these are, as it were, their credentials for admittance to the vessel of migration that was the Chrestomathy. However, the power to grant full citizenship rested, in Neel’s view, solely with the Oracle (thus his eagerness to scrutinize its rolls). Once a word had been admitted into the Oracle’s cavern, it lost the names of its sponsors and was marked forever with its certificate of residence: the symbol +. ‘After the Oracle has spoken the name of a word, the matter is settled; from then on the expression in question is no longer (or no longer only) Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, Hind.Φ, Laskari or anything else – in its English incarnation, it is to be considered a new coinage, with a new persona and a renewed destiny.’

  These then are the simple conventions that Neel’s descendants have adhered to, marking a + upon every girmitiya that has found a place within the Oracle’s tablets. Who exactly made these marks, and at what date, is now impossible to ascertain, so dense is the accretion of markings and jottings upon the margins of Neel’s notes. Previous attempts to untangle these notations caused so much confusion that the present writer was instructed merely to bring the markings up to date, and in such a fashion that any interested party would be able to verify the findings in the most recent edition of the Oracle. This he has attempted to do to the best of his ability, although many errors have, no doubt, evaded his scrutiny.

  When the mantle of wordy-major was placed upon the shoulders of the present writer, it came with a warning from his elders: his task, they said, was not to attempt to re-create the Chrestomathy as Neel might have written it in his own lifetime; he was merely to provide a summary of a continuing exchange of words between generations. It was with these instructions in mind that he has laboured to preserve the timbre of Neel’s etymological reflections: in the pages that follow, whenever quotation marks are used without attribution, Neel must be presumed to be the author of the passage in question.

  abihowa/ abhowa (*The Glossaryα): �
��A finer word for “climate” was never coined,’ writes Neel, ‘joining as it does the wind and the water, in Persian, Arabic and Bengali. Were there to be, in matters of language, such a thing as a papal indulgence then I would surely expend mine in ensuring a place for this fine coinage.’

  abrawan (*The Glossary): ‘The name of this finest of muslins comes, as Sir Henry notes, from the Persian for “flowing water”.’

  +achar: ‘There are those who would gloss this as “pickle”,’ writes Neel, ‘although that word is better applied to the definition than the thing defined.’

  agil (*Roebuckβ): ‘Many will raise their eyebrows when they learn that this was the lascar’s equivalent of the English sailor’s “fore” or “for’ard”, just as peechil was his equivalent for “aft”. Why not, one might ask, agey and peechhey, as would seem natural for most speakers of Hind.? Could it be that these essential nautical terms were borrowed from the languages of Cutch or Sind? Often have I asked but never been satisfactorily answered. But to this I can testify, in corroboration of the good Lieutenant’s definition, that it is indisputably true that the Laskari terms are always agil and peechil, never agey-peechhey.’

  alliballie muslin (*The Glossary): ‘There are those, including Sir Henry, who would consider this a muslin of fine quality, but in the Raskhali wardrobe it was always relegated to one of the lower shelves.’

  +almadia: An Arab riverboat of a sort that was rarely seen in India: Neel would have found it hard to account for its presence in the Oracle.

  alzbel (*Roebuck): ‘Thus does the ever-musical Laskari tongue render the watchman’s cry of “All’s well”: how well I remember it . . .’

  arkati (*The Barney-Bookχ): ‘This word, widely used by seamen to mean ‘ship’s pilot’, is said to be derived from the erstwhile princely state of Arcot, near Madras, the Nawab of which was reputed to have in his employ all the pilots in the Bay of Bengal. Scholars will no doubt cavil at Neel’s unquestioning acceptance of Barrère and Leland’s derivation, but this entry is a good example of how, when forced to choose between a colourful and a reliable etymology, Neel always picked the former.

  +atta/ otta/ otter: Such are the many English spellings for the common Indian word for ‘wheat flour’. The first of these variants is the one anointed by the Oracle. But the last, which had the blessing of Barrère and Leland, was the one most favoured by Neel, and under his own roof, he would not allow the use of any other. The memory of this was passed along in the family even unto my own generation. Thus was I able recently to confound a pretentious pundit who was trying to persuade an unusually gullible audience that the phrase ‘kneading the otter’ was once a euphemism of the same sort as ‘flaying the ferret’ and ‘skinning the eel’.

  awari (*Roebuck): ‘This, says Lt. Roebuck, is the Laskari word for ship’s wake. But as so often with the usages of the lascars, it has the oddly poetical connotation of being cast adrift upon the waves.’ Legend has it that some members of the family went to the movie Awara expecting a tale of shipwreck.

  +ayah: Neel was contemptuous of those who identified this word with Indian nursemaids and nurseries. In his home he insisted on using its progenitors, the French ‘aide’ and the Portuguese ‘aia’.

  bachaw/bachao: This word should by rights have meant ‘help!’ being a direct borrowing of the common Hind. term. But Neel insisted that in English the word was only ever used ironically, as an expression of disbelief. For example: ‘Puckrowed a six-foot cockup? Oh, bachaw!’

  backsee (*Roebuck): This was the Laskari substitute for the English ‘aback’: ‘Another of the many words in the Indian shipboard lexicon, where a Portuguese term was preferred over the English.’

  + baksheesh / buckshish / buxees, etc.: ‘Curious indeed that for this token of generosity Sir Henry was unable to find any English equivalent (“tip” being dismissed as slang) and could only provide French, German and Italian synonyms.’ Neel’s optimism about the future of this word was based on the fact of its having few competitors in the English language. He would have been surprised to find that both baksheesh and its South China synonym cumshaw had been smiled upon by the Oracle.

  +balty/balti: On this commonest of Indian household objects – the bucket – Neel penned several lengthy chits. Already in his time the use of these containers had become so widespread that the memory of their foreign provenance (the word being a direct borrowing of the Portuguese ‘balde’) had been lost. ‘This much is certain, that the balde, like so much else, was introduced into our lives by lascars. Yet the object for which they used the term was a “ship’s bucket”, a leather container bearing no resemblance to the metal vessels that are now spoken of by that name. But the balde could not have become ubiquitous if it were not replacing some older object that was already in common use. What then was the name of the container that people used for their daily bath before the lascars gave them their baldes? What did they use for the cleaning of floors, for drawing water from wells, for watering their gardens? What was the object, now forgotten, that once discharged these functions?’ Later, on his first trip to London, Neel went to visit a lascar boarding house in the East End. He wrote afterwards: ‘Living twenty to a room, in the vilest conditions, the poor budmashes have no other expedient but to cook their food in enormous baldes. Being, like so many lascars, good-hearted, hospitable fellows they invited me to partake of their simple supper and I did not hesitate to accept. The meal consisted of nothing more than rooties served with a stew that had long been bubbling in the balde: this was a gruel concocted from chicken-bones and tomatoes, and was served in a single giant tapori. It bore no resemblance to anything I had ever eaten in Hind. Yet it was not without savour and I could not forbear to ask where they had learnt to make it. They explained that it was Portuguese shipboard fare, commonly spoken of as galinha balde, which they proceeded to translate as “balti chicken”. This did much, I must admit, to raise in my estimation the cuisine of Portugal.’

  History has vindicated Neel’s optimistic evaluation of this word’s future, but it remains true that he had in no way foreseen that the word’s citizenship in the English language would be based on its culinary prowess; nor would he have imagined that on finding entrance into the Oracle this humblest of Portuguese objects would come to be defined as ‘a style of cooking influenced by the cuisine of northern Pakistan’.

  balwar (*Roebuck): ‘Too close in sound to its synonym, “barber”, to have any realistic chance of survival.’

  bamba (*Roebuck): ‘Why would anyone continue to use this Portuguese-derived term for an object which already has a simple and economical name in English: “pump”?’

  banchoot / barnshoot / bahenchod / b’henchod etc (*The Glossary): In his treatment of this expression, Neel decisively parts company with his guru, Sir Henry, who gives this cluster of words short shrift, defining them merely as ‘terms of abuse which we should hesitate to print if their odious meaning were not obscure “to the general.” If it were known to the Englishmen who sometimes use the words, we believe there are few who would not shrink from such brutality’. But rare indeed was the European who shrank from mouthing this word: such was its popularity that Neel came to be convinced that ‘it is one of the many delightful composite terms that have been formed by the pairing of Hind. and English elements. To prove this we need only break the word into its constituent parts: the first syllable “ban”/“barn” etc, is clearly a contraction of Hind. bahin, or sister. The second, variously spelled, is, in my opinion, a cognate of the English chute, with which it shares at least one aspect of its variegated meaning. Like many such words it derives, no doubt, from some ancient Indo-European root. It is curious to note that the word chute no longer figures as a verb in English, as its cognates do in many Indian languages. But there is some evidence to suggest that it was once so used in English too: an example of this is the word chowder, clearly derived from the Hind. chodo/chodna etc. The word is said to be still widely in use in America, being employed chiefly as a noun
, to refer to a kind of soup or pottage. Although I have not had the good fortune to partake of this dish, I am told that it is produced by a great deal of grinding and pounding, which would certainly be consonant with some aspects of the ancient meaning that is still preserved in the usage of this root in Hind.’

  +bandanna: The coolin status of this word would have amazed Neel, who gave it little chance of survival. That ‘bandanna’ has a place in the Oracle is not, of course, a matter that admits of any doubt – but it is true nonetheless that this was not the fate that Neel had foretold for it. His prediction was that the Hind. word bandhna would find its way into the English language in its archaic seventeenth-century form, bandannoe. Yet it is true also that Neel never doubted this word’s destiny, a belief that was founded in part in the resilience and persistence of the ancient Indo-European root from which it is derived – a word that had already, in his lifetime, been Anglicized into bando/bundo (to tie or fasten). This beautiful and useful word is, alas, now only used as it pertains to embankments, although it was once widely used by speakers of English, especially in its imperative form: bando! (Neel even made a copy of the quote that Sir Henry used in his note on this term: ‘This and probably other Indian words have been naturalized in the docks on the Thames frequented by Lascar crews. I have heard a London lighter-man, in the Victoria Docks, throw a rope ashore to another Londoner, calling out, “Bando!” [M.-Gen. Keatinge]).’

  Neel’s faith in bando/bundo was no doubt influenced by the root’s uncommon fecundity, for he foresaw that it would give birth to a whole brood of + anointed derivatives – bund (‘embankment’ or ‘dyke’, the best known example of which is now in Shanghai, widely considered to be the single most valuable piece of land in the world); cummerbund (the fate of which Neel also failed to properly predict, for it never did replace ‘belt’ as he had thought it would); and finally bundobast (literally ‘tying up’ in the sense of ‘putting into order’ or ‘making arrangements’). The passing away of this last into the limbo of the almost-dead Neel could never have foreseen and would have mourned more, perhaps, than any other entry in the Chrestomathy. (Of this too his anonymous descendant might well have written: ‘Why? Why? Why this meaningless slaughter, this egregious waste, this endless logocide. Who will put an end to it? To whom can we appeal? Does it not call upon every conscience to rise in protest?’) For it is true certainly that this is a word, an idea, of which English is sadly in need. Nor did the contributions of bando/bandh end there. Neel was persuaded that band in the sense of ‘head-band’ or ‘rubber-band’ was also a child of the Hind. term. This would mean that bando/bundo did indeed achieve the distinction of being raised to the Peerage of the Verb, through such usages as ‘to band together’.