by Amitav Ghosh
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’.
But to return to bandanna, Neel’s own use of this term never came into conformity with its dictionary definition, for he continued, in his lifetime, to apply it to kerchiefs, handkerchiefs, gamchhas, and especially to the cummerbunds and head-cloths that lascars and other working people commonly wore in order to restrain their hair and their kameezes. His descendants, as was their custom, were even more conservative, and would vie among themselves to find uses for the originary forms. Well do I remember the response of an elderly uncle, who, when invited to join a family expedition to a well-reputed cowboy movie, cried out: ‘Arre! You think I’d spend good money to watch a band of budmashes running around in dungris and bandhnas?’
+bandar: Neel was totally mistaken in his forecast of how the common Hind. word for monkey would fare in English. One of his pet theories was that migrant words must always be careful to stand apart from each other, in sound and appearance: uprooted homonyms and synonyms, he felt, had little chance of surviving in pairs – in every couple, one would perish. In this instance the beastly sense of bandar was, in his view, uncomfortably close in sound to an unrelated nautical term of Persian derivation: bander/bunder (‘harbour’ or ‘port’). He was persuaded that of the two it was this latter form that would survive in English – partly because the use of bunder in the nautical sense had a very long pedigree in the language, going back to the seventeenth century, and partly because the root was uncommonly fecund in English derivatives. It was these derivatives, he felt, that were most vulnerable to the possibilities of confusion posed by the zoological sense of bandar. True enough that the frequently used term bander-/bunder-boat, (‘harbour-boat’) was in little danger of being mistaken for a simian conveyance, but there remained another word that might well be the cause of misunderstandings and confusion. This was the venerable sabander/shabander (‘master of the harbour’ or ‘harbour-master’), a term which had so long a history as almost to be considered Middle English, and was thus possessed of a powerful claim to protection from the sort of abuse that might result from compounds like shah-bandar. As for the animal, there was another word that would serve it just as well, he felt, and this was wanderoo (from wanderu, the Sinhala cognate of Hind. bandar) which was also in wide circulation at the time, although it was generally used to mean langur. It was on wanderoo that Neel pinned his hopes while predicting doom for its synonym. Little did he know that both bandar and its collective +log would be given indefinite prolongations of life by a children’s book, while the beautiful wanderoo would soon disappear into a pauper’s grave. [See also gadda/gadha.]
bando/bundo (*The Glossary): See bandanna.
+bankshall: Neel would have been saddened by the demise of this beautiful word, once much in use: ‘How well I remember the great Bankshall of Calcutta, which served as the jetty for the disembarkation of ship’s passengers, and where we would go of an evening to gawk at all the griffins and new arrivals. It never occurred to us that this edifice ought to have been, by its oracular definition, merely a “warehouse” or “shed”. Yet I do not doubt that Sir Henry is right to derive it from the Bengali bãkashala’. He would have been surprised to learn that a humbler kind of warehouse, the godown, had survived in general usage, at the expense of the now rare bankshall.
+banyan/banian: ‘This is no mere word, but a clan, a sect, a caste – one that has long been settled in the English language. The clue to its understanding lies in the gloss provided by the Admiralδ: ‘The term is derived from a religious sect in the East, who, believing in metempsychosis, eat of no creature endowed with life. It derives, in other words, from the caste-name “Bania” or properly, “Vania”, the last syllable of which is sometimes nasalized. This caste, long associated with banking, commerce, money-lending and so on, was of course famously vegetarian and this was why the word served for centuries as an essential part of the English nautical vocabulary, being applied to the one day of the week when sailors were not served meat: banyan-day.’
But all this being accepted, how did this word come to assume its present avatar, in which it represents the humble and ubiquitous undergarment worn by the men of the Indian subcontinent? Neel was of course in an exceptionally good position to observe this mutation, which happened largely within his lifetime. His tracing of the genealogy of this series of incarnations counts among his most important contributions to the etymologist’s art and deserves to be quoted in full. ‘The word banyan’s journey to the wardrobe began no doubt with the establishing of its original sense in English, in which it served merely to evoke an association with India (it was thus, I imagine, that it came also to be attached to a tree that became symbolic of the land – our revered ficus religiosa, now reincarnated as the banyan-tree). It was because of this general association that it came also to be applied to a certain kind of Indian garment. It serves no purpose perhaps to ask what that garment originally was. To anyone who has lived as long as I have, it is evident that the garment in question is not so much an article of clothing as an index of Hind.’s standing in the world. Thus, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when ours was still a land of fabled riches and opulence, the word banyan/banian referred to a richly embroidered dressing gown that fell almost to the floor: it was modelled perhaps on the choga or the caftan/qaftan. [Here the present writer cannot refrain from interjecting that although this species of robe is extinct in India today, several noteworthy specimens are on permanent display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.] Even in my own childhood the word banyan referred always to these sumptuous robes. But at that time, of course, none but the most Anglicized Indians used the word in this sense, the potential for harm being very great. Well do I remember the fate of the unfortunate Raja of Mukhpora, who had a habit of peppering his Bengali with English words. On a garment-buying expedition to the bazar, he was heard to boast, in the hearing of all, that he intended to have his banyans beaten and washed before they were locked away for the summer. This greatly alarmed the moneylenders, who lost no time in calling in their debts: the results were ruinous for the poor Raja, who had to live out his days in an ashram in Brindavan, with nothing but a pair of saffron chogas in his wardrobe. Thus did he learn why it’s best not to get into a banyan-fight.
‘From that pinnacle of magnificence, this article of clothing has unfailingly kept pace with India’s fortunes: as the land’s inhabitants grew ever poorer and weaker under the British yoke, the garment to which the word was applied grew ever meaner and more humble. In its next incarnation therefore the banyan was reborn as the standard article of wear for the lowliest of workmen: thus does the Admiral describe it as “a sailor’s coloured tunic”. In this form, too, the garment was still a stranger
to India: it was the lascar, undoubtedly, who was responsible for introducing it into his native land. It was he, too, who was responsible for snipping off the arms it possessed in its European avatar. In clothing, as in language and food, the lascar is thus revealed to be the pioneer in all things “Indian”. No morning passes when I do not think of this as I slip my hands through those familiar armholes; nor does the notion fail to bring to my nostrils a faint tang of the sea.’
+banyan-/banian-day: See banyan.
+banyan-fight (*The Glossary): ‘A tongue-tempest’, as recorded by Sir Henry, ‘that “never rises to blows or bloodshed” (Ocington, 1690)’.
+banyan-tree: See banyan.
+barbican: ‘A sewer- or water-pipe,’ as Sir Henry correctly notes, ‘that leads back to the Bab-Khana of Kanpur’.
bargeer (*The Glossary): ‘It is my conviction that this derivative of the marathi word for “soldier” made its way into The Glossary not through the battlefield but the nursery, being employed, as it was in Bengali, to strike terror into the hearts of budzat butchas.’
bas! (*Roebuck): The Lieutenant glosses this as the Laskari equivalent of the English ‘avast’, but Neel believed it to be a sibling rather than a synonym, both being derived, in his view, from the Arabic bass, ‘enough’.
+ bawhawder / bahaudur / bahadur: ‘This once sought-after Mughal title, meaning literally “brave”, took on a derisive undertone in English. Sir Henry is right in noting that it came to “denote a haughty or pompous personage, exercising his brief authority with a strong sense of his own importance”. Curiously, no taint of the derisive attached to this term where it would have been most apt – that is, in its application to the East India Company, which was known in Hind. as Company Bawhawder’.
+bayadère: ‘Those who believe that Portuguese was a language of the decks and had little to contribute to the bedroom would do well to note that bayadère is not a French but of Portuguese derivation (from bailadera – “dancing girl”).’ This was the euphemism that BeeBees used to speak of the women their husbands referred to as buy-em-dears – a motley collection of cunchunees, debbies, dashies, pootlies, rawnees, Rum-johnnies and nautch-girls. Curiously, the word “mistress”, which has a close Hind. cognate (by way of the Portuguese mestre) was never used in its English sense, it being considered quite unusual for a man to share his bed with his mistri’.
+BeeBee/bibi: ‘Why this word prevailed over its twin, begum, in being applied to the more eminent white wives of Calcutta, remains unexplained. In recent times, it has fallen out of favour and is now applied ironically to European women of low rank: this happened because there came a time when the great BeeBees began to insist on being called ma’am-sahibs. Their employees shortened the prefix to “mem-” (and occasionally, in the case of the most bawhawder of the tribe, to “man-”)’.
begaree (*Roebuck): ‘So, according to Lt. Roebuck, were the lascars accustomed to speak of those of their number who had been shanghaiied or impressed into service. Could it be that the word is a curious crossing of the English “beggar” and the Bengali bhikari (of the same meaning) and the Hind. bekari, “unemployed”?’
+begum: See BeeBee.
beparee (*The Glossary): Neel believed that this Hind. word for ‘trader’, like seth, had found its way into English because the extraordinary proliferation of the meanings of banyan had rendered the word unusable in its originary sense.
beteechoot (*The Glossary): For the import of this expression see banchoot/barnshoot, but bearing in mind that it substitutes betee, daughter, for bahin, sister. ‘Sir Henry illustrates his definition of this term with some extremely apt quotations, among them the following: “1638: L’on nous monstra à une demy lieue de la ville un sepulchre, qu’ils apellent Bety-chuit, c’est à dire la vergogne de la fille decouverte” [Mandelsle, Paris, 1659].’
bhandari (*Roebuck): ‘This is the name that lascars use for cooks or storekeepers. I imagine that it may well be their word for “quartermaster” as well’. This sentence is taken from the most unusual of Neel’s notes – a set of jottings scribbled on the verso side of few playing cards. From the tiny handwriting, no less than the liberal splashes of seawater, it would appear that these notes were compiled in the course of a voyage on which paper was not easily obtained. Within the family these notes are known as the Jack-Chits, after the first of the cards to be found (a knave of clubs). Generally speaking the chits are Neel’s earliest attempt to make sense of the shipboard dialect of the lascars: at the time of their writing he does not appear to have known of the existence of the Laskari Dictionary, but on acquiring a copy of Roebuck’s lexicon, he immediately acknowledged the superiority of that great lexicographer’s work and discontinued his own attempts to decode this dialect, which were undeniably of an unscientific and anecdotal nature. The chits are not wholly without interest, however; for example, this excerpt from the eight and nine of spades: ‘To set sail is to find oneself foundering not just in a new element, but also in an unknown ocean of words. When one listens to the speech of sailors, no matter whether they be speaking English or Hind. one is always at sea: not for nothing is the English argot of sail known as a “sea-language”, for it has long slipped its moorings from the English one learns in books. The same could be said of the ties that bind the tongues of Hind. to the jargon of the lascars: why, just the other day, we heard the tindals of our ship racing about on deck, shouting in the greatest agitation – hathee-soond! hathee-soond! That an “elephant’s trunk” had been sighted at sea seemed miraculous to all present and we went hurrying up to bear witness to this extraordinary visitation – but only to be disappointed, for the excitement of our lascar friends was occasioned by nothing more miraculous than a distant column of water, raised by a whirlwind. Evidently this phenomenon, known in English as a “water-spout”, has in their eyes the appearance of an elephant’s trunk. Nor was this the only time that day that I was to be deceived by the fancifulness of their usages. Later, while taking the air near the stern, I heard a lascar imploring another to puckrow his nar. I confess I was startled: for although it is no uncommon thing to hear a lascar speaking casually of the appendage of masculinity, it is unusual nonetheless to hear them referring to that organ in such high Sanskritic language. My surprise must have caused me to betray my presence, for they looked at me and began to laugh. Do you know what we are speaking of? one of them said to me. Placed on my mettle, I replied in a fashion that I thought would amply demonstrate my ship-learning. Why indeed I do know what you are speaking of, I said: it is the thing that is known as a “jewel-block” in English. At this they laughed even harder and said no, a jewel-block was a dasturhanja in Laskari, while the thing they had been speaking of was a rudder-bolt known to the Angrez as a “pintle”. I was tempted to inform them that the great William Shakespeare himself had used that word – pintle – in exactly the same sense as our Hind. nar. On consideration, however, I thought it best to refrain from divulging this piece of information. My shoke for the words of the greatest of dramatists had already gained for me the reputation of being an incorrigible “Spout-Billy”, and offensive as this sobriquet was, I could not help reflecting that to be known as a “Billy-Soond” would be worse still’.
+ bheesty / bheestie / beasty / bhishti: ‘The mysteries of water-carrying, the instrument of which trade was the mussuck. In the south, according to Sir Henry, the terms are tunny-catcher or tunnyketchi.’
bichawna/bichana (*The Glossary): ‘Bedding or bed, from which bichawnadar, or “bed-maker”, an expression that must be used with some care because of the possibility of innuendo.’
bichawnadar: See above.
bilayuti (*The Glossary): ‘Strange that we should have become accustomed to using a version of the Turkish/Arabic wilayat to refer to England; even stranger that the English should adapt it to their own use as blatty. In its bilayutee form it was often attached, as Sir Henry correctly notes, to foreign and exotic things (hence bilayati-baingan for “tomato”). Sir Henry was howeve
r gravely in error on another such compound, namely bilayuteepawnee. Although he correctly glosses this as “soda-water”, he is wrong in his contention that the people of Hind. believed bilayutee-pawnee could confer great strength to the human body by reason of its gaseous bubbles. As I remember the matter, our wonder was occasioned not by the power of the bubbles as they were imbibed, but rather by the explosive detonations with which they were expelled.’
biscobra (*The Glossary): Neel took issue with Sir Henry’s suggestion that this was the name of some kind of venomous lizard. ‘Here is another example of a beautiful marriage of the eastern and western lexicons. The word “cobra” comes of course from a Portuguese contraction of a Latin root meaning “serpent”. “Bis”, on the other hand, is certainly a derivative of the Bengali word for poison, which has been absorbed into English as bish, although with the sense of a “blunder” or “mistake”. It is impossible that such a term could be applied to a lizard, no matter how vengeful. In my opinion, it is none other than an English colloquialism for the hamadryad or King Cobra.’
+bish: See above.
b’longi/blongi (*The Linkisterε): ‘Frequently mistaken as a contraction of the English “belong”, this word is actually an elegant and economical copula, doing duty for the verb “to be” in all its many forms. Imagine then the embarrassment of the griffin who pointed to his wife’s dog and said: “Gudda blongi wife-o massa.”’
+bobachee: ‘As a barkentine is to a country boat, a Kaptan to a Nacoda, a vinthaleux to a dumbpoke, so in the kitchen is a bobachee to a consummer. Each a potentate in his own way, they rule over a vast lashkar, consisting of spice-grinding masalchies, cabob-grilling caleefas, and others whose titles have mercifully lapsed from use. The bobachee, however, is the only culinary mystery to lend his name to the kitchen.’