The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  British interest in India began, like that of the Portuguese, with a desire for strong flavours. An enduring feature of the British kitchen is a taste for foods that combine sweet and sour – for Worcester sauce, pickled relishes, and chutneys. But, for the British, India’s riches were not just gastronomic. Commerce drove the relationship. Fine muslins, colour-fast painted and printed chintzes, carpets, jewellery and household ornaments, opium and tea were sourced in India, and porcelain was sent home from further east. Ralph Fitch, who journeyed to India in the 1580s, enthused about ‘very rich rice’, ‘great store of cloth’ and people digging gold from the earth, and a generation later the diplomat Sir Thomas Roe could expatiate freely on the rubies, diamonds and ‘massie gold’ with which the nobles bedecked themselves.4 In July 1661 Samuel Pepys recorded spending 34 shillings on an Indian gown, and in September 1663 he mentioned that he had had a stressful time of buying his wife ‘a painted Indian callico’ with which to line the walls of her study.

  Half a century later, Charles Lockyer’s account of trade in India sheds light on some of the goods most prized: rattan and sago, betel nuts, Nankeen fans, ivory, ‘Cardamums from the Malabar Coast’, ‘Acheen from the Syndi Islands’, ‘Palampores, Pelongs, flower’d Damasks’, turmeric, ‘Sugar and Sugar Candy from Bengall’, saltpetre, ‘Hubble-bubble Canes’, and from China ‘Plates with blue Flowers, thin and well burnt’ as well as silk flowers and brass locks.5 Lockyer also mentions a snake he shot that had swallowed two hens and five chickens, the monkeys held in religious regard by the Hindus (‘I cannot tell if we are allow’d to shoot them’), and jackals ‘remarkable for Howling in the Night’.6

  Lockyer’s is a splendid display of early eighteenth-century taste, but words of Indian origin had been edging into English since the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Some are easily recognized: others are not. How many of us immediately see the Indian origins of, say, cushy or swastika? In the late nineteenth century, Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell created a glossary of words from this source: Hobson-Jobson. ‘Of words that seem to have been admitted to full franchise, we may give examples in curry, toddy, veranda, cheroot, loot, nabob, teapot, sepoy, cowry; and of others familiar enough to the … English ear … chowry, baboo, mahout, aya’.’ In addition there are items ‘long since fully assimilated, which really originated in the adoption of an Indian word, or the modification of an Indian proper name’: examples are gingham, palanquin and chintz. Yule and Burnell note a further class of ‘words which are essentially Portuguese, among Anglo-Indian colloquialisms’; this includes caste, mosquito, joss and cobra .7

  Hobson-Jobson takes its name from what they describe as ‘an Anglo-Saxon version of the wailings of the Mahommedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of the Moharram’. What the British heard was ‘Ya Hasan! Ya Husayn!’; the two names were those of Muhammad’s grandsons, killed fighting for their faith. Its anglicized form was ‘typical … of the most highly assimilated class of Anglo-Indian argot’. When Yule and Burnell were writing, the phrase was in frequent use by British soldiers in the Punjab to refer to ‘a native festal excitement’: now it is remembered only as the title of this strange, discursive dictionary. But other words have held fast. Next time you see or refer to a dinghy, pause a moment to recall that it is Bengali, and, when you wash your hair, reflect perhaps on the origins of the word shampoo, which are in the imperative (champo) of the Hindi champna, a verb that conveys the idea of kneading and pressing the body to relieve fatigue and stimulate the circulation.

  Similar examples abound. A thug was originally in Hindi a cheat or impostor, and the word was applied by the British to ‘phansigars’, who throttled travellers – supposedly for sacrificial purposes, but often for more immediate and obvious reward. Bungalow is Hindustani, and means literally ‘belonging to Bengal’. From the same source we get bandanna and gymkhana and the tom-tom drum. From Hindi we get bangle – its original is bangri, which denoted a ring of coloured glass. From this language we also derive toddy, which we now use to refer to a hot, spiced drink; its root, tarri, is the name of fermented palm sap. The breakfast dish kedgeree takes its name from the Hindi khichri, and when we use the word cot of a light bedstead it is a corruption of the Hindi khat, a term which could also signify a hammock or couch.

  Pyjamas is another import from India. In fact pyjama derived from the Persian words for ‘foot’ and ‘garment’, and in its Indian context it was used only of loose-fitting trousers, rather than of the entire ensemble of bedwear. Catamaran, spotted by William Dampier, can be traced to the Tamil kattu-maram, meaning literally ‘tied wood’, and the same language is the source of mulligatawny, vetiver and pagoda (the last picked up via Portuguese). Urdu provides words which strike us immediately as having an Indian context: the respectful title sahib and the soft cheese known as paneer. Tank is considered in Hobson-Jobson ‘one of those perplexing words which seems to have a double origin, in this case one Indian, the other European’; in the Marathi language of western India tanken is the word for a reservoir or water butt, and the Portuguese used tanque (‘pond’) of Indian reservoirs and wells. Polo is traceable to a Tibetan word for a ball. Cashmere is named after the province in the western Himalayas where that soft wool, so beloved of moths, has traditionally been harvested.

  Other terms have travelled a long way from their Indian origins. Pundit is one: originally it was the name for a learned Hindu versed in Sanskrit – that ancient, lexically rich and now ceremonial language that has given us the Upanishads, the Mahabharata and the Kama Sutra. The very name of Sanskrit means ‘synthesized’; it denotes the formal language set out in textbooks, rather than the naturally occurring dialects, and it hints as well at the process of sandhi (‘putting together’) which allows the boundaries between individual words to blur into a fluid yarn of syllables. Pundits were required to unpack its ambiguities. Even after Muslim invaders had seized control of the subcontinent – a process that began in the tenth century as they thundered down on horseback from Afghanistan, and was completed in stages over the next half a millennium – Sanskrit remained. The incomers spoke Turkic, prayed in Arabic, and read Persian literature, and Persian became established as the language of administration. But, though Sanskrit lost its position as ‘the representative language of culture’ in the region, its status as the sacred language of Hinduism and Buddhism ensured that it did not fade into oblivion.8 The pundit preserves its rhythms and instructions.

  Sanskrit itself lies behind many English words, such as mantra, avatar and yoga, which literally mean ‘instrument of thought’, ‘descent’ and ‘union’. Jungle derives from the Sanskrit jangala, which was used to denote a desert or wasteland. As the word filtered into other languages, it came to signify any section of land that could not be cultivated, and among Anglo-Indians it meant ‘a forest; a thicket; a tangled wilderness’. For its part juggernaut can be traced to the Sanskrit name of the god Krishna, although its English sense derives directly from Hindi. The annual festival of this deity involves its idol being dragged along on a giant carriage, and many devotees are crushed beneath its wheels. Hence the word’s use of any heavy vehicle – and hence Mr Enfield’s description, in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, of the deformed Hyde being ‘like some damned Juggernaut’. Sanskrit also furnishes nirvana (literally ‘blown out’, like a candle, and thus suggestive of a state where one has gone beyond mere sentient existence). Karma is from the same source; the OED’s nice definition – ‘in Buddhism, the sum of a person’s actions in one of his successive states of existence, regarded as determining his fate in the next’ – can hardly fail to make one think of how irreverently the term is now used. Another such irreverence: whether wittingly or not, the drug Viagra preserves the Sanskrit vyaghra, meaning ‘tiger’.

  The accumulation of these many borrowings was gradual, but it hints at the different British approaches to India: magisterial, curatorial, exoticist. Either the British were preoccupied with the exercise of power, or they minutely cat
alogued and exhibited Indian life and culture, or they dwelt on the country’s wonders.9 The imperial experience in India was different from that in America. India was ‘a place of passage, not of settlement’, and, as the Persian chronicler Ghulam Husain Khan remarked in the late eighteenth century, the English were accustomed to ‘coming for a number of years, and then … going away to pay a visit to their native land, without any one of them showing an inclination to fix himself in this land’. 10 While there were individuals and families who entrenched themselves, there was little desire for the fixity of settlement; riches, not self-reinvention, were the goal.

  Reaching back to examine the beginnings of this connection, we can see its special character. The East India Company was granted a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth on 31 December 1600, at a time when the American experiment seemed to be in jeopardy. The Company’s 218 petitioners were to be permitted a monopoly on all English trade in Asia and the Pacific. Many were Levant merchants, eager to diversify as the price of pepper slumped. Their focus was, as the Company’s name suggests, the East Indies. It was a fabulous opportunity, a shimmering fantasy of drugs and silks and perfumes; but trade in the region was dominated by the Dutch. They had supplanted the Portuguese after King Sebastian’s disastrous invasion of Morocco in 1578 had shattered Portugal’s army and trading interests. The Dutch, united in their own company, had a huge slice of the global trade in pepper, sandalwood, camphor, mace and cloves, and their other exports from Indonesia included gold, gems, pearls, rare birds and tortoise shells. They posed a threat to English interests in the Levant, and it was vital to check Dutch progress in Asia.

  The English joined the race for control of the East Indies in 1601. In 1603 they secured a toehold on Pulo Run, one of the tiny volcanic Banda Islands. Their main goal was to bring back nutmeg, a spice believed to have extraordinary properties. It was reputed to detoxify the spleen and the stomach, improve eyesight, and cure dysentery and head colds. It was also understood to act as a powerful aphrodisiac. Nutmeg sold in England for more than 500 times as much as it cost on Run. The island would in due course form part of a symbolic exchange: although Peter Stuyvesant had surrendered the Dutch colony of Manhattan to the English in September 1664, a neat exchange was effected under the Treaty of Breda three years later, when the English formally renounced their right to Run in exchange for this apparently unpromising American territory.

  The East India Company’s early voyages were profitable, and the level of profit rose with each expedition. But the focus began to shift. In 1607 the Company sent ships east via the Arabian Sea. One of the senior officers, William Hawkins, was commissioned to explore the potential of the territory we now know as Gujarat.11 English traders arrived at Surat, the trading centre of the Mughal Empire, in late August 1608. John Jourdain was one of a second party who passed via Table Bay and Zanzibar to Aden, and from there on to Surat, where he bought ‘some cloves and baftas’ (the latter being a kind of cheap fabric), noted another Englishman’s ‘dieing with eateing opium’, and remarked with some amusement the local overlord’s ‘delight … in strange toyes’.12 Here in miniature is the story of the English in India: the acquisition of goods either rare or cheap, the reckless intoxication, and the Indians’ appetite for English curios, in return for which they would bestow their favour.

  In the sixteenth century a few Hindi words were learnt. Rajah is one of the first to be met, in 1555. There were far more in the century that followed: juggernaut and kedgeree I have mentioned, but we also get guru, dhoti, ghee, dungaree and pukka. Dungaree is a corruption of the name of a part of Bombay once noted for its rough calico. Pukka signified in Hindi a plethora of qualities: being strong, ripe, properly cooked, secure, or made of brick.

  The factory the English built at Surat, stoutly fortified, was the launchpad for trade routes into Persia and what is today Indonesia. Indigo was one of the main materials to be ferried back to England; another was cotton, prized as a light and washable alternative to more traditional textiles. John Keay explains in his history of the Company that ‘Indian cottons were about to invade English domestic life. Napkins and table-cloths, bed sheets and soft furnishings, not to mention underwear and dress fabrics, quite suddenly became indispensable to every respectable household … Having first invaded the larder, Eastern produce was about to take over the linen cupboard.’13

  The Company’s imports and exports were controversial: they appeared to be damaging English manufacture, and were of little use to the majority of the population. The entire business seemed to embody the height of decadence. And, while James I took a passionate interest in the Company’s affairs, those who followed him were less enthusiastic. Charles I and Cromwell both received huge loans from the Company, which they had no intention of repaying. The Company’s fortunes teetered. Investment in consolidating its position in India was all but impossible. Moreover, communication was a persistent problem. Missionaries found they had to have a command of Portuguese to make much progress with would-be converts. Yet in the end it was these patient men of faith who did the most to spread a knowledge of English.

  The East India Company’s key bases were at Madras (now called Chennai), Bombay (now usually Mumbai) and Calcutta (now Kolkata). The first of these was achieved in 1654; the others followed in 1668 and 1690. Madras has its origins in a grant made to the East India Company in 1639; a fort was founded on the narrow strip of sand by one of the Company’s factors, Francis Day. Before the early nineteenth century, Bombay was an archipelago of seven islands; they were taken by the Portuguese in 1534, formed part of the dowry when Charles II married Catherine of Braganza in 1662, and were leased to the Company for the sum of £10 a year. Calcutta is generally believed to have been founded by Job Charnock, the Company’s agent at Hugli; it would in due course serve as the British capital in India for almost 140 years. In each case, local rulers granted territory and trading rights to the settlers: the colonial presence was achieved through ‘Indian permission, partnership and complicity in the business of making money’.14

  Only in 1717, when it achieved exemption from paying customs duties in Bengal, did the Company’s Indian fortunes truly begin to rise. What had started as an affiliation of Elizabethan men of business would become a behemoth of mercantile power, metamorphosing from a commercial venture into a vast political and military machine. A nineteenth-century commentator aptly described it as ‘a Company which carries a sword in the one hand, and a ledger in the other – which maintains armies and retails tea’.15 Yet the persistence of political squabbles with France and Spain inhibited trade; the expanding Company’s expenses spiralled upward; and the tragedy of the Black Hole of Calcutta depressed public perception of the opportunities the colony had to offer.

  Victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 was a pivotal moment in establishing the East India Company’s political power, although it took time for this to be recognized. Robert Clive comprehensively defeated the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daula, having already coaxed the Nawab’s subjects into his thrall. Siraj’s successor, Mir Jafar Ali Khan, awarded Clive a jagir – a handsome share of agricultural revenue worth almost £30,000 a year. The controversial Englishman was to prove an efficient and overbearing engineer of British supremacy in India. Thus a Muslim raj was supplanted by a British one, and, according to superstition, this was destined to last a hundred years before being supplanted in its turn by a Hindu raj. Plassey made an indelible imprint on native minds: the British, with their small-calibre cannon and howitzers, were seen as masters of technology. Once the French had been defeated at Wandiwash in 1760, and following the capture and trashing of their base in Pondicherry the following year, the British position was cemented.

  Thereafter, a programme of treaties and measured aggression was conducted, and its material rewards were huge. In the year of the success at Plassey, a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine could write of Bengal, ‘According to the report of travellers, [it] is one of most fruitful countries in the world, superior e
ven to Egypt itself.’ It abounded with ‘rice, corn, and fruits of all kinds, which the inhabitants candy and preserve … [and] European ships supply themselves with biscuit, fowls, pork, and other provisions at very easy rates’. It also yielded ‘opium, wax, civet, long pepper, and ginger’. 16

  It was clear, though, that the British in India had to face many hindrances and hazards: dust, disease (for instance, beriberi, which takes its name from a Sinhalese word meaning ‘very weak’), snakes and scorpions, the occasional tiger, a riot of bowel complaints, the complexities of Indian society with its approximately 200 languages and countless protocols, and also boredom. To this list Emma Roberts, in her Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan (1835), adds another unhappy detail: the ‘incessant clamour’ of the tom-tom, ‘an instrument which is introduced into every mansion … for the ostensible purpose of charming the young folks’, but which permits an ‘almost constant drumming … from morning until night, a horrid discord, which, on a very hot day, aggravates every other torment’. 17