The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  A further risk was drug-induced folly. As early as the 1670s, a seaman by the name of Thomas Bowrey saw Bengalis drinking bhang. He and a few other sailors bought pints of this cannabis-based concoction in the bazaar; the result was a mixture of merriment and anguish. As Richard Davenport-Hines observes, a ‘sailor who fancied himself an emperor, and his distracted colleague who hid his head inside … [a] jar, provided prototypes of Western behaviour that have endured over three centuries’. Puritan habits of thought ‘had turned such experimental pleasures into an illicit pursuit’: the result was that use had to be clandestine, and this increased its excitement. 18 Bowrey had stumbled on the principle that little can do more to advertise an illicit pursuit than an exotic name. Today, mixed with yoghurt, this explosively named substance makes the ‘special lassis’ beloved of thrill-seeking tourists. Bowrey was an early thrillseeker, but suffered no ill effects. He would go on to compile the first Malay-English dictionary, a useful volume from which one could even learn the Malay for ‘The Kingdom of this World is only a similitude of the Kingdom of the World to come, which is exceeding great, and there is no end to that Kingdom.’19 He is the first Englishman to mention the pelandok, a yellow muntjac which is a staple of Malay folklore. (Muntjac itself is from Sundanese, a language spoken in the west of Java.) He also provides explanations of Malay words with which we are now quite familiar: amok, bamboo, gong and sarong – the last of these magnificently defined as ‘a Sheath, a Scabbard, Case, Coope, Hive, Nest, Frame, as of a picture, Quiver for arrows, the Maw of any living creature, a Webb’.

  What Thomas Bowrey witnessed in Bengal were the hazards inherent within India’s bounty. Negotiating a path through the subcontinent’s complex and often dangerous hinterland required the use of local expertise. Of necessity, business was done through bilingual go-betweens. A sound knowledge of Portuguese was even more valuable for men of business than it was for those trying to spread the word of God. In the provinces of Gujarat and Bengal the native who lubricated contact was known as a banian (the word was first recorded by Hakluyt, and now means a merchant or entrepreneur). Elsewhere he was often a dubash – the Hindi name for a person competent in two different languages.20 When John Fryer, author of A New Account of East India and Persia (1698), fetched up in the fishing port of Masulipatnam on the Coromandel Coast, he was surprised to be offered the services of a local man who had this title. Fryer’s book is worth pausing over; it was the fruit of nine years’ travel, and includes such novelties as to snickersnee, a verb to convey the idea of fighting with a long knife, best known now for its appearance (as a noun) in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. Fryer, a Cambridge-educated doctor – soppy-stern if we credit the image that serves as his book’s frontispiece – is the first Englishman to mention a maharaja. He is also the first to use pukka, and at various points in his account he can report that a fishing town is ‘peculiarly notable for a Fish called the Bumbelo’, that anyone who fails to pay customs duties is threatened with ‘a Chawbuck, a great Whip’ (compare the Afrikaans, sjambok), that the Indian ships are built with a timber he identifies as teak, and that the natives use congee for starching clothes.21

  The dubash and the maharaja were at two ends of a spectrum of subtly graded status. Titles in India were minutely hierarchical, and roles rigidly defined. A grandee could be a nawab or a rajah or a pasha or many other things besides. A rajput was a member of the Hindu warrior caste; a talukdar was the holder of a hereditary estate. In Bengal, land could be held by zamindars or ryots. A jama was a revenue demand payable by zamindars; a patwari was a zamindar officer who kept a village’s accounts; a kist was an instalment of the payment made by tenants to the zamindars or by the zamindars to the government.22 David Gilmour’s study of life in the Victorian Raj, entitled The Ruling Caste, begins of necessity with a two-page glossary of Indian and Anglo-Indian terms, featuring a mixture of the fairly well known (purdah, ayah, the snack known as tiffin) and the distinctly bizarre – such as poodle-faker, a word for a master of seduction, and chota hazri, a term for a light early breakfast. Here too we find badmash, a rogue; kheddah, the capture of wild elephants; mali, a gardener; tonga, a two-wheeled vehicle usually drawn by ponies; and zenana, ‘the area in a household where the women are kept secluded’.23 There were no English equivalents for such terms. To understand the structure of Indian society (or really structures, for a religious hierarchy existed side by side with a secular one), the colonists had to get to grips with the local terminology. Europeans tended to feel that India was in a state of perpetual chaos, and the plurality of languages exacerbated this impression. At first, using the right titles was essential, and so were efforts to adopt the right idiom: trade could be conducted only after establishing a suitable climate of deference. Later, as British might grew, obsequious niceties could be abandoned. English alone could never fully convey the subtleties of Indian society, nor indeed of Indian thought and feeling. But philology and dictionaries helped shape British India – to produce an image of a unified territory, even though this unity was one that few native inhabitants would readily recognize.

  Go-betweens were key players both in enlarging what the British knew of Indian languages and in adopting English words into their own tongues. Learning an ‘intruder’ language will always open up career opportunities. As an Indian, if you wanted to get anywhere under the British, you needed to have a grasp of English. Acquiring it was considered a means of self-improvement; even if the language didn’t ennoble the soul, it certainly meliorated business, made it possible to climb the ladder of administration, and allowed access to the scientific advances achieved within the English-speaking world. In education, the better the institution and the more advanced the course it offered, the more central English was in its curriculum. All the while, the assimilation of Indian vocabulary into English was part of the imperial programme of ownership: to claim and modify Indian words was to anglicize not just the words themselves, but the things for which they stood. Lascar, a term for an East Indian sailor and later for a man employed to pitch tents, was a crass misunderstanding of an Urdu word for an encampment, and another word borrowed from Urdu, sepoy, was used not in its original sense of ‘horseman’, but to denote a private soldier in the infantry.

  A further example in this vein is pariah, which survives as a fairly well-known word for a person to be shunned or avoided. Its particular origin is intriguing. At Indian festivals drums are played – but only those who stand to lose nothing from touching the drums’ taut leather skins feel able to do so. Traditionally, the expert drummers are Dravidians and are known by the Tamil name Paraiyar. These drummers, hailing mainly from Kerala and Tamil Nadu, often used to work for Europeans as servants, and they were thus frequently involved in practices formally regarded as unclean. For this reason they were deemed by most Hindus to be of low caste, or even to be outcasts. But Paraiyar was simply the name of a group united by their occupation, not a catch-all term of abuse or infamy. The English colonists did not pick up on this: they understood only that the servant-drummers were called Paraiyar and were held in low regard by Hindus, and pariah became an English word for an outcast and then, by extension, a term of contempt.

  Words such as pariah, lascar and sepoy became staples of English colonial usage – casually callous misprisions of Indian culture, typical of the ‘magisterial’ approach. The native peoples were organized by the British, who apparently believed that India would disintegrate if left to its own devices. British society was narrow and exclusive. On the one hand Samuel Foote’s play The Nabob (1773), which significantly increased the currency of that word, mocked the upstarts who had made their fortunes in India. On the other, Thomas Williamson’s The East India Vade-Mecum (1810), the fruit of two decades in Bengal, set the agenda for those seeking such fortunes. Williamson was concerned to ‘facilitate the progress of … young gentlemen’, and explained, for instance, that the bearers of a palanquin, known as cahars, should ‘carry the chowry, (or whisk,) and swing a kind of punka
h, (or fan,) made either from a large palm leaf, or with split bamboo, and printed cotton’, adding that the best protection from the sun would be afforded by ‘a chattah, (or umbrella)’.24 The 1,000 pages of Williamson’s two volumes are littered with words his readers are expected to pick up – words such as sircar, choolah, babachy, maylah, ghaut. His readers must often have been baffled by the information he set before them: ‘Carpenters … tremble for their tools, whenever the cowah is to become subject to their labors; ‘About thirty-two years ago, the common raw sugar, known by the name of g’hoor, was to be had at three rupees per maund of 96lb.’; ‘The bickty, (or cockup,) … grows to an enormous size.’25

  Williamson’s Vade-Mecum marks the beginning of the great period of borrowing from Indian languages. When Queen Victoria came to the throne, in 1837, British India consisted of slightly less than half the Indian subcontinent; within twenty years its portion had increased to two-thirds. The acquisition of Sindh was completed in 1843; the Punjab was annexed in 1849. In the year of Victoria’s accession the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff could hail a ‘new era’ in the English language’s role in India – its use in education to allow the country’s youth access to ‘the pure fount of European literature and science’ and to ‘all the really useful knowledge which the world contains’, as well as its help in the ‘demolition of the superstitions and idolatries of India’.26 In Duff ’s imagination, English was a lever capable of moving India into the modern age. This did not happen as Duff envisaged, yet when Lord Curzon arrived in India as its new viceroy, in 1899, he felt able to proclaim the British achievement there ‘the miracle of the world’. But, as David Gilmour shows, at a time when vast numbers of Britons were emigrating to Australia, Canada and America, the British population of India was peculiarly small – a total of 154,961, in the year of Victoria’s death, of whom almost half were soldiers .27

  Language was the key. Although English was the language of administration, the administrative process necessarily involved a grasp of local terminology. Rather as Spanish had usurped the positions of the native languages in South America, English in the nineteenth century advanced parasitically, exploiting power structures that had been created by Persian.28 As Richard Bailey has pointed out, ‘without the aid of a glossary, the letters sent from one English officer to another from the beginning of the Raj until its end are now virtually unintelligible’. The administrative language of the East India Company was ‘crammed with loanwords for the various economic practices that were involved in the extraction of riches from the subcontinent’.29 George An Anglo-Indian Dictionary (1885) was the sort of resource Bailey has in mind. It glosses the familiar words (bungalow and the like), but also explains terms at once peculiar and useful: bela, an area of forest kept as a game reserve; jalakara, ‘one who searches in goldsmiths’ sweepings for gold’; khubber, meaning news or information; sala, ‘a wife’s brother’ and also a ‘very common form of abuse’.

  Writers like Whitworth were collectors of useful titbits. They had little use for a more scientific approach to language. Yet it was precisely by examining Indian words that Sir William Jones initiated a more technical appreciation of language as a whole. In 1783 Jones was appointed to the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal. Already a distinguished orientalist, having learnt Arabic while a schoolboy at Harrow, he would make vital connections between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and the majority of modern European languages, in addition to unlocking some of the mysteries of the Hindu and Islamic civilizations. His insight that related languages spring from a common source laid the foundation for the study of the Indo-European family and its ancestry. It is no exaggeration to say that Jones was the central figure in stimulating European intellectual interest in India, correcting the long-standing view of Indian culture and ritual as absurd and deviant, and disentangling the truth from the sort of lurid fictions that could be traced back as far as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

  Jones’s writings, on judicial subjects as well as on language, deploy borrowed terms out of respect for the complexity of Indian civilization. He catalogued Indian plants, collected inscriptions, wrote essays on the scaly, sticky-tongued pangolin and the slow loris, explained Indian knowledge of music and the zodiac, recorded details of local medicines, and above all immersed himself in Sanskrit, a language he considered far more refined than either Latin or Greek. He was the first to write of an avatar, the sweet song of the bulbul, the Indian lute called a veena, and dharma (a fusion of custom, truth and law, popularized in the title of Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums). Although he remained loyal to the Church of England, India was his Arcadia, and from his retreat at Krishnagar he quietly revolutionized the understanding of languages, raising the possibility of a proto-Indo-European language that could have sired such different tongues as English, Russian and Persian. The scientific study of Eastern languages opened up a range of related subjects, and the comparative grammar pioneered by Jones established the tenor of nineteenth-century language studies and opened a new channel into the very archaeology of human experience.

  Jones’s grasp of the qualities of the region’s culture was scholarly and inquisitive. The East, he understood, could enlighten the West. But nineteenth-century Britons’ image of India was more emphatically shaped by a very different figure. This was James Mill, who began his The History of British India in 1806, and completed it twelve years later without having visited the country about which he was writing. Mill savaged Jones’s positive portrait of Indian civilization, sniping at what he saw as its dangerous inadequacies. He claimed that his own ignorance of the native languages worked to his advantage, allowing him to view India objectively. His was a ‘philosophical’ brand of history.

  William Jones the empirical philologist and James Mill the cold utilitarian: it is telling that Mill was the more popular of the two, for, despite Jones’s important intellectual legacy, the India known to outsiders has been Mill’s. The subtleties of India have held less interest for the rest of the world than a broad impression of those subtleties. The archetypal vision in this respect is that of Lord Macaulay, who wrote in his ‘Minute on Indian Education’ (1835), ‘I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value.’ It probably goes without saying that Macaulay’s ‘correct estimate’ was not a high one.

  This stupendous chauvinism is typical of imperial rapaciousness: the art of taking what you want and pronouncing everything else worthless. And there is more: India was energetically used as a springboard for accessing other cultures. The loss of Britain’s colonies in America – of which more very shortly – diverted attention eastward. India was a base for pushing further east, and the Pacific was to become by 1800 ‘a British lake’.30 The acquisition of Penang in 1786 was crucial, but Penang’s importance was eclipsed in 1819 with Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles’s foundation of Singapore. Burma opened up in the 1820s, and was occupied in stages. Between 1815 and 1880 the majority of British interests abroad were menaced by no foreigner save the indigenous peoples, and this absence of external pressure allowed Britain’s empire to grow at a rate of about 100,000 square miles a year during the half-century after the defeat of Napoleon. Some of the acquisitions were strategic, others commercial, and still others the result of white settlers’ arrogant self-assertion.31

  The greatest opportunities lay in China. The Portuguese had begun to trade with the Chinese around 1540, and had established themselves in Macau by 1560. It seems that the first English travellers to visit Macau did so in the final years of the sixteenth century, but the first useful records of contact between British and Chinese traders date from 1637. The diaries of Peter Mundy, the son of a Cornish pilchard merchant, record his experiences as a trader in the East, describing the Chinese in some detail and documenting the abundance of commodities like porcelain, pepper, ginger and silks. Mundy’s writings contain novel words such as chopsticks and kimono, and he offers what would appear to b
e the first diagnosis of the difficulties faced by Chinese-speakers in their attempts to pronounce English – evident in their calling him Pe-tang Mun-ty.32

  For a long time after Peter Mundy, China remained a land of mystery, disengaged from the rest of the world. Abstaining from seaborne imperialism, it consolidated its power westward, over land. For Sir Thomas Browne, a man never averse to verbal embroidery, the Chinese were quite simply the people ‘who live at the bounds of the earth’. The Chinese, meanwhile, ‘dealt with foreigners as uncouth barbarians’; before the nineteenth century the only foreign influence to make a broad impact on China was Buddhism, which had begun in northern India. Their language and culture developed in a vacuum.33 Some of the rewards of their civilization filtered westward, but always through intermediaries, and slowly: for instance, in China gunpowder was developed during the ninth century AD, and formulae for its composition were published at least as early as 1044, but there was no European science of its manufacture until the thirteenth century. The Chinese people’s ideogrammic written language and subtly tonal speech prevented outsiders from readily getting to grips with their accomplishments. Chinese innovations such as paper, the compass and mechanical clockwork were impressive to those few who saw them, yet, while their practical value was quickly apparent, the precise means of their use and manufacture could not easily be conveyed. The writings of the trailblazing Mundy point up the kind of words that English-speakers have been best able to extract from Chinese. Attitudes to China have tended to be either scathing or apprehensive: the prospect of China’s political and economic rise, which is bruited every generation or so, causes fear. The one area of comparative safety is food.

  The utensils we call chopsticks are known to the Chinese as kwaitsze , which literally means ‘nimble boys’. Chopsticks is a crude equivalent, partly inspired by the pidgin word chop, ‘quick’. (The pidgin English exclamation chop chop replicates the Chinese kwai kwai.) William Dampier explains, ‘At their ordinary eating they use two small round sticks about the length and bigness of a Tobacco-pipe. They hold them both in the right hand, one between the fore-finger and thumb; the other between the middle-finger and fore-finger,’ and adds that ‘they are called by the English seamen Chopsticks.’ It is easy enough to think of a dozen or so other Chinese words connected with food and eating that have been absorbed into commonplace English. Dampier refers enthusiastically to the kumquat, which is the Cantonese dialect term for the little golden orange more widely known in China as kin ku. The lychee, native to southern China, is first mentioned by Hakluyt’s friend Robert Parke in his translation of Gonzalez de Mendoza’s history of that land, and turns up in Dampier. (The mandarin, which we might expect to have something to do with Chinese, gets its name from Swedish.) Dim sum comes from Cantonese, while the Amoy dialect of what is today southern Fujian is the source of ketchup – originally a brine in which fish were kept, and described in a dictionary of cant in 1690 as a ‘high East-India Sauce’. Then of course there are the widely known chow mein, chop suey and tofu. Ginseng derives from jen shen, which has usually been interpreted as ‘man root’ – a reference to the forked fleshy root of the plant, which resembles a pair of legs; John Ray mentions it in his The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), where he gives it the name nisi. The toast chin chin (1795) is a version of the Mandarin salutation ts’ing ts’ing. And the Cantonese wok started to appear in English-language books about Chinese cookery in the 1950s and ‘60s.