DURING the British Raj in the subcontinent, English began to borrow words from local languages. Most of this neologism was not approved by the conventional standards as these were local notions or expressions for which there were no cultural or linguistic equivalents in the English language and they were used out of necessity. Native speakers of English in India used many of the local words with a peculiar British pronunciation and spelt them in their own way, for example, ‘nautch’ (‘naach’ or dance), ‘sepoy’ (‘sipahi’ or soldier), dacoity (‘daketi’ or robbery), ‘copra’ (‘khopra’ or minced coconut kernel), and many more.
Ultimately, such vocabulary grew so vast that some glossaries and dictionaries of ‘Anglo-Indian’ words and expressions were compiled. Here are some notable such dictionaries:
• ‘An Anglo-Indian
Dictionary’ (1885)
Compiled by George Clifford Whitworth and first published from London in 1885, the title says that it is “A glossary of Indian terms used in English, and of such English or other non-Indian terms as have obtained special meanings in India”. While apologising for the use of the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ in his preface, Whitworth has defined it: “The term ‘Anglo-Indian’ would properly designate something which, originally Indian, has been specially modified by something English”.
The dictionary enlists words that, says Whitworth, “English people” found “necessary or convenient”. He adds that many local coinages “have different meanings in India and England”, such as “egg plant, fire-temple, prayer wheel, slave-king, sacred thread”, etc.
Whitworth avoids many terms used by Horace Hayman Wilson in his ‘A Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms’ (1855), as they have proper equivalents in English. But the words he has included have peculiarly local connotations and are from Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, Hindustani or Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Sinhalese and some other languages.
An interesting entry in the dictionary is that of ‘brinjal’. The dictionary says ‘brinjal’ is “the name of a vegetable, called also the egg-plant”. But it does not give the origin or etymology of the word. According to John T. Platts, a ‘baingan’ is ‘brinjal’. A ‘brinjal’ is ‘aubergine’ in English. Oxford Dictionary says ‘brinjal’ is of Indian and/or South African origin. But this needs some correction.
‘Brinjal’ found its way into British English in India indeed, but in Arabic, an aubergine is called ‘al-baadinjaan’ and in Persian ‘baadinjaan’. It is probably the same ‘al-baadinjaan’ that became ‘aubergine’ in English. When ‘al-baadinjaan’ reached Spain along with its Arab conquerors, it was called ‘berenjena’ there. As Portuguese is closely related to Spanish, it was called ‘berinjela’ in Portuguese. We can safely assume that when the Portuguese ‘berinjela’ reached western India, as Portuguese had captured it in the early 16th century (along with now much famous Goa), ‘berinjela’ was absorbed into subcontinental vernaculars and from here was picked up as an ‘Anglo-Indian’ word as ‘brinjal’.
• Hobson-Jobson (1886)
Just a year after Whitworth’s dictionary, a much larger and research-based dictionary of Anglo-Indian words was published. Compiled by Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell, it also has citations from literary works.
The title ‘Hobson-Jobson’ is derived from ‘Ya Hasan, Ya Hussain’, chanted by the mourners at Muharram congregations. The compilers believed it was a perfect title for a work intended to highlight the characteristics of a local brand of English, as it reflects the phonological change that loanwords accept when used in other languages.
One of the interesting entries in ‘Hobson-Jobson’ is that of ‘turban’, which is called ‘pagree’ in Urdu. It says about the word ‘turban’ that “some have supposed this well-known English word to be a corruption of Persian/Hindi ‘sirbund’, ‘head-wrap’...,”. The compilers say this is incorrect and the word ‘turban’ is in fact a corruption of the Turkish word ‘dulband’ and add that it as “a cloth of fine white muslin; a wrapper for the head”. But Jabir Ali Syed wrote that it is probably from Turkish ‘tarband’, as in Turkish ‘tar’ means ‘many’, and ‘band’ in Persian, meaning ‘fastened’. So it is a piece of cloth wrapped around head many times over. It may be noted that ‘turban’ has more phonetic similarity with ‘tarband’ than ‘dulband’.
• Sahibs, Nabobs and
Boxwallahs (1991)
Subtitled ‘A Dictionary of the Words of Anglo-India’ (Oxford, 1991), the book provides the readers with Anglo-Indian word origins and usages as well as meanings and their sources. It is a well-researched work by Ivor Lewis and takes into account all previous similar works. With a detailed preface and a long list of works cited, it is truly a scholarly work.
• Hanklyn-Janklyn (1992)
To pay tribute to ‘Hobson-Jobson’, author Nigel Hankin named his work ‘Hanklyn-Janklyn’, a guide to what the author calls “words, customs and quiddities Indian and Indo-British”.
Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2021
