Unraveling the Linguistic Tapestry of British India: A Tribute to 'Hobson-Jobson'
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The British Empire, many pundits now agree, descended like a juggernaut upon the barbicans of the East, in search of loot. The moguls of the raj went in palanquins, smoking cheroots, to sip toddy or sherbet on the verandahs of the gymkhana club, while the memsahibs fretted about the thugs in bandannas and dungarees who roamed the night like pariahs, plotting ghoulish deeds. All the italicized words in the above can be found, with their Eastern family trees, in ‘Hobson-Jobson’, the legendary dictionary of British India, on whose reissue Routledge are to be congratulated. These thousand-odd pages bear eloquent testimony to the unparalleled intermingling that took place between English and the languages of India, and while some of the Indian loan-words will be familiar others should surprise many modern readers.
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Did you know, for example, that the word tank has Gujarati and Marathi origins? Or that cash was originally the Sanskrit Karsha, ‘a weight of silver or gold equal to 1/400th of a Tula’? Every column of this book contains revelations like these, written up in a pleasingly idiosyncratic, not to say cranky style. The authors, Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, are not averse to ticking off an untrustworthy source, witness their entry under muddle, meaning a double, or secretary, or interpreter: ‘This word is only known to us from the clever little book quoted below … probably a misapprehension of budlee.’
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The chief interest of Hobson-Jobson though, lies not so much in its etymologies for words still in use, but in the richnesses of what one must call the Anglo-Indian language whose memorial it is, that language which was in regular use just forty years ago and which is now as dead as a dodo. In Anglo-Indian, a jam was a Gujarati chief, a sneaker was ‘a large cup with a saucer and cover’, a guinea-pig was a midshipman on an India-bound boat, an owl was a disease, Macheen was not a spelling mistake but a name, abbreviated from ‘Maha-Cheen’, for ‘great China’.
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It’s just about a century since this volume’s first publication, and in 1886 it was actually possible for Yule and Burnell to make puns which conflated Hindi with, of all things, Latin. The Anglo-Indian word poggle, a madman, comes from the Hindi pagal, and so we’re offered the following ‘macaronic adage which we fear the non-Indian will fail to appreciate: pagal et pecunia jaldé separantur.’ (A fool and his money are soon parted.).
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Strange then, to find certain well-known words missing. No kaffir, no gully, not even a wog, although there is a wug, a Baloch or Sindhi word meaning either loot or a herd of camels. I thought, too, that a modern appendix might usefully be commissioned, to include the many English words which have taken on, in independent India, new ‘Hinglish’ meanings. In India today, the prisoner in the dock is the undertrial; a boss is often an incharge; and, in a sinister euphemism, those who perish at the hands of law enforcement officers are held to have died in a ‘police encounter’.
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To spend a few days with ‘Hobson-Jobson is, almost, to regret the passing of the intimate connection that made this linguistic kedgeree possible. But then one remembers what sort of connection it was, and is moved to remark – as Rhett Butler once said to Scarlett O ‘Hara – ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a small copper coin weighing one tolah, eight mashas and seven surkhs, being the fortieth part of a rupee.’ Or, to put it more concisely, a dam.
