Anglo-Indianisms

Unique words and phrases used by Anglo-Indians, via Dialect Blog

Goat dressed as mutton dressed as lamb

Some day I'll write an essay about misnaming in Indian English: the many tangled reasons which lead people in this country to use the word swan for a goose, autumn for the rainy season, and so on.  Meanwhile, here's food critic Vir Sanghvi on why mutton stands for goat meat in Indian restaurant menus.

Just as every MP begins his or her career with a lie – by saying that total electoral expenditure was under the limit – so every chef and restaurant manager who writes a menu usually starts out with a lie of his or her own. The lie consists of a description of the red meat that is used in the kitchen. Often, the menu will simply say ‘mutton’. This is a term widely used in the culinary world to describe meat from a sheep. The term ‘lamb’ is restricted to young sheep. If the meat comes from an older animal then ‘mutton’ is used. It is the sort of distinction embodied by the phrase ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, commonly employed to describe older women who try and dress young. 

The problem, of course, is that the kitchen does not use mutton, no matter what it says on the menu. The chances are that the chef is using goat, a meat for which the term mutton is never used outside of India. Some chefs and menu writers go further with their evasions. In the descriptive line below such menu staples as seekh kebab and raan, they will use lamb instead of goat. So, a seekh kebab will be described as ‘minced lamb cooked on a skewer in the tandoor’ and a raan as ‘leg of lamb’.

The HT Brunch article can be found here. 

Vote Banks

With assembly elections coming up, the newspapers are full of the jargon of India's electoral politics. 'Vote Bank' is one such phrase, which refers to a bloc of voters from a social group - a caste or community or religious minority, say - which can be counted on to back a specific party or candidate consistently. But who coined the term, and how did it come into use? This column by Ramachandra Guha in The Hindu traces the phrase back to a seminal 1955 essay by the sociologist M N Srinivas titled 'The Social System of a Mysore Village', quoting the paragraph where it first appeared.

The word “party” has become a Kannada word. Every administrator and politician speaks of “party politics” in villages, and even villagers are often heard saying, “There is too much ‘party’ in such and such a village”. The coming of elections gives fresh opportunities for the crystallization of parties around patrons. Each patron may be said to have a “vote bank” which he can place at the disposal of a provincial or national party for a consideration which is not mentioned but implied. The secret ballot helps to preserve the marginal affiliation of the marginal clients.

As Guha points out, the meaning of the phrase has shifted since then, referring not to patrons and their clients, but 'a collective political preference exercised by a particular interest group'. See also the entry in Wikipedia, which adds that the meaning of Srinivas' expression was first modified by F. G. Bailey, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, in his 1959 book Politics and Social Change.

Hawala codes

The Indian Express on the codes used by Kashmiri separatist leaders and militants in illegal cross-border financial transactions ('NIA decodes: Chini is hawala money, Re 1 is Rs 1 lakh', The Indian Express, 8 August 2011):

‘Dukaan khol kar rakho’ (open the shop) meant ‘switch on the mobile phone’; ‘dawai le li hai’ (bought the medicine) meant ‘money has been taken’. These were among some of the codes — now part of the NIA chargesheet — that terrorists from Pakistan used for communicating with four separatist leaders who are now in jail in an alleged hawala racket.

Hawala refers to a traditional Indian system of remitting money, now deemed illegal. A description can be found here. 

Musical shorthand

Singer Shubha Mudgal records the jargon of Mumbai's sessions musicians in a pre-digital era (Musical Shorthand, Mint Lounge, July 9, 2011):

...what would you do if you were asked to play a rhythm pattern called “78”? You or I could just sit there looking completely befuddled, but a sessions musician would know instantly that he had to play a specific rhythm pattern that became exceedingly popular in 1978! And if 78 isn’t funny enough, how about making sense of “gumboot”! Yes, that’s right. Rhythm players use the term to indicate the specific sound produced on the dholak.

Voices from the past

Sohini Chattopadhyay reports in OPEN Magazine (26 February, 2011) that the records of India’s first and only Linguistic Survey, conducted by the British Raj over 1914-29, are now available on the internet, thanks to Shahid Amin, professor of history at Delhi University.

The professor is an impatient man, with a penchant for audacious projects. “This is incredible material, I didn’t want it to lie in some stuffy library in the West where only research scholars could access it. The people who really know these languages might be living in a village,” says Amin. So he proposed that the gramophone records be digitised, all 242 of them, and put up on the net where everyone could access it.

Six years later, with the help of a US federal grant, the University of Chicago and his own resourcefulness, Amin’s big idea has materialised: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/lsi/ has all 242 gramophone recordings, categorised by the language group it belongs to, the year and place of recording. And it’s free, open to all.

The original intent behind the recordings was to help train new entrants to the Indian Civil Service, but under George A. Grierson of the LSI, the project was expanded in scope to become a more ambitious survey. As a result, the audio clips now available online include such treasures as the only extant recordings of the lost art of Dastangoi, as practiced by the legendary story-teller Mir Baqar Ali. Here's the Delhi dastango, narrating a story in Urdu.

Ass Backwards

Save the Words is a website from the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary, dedicated to saving underused words from extinction: words such as graviloquence and pigritude and squiriferous, that you are encouraged to adopt and re-introduce to the English language. As the examples I've cited illustrate,  there's a preponderance of leaden, faux-literate words here - these are the lumbering tuataras of the linguistic world, and I, for one, would rather see them waddle into oblivion. I think someone should instead make an effort to rescue certain racy Indian terms that have fallen into disuse. I'd like to make a start on the project by nominating a colourful expression I found recently in Joseph Thompson's A dictionary of Oordoo and English. Here's the entry from the dictionary, courtesy Google Books:

Gand ghalat (literally, 'ass-wrong') is the word here, defined as 'dead stupid' (the comma in the excerpt above has to be an error). Several other dictionaries from the nineteenth century present gand ghalat as a synonym for being out of one's wits, fuddled, or dead-drunk. The latter meaning can be found in John Gilchrist's Hindee moral preceptor, published in 1821, and Duncan Forbes' A dictionary, Hindustani and English.

Given its ubiquity in colonial-era dictionaries, gand ghalat must have been a very useful expression for the British in India. When I first encountered the term, I imagined red-faced Tommies and irate mofussil officials (or should that be mofussials?) muttering it under their breath as they contended with the baffling, plain-ass ghalat realities of an alien land.  But maybe I was dead wrong in picturing mad dogs and Englishmen sweltering in the mid-day sun, and the expression is meant to be used in more pleasant circumstances. Maybe it describes how you end up when the booze addles your brains to the point where you can't stand straight, and you topple over to land on your sorry ass. There you are in the gutter, gand ghalat.

A packet of Aishwarya

The Hindustan Times provides useful tips for the party season:

"A packet of Aishwarya.” That’s what a gram of cocaine is being called by those looking for a stash for their New Year parties. The code words don’t end there. Suppliers are calling hashish ‘Katrina’, while ketamine hydrochloride has been codenamed ‘Rakhi’. Buyers and sellers of narcotics, known to troll the city’s party spots every New Year’s Eve, are using these code words to stay under the police radar.

..It’s not just popular actors’ names that are being used. A drug party is being called a baithak (meeting), while a rave party is being called “420”. Cocaine is also being called ‘coco cola’, ‘cola’ and ‘white’; hashish has been nicknamed goli (tablet) or ‘black’.If, at a pub, someone asks for a ‘tissue’ he or she is likely to be seeking LSD, a hallucinogen. Heroin is being sold as ‘brown’.

Even party spots have been given code names. The invitation to a rave party at Madh Island would simply ask you to come to ‘midland’, while it would be ‘garden’ for Gorai. Ghodbunder Road in Thane has been named ‘Kalaghoda’ and Yeoor ‘jungle’. ‘Sea face’, meanwhile, is the code word for Goa.

(Narco cops on ‘Rakhi’, ‘Aishwarya’ trail, Hindustan Times, 31 Dec 2010)

Dhinchak

Anubha Sawhney Joshi defines the quintessential bling word in this ode to upward mobility in Delhi:

Your friends from South Delhi (GK-sheekay, Jorbagh-shorbagh) might use it as a jibe to describe your taste in clothes (fake brands, blingy handbags, nail jewellery), food (naan chholey, butter chicken, kulfi) or music (Punjabiyaan da tashan is probably your ringtone), but you brush it all aside with a casual: Ainvayi bolte rehte hain,saanu ki? You don't really give a damn because you're dhinchak and proudly so!

..Dhinchak is an attitude. It's what makes the kudi from Janakpuri who aspires to be in South Delhi actually get to Sainik Farms. Dhinchak is in the tinkle of the glass bangles and the sparkle of the bindi that she effortlessly teams with bootcut jeans to get noticed. Dhinchak is that quintessential free-spiritedness that makes a Janakpuri ki ladki smile and bullshit her way out of a sticky situation (Sorry, Auntyji, I can't marry your son because he's never going to get me out of this locality! But my cousin Rinkie from Rohtak will suit him perfectly). Dhinchak is her overconfidence as she misspells and mispronounces words, but doesnt stop using them. (I love romantic joner movies like DDLJ). Dhinchak is never a size zero because she wont ever give up on that spot of butter on her aloo ka parantha or fail to gobble the last garma-garam gulab jamun. Dhinchak will always be slightly conscious of her surroundings and her short skirt when she goes to celebrate her anniversary (not birthday) at The Oberoi (in South Delhi,of course), a once-in-a-year affair that will be duly documented on Facebook, except that she will call it Oberois.

(Confessions of a Dhinchak Ladki, Times of India, 20 Dec 2010)

Death of a Creole

Linguist Hugo Cardoso on the last speaker of a unique language formed through contact between Malayalam and Portuguese (OPEN Magazine, October 2010).

William Rozario passed away on 20 August 2010, at the age of 87. And with him died the Indo-Portuguese Creole of Cochin.

Undercover in India

'A commendable hot-chase, 007! But it was wasted as we lost the film!'

James Bond, licensed to mutilate the English language. Weird Crime Theater's post “Let me taste fish” and the Magic of Amar Chitra Katha has more.

From Where to Where

Anuvab Pal compiles a few current Indian English expressions (Mid-Day, August 1, 2010):

Rajeev this side: Usually said on the phone. It literally means the person saying it is on that side, physically. It has nothing to do with taking a side (for that, see stance (n)). Sometimes, it is said in person, across a table, implying the same thing. It can get awkward because you're not sure if you have to acknowledge your side too.

From where to where he's gone: Meaning success. It never implies anyone physically going anywhere. It's our way of talking about becoming something in life. Also, sometimes substituted with 'He's become a big man' which is also never a reference to size.

It's coming up like anything: Meaning development. Usually in reference to neighbourhoods westernising. Can also be used with individuals in show business and used as a substitute for 'appear' (Eg: You came in that ad, He came in that movie etc.)

Continental Food: Nobody on this or any other continent, knows what this means. It's any dish that has no defined national roots and if the chef does not feel like finding out (see also sizzler, (n) which doesn't mean anything)."

A dowry of parney

Just figured out that Google Books allows you to clip and embed passages from out-of-print books. Here's a curious piece of Anglo-Indian slang I found in A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words (1860) by John Camden Hotten:



Click on the image if it doesn't show up complete in your browser, that'll take you to the page on Google Books.

Mosambi/mozambique

Via मराठी शब्द, this plausible explanation for the origin of the word mosambi, from Firminger's Manual Of Gardening For India:

..a tight-skinned Orange of the Malta type, called the Mosambi (a corruption of Mozambique). This is generally called the Sweet Lime by Europeans.

On Indian English

Via Mint: Sailaja Pingali, author of Indian English (Dialects of English) on the characteristics of Indian English. (Download the podcast here).

Bookie jargon

Some notes on betting jargon, just in time for the IPL season. These are compiled from stray mentions in newspaper articles - if you can add to this list, or suggest a comprehensive guide, let me know.

Sauda: A bet

Sauda fok: Stop payment. When underworld dons suspect that a match has been fixed without their knowledge, they order a 'sauda fok', cancelling all payments.

Fancy sauda: I found this term on Cricinfo which provides the following explanation.

Some bookies and very big punters bet huge amounts between themselves on what is called 'fancy sauda'. This can be on anything, from estimating innings scores, top scorers or wicket-takers and staking from Rs 100-10,000 per run against the difference in team totals. It can take in small details, such as who will bowl the next over from which end and how many runs will be scored in an over, or off the next delivery. Putting a realistic figure on these transactions is difficult and though there are very few punters involved in this, the stakes can often be very high.

Dabba sauda: appears to be something similar, going by this quote from LiveMint:

The bookies have already started accepting interesting bets, called dabba sauda. These include bets on the political fortunes of BJP rebels and the survival of former chief minister Keshubhai Patel, who has made his dislike for Modi’s style of running things in Gujarat clear.

English is now India's second language

The Times of India summarizes recently released census data on bilingualism in India.

More Indians speak English than any other language, with the sole exception of Hindi. What's more, English speakers in India outnumber those in all of western Europe, not counting the United Kingdom. And Indian English-speakers are more than twice the UK's population.

English was the primary language for barely 2.3 lakh Indians at the time of the census, more than 86 million listed it as their second language and another 39 million as their third language. This puts the number of English speakers in India at the time to more than 125 million. The only language that had more speakers was Hindi with 551.4 million.