The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay, writer, historian and member of the Supreme Court in Calcutta, wrote his Minute, which became notorious. It laid out why English needed to be taught. It became a landmark document. Edited paragraphs include:

  I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the value of the Orientals themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia . . . We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West.

  To Macaulay, the pre-eminence of English made Britain’s world imperial role possible. They conscripted Indian clerks or writers, as they were called, to serve the empire’s purposes. An English-speaking class of junior officials was needed and in Calcutta a colossal Writers’ Building was constructed to house them. English was often eagerly sought by Indians and yet it was also forced on them; it added to the repertoire of Indian languages which then and now multiply seemingly effortlessly on the tongues of educated Indians; and yet it had a special place, it was the language of prestige and preferment and as only a minority of Indians received a formal education in English, it was inevitably elitist and divisive. But without this English-speaking Indian bureaucracy there could have been no Raj, a paradox not lost on Indian intellectuals.

  English itself began to frolic on the new continent. What was called “Butler English” soon sprang up, very similar to the frontier English in America, as in “long time no see.” It also had similarities with the pidgins in America and the Caribbean. One example is: “Tea, I making water. Is boiled water. Want anybody want mixed tea, boil the water, then I put tea leaves, then I pour the milk and put sugar.”

  There was also a variety called Babu English. Babu was originally a Bengali word for gentleman, but it came to be used of an excessively ornate variety of English which was a product both of social deference (deeply traditional in India and adopted by the English for the first hundred fifty years) and an education system in which English was often taught by Indians to Indians. So turns of phrase which bore relevance only to a textbook were not weeded out. As in this letter:

  Sir,

  Being in much need and suffering many privations, I have after long time come to the determination to trouble your bounteous goodness. To my sorrow I have not the good friendships with many people hence my slow rate of progress and destitute state. Here on earth who have I but thee, and there is Our Father in heaven, needless to say that unless your milk of human kindness is showered on my sad state no other hope is left in this world.

  “The inferior sort of John Bull” would often mock this and it would be po-faced not to find that irresistible. But in 1903, the viceroy Lord Curzon got as near as it was then possible to comprehend its context and yet have his fun:

  It must not be supposed [he wrote] if I, or anyone else, quote amusing specimens of what is commonly known as Babu English that we do it with any idea of deriding the native intelligence or of poking fun at its errors. On the contrary, one of the most remarkable experiences in India is the astonishing command of the English language, to them a foreign tongue, that is acquired by the better educated Indians, enabling them not merely to write but to speak it with an accuracy and a fluency at which I never cease to wonder . . .

  Of Babu English he also wrote that “it often reveals a sense of humour on the part of the writers that is both quaint and refreshing.” If his admiration is rather surprising in such an English nabob for its fulsomeness, his patronising references are also surprising in their gentility.

  Babu could be extreme, comparing favourably with any weird or demotic use of English in the English-speaking world. This is part of a speech by a Hindu pleader in a court at Barise:

  My learned friend with mere wind from a teapot thinks to browbeat me from my legs. But this is mere gorilla warfare. I stand under the shoes of my client, and only seek to place my bone of contention clearly in your Honour’s eye. My learned friend vainly runs amuck upon the sheet anchors of my cause. Your Honour will be pleased enough to observe that my client is a widow, a poor chap with one post mortem son . . .

  Slang and word-play became endemic among British officials to such an extent that one newly arrived governor-general complained he couldn’t understand the reports written by his staff. The attractions between English and particularly Hindi grew stronger.

  The British army relished picking up Indian words. They prided themselves on being able to “bolo the bat a tora” — meaning to speak the local language a little; if they were “banged up” — high on bhang — they might be summoned by the “amen-wallah” — the chaplain — or face “tori peachy” — delayed repatriation. But a lot of the local lingo did not travel well back to Blighty. Pukka shots in India were blanks in Britain. No one else knew that “chota hazry” was breakfast, a scoundrel was “badmash,” “durzee” was a tailor or a “burra-peg” was a double whisky, that “gubbrow,” “lugow,” “foozilow,” “dumbcow,” “puckerrow” and “bunow” meant respectively to bully, to moor a boat, to flatter, to browbeat, to lay hold and to fabricate. Yet they wallowed in it to such an extent that in 1886 a great glossary of Anglo-Indian words was published, almost nine hundred pages, called Hobson-Jobson.

  Hobson-Jobson is an army term, a corruption of a phrase shouted by Muslims in a procession. The words were “Ya Hassan, Ya Hassayn.” This became “Hosseen Gosseen,” “Hossy Gossy,” “Hossen Jossen,” “Jackson Backson” and finally “Hobson Jobson.” It is now a term in linguistics used for that kind of corruption of words from one language by speakers from another. “Khakee” was one of the more famous words included. It is taken from the Hindi for “dust-coloured,” meaning a light drab cloth. The first Hobson-Jobson dictionary notes that “it is said it is about to be introduced into the army generally.”

  There are thousands of other examples: “chapatti” entered the English language as “chowpatty,” with perhaps a push from “cowpat”; the Indian plant “kawanch” became “cowage”; the fish “kakap” became “cock-up”; “basi khana,” stale food or yesterday’s dinner warmed up, became “brass knocker”; “bringal” — aubergine — became “brown jolly” and “cholera morbus” in Anglo-Indian became “Corporal Forbes.”

  Hobson-Jobsonisms take us back to the “new” words that English captured in India. An alphabetical sampling could read: “amok,” “ashram,” “avatar,” “bandanna,” “bangle,” “caddy,” “calico,” “candy,” “cashmere,” “cheetah,” “coolie,” “cowrie,” “cushy,” “dinghy,” “doolally,” “guru,” “Himalayan,” “juggernaut,” “ jungle,” “karma,” “khaki,” “lilac,” “mantra,” “mongoose,” “panda,” “pariah,” “purdah,” “rattan,” “sacred cow,” “seersucker,” “Sherpa,” “Tantra,” “thug,” “yoga.” Even such a limited and arbitrary selection shows English on its relentless hunt for new words to describe new things, new experiences, new ideas, new shades of meaning, forever swelling the Anglo-Saxon word-hoard, quarrying all the languages it encountered as it moved across oceans and continents. And it was here that the British were introduced to some of what became their favourite foods: curry, it was recently reported, is Britain’s most popular dish.

  Rudyard Kipling, whose greatness as an author has been shadowed by the strength of his passion for empire and for imperial British supremacy, is the writer above all others who brought the life and plight of the British soldier and the mystery and fabulous difference of India to a wide public. His work is well known. There were innumerable others whose passion for India and for the English in India is also difficult to celebrate naïvely given the darker side of the imperial project.

  But this book is to do with the language, and here is part of just one of the many tributes which could still, despite the imperial burden, be calle
d warm-hearted and affectionate. The lines are from E. F. Atkinson’s verses “Curry and Rice.”

  What varied opinions we constantly hear

  Of our rich oriental possessions,

  What a jumble of notions, distorted and queer,

  Form an Englishman’s “Indian Impressions.”

  First a sun, fierce and glaring, that scorches and bakes;

  Palankeens, perspiration and worry;

  Mosquitoes, thugs, coconuts, Brahmins and snakes;

  With elephants, tigers and curry.

  Then Juggernaut, punkahs, tanks, buffaloes, forts,

  With bangles, mosques, nautches and dinglees;

  A mixture of temples, Mahometans, ghats,

  With scorpions, Hindoos and Feringhees.

  Then jungles, fakirs, dancing-girls, prickly heat,

  Shawls, idols, durbars, brandy-pawny;

  Rupees, clever jugglers, dust-storms, slippered feet,

  Rainy season and mulligatawny.

  With Rajah — but stop, I must really desist,

  And let each one enjoy his opinions,

  Whilst I show in what style Anglo-Indians exist

  In Her Majesty’s Eastern Dominions.

  It would be romantic and ironic if it could be proved that English alone, or in some great measure, gave many intelligent Indians direct access to the ideas of democracy and independence which were to wrench back India from its latest rulers. But I suspect that a resolution for independence is not confined to one language or one culture.

  Yet there are those who do believe that it was the English language and the ideas it carried that created a revolution against the British. Just as English made it possible for Indians to administer the Raj on behalf of the British Empire, so English may have been a factor in enabling Indians to rise up against it.

  Macaulay’s Minute and the education policy had brought the English language to the Indian people, and through the language Rudyard Kipling among others saw a nationalist movement developing. English, he feared, gave it credibility. Kipling observed what he called “a strong belief among many natives that they were capable of administering the country themselves,” and he also observed that many Englishmen shared that belief because, as he wrote, “the theory is stated in beautiful English with all the latest political colours.”

  Kipling of course dismissed Indian independence as no more than a pretty idea. But it was more than that. It was persistent. It met in the houses of wealthy and titled liberals and found voices among the newly enfranchised.

  In 1903, Lord Curzon choreographed a spectacular durbar to celebrate the accession of Edward VII. India had never seemed more safely and some self-deludingly thought more happily in British hands. Five years later, a lawyer called Gandhi wrote a pamphlet which was to be the first significant pebble beginning an avalanche. It is fascinating for our story because he concentrates not on the law, not on the military or commercial control, but on the English language. English was the prime and essential target of his attack:

  To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them. The foundation that Macaulay laid of education has enslaved us. I do not suggest that he has any such intention, but that has been the result. Is it not a sad commentary that we should have to speak of Home Rule in a foreign tongue? . . .

  Is it not a painful thing that, if I want to go to a court of justice, I must employ the English language as a medium, that when I become a barrister, I may not speak my mother tongue and that someone else should have to translate to me from my own language? Is not this absolutely absurd? Is it not a sign of slavery?

  Gandhi takes this line of thought to what I think is an original and radical conclusion: “Am I to blame the English for it or myself? It is we the English-knowing Indians that have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will rest not upon the English but upon us.”

  And when Gandhi sets out the blueprint for his India of the future, English is banished utterly. Cast off the language, he seems to say, and you cast off the oppressor; his crucial hold over you is to make you speak and so think and so act like him.

  It was a view which gathered strength. As India approached independence in 1947, many nationalists regarded the English language as the central fact and symbol of oppression. They wanted to be rid of it and the end of the Raj was supposed to bring the slow death of English in India. The new constitution assumed that it would continue to be used as an official language only until 1965 and then it would be replaced entirely by Hindi.

  It did not happen.

  There are many reasons given for this. Non-Hindi speakers objected to the proposed primacy of Hindi. There were riots in the streets — to reject Hindi and to retain English. And, pragmatically, the English language had dug deeply into systems of advancement and status. English gave access to the world; best seen in literature where, since independence, Indian novelists writing in English have made a tremendous contribution and been celebrated not only in India and Britain but in America and throughout the old Commonwealth and been translated all over the world. Yet it is still not straightforward even today. The young novelist Amit Chaudhuri, born in Calcutta and brought up speaking Bengali, writes his fiction in English.

  I think that English has played a double role [he says]. Yes, it has been a language of unification. It has also been the language through which people in India became more self-conscious, and therefore conscious of their own differences — from each other, from the English, so it has played this dual role. The English themselves mustn’t take too much credit for it because they didn’t know this was happening. It’s entirely to the credit of Indians that they used this in this way. In modern Indian history English has been very much at the heart of things. It’s a lingua franca but it’s also more than that, it’s part of the growth of the indigenous languages, and the modern forms as well. So it has also increasingly been a part of that self-expression of difference — of different identities — which is also very vital to what India is.

  English absorbed much from India. But India absorbed the whole of English as another of its languages. Today it is spoken fluently by four or five percent of the population, all of whom speak at least one other language just as fluently and often flick from one to the other scarcely noticing the join. Four to five percent may seem a small proportion, but in a country of India’s size this means forty or fifty million people, what Lord Curzon, the viceroy, would have described as the better educated. Beyond that, it has been estimated that upwards of three hundred millions have some contact with it and some knowledge of it.

  The Times of India, in English, has treble the sales of The Times of London. Calcutta is garlanded with signs in English. India’s writers use it with authority on the world stage in many disciplines: scientific, artistic, political, sociological.

  The Raj quit India more than fifty years ago. English remains: and thrives.

  20

  The West Indies

  Indies” was a misnomer from the start. Columbus came on them on his search for a westward route to India, and after such a long open sea voyage, with some justification he thought he had arrived at his destination and christened the inhabitants “Indians.” This is the first indication of the way in which language has to be examined with more than usual care when it comes from this string of Caribbean islands. “Caribbean” comes from “Carib,” the local name of one of the tribes.

  Professor David Crystal has written that there are six varieties of “varying distinctiveness” for the area: “The situation is unique within the English speaking world, because of the way the history of the region has brought together two dimensions of variation: a regional dimension, from which it is possible to establish a speaker’s geographical origins, and an ethnic dimension in which the choice of language conveys social and nationalistic identity.”

  The Cambridge History of the English Language is no less forbidding:

  It is difficult to gain a clear overview of how English and Creole spread in the West In
dies — whether as standard or regional British, Caribbean or North American English, or as English-based pidgins and creoles. The general history of English in the region has been fragmented into dozens of histories of English in particular island territories . . . A further difficulty is that the story of the spread of English in the West Indies and surrounding area does not always coincide with the history of the spread of British political power in the region . . .

  In some former British colonies, such as St. Lucia or Domenica, English is spoken largely as a second language. Then there are the varieties of pidgin and creole.

  This is not altogether surprising. Though we gaily clump the islands together as “the West Indies,” we are talking about dozens of distinctive territories which can be separated by up to a thousand miles of ocean — in itself a certain recipe for variety as Darwin proved in the Galapagos Islands. We are also talking about Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch settlement as well as English: and most of all we are talking about the intensive enforced settlement of hundreds of thousands of Africans with scores of different African languages. And finally we are talking about the cross-fertilisation of that mix. What is surprising perhaps is that the prosody — the sound of the spoken language — is broadly homogeneous.

  English arrived there late. By the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal had established themselves in the New World, slavery had been introduced, the Portuguese were running slaves from West Africa and various European diseases had combined with Spanish intolerance to reduce immensely and in some cases to wipe out the indigenous population. The English came much later and at first stood offshore, as pirates, waiting for the treasure ships, especially the Spanish, which were looted by Drake and Hawkins and others with the tacit agreement of Queen Elizabeth. Early words which entered English from the West Indies included “doubloons” and “pieces of eight.”