Adding spice to an idiom
By Manohar Malgonkar

EVERY Sunday, BBC TV sheds its workday overalls, puts on tie and coat, and broadcastes serious programmes for adult audiences. In the evening, a 30 minute period is devoted to discussions on important national issues. A panel of pandits drawn from the London correspondents of foreign newspapers sits around a table and tries to field loaded questions fired by some BBC don. Why has Tony Blairs’ popularity rating taken a nose-dive? Why has England been relegated to bottom-of-class ranking in the holy book of cricket, Wisden’s?

And is it true that Britain’s school-leaving boys and girls are better educated today than were their parents and grandparents?

All except one of the members of the panel seemed to agree that school children who had passed their ‘O’ levels today were better equipped to find worth-while employment than their counterparts of 30 or 40 years ago. The exception was the correspondent of The Scotsman, a genial, loose-limbed gentleman with tumbled hair who spoke English without a trace of Scottish accent. He seemed to think that today’s teenagers were given the choice of too many light-weight subjects whereas in his schooldays the emphasis was on basic education; that making high-school education a preparation for finding jobs should not be the aim of schooling. He lamented that they had stopped the teaching of Greek and Latin in Britain’s grammar schools.

It was clear that the other wise men and women on the panel did not go along with this non-conformism, but such differences of opinion as there were, were dissipated in derisive laughter and gentle ribbing.

For my part, as a viewer not particularly concerned with Britain’s educational experiments, I kept thinking how close the parallels were to our own post-independence educational trends. After all, during the Raj our own schools were said to have been patterned after the system in Britain which was devised by the guru of educationalists, Matthew Arnold. The stress was on classical languages and literature, with Sanskrit and Persian substituted for the Greek and Latin of the British system.

Before the British, there were no state-run schools in India. Learning was largely left to parents and gurus. True, in ancient times, there was said to exist seats of learning, or universities. But these institutions taught religion and philosophy. It was the British who gave us schools if only because they wanted to create a pool of clerks to help the sahibs run the business of the empire.

So let’s get this straight. Regardless of nefarious motives of their own it was the British who gave us schools, places where children could be put through an elementary education. Designed to create an underclass of functionaries to help them run the business of the Empire, initially the schools did precisely that. Indians sent their children to these schools mainly because a school education enabled them to find well-paid jobs. And the boys and girls who went to those schools learnt to speak and write English as a matter of course.

But, if only because the Empire itself lasted for well over a century, so many hundreds of thousands of Indians had learnt English, that, over the years, English became just as much a language of India as, say, Hindi or Bengali. By the end of the 19th century, English not only became the common language of educated Indians from different parts of the country, but also the language of the elite, the lawyers, doctors, professors, politicians and business houses, in addition, of course, to the underlings of the administration, the clerks or babus.

Anyhow, that was the name that it went by, Babu English, and spawned countless jokes because of its quaint, hybrid flavour. Here is a typical sample a poem written by Thakur Dass of Shillong who made a journey to London to attend the silver jubilee celebrations of Britain’s King George V, in 1935.

Street was packed in lines of khaki
Honourable Artillery with sticks of hockey
Smart-clad police stood hind
Calm and cool with gesture kind
Procession was moving very sound and slowly
In people’s minds this occasion was holy.

A babu setting himself up as Rudyard Kipling — ha ha ha! Tempted by loyalty to write another recessional. Absurd! Grotesque... but then so typical of babuism.

Granting all that, has any Englishman — and there were hundreds of thousands of them who spent their working lives in India — ever written poetry in any of India’s languages after the one conspicuous example of the very first Englishman who came to India, Father Thomas Stevens, who wrote the Bible in Marathi? And that was hundreds of years before the East India Company conquered India. The sahibs and memsahibs of the Raj went through their Indian careers with guidebook-taught phrases of local languages, with the men picking up a few choice swear-words, and the women content with what they described as kitchen urr-doo.

It was only after the Empire ended that the English language in India took wings; it acquired dignity and even a distinct identity. What had begun as Babu English became Indian English; not quite the language of Henry Higgins, but different from it only in the way that American English or Australian English was different. While the British still ruled India and indeed until well into the 50s, all traces of what were called orientalisms were ruthlessly edited out of books written by Indians, and I have a book written by a Delhi scholar, Perceival Spear, The Nabobs in which the author actually thanks his editor for doing so. By the 80s these same bits of babuism were nothing to be apologetic about. On the other hand they were what gave Indian English its special flavour, its tang and colour, gave you curry in place of stew.

But the flowering may be already over and Indian English is already wilting away from lack of nourishment. As in Britain’s schools, our teaching system has changed. The emphasis on language studies has gone and education is aimed at preparing school-going children to find jobs. English, which was the very medium of instruction in our schools and colleges, is now just another subject in the curriculum, and Sanskrit is not even taught. Like Pali or Aradhamaghedi, or indeed Latin, it is a truly ‘dead’ language, but, if only because a few pandits still teach it, not quite as ‘dead’ as Aramaic, which was said to have been the language Jesus Christ spoke, and which has been lost without trace.

Meanwhile, let us enjoy such examples of Babu English as can still be found in print, for God knows that once it, too, had its day. Here is Thakur Dass, on the silver jubilee celebrations of his King in 1935:

Foes with friends and mice with cats
Deer with tiger and puss with rats
Lamb with lion and hound with hog
Hawk with pigeon and hare with dog.

That is a real — if you will permit a babuism — chatpati curry.