"WE have to educate people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue. We must teach them some foreign language`85 it is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England."

So stated Thomas Babington Macualay, about the languages of India, in his Minute on Indian Education, submitted to Parliament in 1835. It is quite ironical to find that many Indian words, mainly from Sanskrit and Persian, were absorbed into the English language during the British Raj. At present, the Oxford English Dictionary contains more than seven hundred words of Indian origin.

Some of these words stand out as Indian words; some are seldom recognised as being of Indian origin. Most of these words were ‘borrowed’ between the sixteenth and twentieth century, when the British were aggressively following an imperial policy abroad, especially on the Indian subcontinent. However, the British were not the only ones interested in India as a colony; the French, the Portuguese and even the Spanish were a definite presence. Consequently, there are some words that have come to English from Indian languages via French and Portuguese. The cummerbund, a broad sash, especially one that is pleated lengthwise and worn as part of a formal evening dress, came from the Urdu and Persian kamarband. It is made up of the Persian kamar, waist, and bandi, band. The Indian domestic workers and low-status office workers earlier wore this sash. The men of Jodhpur wore full-length riding breeches, which were close-fitting below the knee. These riding trousers came to be called jodhpurs. Bandanna came to English via Portuguese. A large handkerchief or neckerchief, the bandanna is usually made of silk or cotton and has white spots on a background that is of a bright colour. It comes from the Hindi bandhanu or tie-dyeing.

Today, kedgeree is a European dish consisting chiefly of fish, rice and hard-boiled eggs. The original kedgeree of North India was khichri, from the Sanskrit khicca, a dish of rice and sesame. Even today, the Indian khichri is a mixture of rice cooked with butter and dal, with spices and shredded onions. Mango reached English from the Portuguese manga. The Hindi ghee, now a part of the English lexicon, comes from the Sanskrit ghrta, which means sprinkled.

Shampoo was taken from the Turkish custom of massage during the process of bathing; it originally came from the Hindi campo or ‘to press’. The word cheroot that refers to the cigar with both ends open comes from the French cheroute. The French took this word from the Tamil curuttuu (roll of tobacco) while trying to establish their presence in Hyderabad in the Sixteenth century. Similarly, palanquin reached English from Sanskrit, via Portuguese. Palanquin is a covered litter for one passenger, which consists of a large box carried on two horizontal poles by four or six bearers. In the late sixteenth century, English ‘borrowed’ it from the Portuguese palanquim, which itself was based on the Sanskrit palyanka, meaning bed or couch.

India’s contact with foreign languages like Arabic-Persian and English has created many doublets, giving the vocabulary a large number of partial or absolute synonyms. Through English, there are doublets like karyakram/prograam, garhi/motor, railgarhi/train and lekhak/clerk. From Arabic-Persian, there are doublets such as afsar/adhikari, buzdil/darpok, takid/anurodh, naqli/jail and jawab/uttar.

This feature was published on March 13, 2004