India: ON LANGUAGE; Doing the Needful

Thu Apr 10 20:26:27 UTC 2008

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July 12, 1987
ON LANGUAGE; Doing the Needful
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN; STEVEN R. WEISMAN IS CHIEF OF THE NEW YORK
TIMES'S NEW DELHI BUREAU. WILLIAM SAFIRE IS ON VACATION.

LOOKING FOR A wife? The classified advertising section of The
Hindustan Times in New Delhi offers a match with ''a beautiful homely
girl'' from a good family. Set a time to meet, but if you're
especially eager, you can always ''prepone'' the visit. Although they
have been speaking English on the Indian subcontinent for 300 years -
''longer than many of you Americans,'' says an Indian friend - there
are those who think the Indians haven't quite got it right. ''Indian
English could perhaps best be defined as a language written or spoken
by Indians in the belief that it is English,'' H.Y. Sharada Prasad,
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's press spokesman, wrote recently. ''The
spelling is English. The tone and spirit may not be.''

In fact, Indian English has many virtues, among them a certain logic
and succinctness. It makes more sense, after all, for a good homemaker
to be considered ''homely'' than somebody with a plain face. And if
you can postpone a meeting, why shouldn't you be able to prepone it?
English is spoken by perhaps 2 or 3 percent of the billion or so
people who live in the vast territory once embraced by the British
Empire, but in time it has evolved in south Asia into a distinctive
language with its own logic, idiosyncrasies and culture. The official
language of India is Hindi, and in Pakistan it is Urdu, but neither is
spoken by a majority of the population. Instead, most people speak
various regional languages, with the educated classes using English as
a link - and a ticket to advancement.

For a foreigner, English usage in India can serve as a kind of road
map to certain subtleties of culture and politics, since many
peculiarities derive from the grammar and modes of thought in south
Asia. Often, I have found myself interviewing a law enforcement
official about politically or ethnically inspired killings, only to be
assured that the violence was carried out by ''bad characters'' and
other ''antisocial elements.'' But these are not the bland cliches
they seem. Rather, they express the preference of the police - and
much of the public - to treat those who murder in the name of a cause
as common criminals, people whose demands can be ignored. Every one of
the myriad ethnic disputes in south Asia reflects this dilemma, and
there it is summed up in the language itself.

Another example of succinctness is the practice of squashing a noun
and verb together to create a new noun-verb. In a crisis, politicians
never fly to the capital -they air-dash. Policemen wielding
steel-tipped truncheons known as lathis have their own verb forms, as
do street protesters. For some reason, processions are never held, but
always ''taken out''; and slogans are always ''raised,'' not shouted,
before the protesters are lathi-charged by the police. Economy of
expression is also the hallmark of this sort of exchange found among
ethnic Tamils in south India:

''How are you, I hope?'' ''Oh, yes.'' But incisiveness also has its
hazards. I have learned to be wary when a bureaucrat promises to ''do
the needful,'' lest he anticipate his own needs instead of mine. LO,
THE FISSIPAROUS

ON THE OTHER HAND, there is a lot of aggrandizing and long-windedness
involved, too. The Latinate expressions of Indian English, for
example, seem to reflect a general love of rococo euphemism, courtesy
or indirection. People who die meet with an ''untimely demise,'' and
their families are ''condoled'' by friends, just as they have been
''felicitated'' on happier occasions. The Indian Government
establishes countless ''commissions,'' and then gets into debates
about their ''modalities,'' only to discover ''lacunae'' in their
terms of reference.  One of my favorites is the word ''fissiparous,''
as in ''fissiparous tendencies,'' a common expression in India, Sri
Lanka and Pakistan, where ethnic conflict always poses a threat to
national unity. The word comes not from Sanskrit or Persian, the roots
of northern Indian languages, but from Latin for splitting apart,
which has also given us fissure and nuclear fission.
''Fissiparousness'' is a global problem, but I have never heard of
this good word being used in the Middle East, say, or any other part
of the world.

Perhaps the most revealing idiosyncrasy is the pervasive use of the
continuous present verb tense. ''You must be knowing him,'' a friend
will say of a mutual colleague. Another might say: ''He is not knowing
what time it is because he is not having any watch.'' Or the
hard-boiled, infuriating approach of the lowly government clerk who
tells you: ''Whatever you are wanting, I am not giving.'' Here I admit
we run the risk of overinterpretation. But it is tempting to conclude,
along with many linguistic scholars, that the practice is consistent
with a vagueness and timelessness, including the notion of death and
rebirth, at the core of Indian belief.

Indians find other parallels for such themes, even in the saris, worn
by women, and dhotis, or loin cloths, by men. Scholars note that these
ancient articles of clothing are distinguished by the fact that they
contain not one stitch of thread, and are wrapped from a long
continuous bolt of cloth that flows like the Ganges River that gives
life to India. From such concepts comes a view of Indian time and
tense. Overinterpretation has never been a sin in India. HOT, HOT TEA

NONE OF THESE EXAMPLES are connected with the phenomenon of many of
our useful English words in the West being of Indian origin: veranda,
bungalow, pundit, khaki and mango, for example. Such words began
creeping into English during Elizabethan times, and are compiled in
the famous dictionary Hobson-Jobson, a wonderfully thick volume of
Anglo-Indian phrases first published in 1886. There you can find such
suprising anomalies as the fact that two words associated with India,
caste and cobra, are actually of Portuguese origin, imported to the
subcontinent by early traders and settlers.

>>From ancient times, each of India's native tongues has developed a
cadence of its own, which also brings vitality to Indian English. In
Indian languages, many words are repeated twice for emphasis. You ask
someone to please speak ''slowly, slowly'' so you can understand, or
to give you only a ''little, little'' sugar in your tea. Khushwant
Singh, the historian, essayist and novelist, has recorded how some
Anglo-Indian writers have experimented with literal translations of
Indian words, often with lyrical results, as in this evocation by Raja
Rao: ''Hot, hot tea . . . long, long hair . . . with these very eyes,
with these very eyes, I have seen the ghosts of more than a hundred
young men and women, all killed by magic, by magic.''

Indian English thus yields poetry and power, when it is not simply
doing the needful.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEED91F31F931A25754C0A961948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone: (215) 898-7475
Fax: (215) 573-2138

Email: haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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