Hi! Slippy hitherao!
Water, get it! Panee lao!
...You put some juldee in it
Or I'll marrow you this minute...

The volume's roots lie in folk etymology, in words created by misunderstanding them when first heard. It can happen within one's own language: an American once recalled that during his early years in school, one of the favorite songs sung was "Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue." But for the longest time he along with many others in his class thought that they were singing "Threech Ears for the Red, White, and Blue." While 'threech' is a nonsense word, other misunderstood words can be the opposite: 'varicose veins,' for example. Somebody might hear it as 'very coarse veins' or as 'very close veins.' This problem, or process, is compounded when words journey from one language to other, as happened when the English, in the process of putting together their Indian empire, perforce came into close contact with the speakers of the subcontinent's languages. As a professor of Sanskrit put it, 'the human ear is far from accurate, particularly the English ear, which is unaccustomed to a definite system of pronunciation in its own alphabet, especially as regards vowel sounds. The consequences are an entire misrepresentation of the original spelling, and a total want of consistency, the very same word being written in every possible variety of orthography."

Try writing the sounds of the above paragraph in Bengali, and then read it out loud, and think of this process taking place over centuries of a love-hate contact, and you get an idea how the words in Hobson-Jobson came about: a fascinating account of how sound patterns affect etymology, and how the subsequent derivatives then undergo further transformations.

The title, the term 'Hobson-Jobson', itself morphed from what the English thought the Shia Muslims were saying when they cried out "Ya Hassan! Ya Hussain!" in processions to mourn the death of the Prophet's grandsons. T. Herbert in 1618 heard it as 'Hussan Hussan'; Fryer in 1673 wrote it as 'Hosseen Gosseen' and 'Hossy Gossy'; in 1726 it was reported that the Dutch called it 'Jaksom Baksom', and the Portuguese as 'Saucem Saucem'--of course it almost goes without saying that both the Dutch and the Portuguese actually might have pronounced it a little differently than how the English heard it. In 1902 a certain Miss Goodrich-Freer settled the matter by writing it as 'Hobson-Jobson.'

Yup, beats me, too! Even accounting for the fact that the English are a weird lot, as the gravedigger in Hamlet put it ('There the men are as mad as he'), this still seems a little excessive. Which is what Rushdie wrote, too, one of those times when we have to agree with The Bearded Provocateur:

"I don't quite see how the colonial British managed to hear (Ya Hassan Ya Hussain) as Hobson-Jobson but this is clearly a failure of imagination on my part."

True Indian English was what the Europeans spoke when talking with the natives. Within it sub-genres developed, simply because of the length of time the different classes from both sides interacted. So there was 'boxwallah English' (trade or commercial speak), 'babu English' (used in offices), and 'bearer English,' the lingo used when the sahibs and their memsahibs rapped with the domestics. The word 'memsahib' itself is conjoining of one-half of the English duo 'Sir-Ma'am' and 'Sahib'. It was some of these memsahibs, fluently 'boloing the baat' who have left us some of the most interesting accounts of the Anglo-Indian world. As well as some engrossing and well-written travelogues cum memoirs.

The word 'mandarin' (a bureaucrat)--a word that used to be favoured by The Economist, with its vocabulary of 'mandarin class' or 'company mandarins'--is from Hindi mantri, a minister or counselor. It could conceivably be traced back to the old Sanskrit man (think), a distant relative of English 'mind' through obscure Indo-European language roots. Yellow robes worn by the Chinese mandarins inspired the 19th-century English name for the loose-skinned 'mandarin oranges.'

‘Punch’ (the drink) has nothing in common with the roots of English words meaning to hit or a tool for making holes. Made traditionally from five ingredients (spirits, water, lemon juice, sugar and spice), the term for the drink came from panch, meaning five in several Indian languages.

Even place names. Cawnpore is from 'Kahnpur' or the town of Kahn, Krishna, or Kanhaiyya--the same 'Kanhaiyya' Anup Jalota kirtans are about.

Tiffin. Rickshaw. Veranda. Cheroot. Calico. Words were borrowed from all possible fields: administrative, legal, business, trade. From Indo-Portuguese patois: 'caste' is from the Portuguese casta; 'mango' from the Portuguese 'manga', which they themselves had adapted from the Tamil man-kay. The Tamil kattu-marram, meaning 'tied wood', became the English 'catamaran.' Food stuff: 'Bombay Duck', which is not a duck at all but a kind of dried fish. Our shutki mach. But then 'ducks' was also slang for gentlemen in the Bombay Service, which must have led to some diverting asides.

And so on. You get the idea. If you follow the trail of words carefully, Hobson-Jobson takes you on a tour from King James (word man himself, who commissioned the writing of the immensely popular King James' version of the Bible) till the time of the Presidencies.

This process of mutation is now referred to as 'Hobson-Jobson." Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines it as the 'assimilation of the sounds of a word or words foreign to a language into sounds of a word or words coined or already existent in the language. So now it is a bona-fide entry in dictionaries with a definite meaning.

The idea of a glossary was launched by correspondence between Henry Yule at Palermon and Arthur Burnell of the Madras Civil Service with the judiciary at Tanjore. The enterprise was not yet finished when Burnell died in 1882, leaving Yule to finish the job, with a little bit of help from his considerable circle of friends, associates and admirers. The book's language thus reveals the social impress of its authors and which is its chief attraction: a gentle, genial tone, what one other compiler of such words termed as 'a master-work of mellow, witty and leisurely scholarship.' Not the kind of stuff people write nowadays. Which is why, despite fierce competition from a host of successors (The Times Literary Supplement, for example, pronounced that Nigel Hanklin's far more recent Hanklyn-Janklyn, A Stranger's Rumble-Tumble Guide to Some Words, Customs, and Quiddities Indian and Indo-British may have 'dealt a mortal blow' to Hobson-Jobson by being ‘more precise, more up-to-date…and more explicit'), this particular book will remain a favourite.

Rushdie ended his article on Hobson-Jobson with a play on the last words spoken by Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind: 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.' It deserves to be quoted in full:

'To spend a few days with Hobson-Jobson is, almost, to regret the passing of the intimate connections that made this linguistic kedgeree possible. But then one remembers what sort of connection it was, and is moved to remark--as Rhett Butler once said to Scarlett O'Hara--'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a small copper coin weighing one tolah, eight mashas and seven surkhs, being the fortieth part of a rupee.' Or, to put it more precisely, a dam.'

Ha ha ha!

I can't end my piece that well--just not that good a writer--and so I'm going to simply end with an Edward Lear poem first published in Times of India, July 1874. And readers please, don't give it the old post-colonial reading (you know, the apocalyptic forefinger raised to the heavens and the high-pitched: "Aha, I knew it, white woman goes missing, brown man is 'nailed to the wall'"). It will so spoil the fun!

The Cummerbund: An Indian Poem

She sate upon her Dobie
To watch the Evening Star
And all the Punkahs as they passed
Cried, "My! How fair you are!”
Around her bower, with quivering leaves,
The tall Kamsamahs grew
And Kitmutgars in wild festoons
Hung down from Tchokis blue.

Below her home the river rolled
With soft melodious sound,
Where golden-finned Chuprassies swam,
In myriads circling round.
Above, on tallest trees remote,
Green Ayahs perched alone,
And all night long the Mussak moan'd
Its melancholy tone.

And where the purple Nullahs threw
Their branches far and wide,--
And silvery Goreewallahs flew
In silence, side by side,--
The little Bheesties' twittering cry
Rose on the flagrant air,
And oft the angry Jampan howled
Deep in his hateful lair.

She sate upon her Dobie,--
She heard the Nimmak hum,--
When all at once a cry arose:
"The cummerbund is come!"
In vain she fled;--with open jaws
The angry monster followed,
And so, (before assistance came,)
That Lady Fair was swallowed.

They sought in vain for even a bone
Respectfully to bury,--
They said, "Hers was a dreadful fate!”
(And Echo answered "Very.")
They nailed her Dobie to the wall,
Where last her form was seen,
And underneath they wrote these words,
In yellow, blue, and green:--

Beware, ye Fair! Ye Fair, beware!
Nor sit out late at night,--
Lest horrid Cummerbunds should come,
And swallow you outright.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.