Dead Men Talking

DEB WATCHED Anjum twirl his cigarette between his thumb and index finger. “Mulling anything specific?”

“Actually, yes,” Anjum grinned. “Been reading about Indian English . . . wondering how to put into a nutshell exactly what’s wrong with it. Any ideas?”

“What you can put into a nutshell,” said Deb, “deserves to stay there, wouldn’t you say?”

“Hmm . . . alright, a cliché. But would you say the real problem with Indian English is, we get it all from books, and so we end up sounding bookish all the time?”

Chhanda, just-retired professor of English, felt this was up her street: “Depends on which books, surely?”

She hadn’t anticipated Anjum’s pot-shot: “The kind of books you teachers dump on your students, for instance. Those Victorian authors . . . the long-winded roundabout prose . . . the silly euphemisms . . . ever tell your students that wasn’t English?”

“Why ‘wasn’t English’?” said Chhanda indignantly. “That was Victorian English.”

“No,” Anjum shot back. “only literary Victorian English. No one, not even the Victorians, ever spoke that kind of language. You didn’t tell your students that, did you?”

“We taught literature, not spoken English,” Chhanda said firmly. “There was no scope for such discussion.”

“That’s just it,” said Anjum. “The literature you taught had all to do with the Victorians, who garbled English out of shape and size. Add to that the bunkum students get at school---teachers stuffing them with 19th century commercial English---the ‘Respected Sir, I most humbly beg to state’ and ‘yours most obediently’, and all that servile colonial-time shit. No wonder the only English they know is the sort of thing the East India Company baboos wrote”.

Chhanda saw an opening for scoring a point: “Literary Victorian English came to India through the universities that opened in 1859. Some generations of Company baboos would’ve retired by then.”

“Sure,” Anjum shot back. “and passed on to ‘Gen Next’ the early baboo mantras. Baboo slavespeak was the first layer. Then the baboos and teachers plonked into the act together, and laid on layer upon layer of this blunderbuss English that goes on in India to this day – as fuddy-duddy as that gun.”

That riled Chhanda: “When did teachers get into your hair? And what English is the blunderbuss kind?”

“The bookish, vague, and roundabout kind,” Anjum shot back. “Haven’t you noticed? No Indian is just born; he’s brought into the world. He studies at an institution, he will not go to a school. And he’ll peruse his books, not read them. Nor will he ever eat, but consume what he does.

“The average Indian goes marketing instead of shopping, and will always purchase groceries, never buy foodstuff.

“The baboo never goes somewhere specific; he proceeds to its vicinity.

“No one ever tells the baboo anything; they’re for ever advised. But the baboo will not advise you; he’ll say ‘it is advised that you proceed in this matter’.

“No one can tell a baboo his name; he’s gotta identify himself. Nor does the baboo say something; he only indicates it.

“The officer baboo goes a step further: he doesn’t listen to what you say over the phone; he monitors conversation; if he speaks to a fellow baboo officer, he never says hello; he exchanges greetings with his ilk.

“The baboo officer never says what something is; he indicates what it purports to be. And he’ll always preface his ponderous answers to simple questions with ‘to my knowledge’.

“The baboo officer never marries; he’s united in matrimony, and before he is, takes on prefixes like chi. and sou.

“And finally, after he’s done his round of blunderbussing, he refuses to die, but may agree to depart for his heavenly abode.”

Here Deb interrupted with his calm, Virgo reasoning: “You’re right about the symptoms of the disease, Anjum, not with your diagnosis. You can’t single out baboos and teachers as the contagion.

“Those expressions aren’t just wordy, they’re automatic expressions, made by people long dead. Don’t you think we Indians are given to using ready-made, automatic expressions all the time---even with our mother tongues?”

“Hmm . . . you have a point there,” Anjum said. “But that’s more to do with the urban educated Indian, wouldn’t you say?”

“No, it goes way back to our Sanskrit pathashalas,” said Deb. “Brahmin pupils were made to memorise Panini’s grammar, and quotable quotes. That left no room for spontaneous expressions; nor originality.

“Then, after English education came, Indians began to memorise English phrases for occasions. And so speech became a pick-and-dump affair: you picked formulaic expressions and strung them into sentences. No thinking; no spontaneity. Somewhat like copy-paste journalism in India’s English-language papers.

“The Indian gets no training in speech or writing at school. Few teachers have speech or writing skill. They mouth ready-made expressions, and students pick these up. And thus goes the whirligig of automatic expressions.”

“Gosh!” Anjum butted in. “We’re a nation of a billion dead men talking! Ain’t we got fun!”