Words of matter

My last job in full-time journalism, and this was many years ago, was at a Gujarati newspaper in Ahmedabad. While I had overseen newspapers in non-English languages before, this was the first time I was an active editor of one. There are several things different in regional-language journalism and English. This is not a piece on those differences and I may write about that another time, but I can illustrate this, just in case it has whetted your curiosity.

One difference is that regional-language newspapers are read more by women than by men. In the case of Gujarati newspapers, that figure in my time was 51:49 in favour of women. English is more like 35:65. Another difference is that regional language newspapers carry a lot of fiction. I do not mean fake news; I mean serialised novels, mostly romances, which are hugely popular. Charles Dickens was not a novelist but a writer of serialised fiction in the same way. 

However, this is not a piece about those differences, but something specific in those papers that I learned when I worked at them. I wanted to look at three terms that Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu and possibly even other regional-language papers use that are English words. And I want to explore why it is that they are not used in translation.

The first one is “honour killing”. Regional-language papers will use this English term when describing the crime that we are familiar with on the subcontinent. That of a family murdering a daughter because she has fallen in love. The question is why use the term “honour killing” in headlines and news reports when both these words are easily translatable. The answer is that it is not the words but the sentiment which is not translatable. In Gujarati or Hindi or Urdu, the phrase will become something like “izzat ke liye khoon”. 

The problem here is that this does not seem to be a criminal action because the upholding of izzat cannot be such a bad thing. Protection of family honour is culturally valid and even endorsed. The criminality of the act does not come through when put in this manner, in our own languages. This is why English is leaned on.

Regional language newspapers use some terms that are untranslated English words: ‘honour killing’, ‘lynching’, ‘anti-national’

The second word is “lynching”. This is a word of modern usage in our parts, especially the crime linked to meat and cattle. I was glancing through a few editions of newspapers in regional languages recently and noticed that they used the English word “lynching” transliterated into their language. I had not anticipated this and was thinking about why this was. I went to the dictionary and in Gujarati it is translated as an entire sentence. In English it would be something like “to put to death without proper trial”. So there exists no term for this act in our languages. Surely this cannot be because the event itself is rare. The putting of people to death without proper trial by mobs is commonplace in India. So why do we not have a word that describes the act?

Again, the answer must lie in the fact that it is not unacceptable to have it and that is why it is not seen as different or revolting enough to be given coinage. This is a very harsh comment on our society, and I hope I am wrong in making this linkage. However, I do not see why I am wrong, and also, just as tellingly, I do not see other people worrying about the same thing (which tells me that it is actually acceptable). We can discern its acceptability when observing what happens on the periphery of a lynching — the casual video recordings (who are these people who do that?) and the fact that there is equal emphasis on the wrongdoing of the victim. I saw one astonishing press conference in Hindi a few months ago. It was being held by a woman police officer of some seniority (she was wearing the black IPS markings on her collar). She was describing the lynching of a Muslim man who was transporting some cattle. She spent more time talking about how the animals had been mistreated in that van than the murder that she was investigating.

The third term is “anti-national”. It may be found unusual that this has no parallel term in our own languages because this is an English word that only Indians use. I do not see the word “anti-national” being used as a word of abuse in America or the United Kingdom or anywhere else. It is an Indian term of recent coinage. It does not appear in my English-Gujarati dictionary which is only a few years old. 

The English dictionary describes it as being opposed to national interest or nationalism. If we take the second meaning then a lot of great people, including Rabindranath Tagore are anti-national. Why do Gujarati and Hindi papers use “anti-national” and why is there no Indian term for it? I do not know the answer to this one. Perhaps readers who have thought about it can send in their reflections.

This week, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s Manmohan Vaidya wrote a piece in the Indian Express in which he described his organisation’s outlook. He ran down the Semitic notions of blasphemy and said that India (which presumably is represented only by Hinduism and only by the RSS) was more tolerant of dissent inside religion. I challenge this. It was the VHP’s vandals who disallowed the depiction of Saraswati by the artist M F Husain and not a week goes by when there is some or the other offence taken to some depiction, so it is bogus to say that we are different. 

It is also wrong to assume that we do not have anything akin to blasphemy in India. The root of the word blasphemy (like a lot of other Christian words like bible, apostle, catholic, martyr and baptism) is in Greek. In this case the root word is blaptikos, which means that which offends or is hurtful. Something becomes blasphemy because to a number of people, the idea is unacceptable. How is this in any way different from “anti-national”? It is not. So we should not be rejoicing about our tolerance.

What I found interesting was this statement from Vaidya: “I have never experienced any hostility towards Muslims and Christians in shakhas. Only anti-national elements are robustly opposed (not hated).”

Why do we not have a local word for this term, which, according to the RSS, is the ONLY one which offends them? To me the answer is easy and it lies in that English definition of it as being something opposed to the national interest. But who is to define the national interest and does any such thing as national interest even exist? In my opinion, no. We can colour whatever specific offence we want into it, and that is why the word has stuck.