Babus and ethnic issues

WHERE MONEY TALKS

The newspapers tell me that the central government will cut the flab in babudom. I have no objection to reducing costs by trimming an over-manned and under-productive bureaucracy.

But adapting Hermann Goering's outburst against the word "culture", I feel like reaching for my revolver (non-existent, alas!) when I hear another Indian talk of "babu" and "babudom" in this ignorant, imitative pejorative sense.

With its lofty cultural mission, the Bharatiya Janata Party should know that nothing is more insulting to our national heritage than linguistic imitativeness. What makes it most laughable is that only semi-educated Indians with a half-baked knowledge of English indulge in the habit.

They themselves would have been despatched to the lowest rung of what they sneer at as babudom by the white pro-consuls who coined the term in their arrogant illiteracy and whom they ape slavishly.

I constantly come across babu and babudom in this sense in our major national dailies. It is a sad reflection on the state of English in India today that so many of our leading journalists know no better.

They would not even understand an exchange of letters between Romesh Chunder Dutt, historian, economist and one of the first Indians in the Indian Civil Service, and Chunder Sekhar Gupta, whose son, Bihari Lal Gupta, also entered the ICS in 1869 with Dutt and Sir Surendranath Banerjea.

The senior Gupta wrote to his son's friend and colleague in 1904 as "My dear Mr Dutt". The latter replied to "My dear Chunder Sekhar Babu". Our purveyors of Hinglish, which passes for English in the capital, might think that while Chunder Sekhar was being deferential to the young sahib, the latter was being disdainful to a mofussil rustic.

Quite the contrary. Dutt is addressed in that letter in accordance with his official rank as an ICS officer, which doesn't entitle him to the ultimate accolade of traditional respect. He, however, bestows that mark of distinction on the much older and revered father of his dearest friend.

A newspaper colleague of mine "" let's call him Arjun Bose "" was once addressed as "Arjun Babu" by a compositor. His angry retort was that he was no one's babu but "Mr Bose." Against that, when I visited my ancestral home in what was then East Pakistan, a ryot told me they thought a sahib had come to the village until they realised it was the babu.

Any self-respecting Hindu regards babu, as in Babu Rajendra Prasad, as a term of respect. It denotes status, for society still will not call a peasant or a Harijan a babu in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal or Orissa. Not being familiar with any Dravidian language, I must accept the view of an English writer, C P Brown, that the word is (or was) used in South India for "Sir, My lord, your Honour."

But when I complained once to an Indian ambassador about the mess his office had made of my passport renewal, the diplomat's apology took the form of a tirade against his clerks. "I don't know why they send these babus abroad. They'll never learn!"

Like an obedient "house nigger" (to adopt the discredited lingo of the American Deep South), that Indian Foreign Service officer had learnt his lesson well from the legacy of his white masters. It was they who reduced babu to "a native clerk who writes English" and used the definition with dripping scorn.

When Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature, Rudyard Kipling, the envious arch-imperialist, wrote to Rider Haggard about "the babu" being Britain's Caliban. Kipling used babu in exactly the same sense as Evelyn Waugh, a marvellous writer but a racist snob, called V.S. Naipaul "that clever little nigger" when he won the Booker Prize.

Babu thus stood (so far as colonial Brits were concerned) for everything that was crude and bumbling, Indian in short. Lord Lytton, one of the least sympathetic viceroys we have been saddled with, referred to British officers who had "become de-Europeanised from long residence among undomesticated natives" as "White Baboos."

This is not, however, the only innocent word that we have distorted because we want to sound like those we still, albeit unconsciously, regard as our betters. There was a time when prominent Indian barristers spoke of England as "Home" (always with a capital H) and of the voyage to India as coming "out".

The word "posh" is a relic of those times for it is said to stand for "Port out, starboard home" which were the most desirable cabins on board ship. It would be meaningless (and impossible) to purge our vocabulary of posh, but need we refer to ghagras and cholis as "ethnic" attire?

Ethnic implies minority ethnicity. The everyday can't be ethnic. If typically Indian clothes are ethnic, then what is normal in India? Evening gowns and tail coats? An exhibition of mirror work cushions in New York or of zari chappals in London would rightly be called ethnic.

They represent the arts and crafts of an exotic minority with which the majority is not familiar. But such work belongs to the majority here and is, therefore, far from ethnic. This is another word that India's English-language newspapers persistently misuse.

No wonder Rajnarain Bose, the 19th century religious reformer, feared that Macaulay's education prescription would turn out a nation of "third rate Eurasians", using the word in its cultural, not ethnic, sense.That is the challenge of identity that the BJP faces. It is far more important than religion.