What poor Palaniappan Chidambaram may still not realise is that he didn’t open his mouth in Kolkata to put his foot in it only because Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is a cultural purist. Believing with Talleyrand that speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts, the chief minister suspected the ministry-hopping Chidambaram of trying to divert the buck to the wrong stop.
This isn’t the first instance of linguistic prickliness masking political concern. The 19th century Siamese (no Thais then) monarch who objected to being described by The Times, London, as “a spare man” was worried about more than not being plump. If he was spare, he could be spared: the king suspected he was being dismissed as what Chandra Shekhar once derisively called a “Stepney” or fifth wheel when speaking of a UP minister.
The inference was natural for British and French colonials were then jockeying for influence and enthroning and dethroning kings at will all over Asia. Hence, the outburst of nervous royal indignation continued to simmer until the British ambassador was persuaded to declare that far from being a spare man, His Majesty could not be spared.
But this is not to say that language played no part in the chief minister’s irritation. After all, he isn’t one of your Aya Ram Gya Ram cow belt hicks but a gentleman revolutionary who translates Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poems and plays, even if no one is quite sure from what language into what. Bengalis — Lord Lytton’s “Irishmen of India” — can scent a verbal slight before they hear it, and American slang is as insulting as that deadly abuse, “Nonsense”. It may have been even worse until Bengali Marxists fell out with Delhi’s Left Front when priorities had to be revised. A B Bardhan might still regard the Great Satan’s slang as the ultimate vulgarity but no put-down can be more devastating for Somnath Chatterjee than “You are a Nonsense!”.
This is uniquely Calcutta. Returning to the city after many years, the wife of an English colleague took a taxi to Tollygunge Club where the driver demanded a 20-rupee surcharge. Tolly, he said, was outside city limits. “What nonsense!” my friend’s wife declared, having made that trip hundreds of times when she lived here. “Nonsense bonsense neyi bolo,” shouted the driver. “British Raj khatam ho geya!”
Humpty Dumpty isn’t alone in using a word to mean just what he chooses it to mean “neither more nor less”. As the spreading diaspora becomes richer and more influential, the Oxford dictionary may include “officious” as an alternative for official and “trouble-shooter” for trouble-maker, these being common Indian interpretations. It has already bestowed respectability on the horrid “prepone”, which, being old and old-fashioned, I can’t bring myself to write — utter it I never shall — except within inverted commas.
Politics has also developed a universal newspeak. Just as apartheid, literally “separate development”, stood in practice for the development of only one group in racist South Africa, a Freedom of Religion Act means exactly the opposite of what it says.
The suggestion that foreigners should not attempt slang won’t avoid all controversies. For instance, a British gossip writer on Teheran’s only English-language paper in the Shah’s time narrowly escaped being accused of lese-majeste for writing that a certain tycoon was “squiring” one of the princesses. The charge was dropped only when he explained that squiring means no more than escorting and that the word the censors had in mind was “screwing”.
The better known story is about Winston Churchill’s farewell lunch for the De Gaulles at the end of World War II. When Churchill asked Madame de Gaulle what she was looking forward to most after returning to France she replied “A penis!” The amazed Churchill repeated his question and received the same answer. Seeing his host’s look of shock, the general turned to his wife, “I think my dear, they pronounce it ’appiness!”
There was no such misunderstanding in this instance. The dispute is not really about an inelegant term that was popularised by a bankrupt haberdasher without a middle name (the S stood for nothing and shouldn’t have a stop) whom Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death elevated to the US presidency. The argument is over where the buck really stops. Though Bhattacharjee was too polite to say so, Shivraj Patil’s fate clearly showed where. Anything the author of Operation Green Hunt (which many find difficult to dissociate from last Tuesday’s massacre) has to say to the contrary sounds like a desperate attempt — and here’s another Americanism! — to pass the buck.
