I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes

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https://languagehat.com/a-new-irritant/

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As I said here, my wife and I are reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, and I’ve gotten to another passage of sufficient Hattic interest to post. One of the protagonists is Hari Kumar, who was raised by his father Duleep to be a perfect Englishman; in this section we are learning about Duleep’s background:

Duleep Kumar was the youngest of a family of four boys and three girls. Perhaps a family of seven children was counted auspicious, for after his birth (in 1888) it seemed for several years that his parents were satisfied and intended no further addition. […] Of the four brothers only Duleep completed the course at the Government Higher School and went on to the Government College. His family thought that to study at the college was a waste of time, so they opposed the plan, but finally gave in. In later years he was fond of quoting figures from the provincial census taken round about this time, that showed a male population of twenty-four and a half million and a female population of twenty-three million. Of the males one and a half million were literate; of the females less than fifty-six thousand, a figure which did not include his three elder sisters. His father and brothers were literate in the vernacular, semi-literate in English. It was because as a youth Duleep had acquired a good knowledge of the language of the administrators that he began to accompany his father on visits to petition the sub-divisional officer, and had the first intimations of the secrets hidden behind the bland face of the white authority. There grew in him a triple determination – to break away from a landlocked family tradition, to become a man who instead of requesting favours, granted them, and to save Shalini from the ignorance and domestic tyranny not only his other sisters but his two elder brothers’ wives seemed to accept uncomplainingly as all that women could hope for from the human experience. When Shalini was three years old he began to teach her her letters in Hindi. When she was five she could read in English.

Duleep was now sixteen years old. The Government College to which he had gained admittance was at the other end of the earth: a hundred miles away. His mother wept at his going. His brothers scoffed. His elder sisters and sisters-in-law looked at him as if he were setting out on some shameful errand. His father did not understand, but gave him his blessing the night before his departure and in the morning accompanied him to the railway station in a doolie drawn by bullocks.

And perhaps that is when what could be called the tragedy of Duleep Kumar began. He was a boy whose passion for achievement was always just that much greater than his ability to achieve. And it was a passion that had become used to the constant irritants of home. Far removed from there, in the company of boys of diverse backgrounds but similar ambitions, the original sense of frustration upon which these passions had thrived began to diminish. Here, everyone was in the same boat, but as the BA course progressed he became uncomfortably aware of the process that separated the quickwitted from the plodders. For the first time in his life he found himself having to admit that other boys, if not actually cleverer, could certainly be quicker. Analysing this he came readily to an explanation. The quick boys, surely, all came from progressive homes where English was spoken all the time. On the college teaching staff there was a preponderance of Englishmen. At the Government Higher School, most of the instruction, although in English, had been in the hands of Indians. He had always understood exactly what the Indian teachers were saying, and he had often felt that what they were saying he could have said better. But now he sat through lectures increasingly at a loss to follow not the words so much as the thinking behind the words. And he did not dare to ask questions. Nobody asked questions. They listened attentively. They filled exercise books with meticulous notes of what they thought had been said. To ask questions was to admit ignorance. In a competitive world like this such an admission would probably have been fatal.

He was, however, discovering a new irritant: the frustrations not of a hidebound orthodox Indian family, but of the English language itself. Listening to his fellow students he was amazed that they seemed unable to comprehend the difference between the way they spoke and the way the Englishmen spoke. It was not only a question of pronunciation or idiom. He was too young to be able to formulate the problem. But he was aware of having come close to the heart of another important secret. To uncover it might lead to an understanding of what in the sub-divisional officer looked like simple arrogance and in the English teachers intellectual contempt.

There came a time when he was able to say to his son Hari: ‘It is not only that if you answer the phone a stranger on the other end would think he was speaking to an English boy of the upper classes. It is that you are that boy in your mind and behaviour. Conversely when I was your age, it was not only that I spoke English with an even stronger babu accent than I speak it now, but that everything I said, because everything I thought, was in conscious mimicry of the people who rule us. We did not necessarily admit this, but that is what was always in their minds when they listened to us. It amused them mostly. Sometimes it irritated them. It still does. Never they could listen to us and forget that we were a subject, inferior people. The more idiomatic we tried to be the more naïve our thinking seemed, because we were thinking in a foreign language that we had never properly considered in relation to our own. Hindi, you see, is spare and beautiful. In it we can think thoughts that have the merit of simplicity and truth. And between each other convey these thoughts in correspondingly spare, simple, truthful images. English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next. At least, this is so when it is written, and the English have usually confided their noblest aspirations and intentions to paper. Written, it looks like a way of gaining time and winning confidence. But when it is spoken, English is rarely beautiful. Like Hindi it is spare then, but crueller. We learned our English from books, and the English, knowing that books are one thing and life another, simply laughed at us. Still laugh at us. They laughed at me, you know, in that Indian college I went to before I came over here that first disastrous time to study law. At the college I learned the importance of obtaining a deep understanding of the language, a real familiarity with it, spoken and written. But of course I got it mostly all from books. A chapter of Macaulay was so much easier to understand, and certainly more exciting, than a sentence spoken by Mr Croft who taught us history. In the end I was even trying to speak Macaulayesque prose. Later I found out that any tortuous path to a simple hypothesis was known among the English staff as a Kumarism. And it was later still before I really understood that a Kumarism was not something admirable but something rather silly. But I think this notoriety helped me to scrape through. I was a long way down the list. But it was a triumph by my standards.’

(A doolie is “A rudimentary litter or palanquin used in India by the lower social classes, and as an army ambulance”; it’s from “Hindi ḍōlī a litter, a kind of sedan for women, etc., diminutive of ḍōlā swing, cradle, litter, < Sanskrit dōlā litter, swinging cradle, < dul- to swing.”) Of course, Hari’s perfect Englishness does him no good when he has to return to India.

I might also mention the phrase “civil lines,” an odd expression that recurs frequently in the novel and that the OED added in 2010:

(The name for) an area (in various South Asian cities) originally developed as a residential district for colonial administrators and civil servants.

1833 The civil lines, at the distance of two miles, are much more beautifully-situated, amidst well-wooded ravines.
Asiatic Journal & Monthly Register vol. 10 i. 59

1920 By 1 o’clock the crowds making for the civil lines were not merely those who were attempting to approach via Hall Gate.
Rep. Comm. Government India Disturbances Punjab ii. 23 in Parliamentary Papers (Cmd. 681) vol. XIV. 1001

1992 Kailasnath Choudhary..fought tooth and nail with the bureaucrats residing in the British-built bungalows of the Civil Lines to stop them from introducing an electric crematorium to the city.
World (BBC) April 23/1

2002 Wanted a flat in civil lines, Delhi between 1000–1200 sqft.
Sunday Times of India 22 September (Classifieds section) 2/1

https://languagehat.com/a-new-irritant/

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Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/periodic-table-of-swearing-2/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19308

Via Pengio’s MeFi post on the 30th anniversary of Trainspotting, “the intro to Glaswegian slang that is Modern Toss’s Periodic Table of Swearing (The Scottish Field Report).” It goes from C 1 Cunt to Sbb 102 Shitting A Fucking Breeze Block, and if you click on a square you will hear the sweary element spoken.

Has it really been thirty years? I loved that movie when it came out, and I obviously need to see it again or I’ll be a Prat in a Hat (48).

https://languagehat.com/periodic-table-of-swearing-2/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19308