Pukka trumps and lost charpoys
ANTHONY BURGESS
Hobson-Jobson Henry Yule and H. C. Burnell (Routledge and Kegan Paul £6 6s) Let us take tea. The word came from Fuh-Kien, along with the leaf itself. The English pro- nunciation used to be close enough to the Chinese: it rhymed with obey, as we know from The Rape of the Lock. Conservative Europe and Ireland cling to the Chinese vowel, but in the late eighteenth century England began to change over to the form we have now: some extempore verses of Dr Johnson, written about 1770, rhyme tea with me. Yule and Burnell tell us all this, but they miss the real point, which is that all words containing ea began to favour raising of the tongue to ee from about 1750 on, so that sea and see, beat and beet became homophones. Some words (steak and break, for instance) resisted the change, though not everywhere: in Wales you can eat sleek.
The other British word for the beverage- chah—is regarded by some as a vulgarism, perhaps because of its association with rough soldiers, who brought the form back from eastern service. But chah is the Mandarin read- ing of the tea-plant ideogram. In Italian, cia and to used to have (still have?) equal status, but in England chah goes with NAAFI wads and tea with Gentleman's Relish. Twankay, after which Aladdin's pantomime mother is named, is the green tea from T'un-k'i, a mart near Hwei-chau-fu in Nganhwei. Tea-caddy prob- ably comes from the eastern catty—a weight of 1+ lb—through catty-box, a box holding that amount of tea. 'Tea-caddy' was once a local name for Harley Street, because of the large number of East India Company directors and proprietors who used to live there.
If you like this sort of useless information —the only sort of information worth picking up, in my opinion anyway—you can get a lot of it from the Anglo-Indian glossary of Colonel Yule and Dr Burnell, first published in 1886 and out of print from 1903 till now. The book describes itself as 'etymological, historical, geo- graphical and 'discursive,' and it is, as it always is, the discursive part that is the best.
The primary title of the work, Hobson-Jobson, must sound facetious to the non-philologist. It is a term, however, which is in standard lexicographical use (in Partridge's great slang dictionary, for instance) to designate the process by which unlearned people absorb the exotic into their own vernacular. Thus, jeru.salent artichoke is an attempt to domesticate the Italian girasole, and Hobson-Jobson is what the British soldier made out of the Muslim cry of `Ya Masan! Ya Hosain!' in the proces- sion of the Moharram. The British occupation of the Indies brought a fair number of Hobson-Jobson terms into English—Penang lawyer from Malay pinang liar (wild arecal, bearer from Bengali veharu (domestic servant), compound (Malay kampong? Portuguese catn- panha?), and many others.
But some Orientalisms. have come into English without the quaint perversion of folk- etymology—pukka, for instance (Yule and Bur- nell spell this pucka), which is from the Hindi pakka, meaning ripe or matured or cooked. 'Your Lahore men have done nobly,' wrote Lord Lawrence to somebody. 'I should like to embrace them; Donald, Roberts, Mac and Dick are, all of them, pucca trumps.' In non- Indian contexts it still has its uses; indeed, I can't think of an English word that conveys its peculiar concreteness—a property derived from its employment as a substantive meaning well-built work of brick and mortar. Here it is in a document of 1727: 'Fort William was built on an irregular Tetragon of Brick and Mortar, called Puckah, which is a Composition of Brick-dust, Lime, Molasses, and cut Hemp, and when it comes to be dry, it is as hard and tougher than firm Stone or Brick.' The pukka gen of wartime, as opposed to duff gen (why not cutcha gen?), has no real synonym: trans- late it into English and you get a pulpy abstract kind of officialese—authentic information, re- liable report, and so on.
What I'm trying to say is that the kind of verbal importation that went on when we had an empire was not really affectation. It is not right to call, say, charpoy a slang term in ex- pressions like 'After lunch I, always do a bit of charpoy-bashing.' Why not bed? Because a bed is something made up, something soft and cosy you get into, while a charpoy is a functional structure you lie on. The Hindi word is charpai, from the Persian chihar-pai (four feet): four-footedness is its simple essence. And some of the languages of the Empire do better than English in certain semantic areas. 'Yes, thank you, the curry's hot, but it isn't hot.' Malay gives us a useful distinction between panas (of high temperature) and pedas (pun- gent, savoury, spicy, hot).
As for curry itself, Yule and Burnell tuck their napkins in firmly for a detailed session. They derive the word from the Tamil kari, which means sauce, but note that the verb Lad means `to eat by biting.' Curried egg- plant here deserves attention. The Sanskrit word for the eggplant is bhaniaki, the Persian badingan, the Hindi bhanta or baigan or baingan, the Arabic badinjan. Spanish, punc- tilious about using the Arabic article in its Moorish loan-words, has albereneetta, which gives the French aubergine. Portuguese dis- penses with the al- and produces heringela or bringiela. It carries the word east, where we end up with brinjaul or brinjal. The Low Latin inelangolus or merangolus has a kind of shadowy resemblance to some of these forms, but Italian was pretty quick to come up with the corruption meta insana, which curiously ties in with the Arabian Nights super- stition about the badinjan's engendering mad- ness. Avicenna says that it generates melancholy and 'obstructions.' Fascinating? It seems so to me. Yule and Burnell, or Hobson and Jobson, have worked hard on this.
As also on durian, that great and terrible fruit of the Malay Peninsula. Nicolo Conti, in the fifteenth century, says: 'When opened five fruits are found within, resembling oblong oranges. The taste varies like that of cheese.' Poggio agrees about the 'five things like elon- gated oranges,' but says they resemble 'thick butter, with a combination of flavours.' None of this is quite right. The smell of the durian is fetid: the Ba (avian Dutch elegantly called it the stancker. It is also very exciting, even aphrodisiacal. Eat it with whisky and you are supposed to die. Eat it anyway, and the stink is swallowed up in deliciousness. In this respect it is like toddy (Hindi tar!—the fermented sap of the tar or palmyra): gulp it down and you cease to smell its ghastly odour of decay wrapped in burning newspaper. Once you eat durian you tend to become an addict. I have seen expat planters cry for it. But the smell, to the insusceptible, is shocking. A policeman friend of mine said it was like a raspberry jelly set above an unclean lavatory. 'A Governor of the Straits,' say Yule and Burnell, some forty-five years ago, used to compare the Durian to "carrion in custard."' We threw the Empire away before it was ripe for abandonment, and we threw away a great linguistic and folkloric heritage at the same time. I mean, of course, a living and continuing heritage, not a museum. Competi- tion-wallahs and servants of John Company did not spend all their time beating the natives. They turned themselves into very competent amateur philologists and anthropologists, and what they have preserved for us they have pre- kervcd out of love. The bum sahibs and titan besars no longer drink their chota pegs or gin paldts, unless they're American aid-men or German box-wallahs. Ichabod, ichabod. But some of the glory can be recalled in books like Hobson-Jobson.
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