Sea of Poppies (79 page)

+bandanna
: The
coolin
status of this word would have amazed Neel, who gave it little chance of survival. That ‘bandanna' has a place in the
Oracle
is not, of course, a matter that admits of any doubt – but it is true nonetheless that this was not the fate that Neel had foretold for it. His prediction was that the Hind. word
bandhna
would find its way into the English language in its archaic seventeenth-century form,
bandannoe
. Yet it is true also that Neel never doubted this word's destiny, a belief that was founded in part in the resilience and persistence of the ancient Indo-European root from which it is derived – a word that had already, in his lifetime, been Anglicized into
bando/bundo
(to tie or fasten). This beautiful and useful word is, alas, now only used as it pertains to embankments, although it was once widely used by speakers of English, especially in its imperative form:
bando!
(Neel even made a copy of the quote that Sir Henry used in his note on this term: ‘This and probably other Indian words have been naturalized in the docks on the Thames frequented by Lascar crews. I have heard a London lighter-man, in the Victoria Docks, throw a rope ashore to another Londoner, calling out, “
Bando!
” [M.-Gen. Keatinge]).'

Neel's faith in
bando/bundo
was no doubt influenced by the root's uncommon fecundity, for he foresaw that it would give birth to a whole brood of + anointed derivatives –
bund
(‘embankment' or ‘dyke', the best known example of which is now in Shanghai, widely considered to be the single most valuable piece of land in the world);
cummerbund
(the fate of which Neel also failed to properly predict, for it never did replace ‘belt' as he had thought it would); and finally
bundobast
(literally ‘tying up' in the sense of ‘putting into order' or ‘making arrangements'). The passing away of this last into the limbo of the almost-dead Neel could never have foreseen and would have mourned more, perhaps, than any other entry in the
Chrestomathy
. (Of this too his anonymous descendant might well have written: ‘Why? Why? Why this meaningless slaughter, this egregious waste, this endless logocide. Who will put an end to it? To whom can we appeal? Does it not call upon every conscience to rise in protest?') For it is true certainly that this is a word, an idea, of which English is sadly in need. Nor did the contributions of
bando/bandh
end there. Neel was persuaded that
band
in the sense of ‘head-band' or ‘rubber-band' was also a child of the Hind. term. This would mean that
bando/bundo
did indeed achieve the distinction of being raised to the Peerage of the Verb, through such usages as ‘to band together'.

But to return to
bandanna
, Neel's own use of this term never came into conformity with its dictionary definition, for he continued, in his lifetime, to apply it to kerchiefs, handkerchiefs, gamchhas, and especially to the
cummerbunds
and head-cloths that lascars and other working people commonly wore in order to restrain their hair and their
kameezes
. His descendants, as was their custom, were even more conservative, and would vie among themselves to find uses for the originary forms. Well do I remember the response of an elderly uncle, who, when invited
to join a family expedition to a well-reputed cowboy movie, cried out: ‘Arre! You think I'd spend good money to watch a band of
budmashes
running around in
dungris
and
bandhnas
?'

+bandar
: Neel was totally mistaken in his forecast of how the common Hind. word for monkey would fare in English. One of his pet theories was that migrant words must always be careful to stand apart from each other, in sound and appearance: uprooted homonyms and synonyms, he felt, had little chance of surviving in pairs – in every couple, one would perish. In this instance the beastly sense of
bandar
was, in his view, uncomfortably close in sound to an unrelated nautical term of Persian derivation:
bander/bunder
(‘harbour' or ‘port'). He was persuaded that of the two it was this latter form that would survive in English – partly because the use of
bunder
in the nautical sense had a very long pedigree in the language, going back to the seventeenth century, and partly because the root was uncommonly fecund in English derivatives. It was these derivatives, he felt, that were most vulnerable to the possibilities of confusion posed by the zoological sense of
bandar
. True enough that the frequently used term
bander-/bunder-boat
, (‘harbour-boat') was in little danger of being mistaken for a simian conveyance, but there remained another word that might well be the cause of misunderstandings and confusion. This was the venerable
sabander/shabander
(‘master of the harbour' or ‘harbour-master'), a term which had so long a history as almost to be considered Middle English, and was thus possessed of a powerful claim to protection from the sort of abuse that might result from compounds like
shah-bandar
. As for the animal, there was another word that would serve it just as well, he felt, and this was
wanderoo
(from
wanderu
, the Sinhala cognate of Hind.
bandar
) which was also in wide circulation at the time, although it was generally used to mean
langur
. It was on
wanderoo
that Neel pinned his hopes while predicting doom for its synonym. Little did he know that both
bandar
and its collective +
log
would be given indefinite prolongations of life by a children's book, while the beautiful
wanderoo
would soon disappear into a pauper's grave. [See also
gadda/gadha
.]

bando/bundo (*The Glossary)
: See
bandanna
.

+bankshall
: Neel would have been saddened by the demise of this beautiful word, once much in use: ‘How well I remember the great Bankshall of Calcutta, which served as the jetty for the disembarkation of ship's passengers, and where we would go of an evening to gawk at all the
griffins
and new arrivals. It never occurred to us that this edifice ought to have been, by its oracular definition, merely a “warehouse” or “shed”. Yet I do not doubt that Sir Henry is right to derive it from the Bengali
bãkashala
'. He would have been surprised to learn that a humbler kind of warehouse, the
godown
, had survived in general usage, at the expense of the now rare
bankshall
.

+banyan/banian
: ‘This is no mere word, but a clan, a sect, a caste – one that has long been settled in the English language. The clue to its understanding lies in the gloss provided by
the Admiral
^δ
: ‘The term is derived from a religious sect in the East, who, believing in metempsychosis, eat of no creature endowed with life. It derives, in other words, from the caste-name “Bania” or properly, “Vania”, the last syllable of which is sometimes nasalized. This caste, long associated with banking, commerce, money-lending and so on, was of course famously vegetarian and this was why the word served for centuries as an essential part of the English nautical vocabulary, being applied to the one day of the week when sailors were not served meat:
banyan-day
.'

But all this being accepted, how did this word come to assume its present avatar, in which it represents the humble and ubiquitous undergarment worn by the men of the Indian subcontinent? Neel was of course in an exceptionally good position to observe this mutation, which happened largely within his lifetime. His tracing of the genealogy of this series of incarnations counts among his most important contributions to the etymologist's art and deserves to be quoted in full. ‘The word
banyan
's journey to the wardrobe began no doubt with the establishing of its original sense in English, in which it served merely to evoke an association with India (it was thus, I imagine, that it came also to be attached to a tree that became symbolic of the land – our revered
ficus religiosa
, now reincarnated as the
banyan-tree
). It was because of this general association that it came also to be applied to a certain kind of Indian garment. It serves no purpose perhaps to ask what that garment originally was. To anyone who has lived as long as I have, it is evident that the garment in question is not so much an article of clothing as an index of Hind.'s standing in the world. Thus, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when ours was still a land of fabled riches and opulence, the word
banyan/banian
referred to a richly embroidered dressing gown that fell almost to the floor: it was modelled perhaps on the
choga
or the
caftan/qaftan
. [Here the present writer cannot refrain from interjecting that although this species of robe is extinct in India today, several noteworthy specimens are on permanent display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.] Even in my own childhood the word
banyan
referred always to these sumptuous robes. But at that time, of course, none but the most Anglicized Indians used the word in this sense, the potential for harm being very great. Well do I remember the fate of the unfortunate Raja of Mukhpora, who had a habit of peppering his Bengali with English words. On a garment-buying expedition to the bazar, he was heard to boast, in the hearing of all, that he intended to have his
banyans
beaten and washed before they were locked away for the summer. This greatly alarmed the moneylenders, who lost no time in calling in their debts: the results were ruinous for the poor Raja, who had to live out his days in an ashram in Brindavan, with nothing but a pair of saffron
chogas
in his wardrobe. Thus did he learn why it's best not to get into a
banyan-fight
.

‘From that pinnacle of magnificence,
this article of clothing has unfailingly kept pace with India's fortunes: as the land's inhabitants grew ever poorer and weaker under the British yoke, the garment to which the word was applied grew ever meaner and more humble. In its next incarnation therefore the
banyan
was reborn as the standard article of wear for the lowliest of workmen: thus does
the Admiral
describe it as “a sailor's coloured tunic”. In this form, too, the garment was still a stranger to India: it was the lascar, undoubtedly, who was responsible for introducing it into his native land. It was he, too, who was responsible for snipping off the arms it possessed in its European avatar. In clothing, as in language and food, the lascar is thus revealed to be the pioneer in all things “Indian”. No morning passes when I do not think of this as I slip my hands through those familiar armholes; nor does the notion fail to bring to my nostrils a faint tang of the sea.'

+banyan-/banian-day
: See
banyan
.

+banyan-fight (*The Glossary)
: ‘A tongue-tempest', as recorded by Sir Henry, ‘that “never rises to blows or bloodshed” (Ocington, 1690)'.

+banyan-tree
: See
banyan
.

+barbican
: ‘A sewer- or water-pipe,' as Sir Henry correctly notes, ‘that leads back to the Bab-Khana of Kanpur'.

bargeer (*The Glossary)
: ‘It is my conviction that this derivative of the marathi word for “soldier” made its way into
The Glossary
not through the battlefield but the nursery, being employed, as it was in Bengali, to strike terror into the hearts of
budzat butchas
.'

bas! (*Roebuck)
: The Lieutenant glosses this as the Laskari equivalent of the English ‘avast', but Neel believed it to be a sibling rather than a synonym, both being derived, in his view, from the Arabic
bass
, ‘enough'.

+ bawhawder / bahaudur / bahadur
: ‘This once sought-after Mughal title, meaning literally “brave”, took on a derisive undertone in English. Sir Henry is right in noting that it came to “denote a haughty or pompous personage, exercising his brief authority with a strong sense of his own importance”. Curiously, no taint of the derisive attached to this term where it would have been most apt – that is, in its application to the East India Company, which was known in Hind. as Company
Bawhawder
'.

+bayadère
: ‘Those who believe that Portuguese was a language of the decks and had little to contribute to the bedroom would do well to note that
bayadère
is not a French but of Portuguese derivation (from
bailadera
– “dancing girl”).' This was the euphemism that
BeeBees
used to speak of the women their husbands referred to as
buy-em-dears
– a motley collection of
cunchunees
,
debbies
,
dashies
,
pootlies
,
rawnees
,
Rum-johnnies
and nautch-girls. Curiously, the word “mistress”, which has a close Hind. cognate (by way of the Portuguese
mestre
) was never used in its English sense, it being considered quite unusual for a man to share his bed with his
mistri
'.

+BeeBee/bibi
: ‘Why this word prevailed over its twin,
begum
, in being applied to the more eminent white wives of Calcutta, remains unexplained. In recent times, it has fallen out of favour and is now applied ironically to European women of low rank: this happened because there came a time when the great
BeeBees
began to insist on being called
ma'am-sahibs
. Their employees shortened the prefix to “mem-” (and occasionally, in the case of the most
bawhawder
of the tribe, to “man-”)'.