You Could Look It Up (36 page)

The
Haruma-wage
’s influence was limited, because just thirty copies were produced—the Japanese definitions had to be added by hand, and mass production was impossible. An abridged version, the
Yakken
, followed in 1810, available in a hundred copies; it was printed in movable type and featured about twenty-seven thousand headwords. A new project, also based on Halma, was prepared in Nagasaki by the chief of the Dutch enclave, H. Doeff and was completed in 1833. The so-called
Dufu Haruma
or
Nagasaki Haruma
was more influential than its Edo predecessor, and more useful because it featured sentences showing the words in context.
5
The book was finally published in 1855–58, and it was the last significant bilingual dictionary during the closed Sakoku era. In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry’s warships forced Japan to open to Western trade, and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 broke down the last of the barriers.

Haruma-wage
linked two immense cultures, but the number of people who had any reason to care about this work at the time was tiny. A trivial number of Dutch traders were allowed into Japan, and a similarly trivial number of Japanese translators were permitted to interact with them. But another variety of imperial relation comes at the opposite
end of the spectrum. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, British traders and troops controlled the whole of South Asia (known as India before partition). Thousands of British civil servants came into direct contact with millions of Indians, and with the ripple effect, hundreds of millions of people on two continents were influenced by the Raj. And a dictionary played a major role in connecting the parties.

Henry Yule was born in East Lothian, Scotland, in 1820. When his father, an orientalist who knew Persian and Arabic and worked for the East India Company, was stationed in Bengal, Henry followed. He got a close-up view of Anglo-Indian culture: his father’s boss, Sir David Ochterlony, had “gone native” to the extent of marrying thirteen Indian wives. Henry Yule entered the East India Company’s Military College in 1837, and two years later he was appointed to the Bengal Engineers. Between 1840 and 1862 he worked in Indian railways and irrigation canals; at forty-two he retired with the rank of colonel and moved to Sicily. There he became interested in travel as a means of exploring other cultures. His publication of an English translation of Marco Polo’s
Travels
earned him a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society, and he “so completely identified himself with his favourite traveller” that he would sign articles he wrote “M
ARCUS
P
AULUS
V
ENETUS
or M.P.V.”
6

After his retirement he resolved to create a glossary of Anglo-Indian terms. In or around 1872, while working in the India Office Library in London, Yule met a thirty-two-year-old senior Indian civil servant named Arthur Coke Burnell. Burnell began his career as a student of Arabic and had become proficient in Sanskrit, Tamil, Tibetan, Coptic, Kawi, Javanese, Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian. It turned out that Burnell was also working on an Anglo-Indian dictionary, so, rather than produce competing works, the two decided to combine their energies.

They planned to cover “etymological, historical, and geographical” subjects, but they found it difficult to draw boundaries. Though their book,
Hobson-Jobson
, is in theory concerned only with the language, in reality it takes in many subjects related to the Raj. “Anglo-Indian” is a strange category: there is no such language as “Indian,” so it is inherently multicultural.
Hobson-Jobson
was concerned with the English
language as spoken in what was then India. It includes words from Hindi, Tamil, and Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Malay, Marathi, Chinese, and even Portuguese.

The two worked together for a decade, Yule usually in England, Burnell in Madras. Burnell, victim of a constitution that did not respond well to the Indian climate, died of cholera and pneumonia in 1882, at the age of just forty-two, but Yule kept at it for another six years. A year before
Hobson-Jobson
appeared in 1886, a rival work, George Clifford Whitworth’s
Anglo-Indian Dictionary
, came out. But
Hobson-Jobson
was more than twice the length of Whitworth’s dictionary, and the range and depth of Yule’s and Burnell’s learning, combined with the quirkiness of their interests, left the competition far behind.

The strange title was Yule’s idea. A friend who had published a book with the drab title
Three Essays
was disappointed with sales, and Yule wanted to avoid that fate. He thought of the Arabic phrase “Ya Hasan! Ya Hosain!,” a mourning cry used in Shia Islam, which was variously anglicized as “Hosseen Gosseen,” “Hossy Gossy,” “Hossein Jossen,” and “Jaksom Baksom.” The version that caught on borrowed a pair of stock names, “Hobson” and “Jobson,” used in the nineteenth century to stand in for unknown or concealed names, a paired version of “John Doe.”
7
The process by which foreign loanwords get twisted into new forms to suit the sound system of the receiving language has since come to be called “the law of Hobson-Jobson.”

Many words in the dictionary have to do with colonial administration—only natural, given the nature of the Raj—including both words originally Indian (
peshwa
, “chief minister of the Mahratta power”;
dewaun
, “the head financial minister”) and words originally English (
settlement
, “an estate or district is said to be
settled
when … the Government has agreed … for a fixed sum to be paid”;
civilian
, “covenanted European servants of the E[ast] I[ndia] Company”). Other words reveal social relations:
sahib
is “The title by which, all over India, European gentlemen, and it may be said Europeans generally, are addressed, and spoken of, when no disrespect is intended,” and a
cooly
is “A hired labourer, or burden-carrier; especially, a labourer induced to emigrate from India, or from China, to labour in the plantations … sometimes under circumstances … which have brought the cooly’s condition very near to slavery.”

The list of words from Indian languages that made their way into standard English is long, and
Hobson-Jobson
reveals the pathway they took. Words for distinctively South Asian phenomena, such as
chutney
,
curry
,
guru
,
nirvana
,
pashmina
,
sari
, and
yoga
, are still associated in many minds with India. On the other hand, most English speakers have forgotten the Indian origins of words like
avatar
,
bungalow
,
cashmere
,
chintz
,
juggernaut
,
jungle
,
khaki
,
pariah
,
polo
,
pundit
,
typhoon
, and
veranda
. And to learn that words like
bangle
,
cummerbund
,
dinghy
,
dungarees
,
loot
,
shampoo
,
shawl
,
thug
, and
toddy
are all of Indian origin probably surprises everyone but etymologists. Conversely, English words have acquired new meanings in India.
Cheese
, for instance, came to mean “anything good, first-rate in quality, genuine, pleasant, or advantageous”; English
compass
developed into
kompáss
with a meaning expanded to take in all sorts of surveying instruments; and
ducks
was used as a “distinctive name for gentlemen belonging to the Bombay service.”

The longer entries in
Hobson-Jobson
are often the most enlightening. The article on
boy
includes extensive comments on the situations in which the term was considered appropriate;
snake-stone
(“a substance, the application of which to the part where a snake-bite has taken effect,
is supposed to draw out the poison”) drew on mythology, history, and medicine; and the entry for
India
filled pages—“A book,” the lexicographers say, “might be written on this name”—and should be included in any account of European attitudes toward South Asia. The entry for
home
is telling: “In Anglo-Indian and colonial speech this means England.” The first quotation from 1837 makes it clear: “
Home
always means England; nobody calls India
home
—not even those who have been here thirty years or more, and are never likely to return to Europe.” The article on
suttee
—“The rite of widow-burning;
i.e.
the burning of the living widow along with the corpse of her husband”—is one of the longest in the book; it combines a history of the practice with comparative anthropology, noting similar traditions in other faiths, and the quotations give a good account of how Europeans have understood it over the centuries.

An early review exulted that “ ‘Hobson-Jobson’ provides a practically inexhaustible supply of quaint and rare information, and the reader who grumbles at the heaviness of Oriental literature should find reason to moderate his complaint from a cursory inspection of its pages.”
8
Hobson-Jobson
is an impressively scholarly work; it is also, in the words of the poet Daljit Nagra, “a madly unruly and idiosyncratic work.”
9
The etymologies are notoriously digressive, rambling into anthropological anecdotes and speculation. The book ends up being a social history despite itself.

The occasional condescending entries do make one wince—the definition of
naukar-chaukar
, “the servants,” comes with this note: “one of those jingling double-barrelled phrases in which Orientals delight even more than Englishmen”—and sometimes the book engages in outright racism, using terms such as “barbarous display” and “ignorant natives” when discussing the Indians. But the more we examine the book, the more balanced, even enlightened, it becomes. Yule and Burnell took the trouble to get to know the languages and the cultures, and they believed they had much to learn about them. Every subsequent lexicographer of nonstandard English has been indebted to Yule and Burnell. James Murray (see chapter 18) read the book while it was still in proof, and the
Oxford English Dictionary
quotes
Hobson-Jobson
in nearly 150 entries, including citations for words such as
beri-beri
,
chit
,
nabob
, and
pundit
,
and there are probably hundreds more for which the
OED
editors borrowed without citation. A second edition, edited, expanded, and indexed by William Crooke, was published in 1903 and had greater influence than the first.

Plenty of writers have valued
Hobson-Jobson
. Rudyard Kipling admiringly called it “neither glossary, vocabulary, dictionary or anything else that may be described in one word, but simply—
Hobson-Jobson
.” For Anthony Burgess, it evoked the lost days of British India, and
India Ink
by Tom Stoppard—who spent part of his childhood in India—is riddled with allusions to the glossary. Amitav Ghosh praises
Hobson-Jobson
for revealing something about the way English was actually spoken in the nineteenth century: “I love dictionaries and have many, not just of English, but dictionaries of laskari and nautical language. If you read these dictionaries, it becomes perfectly clear that English people when they were living in India were certainly not speaking like Jane Austen or George Eliot. In fact, it is often said when these nabobs went back home to England, people couldn’t understand them.”
10
Salman Rushdie is also attentive to the influence of Indian speech patterns on the English when he calls
Hobson-Jobson
a “legendary dictionary” and views it as “eloquent testimony to the unparalleled intermingling that took place between English and the languages of India,”
11
though he complains that some offensive terms have been omitted from the modern abridgment.