The Adventure of English (31 page)

The Cockney rhyming slang was identified by Henry Mayhew in 1851. “The new style of cadgers' cant is done all on the rhyming principle.” It became the most relished characteristic of Cockney; its wit and innuendo still give it a life. “Trouble and strife” — wife; “apples and pears” — stairs; “a bull and a cow” — row. And more recently: “Mars Bar” — scar; “Tommy Steele” — eel; “Hong Kong” — pong, and a long tail of ruder rhymes for “D'Oyley Carte,” “Elephant and Castle,” “Raspberry Tart”; “Becks and Posh” — nosh. There are what might at a stretch be called classics such as those with which the paragraph began and “Adam and Eve” — believe; “Dicky Dirt” — shirt; “frog and toad” — road; “tea-leaf” — thief; “whistle and flute” — suit. On it goes still: “dog and bone” — phone; “boat race” — face; “elephant's trunk” — drunk; “jam jar” — car.

As the Victorian age hit its stride and fired on all cylinders, including the censorious, public language, mainly innuendo and slang, became an enjoyably risky way to tweak noses. Marie Lloyd, racy star of the music hall, whose catchphrase was “a little of what you fancy does you good,” outraged the Watch Committee when she sang “she sits among the cabbages and peas.” Miss Lloyd changed it to “she sits among the cabbages and leeks” and there was no problem.

Coded gay content came in. “Earnest” was slang of the period for “gay.”
The Importance of Being Earnest,
Oscar Wilde's play, takes on another strand of meaning. There are learned theses about this play which deconstruct it as a perfectly disguised description of the place of homosexuals in Victorian society. Sometimes there seems to be hard proof. Jack and Algernon consume muffins: apparently the brighter portion of the audience would know that “a muffin” was also a gay man, especially a cute one.

It is tempting to see the nineteenth century as the apotheosis of industrialisation with its multitude of interlocking functions and skills being matched by an increase in classes and in the niceties of a language that had taken yet another great leap forward. Accent and language became a game, sometimes cruel, of fine distinctions which seemed intended to put everyone in his or her place. Like an industrial plant, nothing would be left to chance. George Bernard Shaw put it very clearly in his preface to
Pygmalion.
His Irish prejudice and his satirical scorn only lightly tincture a fair view of the truth of that time.

Professor Higgins saw English as still the captive of its original tribes. “You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.”

And yet, floating above it all is a language which is not Standard Pronunciation, nor anything like Ideal Pronunciation, but it is nevertheless, as Shaw implies in a letter, the ruling tongue. “It is perfectly easy,” he wrote, “to find a speaker whose speech will be accepted in every part of the English-speaking world as valid 18 carat oral currency . . . if a man pronounces in that way, he will be eligible as far as speech is concerned for the post of Lord Chief Justice, Chancellor of Oxford, Archbishop of Canterbury, Emperor, President or Toast Master at the Mansion House.”

It was that eighteen-carat voice, on the back of unparalleled industrial wealth, which took English yet more intensively over the globe.

I
n India, English met a unique challenge. It faced a huge empire, initially far greater than its own, a country of intense and elaborate civilisations and one which boasted about two hundred languages, many of them — Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Kashmiri and Urdu for example — long and deeply established. They had no need of another language whether for literature or scholarship and certainly not for conversation, trade, religion and gossip. One of the most astonishing feats in this chapter in the adventure of English is not so much that English, the foreign language, was taken on board as a result of imperial rule but that it outlasted imperial rule, that still today in a country of a thousand million people, about three hundred million have some sort of familiarity with it and forty or fifty million speak and write it (often as a second or third language) to the highest level, as the last two or three generations of prize-winning novels from India attest. Yet it was hated, and resented, and India's greatest politician, Gandhi, believed that it “enslaved” the people of India.

It is thought that the first English speaker to reach India arrived in 882 from the court of Alfred the Great. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reports that his emissary went there bearing gifts for the tomb of St. Thomas, the apostle who is said to have taken Christianity to India and beyond. The story shows the accessibility of India in days when the sea was the key to trade and the reach of Alfred.

Trade contacts grew in the early Middle Ages, bringing to English Asian words, from India, often through Latin and Greek, which absorbed them and passed them on. Pepper, for instance, Greek “peperi,” Latin “piper,” Sanskrit “pippali”; Sanskrit is the deep background for words such as “beryl,” “ginger,” “sugar,” “musk,” “sandal,” “camphor” and “opal.” These were just the beginning of a growing procession of words which travelled back west with merchants and sailors; familiar words, many of which we could swear had “always” been English. Like “Blighty,” “bungalow,” “cheroot,” “loot,” “thug,” “pundit,” “calico,” “chintz,” “cot,” “dungarees,” “toddy,” “dekko,” “gymkhana,” “jodhpurs,” “polo,” “bangle,” “jungle,” “cushy,” “khaki,” “swastika,” “pyjamas,” “catamaran.” Whole styles of life of fears for it are encapsulated in that modest selection.

What was to become a close and fierce relationship between the English and India started on the last day of the year 1600: it sounds as if it ought to carry a symbolic punch but perhaps it is merely and by chance an easily remembered date. Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to a few merchants, giving them a monopoly over the rich spice markets of the East. The richest market of all was in Bantam in Java, where pepper, spices, silks and aromatic woods could be bought. The English hoped they could increase their profits by taking not just cash but also Indian fabrics to trade in Bantam. It would be too crude to speak of India as a stopover in these early days but it was at first much more of a launch pad than a target.

The fabrics grew in commercial importance. But the English had to work to gain the trade. They wormed their way in. Those merchant adventurers were met by potentates of a complex oriental society, and however glorious their Queen in London and fabled their victory over the massively superior Spanish Armada, however dazzling Shakespeare and powerful the philosophies of law and natural science, in India the English had to learn and obey a rigid power system whose stratifications of status made Elizabethan and Jacobean England look like beginners.

They had to learn to be obsequious. It was the only way to trade. Their problem can be seen in the titles they met — titles, from some of India's many languages, which included Persian: “maharajah,” “mandarin,” “nabob,” “subahdar,” “sahib,” “sirdar,” “sheikh,” “sultan,” “caliph,” “pasha,” “imam,” “shah,” “mogul,” “khan,” “rajah,” “emir,” “nizam,” “nawab,” “padishah,” “lama,” “seyyid,” “sultana,” “maharani.” This was a country which knew about hierarchy. The English had to kow-tow; and they did. Far from imposing their glittering language, they had to learn Bengali and Hindi; and they did. Instead of gunpowder and the sword, they used soft words and negotiation. They buttered up the Moghuls in their own Persian tongue. They begged. They persisted. Eventually they were allowed to set up trading posts at Madras, Bombay and in the opulence of Surat. John Ovington, the East India Company chaplain, wrote in delight in 1689:

However much they may have despised their own methods, the East India Company merchants had bowed and smiled and held on and finally achieved their aims. As yet, though, the English language did not register in the rich and ancient cultures of the Indian subcontinent.

But they had staked a claim. And if one place could be said to mark the real beginning of what was to be, by whatever standards, a remarkable advance of the English language, it was a tiny village on the banks of the River Houghly, a village called Kolkata, renamed Calcutta by the English merchants and now once again called Kolkata. They established a factory there and from that factory grew one of the world's greatest trading cities. English found a bridgehead in Calcutta and even today, wherever you walk, you are surrounded by street signs, slogans, advertisements, all manner of vivid print claiming your attention in several languages, one of the most prominent being English.

What the traders found was that the high-quality, brightly coloured, printed and woven fabrics were an instant success in Britain and could and did make fortunes. The relationship between Britain and India was woven through these fabrics. But though trade prospered, English was still peripheral. English-speaking employees at the end of the seventeenth century were still numbered in hundreds, creeping slowly towards a thousand or two. If they wanted to conduct business they had to learn local languages. Here we have an example of English people abandoning their language for that of others and yet bringing back from the relationships words and phrases which would eventually be embedded in their own native tongue. They were encouraged not only to talk like Indians but to take local wives, adopt local habits and wear local dress. And they did. The company's clerks or writers, as they were known, were forced to take on a great number of local business terms, words, rather surprisingly given the takeover nature of the language of commerce, that only very rarely became familiar in Britain.

Words like “batta” — a travelling allowance; “bigha” — an area of land; “cadi” — a civil judge; “chit” — a note or letter (as in “chitty”); “crore” — ten million; “dawk” — mail; “firman” — imperial order; “hashish” — a native drug, which like chitty also made it west; “jowar” — tall millet; “jumma” — an assessment for land revenue; “kotwal” — police officers; “rahdaree” — toll, duty; “sunnud” — deed or grant; “zemindary” — system of land tenure. Most of these came from Urdu and Hindi, sometimes from Persian or Arabic.

English, you might say, was biding its time.

That came in the eighteenth century with an accumulation of events which led to the spectacular and unthinkable collapse of the Mughal Empire. The British navy defeated the French. The East India Company set up its own private army and by 1765 the Mughals formally recognised the company's control of the administration and finances of Bengal, the richest province in India.

The boot was now on the other foot. The British no longer had to beg, worm, flatter, kow-tow. Yet, at first, in what seems a hopeful interregnum, the blinkers of imperial destiny were not put on. They still married local wives, still adapted to local ways and still maintained a true fascination with India. As Governor-General of Bengal, for instance, Warren Hastings actively promoted the study of Indian languages and traditions.

And it was at this time that the deep-rooted connection between Indian languages and English was uncovered by an amateur scholar, a Supreme Court judge, Sir William Jones, mentioned at the outset of this book, but worth putting in context here. Sir William Jones founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal to encourage enquiry into the “History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia.” He was a one-man representation of the British Enlightenment. When he began to look at the ancient language of Sanskrit — which had been a written language centuries before the Homeric epics — he had a Eureka moment and saw what was effectively a series of root connections between Sanskrit and other languages. The route had been through a distant parent language (which no longer existed) to other language groups. Thus, “pitar,” Sanskrit for “father,” was “pater” in Latin, “fadar” in Gothic, “father” in English; the Sanskrit “bhrater,” Latin “frater,” German “Bruder,” Irish “braithair,” English “brother.” Even the forms of verbs look similar: English “am,” Old English “eom,” Gothic “im,” Latin “sum,” Greek “eimi,” Sanskrit “asmi.” English “is,” Gothic “ist,” Latin “est,” Greek “esti,” Sanskrit “asti.” His insights became one of the chief foundation stones for modern philology. Sir William's work shows, I think, the great respect the small intruding country had at that time for the awesome mass of a subcontinent of which it was edging into control.

The respect of the English can still be seen in 1805 in a letter written by Martha Sherwood, wife of a captain in the 53rd Foot. There is a mixture of showing off and a determination to get on top of her job. There is also an almost scholarly fascination with the complexities of this exotic new culture.

That last sentence is endearing. Mrs. Sherwood then goes on to name and describe five more servants for what must have been a comparatively modest captain's house. The respectful curiosity is still there: so is the respect. But it must have been heady stuff. The British were now allowed to behave like mini-Mughals and they soon eased themselves into the glamour and power of it all. It was their time to shine. A minute number of people now governed a place of such tradition and history and size that it could not but encourage delusions of superiority.

This is not the place to debate the commercial daring and military prowess of the British and set it against the undoubted ruthlessness and miseries inflicted. Keeping to the track of English, though, it needs to be noted that as the nineteenth century opened up, the British increasingly adopted that air of superiority: going native, adopting Indian customs (though not Indian words and phrases), revering its culture, largely dropped out of fashion. Perhaps, given the psychological weight of the new situation, this was essential for the security, inner and outer, of such a perilously small number of foreigners on a continent seething with warriors and intelligence. Or power corrupted as ever.

The superior position was justified through religion. In 1813, the Foreign Secretary, William Wilberforce, told Parliament that it must change what he called India's “dark and bloody superstition for the genial influence of Christian light and truth.” Leaving aside the question which it begs, the result was missionaries, missionary schools and, to our purpose, the first organised drive to take English to substantial numbers of Indians. This was the spirit of the Raj, a word taken from Hindi meaning kingdom or rule. The British would rule and English was called up, the language was enlisted.

There was controversy but a small but influential group of Indians were impressed by western thought — particularly in science and technology. English, they reasoned, would give them access to such knowledge and though not superior to Hindi, Persian and Sanskrit, might be learned alongside them. Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) was the most articulate spokesman for this group. His letter of 1823 reads, in part, when he learned that money would be available for the instruction of Britain's Indian subjects: