By Kollengode S. Venkataraman (written in 2005)
Recently, during my emergency business trip to China in February, I had to transit through Beijing on my way to Qingdao (1-h flight from Beijing), situated along the shores of Yellow Sea facing Korea. I was forced to spend a night at the Holiday Inn at Lido, Beijing. This was the time of the Chinese New Year weekend, when the world sees the largest peacetime movement of people, with over 140 million Chinese of all backgrounds going to their hometowns to visit their extended families.
Thoroughly jet-lagged and weary after 19 hours in airplanes and an 11-hour time difference, I tried to revive myself with a shower. And then went to have dinner in the restaurant in the hotel lobby.
One more visible sign of China’s booming economy is a proliferation of American-style big-spread buffets in hotels catering to the diverse tastes of international business travelers. I went around the buffet table and condescendingly chuckled at the items “Cole Slow”, “Chocolate Mouse,” “Brownites.”, and “Gonjee.”
Also in the complex was an Indian restaurant appropriately called “The Taj.” I went over the obviously overpriced items in the menu card. One item that caught my attention on the Indian menu card on display was “Milaughutawney.”
The name traces its origin to the early British colonial days (18th century) in Southern India, in the Tamil Country. The name is the Englishmen corrupting the simple, colloquial Tamil word, Milagu-tanni, that they heard from the unpadh local foot-soldiers for the East India Company. With Milagu meaning black pepper and tanni meaning water, Milagu-tanni refers to a very light, spicy soup, containing tamarind, dal, cumin, crushed pepper, turmeric powder, mustard seeds…… The Tamil upper crust would call it milagu-rasam. It should have worked wonders for clearing up the sinuses the goras.
In typical Desi ishtyle, over the years, Indians have come to use not the original Indian names for many things that are authentically Indian, but the corrupted versions of the names given by the angrezi, thanks to our subservience to the colonial rulers.
Milaughutawney we see in Indian restaurant menu cards is one example. Another is coir. Coir is the English term for the rope made of coconut fibers taken from the coconut husk. The original name is kayiru in Tamil, or kayaru in Malayalam. Yet another is “gonjee” for gruel with broken rice kernels, for which the original term is the Tamil “kanji.” Catamaran is likewise a corruption of Tamil “kattu-maram” (literally “logs tied together” in Tamil, a device in which several 20′ to 30′ long logs of wood are tied together with kayiru. Kattumarams can still be spotted along the Tamil Nadu coastline used by local fishermen.
Sometimes, we have even taken the altogether Europeanized names for things very Indian. Tamarind is the English name for imli as it is called in most North Indian Languages, or puli in Tamil and Malayalam, and huli in Kannada. This is a quite common cooking item in India household.
Tamarind is again the Englishman’s corruption of the Arabic/Persian Tamar-i-Hind, which literally means, “dates of India.” For Arabs/Persians, the desi imli came close to the dates they were familiar with in color (dark brown pulp) with a hard seed inside. The taste was not sweet, but sweet-sour. In typical Desi ishtyle, anglicized desis use Tamarind, the Goras’ corrupted word for imli, which the Goras borrowed from Arabs/Persians.
Another word is the Persian/Urdu sharbat, pronounced shur-buth in the Indian subcontinent, a cold drink made with crushed ice and sweet syrup of different flavors. Europeans took the word from the French, who first took it from the Persians/Indians. The French made the word sound, well, very French.
The French swallow the “t” at the end of many words. Monet, the name of the famous French painter, is pronounced Monay. Filet, a boneless piece of meat, is likewise filay. Merlot, the type of wine is Merlow, and cabaret, buffet, and gourmet are cabaray, buffay, and gormay. So, the French, as they swallowed their serbet, also swallowed the “t” pronouncing it sorbay.
The English, and then the Yankee, to display their eclectic French gourmet tastes, would order for sorbay at the end of the dinner.
To complete the circle, we see native Desis, showing their anglicized, and now Americanized, sophistication, ordering their sorbay at the end of a 10-course dinner in upscale restaurants in India.
The grand prize for many educated “modern” Indians’ ignorance is they calling the decimal system of numbers “Arabic numerals.” Europeans called it Arabic numerals because they learned it from the Arabs. Arabs did not create the decimal system. Arabs learned it from Hindus. The Arabic name for the number system is “hinsa,” meaning, “of the Hindus.” The term “decimal” is as close as it can get to the Sanskrit “dashama-, with dasham meaning ten, as in Vijaya-dashami.
As this etymological exercise went through my mind, I wondered: If caucasians can corrupt the simple Kayaru to Coir, Sher bath to Sorbay, Milagu-tanni to Milaghutawny, and if desis can embrace the corrupted terminology and pronunciation as a sign of their sophistication, what is wrong with the Chinese corrupting coleslaw to Cole Slow, Chocolate Mousse to Chocolate Mouse, and the Brownies to Brownites!
As I was thinking along this line, I was embarrassed that I instantaneously and condescendingly chuckled on first seeing Chocolate Mouse and Cole Slow and Brownites on the buffet table in Beijing.
Mulling over this etymological exercise through my jet-lagged stupor, helped myself to the very Chinese Chocolate Mouse and Cole Slow, and Brownites at the buffet. •