Regards, Ivan
Posted on 10/10/2002 4:18:28 PM PDT by MadIvan
The Empire has pejorated from hurrah-word to boo-word within a century. Lenin and Hitler helped to make imperialism a dirty word. Sanctimonious nincompoops have relegated Kipling from the premier division in the literary league tables to a joke in the McGonagall mobile phone division. Our honours system, with its gradations of the British Empire, is an embarrassing anachro-oxymoron. Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/ Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
This is not the politically correct time to be opening a museum of the British Empire. There are natives present. For God’s sake, don’t mention the Empire. It is divisive, not inclusive. It is racist and elitist. And it brings out the worst kind of chauvinism and arrogance in the lower orders — and the middling and upper orders, for that matter. This month we are opening the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum at Brunel’s Temple Meads railway station in Bristol. A good place for such an enterprise. From Cabot to slavery, from West African trade to Afro-Caribbean immigration, Bristolians have been engaged with the E-word. Already the PC brigade are condemning the museum as jingoistic and nostalgic, bogus and “very evil”. Bunkum. Like every human institution, the British Empire was a mixture of good and evil. But you cannot airbrush 500 years of history out of existence.
And what history! Of a less extensive empire, the national poet wrote that once Greece was captured, it captivated its wild Roman conquerors, and civilised them. So the Empire on which the sun never set provides remarkable history, magnificently displayed and narrated in our new museum.
Like it or not, the Empire is part of our heritage. And it is ingrained even more intimately than the memoirs, family ties, younger sons, pictures and treasures preserved in our Empire Museum. It lies just beneath the surface everywhere in our mutual treasure, the English language. English always was a mongrel language. Unlike any other, it was stretched between Greek and Latin, German and French. The languages and experience of Empire have enriched it, so that it has become the world language.
After America, India has the largest population of English-speakers in the world. Both former colonies have conquered the language of the Empire. I could write a piece arguing that the best writers of English today come from the Indian sub-continent. And the Booker Prize agrees. With their novels, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, V.S. Naipaul and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala demonstrate the extraordinary catalyst of Empire on the English language. It is a commonplace that India has inspired British writers of all genres, from the unfashionable Kipling and Forster to Masters and Harry Keating. The best sub-editors in the inky trade tend to be Indians, taught their grammar and prose style out of old-fashioned, prescriptive textbooks from the days when the Queen’s English meant the language of the Queen Empress, the Widow of Windsor.
The first contact of the English language with India is generally taken to be the letter that James I wrote in 1614 to the Emperor Jehangir, accrediting Sir Thomas Roe as Ambassador to the Mogul court. Hobson-Jobson to that. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in AD 883 Alfred sent envoys to India with gifts for the tombs of St Thomas and St Bartholomew. Since then the linguistic traffic has been rich. My little dictionary of common Indian words in English lists more than 2,000.
Some come from Portuguese: caste. Some from local languages through Portuguese: curry. Others come from indigenous languages, such as Hindi and Bengali: bungalow and chintz. Others come from Arabic and Persian, through north Indian languages: (movie) mogul. Others come from Sanskrit: guru. Others are calques from local languages: co-brother-in-law is somebody who is also a brother-in-law. Others are hybrids, adaptations and local idioms: Eve-teasing (harassing young women), tiffin-box (a lunch box).
Like British English, Indian English is a lake in which tigers can swim and mice can paddle. It ranges from the best formal writing to vernacular trash. And it is gratifying that we are both able to laugh at our English, as in Goodness Gracious Me! A satirical column in a Bombay paper called PSST regularly takes the psst out of Indian English, just as Monty Python takes it out of pukka British English. “Muss to be pheeling phie year hitch.” “What that is?” “Pheeling like to scratch.” The column regularly ends with the slogan “Boycott British Language”. For the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady, Hari Kumar and Gunga Din, are brothers and sisters under the skin.
The Empire strikes back with our new museum. But the Empire is always with us, bred in the bone and the tongue.
Regards, Ivan
Color Sergeant Bourne!
Sir!
They're bringing the Empire out of retirment! Let's off to make sure that the chaps vote Tory this time!
Very Good, sir....
Be Seeing You,
Chris
BTW, Kipling has been, is, and will be my favourite poet of all time.
/john
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.