Several dozen words have been ‘looted’ from Indian tongues and paraded before the world as English—chappal, pyjamas, ginger, jungle, juggernaut, loot, bandicoot, curry and mulagatawny, to name a few. Then there are phrases like koi hai, which was once heard in planters’ clubs and officers’ messes and got morphed into a noun, but has gone out of use along with the Somerset Light Infantry.
Noun, yes; it’s mostly nouns that have been accepted into the king’s tongue. When it comes to verbs, English purists act snooty. Why else are they still not accepting ‘prepone’, a fine verb we thought could be administered as an antidote to the ‘postponing’ poison that has entered our babu-ruled lives? We developed the word in our great middle-class laboratory so to avoid the delays of our postponement culture in the government and the bureaucracy. We offered it free to the English-speaking world, but they have been spurning it as an ‘ugly Indianism’.
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