Take ‘Chhodo kal ki baatein,’ the Usha Khanna-Prem Dhawan song from the 1961 film Hum Hindustani sung with nation-building gusto by Mukesh. ‘Let go of yesterday’s things’ is a fine sentiment that should be heeded even today if one is to move forward without getting stuck in the quagmire of correcting ‘historical wrongs’. But every time I encounter ‘chhodo,’ I can’t help but break into a lonesome guffaw at how a person with no knowledge of Hindi would pronounce the Hindi word in its Romanised spelling.
Similar potential casualties include ‘ankhon’ (eye), ‘kapda’ (clothing), ‘tha’ (was). These words rendered in letters of the English alphabet to the phonetically guided non-Hindi reader will read very differently from ‘aakho,’ ‘kapra’ and ‘thha’. Usually, no harm is done, and some fun is had.
A special 2015 Bigg Boss episode had Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Kajol in a game that involved one of them wearing noise-cancelling headphones and guessing what the other person was saying by only reading his or her lips. The word ‘chudiya’ (bangles) created scandalous confusion for the headphone-covered Salman.
My question is simple. I understand that the heavy ‘r+d’ sound of ड़ requires something stronger, something more palatable – as in with the tongue striking the roof of the mouth more forcefully – than when engaging in a simple (r). But do you really want to keep misguiding non-Hindi-speakers into believing that ‘badiya’ (excellent) bears the same sound as ‘India’ – and not ‘barhiya’?
That such phonetic deception can also create untoward, unnecessary and unintended ruckus was recently on display at Ravenshaw University in Cuttack, Odisha. There were objections from some pronounced fanatics on the screening of Satyajit Ray’s 1955 classic Pather Panchali as part of the university’s film festival.
Apart from apparently having problems with the film depicting a poverty-stricken India – a grouse that was shared by Nargis Dutt, a parliamentarian when the film was first released, when she criticised Ray for ‘exporting poverty’ – these cutting-edge Cuttack critics, apparently unaware of Bengali pronunciation, read ‘pachali’ (ballad) as ‘Panchali’ (one from Panchal, another name for Droupadi). Thereby, rendering the title of Ray’s film as ‘Droupadi of the Road’, not the best of epithets for Mrs Pandav(s). The misunderstanding was sorted out, and along with Charulata – the other Ray film that Ravenshaw’s ravenous considered to be ‘borderline incest and suggestive of extra-marital affairs, downplaying of (sic) role of press in India’s freedom struggle’ – Pather Pachali was allowed to run. But that’s neither my point here nor my concern.
My grudge is against the way many non-English Indian words are spelt in English. I know, I know. Much ‘nuance’ is lost when the nasal twang of the Bengali ‘pnachali’ is lost without the ‘n’, or the baritone thud of ‘Bade’ in ‘Bade Ghulam Ali’ is sacrificed without the ‘d’. But spelling it in English as ‘pachali’ and ‘barey’ beats the complete anguish of derailing the words altogether – such as pronouncing ‘Bade’ as in ‘Marquis de Sade’ or rhyming with ‘jade’.
In Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, a Portuguese traveller visiting Vijayanagar is unable to pronounce the city’s name.
‘Welcome to Vijayanagar,’ Pampa Kampana said. She pronounced the v almost like a b, which was a thing that sometimes happened.
‘Bizana…?’ repeated Domingo Nunes. ‘I’m sorry. What did you call it?’
‘First say vij-aya, victory, Pampa Kampana said. Then say nagar, city. It’s not so difficult. Nag-gar. Vijayanagar. Victory City.’
‘My tongue can’t make those sounds,’ Domingo Nunes confessed.’
Ultimately, the foreigner makes his best effort – ‘Bisnaga’. And it’s Bisnaga that sticks as the city’s name. Not too many people are as liberal – and delighted – about mispronunciations as Vijayanagar’s/Bisnaga’s creator, Pampa Kampana is. Not in Odisha (phonetically corrected from the earlier slide into ‘Orissa’ in 2011 by an Act of Parliament). Not in the English city of Gloucester, which for some bizarre reason the English pronounce as ‘Gloster‘.
