Miss Prism, the governess in The Importance of Being Earnest, tells young Cecily: “The chapter on the fall of the rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational.” Perhaps Miss Prism had been reading the surprise bestseller of her day, Hobson-Jobson.
This discursive glossary of Anglo-Indian words and phrases came out in 1886, nine years before Wilde’s play. Its editors speculated that when people exclaimed “I don’t give a damn!”, they unknowingly invoked an Indian coin – the dam – worth one sixteen-hundredth of a rupee. A likely story.
Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary remarked that the hypothesis was “ingenious, but has no basis in fact”. But this example, to be fair, is uncharacteristic of the strange and wonderful world of Hobson-Jobson. Normally it is spot on, and the OED borrowed 500 of its citations. The book is so beguiling because it misses no opportunity for a ramble in the jungles (a word of Sanskrit origin) and godowns (“warehouses”, a Malay word) of India and beyond.
Hobson-Jobson is a classic of British teamwork. Its editors, Yule and Burnell, should be as celebrated at Gilbert and Sullivan, Liddell and Scott or Fortnum and Mason. For Hobson-Jobson is a rare dictionary that can be read for pleasure, like an old edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
It bears strong marks of authorship, and to read it is to commune with the minds behind it, vividly aware of the realities of India in the 19th century. The new edition now published by Oxford (£14.99) gives about half of the expanded edition of 1903, but no entry chosen for inclusion has been cut. This is important, just as it was a blessed act of self-denial for William Crooke, the 1903 amplifier, not to mess around with the original but to put all additions in square brackets. So we can still enjoy the lively character of its principal author Henry Yule (1820-89).
Yule’s father served in the East India Company, for a spell under Sir David Ochterlony, who had a harem of 13 Indian wives (a kind of multiculturalism before the invention of the term). His son’s first posting was to a remote region of Bengal inhabited by people of Mongolian descent. He later explored Burma and wrote on the geography of the Oxus valley.
He was still only 42 when he retired from Army service in India and took his wife to live in Sicily, where he edited a monumental edition of Marco Polo. In 1872 he met, at the India Office Library in London, A C Burnell, an astonishingly learned Indian civil servant 20 years his junior, who supplied the scholarly linguistic element in Hobson-Jobson. He knew Sanskrit, Arabic and Tamil, of course, but also Tibetan, Coptic and Kawi (which, they say, is like Old Javanese). Poor Burnell died aged 42 before Hobson-Jobson was published.
The title for the glossary on which they worked for 14 years was Yule’s idea – a label more intriguing than informative. Yule explained that a friend of his had once published a book called Three Essays and wondered why it sold so badly. Yule knew better than to call his book A Glossary.
What does Hobson-Jobson mean? It is not the name of a language but an example of how a foreign word is adapted to the sound-system of the language that incorporates it. British settlers in India heard Muslims in processions for the holy day of Muharram (in memory of Hasan and Husain, Mohammed’s grandsons) repeatedly crying out the Arabic: “Y Hasan! Y Husayn!”
As Hobson-Jobson’s own citations shows, this exclamation was variously interpreted by colonialists as “Hosseen Gosseen”, “Hossy Gossy”, “Hossein Jossen” and “Jaksom Baksom”. Oddly enough, Yule and Burnell couldn’t find a literary source for the form they were familiar with, “Hobson-Jobson”. It was a triumph of their continuator Crooke to unearth, in the Oriental Sporting Magazine for 1829, this: “The folks makes sich a noise, firing and troompeting and shouting 'Hobson Jobson, Hobson Jobson’.”
Not only exotic words are explored. I didn’t believe, until I checked, that the word “dinghy” was of Indian origin. I’d have thought it Dutch. “Tea” we knew was foreign, like the stuff itself, but I hadn’t followed it to its Chinese roots before, and had no suspicion that a kind of tea called congou derives from the Chinese “kung-fu”, meaning “work”. (Nor did I realise that Widow Twankey in the pantomime took her name from another variety of tea.)
So the reader is led through a cabinet of curiosities, from “calico”, “chintz” and “gingham” to “coffee”, “rice” and “ginger”. Before you know it, it’s time for “tiffin”. Yule happily calls papaya or pawpaw a “nasty fruit”, but quotes enthusiasts for the durian (once compared to “carrion in custard”) assuring us that “to eat durians is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience”.
Not quite all human life is here. Salman Rushdie complained at a lack of terms of abuse, which reveal another side of British life in India. He noted the absence of “kaffir”, but he was looking in the wrong place, for it is listed under the spelling “caffer”: “The word is properly the Arabic kafir, 'an infidel, an unbeliever in Islam’. As the Arabs applied this to pagan negroes, among others, the Portuguese at an early date took it up in this sense.”
Hobson-Jobson does not demonstrate that there is such a thing as “world English”, despite efforts by some recent dictionaries to pretend there is. It shows that English is adapted very differently in different places. Hobson-Jobson is part of the history of how the Englishes of India came to be.