Epithets, with love?

No one missed the contemptuous inflection when Narendra Modi, poised for his electoral hat-trick, asked rhetorically why the Congress hadn’t declared “Ahmed Miyan” its chief ministerial candidate. He did not use the surname of the Congress president’s political adviser because there wouldn’t have been any sting in it. Patel can be both Hindu and Muslim.

Hindus and Muslims have many rude epithets for each other, not usually aired in mixed company. Miyan is not one of them. In itself, it’s perfectly innocuous. Emperor Akbar bestowed the “miyan” honorific, indicating a learned man, on Tansen, the noted musician. In certain Muslim circles today, miyan is a term of affection and respect. But who uses it, how and when makes all the difference. It’s unlikely Modi was comparing Ahmed Patel with Tansen.

Similarly, “chacha” is a non-denominational term for uncle among Hindi speakers, witness the popular comic character Chacha Chaudhary. But Hindi and Urdu overlap in rural Bengal where “chacha” is identified with Muslims. One of the mysteries of my childhood in Calcutta was an immensely dignified but impecunious ageing Hindu gentleman who was called “Rajen Chacha” behind his back. Gradually, I pieced together the story. As a zamindar in East Bengal, Rajen Chowdhury once had to adjudicate between disputing Hindu and Muslim peasants. He had supported the latter whereupon the former dubbed him Rajen Chacha. It was like calling a liberal white in America’s Deep South a “nigger-lover”. East Bengal had vanished. So had zamindaris. Rajen Chowdhury was an impoverished refugee in another country. But the nickname stuck.

One of Modi’s publicists — a media cham

cha you might say — once referred scathingly to “lads in lungis”. No further identification was necessary. Questioned, he would have said men of all religions wear lungis. Imprecision and innuendo are the shields of cowards “willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike”.

Journalists are not alone in leaving themselves an escape hatch in case they are challenged. Politicians do it all the time, especially legislators who are bound by House rules and a presiding officer’s discipline. When a Lok Sabha member was reprimanded for saying a fellow MP wasn’t human he promptly changed it to “he belongs to some species other than mine.” The man was clever but not clever enough. His second phrase allowed other MPs to decide what species he himself belonged to.

Abusive language — no matter how ingeniously packaged —

In certain Muslim circles today, miyan is a term of affection and respect. But who uses it, how and when makes all the difference...

always reflects more on the speaker than on the target. It betrays his biases and prejudices. A Muslim may bestow an endearing miyan on a co-religionist, but when others do so, the intention usually is to emphasise an identity that the speaker clearly considers derogatory.

Other words convey the same purpose. You know, for instance, that a political commentator who mentions “Rahul bhaiyya” is itching to say “Rahul baba” which is more explicitly disparaging. Whether tinged with pink on the left or swathed in saffron on the right, the commentator is a seasoned Congress-baiter. But he is too sophisticated to indulge in outright racism by speaking of “Rahul Vinci” or “Antonio Maino Gandhi”.

The Indian right — if that’s what it is — indulges most often in these semantic vulgarisms but doesn’t enjoy a monopoly. Everybody knew why the late Chandra Shekhar dubbed a particular politician a “Stepney minister”. The future Prime Minister thought him redundant.

I often wonder where the word “babu” fits into this debate. Bengalis are not alone in treating it as a term of respect. India’s first President was “Rajendra Babu” to intimates. In South India it meant “Sir, My lord, your Honour”, according to scholars. “Baboo Dheep Narain” was a 19th-century Raja of Benares’ brother. The British gave the word a derogatory flavour. Lord Lytton called Englishmen, whom long residence in India had deEuropeanised, “White Baboos”. That was like “Rajen Chacha” and the “nigger-lovers” of America’s Deep South.

Babu came to stand for an emasculated Indian clerk with a smattering of English who was both servile and bombastic. The English also used the word as a subtle instrument of discrimination like Modi’s Ahmed Miyan. Any list of names during colonial times — guests at an official reception or contributors to a public charity — revealed the nuanced hierarchy of the Raj. Leaving aside the titled few, Brits on the list had Esq. after their names (short for esquire, signifying a landed gentleman). So did untitled Anglicised Indian barristers and members of the Indian Civil Service. But lesser Indians had to be content with the prefix babu. A babu was an Indian who hadn’t made it to sahibdom.

That distinction survives. “There are no babus here!” a colleague of mine retorted indignantly when someone added the word to his first name. Peons and durwans, impeccable arbiters of rank and fashion instinctively know and acknowledge the difference. But I can’t for the life of me understand why our English-language newspapers have decided that a government servant, irrespective of rank, is a babu, and the bureaucracy is babudom. Either they are slavishly imitating what they imagine in their ignorance was British practice, or the press isn’t English-language at all. It’s Hinglish language.

That brings me to something that has always puzzled me. There exists a letter from the ICS officer, historian and Congress president, R.C. Dutt, to the father of his childhood friend, B.L. Gupta, also of the ICS. It starts “Dear Babu Chandrashekar Gupta” and ends with the signature “R.C. Dutt”. The senior Gupta addresses his son’s lifelong friend as “Dear Mr Dutt.” Was Dutt condescending? Was Chandrashekhar Gupta ingratiating? Or were they merely observing the norms of the time?

I don’t know. But I do know that Modi’s deliberately slighting miyan bodes ill for communal harmony and social stability.