“Chappatis Are what you need, my friend
‘Cos there aren’t Enough naans To go round!”
From The Antoinettenama by Bachchoo

Once again someone has cranked up the debate about the Indian national anthem illicitly, including the territory of Sind. It’s a trivial complaint. Tagore’s celebration of the everlasting (well, till the planet is hit by a meteor or the Sun implodes) geography of the subcontinent shouldn’t be tampered with despite the feeble objections of Pakistan.

Territories change hands. Sind was once part of the Persian Empire and was only annexed from the rule of the Mirs to British India in the 19th century. Territories come and go while Tagore’s poem takes the longer view. Pakistan should understand that we are aware of the anomaly but can’t do anything about it.
Not that words are sacred. New ones are certainly not!
My youngest daughter, who can discourse perfectly fluently on George Orwell or Shakespeare, imitates her peers by punctuating her social chit chat with “like”. It annoys.
With language, though alas not with morals, persistent misuse gets elevated into usage. “Hopefully” used to be an adverb. It now means that the user hopes for a particular outcome. I can’t bring myself to say the word but have given up the fight against it.
Using temperature to describe people, fashions or situations is so widespread that it has to be acknowledged and I do — How cool is that? A band or actor is said to be “hot” and that makes vague sensory sense. A woman is described as a “hottie” because she affects the temperatures of beholders.
Even so, some accepted usage still jars. A common computer virus is labelled a “Trojan”. The word derives from Homer’s Iliad in which the Greeks hide inside a wooden horse, pretend to withdraw from their siege of Troy and return in the night when the Trojans have pulled the horse into their fortress city. Troy is infiltrated and destroyed.
To make sense of the analogy, the virus should surely be called a Greek? Or even a Trojan Horse? (If any anti-viral software empires think of using the Dhondy Correction, please send the copyright cheque to the usual address.) Has this occurred to anyone else? Or am I being a bit pedantic? Oh dear.
Nevertheless, since I’ve started I’ll finish. Another usage, slightly more obscure, that gets my goat — or even both my goats – is the misuse of the word “subaltern”. I grew up in an Indian Army household and read a lot of Kipling and other British Army stories. The word “subaltern” always meant — and several dictionaries tell me it still means — an officer of a rank lower than a Captain. This would be a Lieutenant or a Second Lieutenant.
Reading a review of my recent book of short stories (please note that I have nothing to say about the review — it’s very bad form to argue with or reply to these) I came across the word. The reviewer wrote that she was going to quote from the dialogue or language I attributed in one of my stories to the “Subaltern”.
I couldn’t for the life of me remember having included any subalterns or other Army ranks in the entire book. I read the quoted passage. This “subaltern” turned out to be a character I had created who was a poor boy picked up on the streets of Mumbai and jailed for selling bootleg fiction at traffic lights. He had no ambition to join the Army, leave aside its officer corps.
I have come across this peculiar, pretentious and frankly unevocative usage of the Army term before. I am told that poseurs at American universities have used it to describe poor people. A little research among academic friends tells me that the term was first used by Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist writer. I have always assumed that Gramsci, some of whose works I have read, wrote in Italian. His word for poor people, downtrodden people or those who he imagines are not normally portrayed in literature, must have been mistranslated by some fool as “subaltern”. Why it was then adopted by reviewers is hard to explain. Would the poorer characters in Chaucer or in Shakespeare (think of Nick Bottom and the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) or the hundreds that throng Dickens’ work be labelled “Subalterns?”
All very confusing.
It goes without saying that when Indians or Pakistanis write in English they have to transliterate the language of some characters who would not in the normal course of life speak it. So the Indian writer in English, be he Salman Rushdie or V.S. Naipaul, has to invent an idiom to represent the Marathi, Tamil or whatever. It is perfectly legitimate for a critic to say that the transliteration or the representation of the lilt and idiom of such representative dialogue is superb or unconvincing.
My own humble contribution to such a judgment is that very many of the Indian writers in English I have read are cloth-eared.
Their representation in English of characters who don’t speak it is sometimes stereotypical in the manner of Peter Sellers and sometimes just grotesque.
The writer who did it brilliantly and still stands out for this achievement was Rudyard Kipling. If you don’t accept that, read the scene in the railway carriage from Kim again and repent or marvel or both.