Erroneous or Non-standard English Usage in India : A Few Examples

Sanjeev Kumar Nath

English as “bread and butter” : Once, while attending a refresher course, I met a teacher from north India who told me that for us English teachers, English was our “bread and butter”.

He said that with the peculiarly strong “d” and “t” sounds that many people from Punjab, Haryana and other places in the north produce, so strong that you almost get a vision of their tongue striking the roof of the mouth with great force.

I had never thought of English in that manner, may be because I don’t usually have the nutritionally deficient bread-and-butter breakfast in English style, but a proper Indian breakfast with roti and dal and vegetables and pickles or in the Assamese style with bora rice and milk or flattened rice and curds.

Erroneous or Non-standard English Usage in India : A Few Examples

I love Indian food and I love my mother tongue, although I teach English. However, I understand what my north-Indian friend says—that English-teaching is what we get our salaries for. We are paid for this service because English is not without value in India and the world. In future, too, people like my north-Indian friend will continue to be grateful to English for its “bread-and-butter” value.

Besides, I am aware that while there are occasional demands for the banishment of English from Indian soil, (and while, on the contrary, there are Assamese parents who believe in teaching English to their children in such a manner that it becomes their First Language and they remain ignorant of their mother tongue,) English is there to stay in India.

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English teachers can also be thankful to English for the free entertainment that their encounters with English usage in India provides. Here are a few examples of such usages:

Threadbare : This is such a straightforward word in its construction: “thread” + “bare”. It can mean, literally, a cloth tattered and worn with use. Visually, it can suggest something like “a cloth made of just a few threads, so that it looks rather bare, not woven to its full complexity”, and from this meaning we infer the metaphorical meaning of the word.

It is an adjective used to describe a discussion that is not exhaustive, but rather “bare”, not including all the complex issues or finer details that may be there. It can also mean a discussion that has become worn out, as it were, like that tattered cloth, because of the use of clichés and lack of real attention to the issues concerned. Yet this word is wrongly used in exactly the opposite sense of what it is supposed to mean. They use the word to talk about a thorough, in-depth discussion.

Any number of Indian ministers and other such honourable people have used it again and again in this wrong sense.

They use it in the wrong sense so frequently, that if they keep at it for long enough, and if through their continuous and consistent wrong use they are able to persuade more and more people that the word means what they have wrongly supposed it to mean, then one day dictionaries of the English language may be compelled to acknowledge this opposite, contrary and contradictory meaning also to be one of the valid connotations of the word.

No any : Every English teacher in India is doomed to encounter the wrong usage “no any” in examination scripts and assignments written by students. For a sentence like “When I went into the classroom, there were no students there”, the student might write “When I went into the classroom, there were no any students there.” The “any” here is absolutely unnecessary, but somehow the student seems unable to do without it.

Or, instead of “No one in the gathering knew her name” the student may write “No any person in the gathering knew her name”, replacing the correct “no one” with the wrong “no any person”. “No any” is a weed that the fraternity of English teachers in India have not been able to eradicate, and it is doubtful if they will ever be successful. “No any” seems determined to stay in India for ever, just like the English language!

“Father” and “priest”: When it comes to teaching English literature, the teacher finds that many students need to unlearn wrong usages they keep on using mechanically. For example, many Indian students seem to think that a person who is known as a founder or a pioneer of a field of human endeavour has to be its father, so that Aristotle is the father of countless subjects in the Arts and the Sciences and John Donne is the father of Metaphysical Poetry.

I don’t know if psychiatrists have a theory to explain this obsession to make all relations biological. I wonder if it ever occurs to the student that the biological process of heterosexual reproduction involves a mother too, unless there is something like a masculine version of the immaculate conception.

Equally baffling is the propensity to call someone a priest if he is especially good at something or shows some special interest in something, so that Wordsworth is described as a priest of nature and even Newton can be described as a priest of science! Obviously, the Indian obsession for puja and rituals can overpower all rational considerations.

Carnal love : I once read about a school teacher of Assamese from western Assam. One of his students wrote very lovingly about how good and down-to-earth a teacher he was. In his account the following incident, among others, was described. It so happened that while teaching old Assamese poetry in class, the teacher skipped a portion of verse concerning the bodily beauty of Sita.

One particularly naughty student stood up and reminded the teacher that that portion needed to be explained. The teacher looked at him and said, “You have your father and mother at home, don’t you? Ask them to explain that portion.”

That was many decades ago when teachers felt embarrassed on encountering texts involving description of bodily beauty, but the problem surfaces in some form or the other even now. Thus, when teaching texts involving explicit reference to or description of sex, for instance, the teacher has to decide about his approach. Obviously, he cannot launch into a pornographic description in class, but nor can be entirely ignore the text.

May be in a postgraduate class one need not be too timid to discuss these things, but still one will at least need to carefully choose one’s words while teaching such texts. I have had that experience of concentrating and hunting for the right words, but occasionally I get to read a student’s submission on such a text that makes me wonder if all my circumspection and caution in teaching the text was necessary at all.

The student’s description of the sexual foibles of certain characters, for example, could be so full of zest that the examiner of the script would feel ashamed.

Pure love : The opposite of what has just been discussed is also true. There are students who are so puritanical in their conception of love, that explicit sexual references in Shakespeare or Donne are given a garb of specially designed Indian, other-worldly love that has nothing to do with carnality. Occasionally they use the phrase “Platonic love” to describe what they take to be love cleansed of all sinful desires.

From their style of writing you would not be able to decide if they are talking about love between adult men and women or between ethereal beings bereft of all passions. If this tendency to deny the sexuality of normal human beings has to do with some kind ascetic denial of pleasures that the student has somehow absorbed from Indian culture, has that same culture not created the sculptures of Konark and other places?

Try as he might, the English teacher will not be able to understand from where his students have learnt so much about pure love.

“Revolve” and “said” : I found these beauties together in a script I was examining recently, so I didn’t want to separate them. The student wrote that “John Donne’s poems revolve around love and the problems of performing said love”. Yes, there is a problem with “performing” too, in this sentence, but let us first look at what “revolves” and what is supposed to be “said”.

If you are an English teacher in India, you will find almost anything revolving, including your head, when you read about Wordsworth’s poetry revolving around nature and Donne’s around love, just like the earth revolving around the sun. And as far as the “said” is concerned, if the student has mentioned something earlier, then that is the “said”, although you are not reading a legal document but an assignment on poetry.

So the “said love” in the sentence is the love around which John Donne’s poems revolve, like so many planets and meteors revolving around the sun. The “performing” in the said (!) sentence, of course, seems to indicate the actual act of making love, John Donne being John Donne, and your students being an Indian like you.

Myself: I first encountered “myself” in South India, and thought that it might be a South Indian phenomenon, but later I realized that “myself” is pan-Indian. Even an English teacher or professor can come smiling to you at a conference and introduce himself to you, “Myself Venketeswara Iyer from…..” You have no option but to smile back and shake hands with the friendly man.

How can you be so boorish as to be angry with his friendly “myself”?

To be sure, a native user of the language might take a few moments before realizing what Mr Iyer was saying, but what of that? We are proud Indians, and have Indianised the imperial language enough to carry the burden of our invented usages.

sanjeevnath21@gmail.com Phone: 9476527719

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