Indian scripts

The variety of the world's scripts has long held a fascination for me, something which is independent of the variety of spoken languages they encode. Perhaps this has something to do with my musician's training, specifically training in Western notation. (In that sense all Western classical musicians could claim to have been using two scripts since an early age.) I think however that artists often have an equal penchant for scripts per se - even in the West, where they are not integrated into the mainstream of 'fine art' in the way they have been in Islamic and Chinese culture. At any rate they are not just, and even not primarily, a supplement to spoken language and thus a subject for linguists. One could begin to summarize Jacques Derrida's famous and intricate arguments on this point - but that would be rather unnecessary so early in the day. Better to observe the striking instances of non-verbal scripts: not only music notation, but dance, computer code, the notation of games (chess, go, bridge), certain kinds of assembly manual (decipherable or not)...

What I want to discuss in this post is however something that occurs particularly with language, and to some extent also with music. It seems to me that a script doesn't merely reproduce a language, which has its own identity already fixed through sound and meaning. It also constitutes part of the language's identity: the specific way in which written letters and the sound of words blend, or what we call spelling (although that word isn't normally used in the case of different scripts). This occurs despite the fact that many unwritten languages, and illiterate speakers of written languages, have existed for which none of this can hold true. What one can say is that, once a script is present to mind for a language and its speakers, it will begin to affect the way words in that language are imagined, and this involvement of the imagination will powerfully affect the identity of words, in the sense of how foreign or familiar they are felt to be.

To illustrate this very briefly first of all with a European example, I will appeal to any regular beer-drinker and ask them, if they are linguistically inclined, if they have ever idly peeled away the back label on a beer bottle, and in doing so noticed the spellings of the word "beer" and its ingredients in the various European languages (excluding those derived from the Latin "cervisia", such as Spanish). In German it becomes "Bier": the same sound more or less, although one somehow imagines it in a German accent, and the word as spelt would have gloomier connotations in English. Pronounce it with your best approximation to an Italian accent, and the Italian spelling "birra", with its extra syllable and rolled "r", immediately seems logical, although someone with no Italian might not recognize the word if it were printed, and out of context. For the most startling transformation however, you need a little bit of Greek. Although the pronunciation is roughly similar to Italian, not only is the script itself different, but it must cope with the odd fact that modern Greek has no single letter expressing the consonant "b" (since the second letter of the alphabet "beta" is actually pronounced "veta"). When forced to include the sound as part of foreign words, it has to improvise by shoving together "mu" and "pi". Beer is thus "mpira": a weird defamiliarization, splitting in two a consonant one had thought was utterly fundamental, atomic - a kind of linguistic equivalent of the first time one discovered that green could be produced by blending blue and yellow.

In the Indian languages this kind of thing goes on all the time with English words, and it is one of the first things you notice when learning their scripts since, of course, transliterations of English on adverts or shop-signs are both ubiquitous and among the first things one can decipher. The best way to present this is as a puzzle. I'll give the Indian spelling ("back-transliterated", of course, using the standard modern system for Brahmi and Devanagari minus the diacritics), and you guess the English word: kariyar; sarkas; kek; daktar; eyarplen; ilekshon; apel; ophis; meshin; pulis; injin. (Answers at the bottom of this post.)

Among the English consonant sounds that are trickiest to deal with are "t" and "d". The languages of north India all have about four letters that could reasonably correspond to each of these, distinguished by whether they are aspirated (pronounced with extra breath) or unaspirated, and whether the letter is taken to belong to the retroflex (tongue curled back against the palate) or the dental group (tongue touching the teeth). The problem is that English "t" and "d" sit in between the Indian categories: you pronounce them with a certain, non-emphatic amount of aspiration, and with the tongue loosely in front of the teeth. Naturally, both the script and the majority of Indian English speakers cannot deal with that, and so they have to make a choice. And this is always in favour of the "hardest" available sound: unaspirated and retroflex - the retroflex consonants paradoxically being the one group that native English speakers cannot produce unless they are physically shown how to pronounce them! The result is an (unnecessarily) inaccurate reflection of normal English pronunciation, and thus the most recognizable feature of an "Indian" accent. Get an Indian-born English speaker to say "dirty" or "today" and you'll hear what I mean.

A similar paradox occurs with "s", "z" and "j" in Bengali. Most native English speakers (with the exception of graffiti taggers) have probably ceased to notice that the plural ending "s" in many cases is actually pronounced as "z" - e.g. "things" is really "thingz". But Bengalis have registered this fact, and try to reproduce it when transcribing English words. Only the problem is, there isn't a letter "z" in the Bengali script. They can pronounce it, but the closest they can to writing it in their alphabet is a "j" - which isn't really the same thing as "z", bears no relation whatever to "s", and produces very humorous-looking spellings, such as "ledij" (ladies) or "chij" (cheese).

But there are other cases when English loan words have apparently been changed on the phonetic level in a way that can't be explained by the differences between the languages' phonemic systems. Why should "biscuit" become "biskut" in Bengali, for instance, and not "biskit"? Why "haspatal" instead of "hospital"? A few words are distorted almost out of recognition: why "ketli" instead of "ketil" (i.e. "kettle")? The word "English" itself is "ingriji", as if the Bengalis were like the Japanese and couldn't tell the difference between "r" and "l". "Geometry" is "jemiti", and yet the "tr" combination is ubiquitous in Bengali. But one can't pin blame on Indians alone for this, for the most numerous cases of such distortion occur the other way, in the adaptation of Indian words into English. Some spellings, such as the nuances of the different types of Indian "t", cannot be represented at all in Roman script without immediate recourse to pre-defined systems of diacritic marks, so the issue of distortion does not even arise. (This is one symptom of Indian scripts' superior phonetic power.) But in other cases some quite interesting linguistic mangling has gone on. Yule and Burnell, the editors of the famous Anglo-Indian dictionary "Hobson-Jobson" chose a radical and strangely symbolic example for the title of their work. "Hobson-Jobson" is a heavily Anglicized representation of the Shia cry during the procession of Mohurram, "Hussain, Hossan". The anguished, guttural invocation of the names of the early Muslim martyrs, screamed out in the midst of extraordinary scenes of collective self-flagellation, is "cleaned up" so far that the grandsons of the Prophet sound like two elderly Edwardian butlers being summoned to fetch more tea.

In the end however, rather than simply ridiculing such examples I think they deserve some degree of celebration too. They contain within them the sensible acknowledgement that the world's languages vary from each other so much on every level that we will never be able to reproduce even the sounds of one language accurately within the framework of another. (In fact, as I stressed earlier, even a language's "own" script doesn't "reproduce" that language in an exact or scientific fashion - something that so bothered George Bernard Shaw that he agitated for English to be written in a more phonetic script, the Shavian alphabet, resembling Pitman shorthand.) In the present academic orthodoxy, when including words from a foreign script in an essay, one tries to be as consistent and complete as possible in transliteration, establishing tables and adding diacritics or special characters until every letter in the original script has its one-to-one counterpart in an adapted Roman alphabet. This exactitude is desirable if you're a professional linguist. But the consequence of such an adaptation is that one has to learn how to read a good proportion of the altered alphabet anew. In the logically extreme case, the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to be able to represent every language on earth, the result is something often resembling computer code.

The "Hobson-Jobson" solution is more creative: to use the idiomatic features of one's own language as effectively as possible, resulting for the English speaker in lots of doubled letters, endings in "-y" or "-ee" instead of "-i", or "-oo" instead of "u" ("Hindoo"), use of "c" in preference to "k" and so forth. If the result looks more like English than like Hindi, well it was always going to - because the only way to really make Hindi look like Hindi is to write it in Hindi script. Why not, then, have the quaintness of spellings like "chupatty" - which in this case happens to remind one of an English word close in meaning ("patty") - instead of the false conscientiousness of chapātī? (Here the "u" represents the short "a" of Devanagari, just as in another culinary loan, "chutney", which one would "properly" have to write chatnī.) Why not the familiar Calcutta place-name Chowringhee - even though chaurangī would be more precise? As in other cases (such as Indo-Saracenic architecture), the Victorians seem to have already anticipated postmodernism, in this case via the principle that "there is no metalanguage"; that we will never create a perfect symbolic representation of reality (whether human or natural) but will instead forever be embroiled in the imperfect, adaptive and improvisatory task of translation.

Just recently there has been a belated confirmation of the failure of any attempt to establish the Roman alphabet as standard for the globe: the decision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to allow Web addresses in non-Latin scripts, billed as an important move to establish more equal international access to the internet. And quite right too. Indeed there would undoubtedly be some more enthusiastic Hindus here who would say that, if any script ought to be universally imposed, it should be Devanagari, the writing system of classical Sanskrit. With more than double the number of letters in the Roman alphabet, organized systematically according to natural phonetic principles (the consonants are grouped according to how far back in the mouth their point of articulation is), Devanagari's logic and power are a good reminder of how intellectually far advanced ancient Indian civilization was - at a time when the "English", if they could be said to exist, did not even have a writing system of their own.

(Answers: career; circus; cake; doctor; airplane; election; apple; office; machine; police; engine.)

Puja puja!

The last month or so here in West Bengal has been one long holiday, occasioned by a series of three "pujas" or religious festivals each dedicated to the worship of a goddess. First comes the martial but fundamentally benevolent Durga, invoked by Rama in his battle against the demon king of Sri Lanka, Ravana - the climax of the Ramayana epic, and the main focus of the Dussehra festival held on the same days throughout the rest of India. Then comes Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, who is celebrated slightly earlier here than elsewhere. Finally the fierce and terrible Kali arrives to demand her sacrifices, the black goddess appearing ironically on the very day of Divali, the festival of light. (Divali is celebrated simultaneously with Kali Puja by Bengalis in the manner traditional across India, by the lighting of "rows of lamps" - the Sanskrit meaning of the word di[pa]vali. This is supposed to be in imitation of the citizens of Rama's city Ayodhya, who did the same to welcome their king back after his victory against Ravana.) Bengalis decide to link the three up as a single puja season, giving one the chance to get properly into the festival spirit - although also ensuring that little or no official work gets done for four weeks. In England we have bank holidays; in India they have holi-months.

Durga Puja in Calcutta focuses on what is colloquially known as "pandal-hopping": visiting pandals, temporary pavilions built to house an image of Durga. During the puja period one finds them virtually at every street corner, most no more than a sort of tinselled tent - although the statue inside is always magnificently adorned - but some enormous, and/or enormously expensive. Visiting College Street a few weeks before the puja, I caught sight of this structure in scaffolding (the figures at the top give you an idea of the scale!):


Returning in the late afternoon of Saptami (the seventh day of the festival, but the beginning of the actual festivities), it had been transformed into a life-size replica of the Hava Mahal, or Palace of the Winds, the famous free-standing facade in the "pink city" of Jaipur, Rajasthan:


Without a contact in Calcutta at the time to guide me round, I couldn't quite get into the spirit of pandal-hopping on my own. Festival time here is very family- and community-oriented, and one wants to feel included, rather than hovering about in the background taking photos all the time. So I left the city and returned to Santiniketan, thinking to accept the kind offer my friend Partha Gupta had made to me that I visit his village, Daronda, 8km away, for the last couple of days of the festival. Here the urbane touring of pavilions gave way to a more dramatic spectacle: the mass slaughter of goats. First the dhak drummers summon the villagers to the temple. The dhak is a heavy drum, worn slung over the shoulder so that the attached plumes curl up over the drummer's head, and played with two sticks from underneath. The sound is loud without being deafening, and according to Partha can travel long distances.


In the centre of the cleared space in front of every temple, a small area is earthed up and a heavy six-foot fork driven hard into the ground, leaving only its two prongs visible.

A decorative pattern made of red earth and white rice flour links it symbolically to the temple entrance, which stands open so that Durga can witness the sacrifice. The fork's distinctive shape both reminds one of other symbols in Indian mythology (such as Shiva's trident), and also serves a practical purpose. Its narrow neck, bolted across with a bamboo stick, prevents the victim from wriggling its head out of the block.


On hand to sprinkle the victim's neck with water is a Brahmin priest:

The goat's neck is then severed with a single blow from a heavy sacrificial sword. It is of course considered inauspicious if the executioner fails to achieve this cleanly - something that happened once out of 15 times during the main village sacrifice. Having never witnessed the killing of a large animal before I was a bit alarmed that, even with a true blow, the goat does not appear to die immediately. Both head and body writhe bleeding on the ground for a period of up to half a minute. I was advised against photographing any of this, and I'm not sure I wanted to anyway. Once it is over, the bodies are placed at the temple door:


More goats get the chop when Kali Puja comes round a month later. (By the end of all this I'm surprised there are any of the poor animals left in Bengal.) Since on this occasion the slaughter took place after midnight I had an easy excuse to miss it out. Kali is in fact particularly associated with goat sacrifice on account of the famous Kalighat temple to her in Calcutta, where the goddess's bloodlust is satisfied on a daily basis. Her image there is black, as her name suggests (black is kalo in Bengali); but the version more often found is blue, like a number of other Hindu deities.

In all versions she has her tongue poking out. I've read that this is a reaction of surprise (although when do you ever express surprise by sticking your tongue out?! Usually we do it to surprise someone else!). The occasion for this is depicted in the image above. Under Kali's feet is her consort Shiva, who has unexpectedly thrown himself under her feet to halt her spree of destruction.

Despite the pretty dark connotations of the deity being worshipped - incidentally, Kali was also the main goddess of the murderous dacoits, described in another post on this site - Kali Puja seemed mainly to be an excuse for a full-blown, let-your-hair-down party. Or maybe it was just where I was - the area just south of Sriniketan, Santiniketan's partner village, at the house of my Sri Lankan dancer friend's guru, Bosanta. In consequence there was a good deal of dancing, both before and during the procession of the deity around the village, which lasted around three hours.

Under the influence of a quantity of surreptitiously consumed rum, it can't be said that the family exhibited their dance training to best effect... Other intoxicants were on hand: I assisted with the preparation of a very thick, sweet beverage called siddhi. The ingredients include bananas, milk, sweets, jaggery (palm sugar), and the ground siddhi leaves, which I was assured were not the same as bhang, even though they looked pretty similar.

There was also country liquor, a curious local rice-wine, greyish white and quite pleasantly sour. Asking the name I was told they called it bachui here - not a word I was able to find in the dictionary or online, but to judge from the preparation method it may have been similar to hadia. To sustain all the dancing, plenty of food was provided too - enough for about five hundred people, served in the courtyard on banana leaves in a series of consecutive sittings:



Everyone is included in the festival spirit - even the cows are painted with pink polka-dots!

While waiting for things to get under way, the charmingly irrepressible Titi, Bosanta's niece, conducted me on a little tour of the area's notable buildings, including a terracotta temple, similar in design to the famous ones of Bishnupur. We also walked around the "boro bari", literally "big house": the mansion of the erstwhile local zamindar, perhaps 200 years old. Predating the invention of the "Indo-Saracenic" style, it seems to have no native architectural elements at all - apart from maybe the colour scheme:

Yet this building, its central, partially enclosed courtyard strangely ecclesiastical in design, has been taken over by the locals for their own ceremonies. Behind an iron grille framed by a decidedly Gothic arch, rather like a side-chapel entrance in a Catholic cathedral, the image of Durga is installed during her puja, and in front of it lights were burning that evening for Divali.

That this did not look at all out of place prompted me to think how universal a religious symbol the lighting of candles is. Only Islam makes little use of it, as far as I know. The candle-flame seems like an emblem of human consciousness - finite, vulnerable, insubstantial, but steadily shedding illumination, rescuing a certain area of space from the larger, encompassing dark. To worship that darkness itself still seems to me counter-intuitive, not to say perverse, and for that reason I still cannot sympathize with the devotion to Kali and Durga that is so central to the religious calendar here in Bengal. The Tantric tradition in which it is rooted is undeniably fascinating - originally not traditional or Vedic Hindu, but Mahayana Buddhist in its emphasis on the female, and doubtless very rich in psychological insights. And the festival atmosphere sweeps one with it anyway, without too many scruples about the meaning of what is being celebrated! But I would be curious to have a Bengali explain their relationship to or conception of Kali, and what it is they find inspiring about such an image. I could have asked then, of course, but found neither the timing nor the phrasing of the question easy to judge. To interrogate any religious tradition like that is fraught with the danger of immediate offence; even though such questions may be necessary if outsiders - or even insiders - are to understand the meaning of religious practices and symbols.

Raibeshe

Though it might be a mundane sentiment, I often feel the best side of travelling is in the discovery of things that you had no idea even existed before you set out. It's always satisfying to know that the world is larger than a guide book. This is an example - a local tradition I'm not even sure how to classify.

A few weeks after I arrived here, a good friend and Sri Lankan dancer piqued my interest by mentioning the existence of a particular folk tradition called "raibeshe", native to the Birbhum district of West Bengal in which Santiniketan is located. Although usually described as a folk dance, listed here (in the last paragraph) among others of northern India, its appearance was more that of a martial art. Even though neither dance nor martial arts are subjects I know much about, I was intrigued, possessed by the vague idea of some kind of undiscovered Bengali capoeira (the Afro-Brazilian fighting style thought to have been "disguised" as a dance in order to protect its slave practitioners from punishment).

According to the people I've asked here, the origin of raibeshe is almost as peculiar. The dacoits of West Bengal, bandits feared and romanticised in equal measure, were traditionally regarded as constituting a "profession", known as dacoity, having elevated house-breaking and highwaymanship to fine arts. Raibeshe is thought to have originated as a kind of dacoits' training programme, a method both to maintain fitness during the idle periods between their criminal deeds and to cultivate the physical skills - many of them co-operative and almost resembling military tactics - that were necessary to ensure success in consummating their crimes. Another source locates the art's origin among the "lathiyals" or members of the zamindars' (Indian feudal landowners') private armies; but the two may not contradict each other anyway. According to this fascinating period account, translated from the Bengali, zamindars under the Mughals were unable to stop their militia from criminal activity, and with the arrival of the Raj, soldiers discharged by zamindars turned en masse to dacoity. In the opening section of his great novel Pather Panchali (1929), the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan makes an even closer and more scandalous connection: of the zamindars of early-19th century Bengal he alleges, "Many a wealthy family of those days built up its fortune by dacoity; indeed every student of ancient history knows that the wealth of most of the Bengali zamindars today is derived from the gold and jewels that their ancestors looted."

As a latter-day zamindar, Rabindranath Tagore is said to have been interested in the remnants of dacoit culture persisting in the area around Santiniketan (the village lying directly west of the Santiniketan-Bolpur road, Bhubandanga ("Bhubon's land"), takes its name from a famous bandit). He even encouraged, as part of the physical side of his education programmes, the cultivation of the dacoits' stilt-walking technique - the bamboo ron-pa or "battle legs", designed for the flat plains of Bengal as they were independently for certain regions of Europe, that allowed fleeing dacoits to cover ground at tremendous speeds. It was however Gurusaday Dutt, a contemporary of Tagore's, even more deeply engaged than the poet in village social projects and the preservation of traditional Bengali culture, who counts as the "discoverer" in 1930 of raibeshe, on which he published a considerable quantity of material in Bengali and some in English (which I haven't yet been able to consult here - update pending, I hope). Weirdly, the year after this he travelled to England and met Cecil Sharp, the discoverer of morris dancing, which seems to have spurred on his own folk revivalist efforts.

The "dance" itself couldn't be less like morris - apart from the fact that both use wooden sticks. A day or so after Durga Puja I had the chance to see a performance in the nearby village of Raipur by a local group, "Binuria Raibeshe", run by a friend of the above-mentioned Sri Lankan dancer. How "authentic" the performance I saw really was, I'm not qualified to judge. In this variant, it was certainly less of a dance and more of an acrobatic display. What was clear was that this was a home-grown, amateur cultural form, still practised for the sake of exercise, alertness and a kind of team spirit by villagers in the hours they could spare from the day's work. Though the group leader was a driver for of one of the university faculty, many of the others were apparently day-labourers. The only concession to slick presentation was the red and yellow sports kit. In performance the result was impressively athletic and ingenious by turns, as these photos hopefully show. (Apologies for the dimness of some of the images - the performance went on into the evening and my camera flash could only achieve so much!) Some stunts did look rather as if they had been borrowed from a circus, for instance twirling a flaming brand -

- or diving headfirst through a ring of fire -

None of this is especially unusual, although impressive considering the performers were not professionals. The pyramid-building exercises seemed to me at first to belong to this category, until it occurred to me that they might well have had a criminal use too: standing on the shoulders, or in one case, head, of his accomplice(s) would allow a dacoit to gain quick access to an upper storey.

Other poses demonstrated sheer strength -



or incorporated aesthetic compositions based on religious imagery (Vishnu seated on a lotus):




The most interesting displays, since most obviously related to the art's origin, were those involving squeezing through confined spaces (originally in order to break into a house). Here Baban the group leader - well-built and not at all the slenderest of the group - crawls under a bamboo lathi on whose ends two of his colleagues are standing. The only space available is whatever Baban can create for himself by forcing the stick to flex:


Another vertical variant involves a hoop, with one person standing upright inside it and the other wriggling head down through the remaining space, as if crawling through a pipe or a hole in a roof:




Finally there was stick-fighting, the core martial element, which apparently went off less well at this performance than in others:

An impartial observer might have thought this not much as a purely physical display, compared to something like the Shaolin monks, but I was quite caught up in the atmosphere of village excitement generated by the performance - and at the same time fascinated to imagine its distant origins in India's feudal past.