Biryani, bhang and bhindi figure in millennium dictionary
New Delhi: Ram and Rambo cohabit with Bollywood and Hollywood as English marches into the new millennium as the lingua franca of the world.Bhindi, bhang, bhajan and biryani have become as much Queen’s English as ball, balloon and banana in the millennium editions of the English dictionaries.
Rama is “an incarnation (avatar) of the god Vishnu’’ and Bollywood “nickname given to the Indian film industry’’ in the Encarta World English Dictionary, which has hundreds of references from Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and other Indian languages.
Sylvestor Stallone’s Rambo has also found an entry: Somebody who is extremely aggressive or readily resorts to violence, willingly breaking rules, laws or other generally accepted regulations to achieve what he or she believes to be right.
Named after John Rambo, the aggressive protagonist in the film First Blood. Rambo does not end there. Its adjective is ‘ramboesque’ and noun ‘ramboism’. Indian cuisine, which has virtually developed into an industry in the west, has supplied a range of words from achar to korma and samosa to tandoori while masala “a mixture of spices ground into a paste’’ is also an English word “used to describe Indian popular films’’.
The 2,172-page Enacarta, which claims to be the “first dictionary to be able to reflect the new world status of English’’ brings together all the main varieties of the language — from Britain, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific rim.
The World Dictionary, a collaboration between Bloomsbury and Microsoft, is the latest to join the ‘war of words’ which began last year with the launch of the millennium editions like the New Oxford Dictionary of English (which contains entries like achcha and bachcha), the Chambers 21st century dictionary and the Collins millennium edition.
Arundhati Roy becomes the only Indian writer, besides Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whose picture adorns the dictionary, though there is a reference to Salman Rushdie. “Indian English is notable for its strong ongoing contribution to English literature,’’ says the entry against Indian English though names like Vikram Seth do not find a place.
The Hindu calendar finds itself among the Gregorian, Jewish and Islamic calenders, so also is a list of Indian festivals like Holi, Diwali, Dassera, Sivaratri, Krishnajayanti, Ganesha Chaturthi and Rakhi Bandhan.
The entry against Holi reads: “The Hindu festival of spring that honours the time when Krishna paid amorous attention to young women tending cows’’.Places like Tirichchirappalli, Tirunelveli and Bhopal (site of the world’s worst industrial accident when a gas leak at a chemical plant killed more than 3,300 people in 1984) have also made their way into the Encarta which employed 320 lexicographers, including Kamal Keshkar Sridhar, an Indian professor at the department of linguistics, State University of New York, from around the world. Another word derived from Tamil entered in the dictionary is mulligatawny, “spicy meat and vegetable soup originally from eastern India.”