Trampling our way through pronunciations

The British always took liberties with our names, abbreviating Chattopadhyay to Chatterjee, as though the clan were talkative and entitled to some mocking respect, or Bandhopadyay to Bannerjee, like someone advertising themselves. And then there were the distortions of Mumba Devi to Bombay, Kanpur to Cawnpore and even, quite absurdly, ‘Chennai’ to ‘Madras’! I ask you!

Pronunciation was never their forte. It’s only recently after hundreds of westerners have been killed by them that the British have learned to called the pathans ‘pathans’. For centuries they called them ‘pay-thnz’.

And now, as the feeble playwrights of the Indian diaspora say, The Empire Strikes Back! David Cameron, British PM, recently made it to India to meet Manmohanji and other luminaries in policy and business. He took the opportunity to issue a sideswipe at the Pakistanis, calling that nation an exporter of terror and saying that the ISI, a state within a state, ‘faced both ways’ in the Afghan conflict and the war on terror.

What he meant was that the ISI publicly wanted the world to know that the army was keeping the Taliban at bay, but in reality had parts of the army supporting, arming and even controlling Taliban activity in Afghanistan and in the border regions of Pak itself.

His words brought mobs out in demonstration on the streets of Pakistani cities carrying banners which said “Kamrroon is Lyur” and “David Cammroon must Death”. Some of the banners I spotted on TV were in perfect Urdu, but the ones composed in English, presumably for the consumption of the international community, took their revenge on both the prime minister and the spelling and grammar of his native tongue.

After meditating on it, I came to the conclusion that these misspellings and enthusiastic mispronunciation of Cameron’s name were not deliberate stratagems to belittle the man. They were the difficulty we subcontinentals have with the names of British politicians.
My first real awareness of this came in the late 1960s — in 1968 to be precise. I lived in Leicester at the time, doing a post-graduate thesis on Rudyard Kipling. I lived in the Indian part of the town — Narboro Road — because through a subtle racist bias, no landlord would have Indian students as tenants in the non-Indian part. I used to frequent a pub on the corner of my road and there met with a jolly bunch of Indian workers whom I befriended. As a super-literate member of this community, I was soon asked to write letters to factory managements, and then progressed to writing leaflets for the Indian Workers’ Association to which they belonged and thence to being an honourary secretary. 
As such I was party to organising a demonstration against the then home secretary James Callaghan’s denial of British citizenship and entry to the Ugandan Asians who had been expelled by Idi Amin and against another politician called Enoch Powell, who had delivered an inflammatory speech against immigration. The demonstration was to bring together thousands of members and make known our opposition to Powell and Callaghan.  We marched, maybe ten-thousand strong, carrying banners which misspelt their names and shouting “Chall-aa- ghun Hai Hai!” and “Eenuk-a-pole Out out!”        
It was a heartening demonstration, but I was convinced that the good citizens of Birmingham were perplexed as to what this mob of angry Asians was shouting about. But we knew!