“He said the world’s a stage
And life is just a play
And though they’re words of a sage
Life’s more like a cabaret
A play consists of composed lines
A cabaret’s often spontaneous
With aphoristic anodynes
And vulgarity outrageous
— From The Comma Sutra by Bachchoo
The English language has dramatic uses. I don’t simply mean it’s used to write plays. It’s sometimes used for subterfuge and, in a diametrically opposite way, for a sort of false modesty.
First example: This week, comedian and actor Russell Brand was convicted of rape and sexual assault in a London court and sentenced to ten-and-a-half years’ imprisonment. Crowds gathered outside as the sentence was handed down: Some welcomed justice for the victims, while others were Brand’s friends and fervent supporters.
A few of these — several — told the press that what Brand had done didn’t amount to criminality, but merely to what they called ‘male laddishness’. Other phrases such as “behaviour of a crazy idiot” emerged. ‘Laddishness’ was even used, by the convicted rapist’s apologists, to characterise a phrase from one of his TV acts describing, in disgusting terms, his penetrative skills in oral sex.
These linguistic dodges are not simple euphemisms as, perhaps, a word from Raj vocabulary is. There was in Raj days a mental hospital for army personnel in a town called Deolali. (I knew the town as my ancestors owned land there and there’s even a Dhondy Road there.) The euphemism for mental illness — and at the time they used derogatory expressions like ‘mad’ and ‘insane; and softer euphemisms like ‘lost his marbles’ — was the phrase “gone Doolally” to characterise mental illness. Still used and recognised?
The above examples are modes the language has, firstly to make dramatic excuses for nastiness — even crime, and the other for softening the impact of the description of a disability.
There are, gentle reader, myriad other feints of the language, imitated linguistically by other cultures, but only one I’ve come across in a single and singular instance in India. It was the imitation of the very British disguising, yet deliberately transparent, extreme modesty.
What are those? Well, I was at a BBC occasion as an invitee. The party was at the House of Lords terrace overlooking the banks of the Thames. I was at the time a commissioning editor at Channel 4 and had recently broadcast a series on the history of the Middle East which concentrated on the relationship between Israel and the states around it. A gentleman came up to me at the bar and asked me if I was Farrukh Dhondy. And when I said I was, he complimented me on the series and said he was going to ask my boss Michael Grade, the CEO of the Channel, to repeat it. I said it could be repeated, but it would have to be some time in the future. He understood.
I thought that if he, so confidently, talked about approaching Michael, he must be some big-shot in the industry and I asked him if he was in TV.
“No, no, I’m a grocer,” he said.
“Sorry, I didn’t get your name,” I said.
“Oh, sorry. Sainsbury, David Sainsbury”
The science minister in the then Labour government
‘Grocer’ indeed!
And then one evening my friend V.S. Naipaul asked me to accompany him to the annual party of The Spectator magazine. Actually, he asked to assist him by pushing his wheelchair there. I did. And as I was at the bar fetching him and myself a drink, a tall gentleman came up to me and asked if I was with Vidia. I said I was.
“And so, are you a writer too?” He asked.
I said I was, and he asked me what I wrote. I skewered as succinctly and briefly as I could and then asked him if he was also a writer.
“No, no,” he said, “I’m a soldier.”
Before the conversation could go any further, some people attracted his attention and he turned away. I carried our drinks to where Vida sat in his wheelchair.
“What were you talking to Lord Guthrie about?” Vidia asked.
Lord Guthrie! Head of Britain’s armed forces???
“I’m a soldier!” Of course.
As I said, I’ve only encountered one instance of this style of modesty and that may have been an affectation. I was in the hill town of Ranikhet on a film shoot and was lodged in the Ranikhet Club.
For the first week I was there, there were no other guests, but then one evening the bar was full of young men. When I went in and got my drink, one of them approached me using my name and saying our mutual friend Tarun Tejpal had told him I’d be at the Club. I asked him what he and the other fifteen or so young men were doing there and he said they’d come up from Delhi to play polo.
“So are you professional polo players?” I said, knowing they weren’t.
“No, no, I’m a baker,” the young man said.
“You have a bakery here? In Delhi?” I asked
“No, not bread, “I own Brittania Biscuits,” he said.
I suppose when people ask me what I do, I can say “I scribble!”
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