By Mohan Sivanand

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Mohan Sivanand remembers the English he heard and spoke down South

Back home in Kerala recently, I put on my sunglasses before stepping out one hot afternoon. “Cool glasses!” a female relative complimented me.
“Cooling glass,” I shot back cheekily, pretending to correct her.
What she meant was that my sunglasses looked stylish. But my response was a nod to the fact that people don’t say sunglasses (or glares or shades) in the South; cooling glass (usually singular) is the preferred term. And I think it’s a sensible word coinage—because those glasses cool our eyes rather than warm or “sun” them. Much like cooling towers or cool drinks. Imagine calling Coca-Cola a sun drink.
Says Wikipedia: “Cooling glasses is a term used all across India and the Middle East for sunglasses.” Middle East, I agree. Because Keralites, a major community there, need to stay cool in every sense of the word. I never hear “cooling glass” used in Mumbai, except from some visiting relatives and friends.
Speaking of Mumbai, the city’s old name survives in a few phrases, like Bombay duck and Bombay gin.
Or, in the South, Bombay toast, a staple at the Indian Coffee House and some other restaurants all over Kerala. I used to wonder what people in Bombay called those slices of bread soaked in a sweetened eggs-and-milk batter and fried. Just toast? Our toast? No, I learnt after I moved here. It’s called French toast, much like in the rest of the world.
So what, I wondered, do they call it in France? Just toast? No, again. It’s actually pain perdu (translation: lost bread), because French toast is best made from old bread that may otherwise have been thrown away. It was known as pain perdu even
in medieval England. But since that was a fanciful French name, ordinary people simply started thinking of it as the toast with the French name... French toast!
Anyhow, after so much food history, I still haven’t cracked the riddle of why we call that eggy bread Bombay toast down South. The phrase wasn’t included in Hobson-Jobson, that comprehensive dictionary-like glossary of Anglo-Indian terms, first published in 1903. Could someone please explain?

One word that gets about two pages in Hobson-Jobson is tiffin. It was a word widely used in English households in India during the Raj. Today, however, its usage is predominantly South Indian. In Chennai, for instance, it usually means any light snack, or a mid-afternoon snack. In Kerala, I’ve heard it used mostly in tiffin-carrier, which is a lunch container about three to six decks tall. But the food inside is not normally called the tiffin. Most Keralites will just call it “oonu” or “meals.”
Dictionaries are wary with tiffin. My new Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives the word’s origin as “old-fashioned or Indian English.” A much fatter Chambers Dictionary has more: Its origins, indeed, lie in an obsolete meaning of tiff (lunch, a light meal) and derived from that was tiffing (“eating or drinking out of meal-times,” according to a 1785 source quoted in Hobson-Jobson). Michael Quinion, the noted British etymologist, explains on his website WorldWideWords.org that tiffin “entered the language at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, perhaps because the English fashion for eating dinner mid-afternoon was giving way under the influence of the Indian climate to a main meal taken later in the day, requiring a lighter midday meal and a name for it.”
Requiring a name is what much of language is about. In Kerala’s Kollam district, I lived as a boy for more than a decade in a coastal,
99-acre village called Tangasseri, where, up to the mid-1970s, most of the families were Anglo-Indian. And Tangy, as we affectionately called the place, was still very European, its many old bungalows grand and colonial. Tangy folks spoke English, waltzed, jived and twisted to the sounds of Bill Black’s Combo or The Ventures at the local East West Club. They all loved Western pop music. The guys wore suits to Sunday Mass, courted and dated Tangy’s prettiest girls, and they all lived a very different life from the Malayalis across the fence.
Linguistically speaking, Tangy’s Anglo-Indians were extraordinarily resourceful. Since they rarely spoke Malayalam, many local items demanded an anglicized name—and creative alternatives were coined or imported.
You won’t find these even in Hobson-Jobson. Take puttu, a Kerala breakfast dish traditionally made of rice flour steamed in a foot-long piece of bamboo. Puttu just didn’t sound right in an English sentence. So they called it “bamboo cake” in Tangy. Pappadam became “dinner biscuits.” A coconut frond (madal, in Malayalam) was “kajan” (a Malay word). I could go on.

 Looking back, Tangy English was a distinct dialect with a touch of Caribbean swagger (which may have come from the pop music craze). Sentences spoken often had “man” or “men” (even if you were addressing a woman) or a “yea” (similar to the way yaar is used among Hindi speakers).
“Men, what’s up, yea?” or “What the bloody hell, man?” (Both questions roughly meant “How do you do?”) And if people really liked you, you were a “damned nice bugger.” In fact, during my Tangy schooldays, I didn’t know of any other meaning for bugger.
At school, the Tangy boys switched easily to Standard English when addressing their Anglo-Indian lady teachers, many of whom could speak in the cut-glass accents of the Queen’s English. But even those ladies could revert to comfortable Tangy dialect in the privacy of their homes. 
Sadly, while Tangy’s old European culture flourished—the village was held in turn by Dutch, Portuguese and English settlers—nobody ever thought of studying or recording its unique and colourful English. Today, most of Tangy’s Anglo-Indians have taken wing for Australia, where people of British descent are offered citizenship. So, culturally, the old enclave is now a shadow of its lively former self.
I revisited Tangy last year and noticed that the old dialect of my day, too, had largely disappeared.
I think I even heard somebody say pappadam.
 

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