Anglo-Indian Dictionaries

The earliest examples of the lexicography of Indian English appeared as glossaries in works written for an audience outside of India, such as the 1698 travelogue of Persia and India written by the East India Company physician John Fryer or various reports to the British government. These glossaries were limited in their scope to the vocabulary and topics in the works to which they were appended. In the mid-1800s, several free-standing dictionaries appeared, focused not on terms from a specific book or report, but on terms from a specific realm of British activity in India – at that time, these were trade, taxation, law, and the military. Among these works, which would be most useful for the East India Company and government officers joining the British Indian service and heading to India for the first time, were H. H. Wilson’s hefty Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms, C. P. Brown’s Zillah Dictionary, and Patrick Carnegy’s Kachahri Technicalities. The authors of these independent glossaries were typically officials from the British Indian service or scholars with detailed knowledge of the languages of India, and they documented not the Indian English spoken by Indians who had learned English as a second language, but the terminology particular to the ‘Anglo-Indian’ spoken and written by British transplants to India. The entries in these works usually reported a language of origin, orthography of the word in Persian, and a brief definition. Spelling of these terms in English was idiosyncratic, however.

In 1886, the lexicography of Anglo-Indian was transformed when the retired military engineer Henry Yule published a landmark Anglo-Indian dictionary, which he had compiled with Arthur Coke Burnell, a linguist and jurist from the British Indian service. Their dictionary departed from its predecessors in its coverage of terms from all aspects of life and work in India, including many geographical terms; its presentation of generally sound etymologies; its documentation in many lexical entries using historical examples of the term’s use in print; and its chatty, entertaining style. A typical entry in Hobson-Jobson offered cultural context and a sense of the changing use of a word over centuries of European presence in India. Although Yule and Burnell benefited from and relied on the work of prior Anglo-Indian lexicographers, their Hobson-Jobson modernised the entire genre, bringing it up to date not only with the wide range of the British experience in India but also with the most modern practices of lexicography (except for pronunciation, about which Hobson-Jobson gave no guidance). Indeed, Hobson-Jobson was so ground-breaking and set such a high bar for readability, reliability, and comprehensiveness that it eclipsed its contemporary competition, such as G. C. Whitworth’s Anglo-Indian Dictionary, issued just six months earlier. Hobson-Jobson’s authoritative information made it the most important source for the Oxford English Dictionary’s documentation of words imported from South Asia. No other dictionary of English in India gave it serious competition for more than a century. A lightly edited second edition of Hobson-Jobson was issued in 1903, and reprints of that edition have been produced from the 1960s onward.

Yet Hobson-Jobson was only ever half a dictionary. It documented the English spoken by the British in India but, like its predecessors, included almost no examples of the English spoken by Indians. For instance, terms that represent native Indian uses of English, such as ledikeni or Lady Kenny (a Bengali dessert reportedly invented for presentation to Lady Canning, the wife of the first viceroy of India in the late 1850s – the word is an accented pronunciation of her name), were not included in Hobson-Jobson, despite being current at the time of its publication. In fact, the authors of Hobson-Jobson were contemptuous of the English spoken by Indians, which they called ‘butler English’ and ‘baboo English’. The British civil servants and military officers who departed when India gained its independence took their variety of English with them but left behind the sense that Indian English was inferior to the British variety.

Dictionaries of Indian English

Indian English today is distinguished lexically by two categories of words: those from Indian languages that have eased their way into English (the same types of words documented by Hobson-Jobson and its predecessors), and existing or innovated English words and phrases that have unique meanings in the Indian context. In the first category, we find very common words such as lakh (n., ‘a hundred thousand’), crore (n., ‘ten million’), or desi (n. or adj., ‘native South Asian’). The second category includes words such as military hotel (n., ‘a restaurant that serves meat’), batch-mate (n., ‘classmate of the same graduation year’), and prepone (v., ‘to move to an earlier time than planned’).

A century after Hobson-Jobson was first published, a few small dictionaries of Indian English began to appear that addressed one or the other of these segments of the lexicon. The first category includes the anachronistic Sahibs, Nabobs, and Boxwallahs by Ivor Lewis, which covers much of the same Anglo-Indian lexicon found in Hobson-Jobson, although in a less discursive style. In the second category, Indian and British English by Paroo Nihalani et al. includes a comprehensive lexicon of English words and phrases whose meaning in Indian English differs from that in British English – but none of the lexical items imported from Indian languages. Nigel Hankin’s Hanklyn-Janklin, a popular volume of amateur lexicography with a discursive tone similar to Hobson-Jobson’s, does include terms from both segments of the Indian English lexicon, but it is not comprehensive and lacks some structural elements of a dictionary, such as pronunciations.

So where are the comprehensive dictionaries of Indian English? To which dictionaries does the speaker or writer of English in India today turn for guidance on spelling, meaning, and usage? A request in 2018 to a prominent New Delhi bookstore for a selection of dictionaries that educated Indians might purchase produced the eleventh edition of the Pocket Oxford English Dictionary, the twelfth edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the ninth edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, and the fifth edition of the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Each of these was printed exclusively for the South Asian market, but only the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary appears to have been adapted in its content to the South Asian user. For example, Indian terms such as lakh, crore, prepone, and desi do not appear in the Pocket Oxford or the Collins, which draws its wordlist only from British, American, Australian, and New Zealand English. These terms do appear in the Concise Oxford, but with usage notes indicating that they are specifically Indian English. These usage notes, which also identify terms and meanings that are specifically British, Australian, or North American, suggest that this dictionary is written for users in many parts of the English-speaking world, not just India. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s includes these terms without India-specific usage notes. None of these dictionaries, however, includes words such as the regional Bengali ledikeni or Lady Kenny or sarod, an Indian stringed musical instrument.

English Dictionaries and Standardising Indian English

The variety of English spoken in India is not yet recognised, even by its own educated speakers, as an aspirational standard. As might be surmised from the lack of an Indian-edited and -published dictionary on the shelves of a New Delhi bookstore, ‘the standard accepted in India by tradition and convention is British English’ (Yadurajan 2001, xi). Yet British English is not what is spoken in India, nor is it what appears in English-language newspapers. Although the bulk of Indian speakers of English have learned it as a second language (from non-native-English-speaking teachers), the speech of the several hundred thousand native speakers can serve as a basis for the documentation of a standard Indian English. A dictionary by Indians for Indians would encourage speakers of English in India to consider their variety as legitimate and not defective.