Evolution

[Angrboda]

P.R. Sarkar on linguistics, or, "Baba strikes out"

I have previously discussed how ridiculous things can get when linguistic interpretations are filtered through politics. And particularly so when the process is lubricated with outright insanity. And sometimes politics and insanity join into their natural composite: Religion. This time I found a holy man who, through his powers, was enabled to discourse in length on the exact science of linguistics. The result is unsurprisingly baffling.

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Baba was born as Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar in Bihar, India in 1921 and died in 1990, contrary to his own preceding statements. Like most gurus he claimed to have tapped into The Divine and acquired infinite knowledge. So in between his daytime job at a railway station and authoring numerous books on yogic exercises and vegetarianism (which, by all accounts, he seemed to know a lot about), he also wrote scores of books on practically every established scientific discipline, including sociology, literature, cosmology, medicine and microbiology—which, I suspected from early on, he maybe did not know so much about.

According to the various books’ forewords, the droplets of divine wisdom from this spiritual superman would give the established scientific community food for thought for decades to come and contribute greatly to the advance of mankind. (In addition to this, he could also levitate, control the weather telepathically, and utilize X-ray vision from behind his thick-rimmed glasses.)

Statements like that do invite scrutiny, so I have taken the liberty of looking closer at one of the books defining guru Sarkar as a world class academic. As I don’t know much about cosmology or medicine (and mind you, neither do I pretend to), I chose the book Varńa Vijiṋána: The Science of Letters, published by Ananda Marga Publications in Anandanagar in 1983. The subject is linguistics, which I do know a little bit about.....

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The most picturesque etymology offered is one that I feel I have to quote in all its absurd length, so bear with me:

Many people think that the English word “mango” comes from the Tamil word máungá but it has not. (…) There is a different reason why what we call ám in Bengali is called “mango” in English. Once there was a gentleman by the name of Mr. Ricecurry who came to work in this country during the rule of the East India Company. He was the first English gentleman to bring his wife with him. Both Mr. and Mrs. Ricecurry were responsible for introducing many Bengali as well as North Indian words into the English lexicon. It is said that the night the missus heard an owl-call for the first time she was so shaken by it that she cried out several times “horrible, horrible”. She asked the maid: “Was that the sound of the famous Royal Bengal tiger of the Sundarban jungle?” The maid replied: “No, ma’am, that was an ullu (ullu in Urdu means “owl”). Then the missus said, “Oh, horrible, its name is ‘owl’?” Thus the Urdu word ullu entered the English lexicon in altered form as “owl”.

When the mango-seller would pass by the house of Mr. Ricecurry, Mrs. Ricecurry would not be able to restrain herself from buying that delicious fruit. Right away she would tell her orderly: “Man, go go …,” that is, go and call the mango-seller. The orderly started to think that perhaps the lady was calling the fruit “mango”. Thereafter on his own the orderly used to tell the missus “mango, mango” when he would see the mango-seller. In time this “mango” became the English synonym for ám. (pp. 48-49)

I do not know if this is a common myth (or perhaps a simple pun) in India. But the notion that the first British woman to visit India would be called “Mrs. Ricecurry” and had never heard of owls is simply ridiculous.

As for “mango”, the first known use of the word in English was in 1582—years before the East India Company was founded. According to both the Oxford and the Merriam-Webster dictionaries, the word entered English via Portuguese traders, who picked it up from Tamil or Malayalam. The two are closely related Dravidian languages, and the original māngāy means “the fruit or seed (kāy) of the mān tree”. It has nothing to do with men going anywhere.

Finally, a religious book about mangos