Indian English Class (aka Doing The Needful)

From a foreigner’s perspective, Indian English is a constant fascination for two chief reasons: it irks and delights in equal measure (usually depending on your mood), and you pretty quickly start speaking it yourself. I experienced this phenomenon in Japan as well, my previously proudly upheld language disintegrating into cheap affirmations and exclamation marks. (Life was disappointing!) Here in Kerala, numerous phrases and intonations have entered my everyday speech that never cross the barrier into my thoughts. I notice them all the time as I drink tea with friends, chat with a neighbour or – this one especially – speak on the phone. It often feels like I’m interrupting myself in a different voice, but without dividing your personality that little bit, communication is considerably more difficult.

I’m getting to be a proud speaker of Indian English. My colleagues tease me that I’m more Malayali than they are as I cultivate a ‘benana and pissa’ accent right below a bushy moustache. In spite of this, many language habits of the land seem peculiar. Here are few that I remain intrigued by…

• do the needful at the earliest – Anyone who deals with Indian businesspeople or outsourcing will be familiar with this one. According to Wikipedia, it’s a remnant of early-to-mid-20^th Century British English that has died out in the native speakers but lives on in this and a couple of other colonies. Search for it in Google, with quotes, and the first few results are humorous Western perspectives of the phrase, but then you have another 260,000 results of people actually posting that phrase on the internet. Add ‘kindly’ in front and the field narrows to a paltry 103,000. I can only hope that in each case, the needful was indeed done. At the earliest. (Earliest what?)

• reach office by 9 only – all kinds of shenanigans going on here…

  • The two chief uses of ‘reach’ in India are to say ‘arrive at a destination’ (e.g. reach office) or ‘place into the hands or custody of’ (e.g. ‘Help Indian Railways Reach You Safely’), both pretty archaic in the West.

  • Where ‘the earliest’ above always comes with the definite article ‘the’, ‘office’ seems in desperate need of it. Omitting ‘the’ in newspaper-headline style is a relatively common practice for which I haven’t yet grasped the reason, but in this case, ‘office’ is an activity and a direct replacement for ‘work’.

  • Westerners tend to use ‘by’ as a synonym for ‘before’, but here it seems to take the place of the far more precise ‘at’, or very occasionally ‘around’. I realised this when, in my early days at Technopark, a colleague said “I usually take lunch by 1:30”… and then, like a metronome, would get up from his desk at precisely 1:30 every single day.

  • Then there’s ‘only’, which, along with ‘itself’, seems to be added for emphasis. To every spoken sentence only, in Kerala itself.

• I would contact you by email next week. – as a conditional modal verb, ‘would’ generally requires an accompanying clause starting with ‘if’, or some other explanation of the conditions required. Hence, in a case such as this I would normally wonder what wasn’t being said. Here, however, ‘would’ means the same as ‘will’… but no amount of searching can dig up an answer as to why. My romantic take is that somebody saw The Man Who Would Be King and, upon learning that Sean Connery does indeed become king, believed that ‘would’ signified certainty and went forth to spread the news.

• get over – move on from the worst of, or deal with successfully, as in “I just can’t get over her” or the always relevant “Get over it!” Right? Wrong, think again! In India ‘to get over’ means ‘to finish’, or perhaps ‘to run out’. I remember reading this for the first time in a popular Indian weekly, which was reporting on the distribution of aid packages to Kashmir: ‘As the second of the three trucks gets over, it’s clear that there is not enough for everyone present.’ Come on now, the only thing a truck can get over is a hill. There are surprisingly few examples online, but ‘When this economic recession will get over?‘ is timely.

DISCLAIMER: I have made sure not to say that any of these examples are incorrect, because I understand that a language can evolve over time and that Indian English is effectively its own dialect, with different rules and practices from the English of England – just like American English. I find things funny and strange about American English too, but I live in India and this is an NRI website, so here we are.

Feel free to add your own in the comments, or flame me for my effrontery.

Dear NRI readers why not connect with us on LinkedIn, the premier professional and business networking site. Our new Group page is a community where NRIs, resident Indians and anyone with an interest in Indian culture can share views and experiences, to connect and interact.

Click Here to join us. It’s free!

We look forward to seeing you there.