What’s in a name? Go on then, say it with me: Pa-La-Shi

I’ve a bee in my bonnet. It includes me having many sleepless nights, and plaguing household and pals over the lack of the Battle for Palashi. A few of you could recognise the correct noun and enterprise to level out, ‘Son, it’s the Battle of Plassey. A few of us had been there.’ However it’s not the precise 11-odd-hour battle that occurred 265 years in the past on June 23 between the 18th century model of the Sith and the Jedi orders which began a complete franchise that I give a toss about.

What bothers me to the purpose of me eager to storm Raisina Hill sporting a horned head-dress is how everybody and their khansama has taken it as a right that the place is Plassey, not Palashi or, the phonetically extra appropriate Polashi. I do know, I do know, it’s how the place known as and spelt in English, a language I’m completely happy to go all diphthong with. I additionally know that some locations have a number of names in a number of languages — Londres (London) in French, Delhi (Dilli) in English, Glostar (Gloucester) in Bengali….

However in some way, ‘Plassey’ will get my bakri. It’s particularly infuriating when by no means thoughts fellow Indians, however even fellow non-Bangladeshi Bengalis name this web site of historical past —and current ramshackle village in West Bengal’s Nadia village — in that ridiculously pissant manner. As soon as once more, I do know it’s an illogical rage towards some very respectable of us calling (what needs to be) acquainted issues the ‘unsuitable’ approach to sound ‘worldwide’.

However then, I’ve no pores and skin within the sport relating to these outdated bakwaas debates about Kolkata/Calcutta (as if ‘Kalkatta’ by no means issues) or Mumbai/Bombay. And but, when ‘Plassey’ comes up, particularly in any dialog in English in Hindustan (Hindi for India), I politely interject, ‘You imply Palashi.’

What’s it that the Bob Clive bunch — and I don’t imply the English — discover so onerous to wrap round their tongues that they proceed to mispronounce Palashi and thereby present their ‘membership membership’? That double vowel bump at ‘Pa-la’? Or the fondness of the Loch Bengal Membership sibilant ‘sss’ that’s misssing within the lusher ‘sh’ within the precise place title? There are errors that the herd follows. Like calling West Asia ‘Center East’ even if you happen to’re having a cuppa east of the Suez.

It makes complete sense if you happen to’re west of Baghdad. However to name it that’s as ridiculous as calling one’s grandmother mother-in-law simply since you’ve heard your father name your mom’s mum that. Then there’s the dinner facet chatter in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Bangalore, Madras… when en passant, the dialog strikes to the topic of ‘ladies of color in Hollywood’. I’m not going to go all woke in your albumen and demand that individuals begin describing Scarlett Johansson as a ‘girl of no color’. However calling Priyanka Chopa a WoC is, for brown individuals, as ludicrous as calling out for milagu thanni in a Chennai canteen and anticipating mulligatawny soup — which might be rasaism.

‘Plassey,’ admittedly doesn’t fall into that class of that type of unsuitable. In spite of everything, calling Varanasi or Banaras ‘wrongly’ ‘Benaras’ is a far cry from transferring the goalposts, area and syllables of Palashi to Plassey. The truth that the place is known as after the red-flowering palash tree — the flame-of-the-forest — is buried deep to the purpose of oblivion even whereas it’s inhaling its personal language.

However it’s not even that lack of title origin that provides me the gripes. It’s the servility camouflaged as conceitedness that breaks the bee in my bonnet into hives. It’s the identical sense of misplaced (and irrational) language-usage superiority that finds ‘bhetki’ on the menus of posh eating places become ‘bhekti,’ as if a complete class of managers and/or printers undergo from dyslexia. How onerous can or not it’s to maintain that ‘okay’ earlier than the ‘t’?

It’s for a similar nyakeri (translate that, boffins!) that Plassey continues to be additionally trotted out as an English translation, when all that saying it that manner is saying this: ‘I’ll say it as a result of I can. The opposite phrase sounds so… native.’