“The cock crows at the break of dawn
He annoys me —
My boss calls in the early morn
He employs me
I resent the call of the cock
I work for a rupee around the clock…”
From Iss Gulami Iss Daastaan by Bachchoo
Jeremy Clarkson, star of the BBC’s travelling-automobile show, has run into what we Brits call a spot of bother. Some have solemnly called for Clarkson to lose his very well-paid position — one can hardly call it a job.
His crime? I shall present the facts so you can judge for yourself, albeit from a culture that may not comprehend the same taboos.
Two years ago, in a setting-up shot for his programme, Clarkson was faced with a choice between two cars that he might possibly use. Standing before them for camera adjustments he favoured a mechanism of choice which children all over the world use. He recited a childhood rhyme, gesturing with a finger alternately between the cars when pronouncing each syllable of the spoken rhyme. Just so, we in our infancy in India used one of several rhymes to see which of a circle of players was “in” or was “out”.
For the sake of posterity I’m reproducing a rude and nonsensical one:
“Adha Padha, kown padda
Mamaji ka dhol padda
Dhem dhoos, cherry choos
Khatta bor, mittha bor
Gharye gharye laga
CHOR!”
The person pointed at on the word “chor”, was the victim or the winner, depending on what we were playing. My cousins used a slightly altered version in which “dhol” the drum was replaced by “ghoda” the horse. It’s a moot point: did the drum or the horse emit the offending fart!
Clarkson, however, used a rhyme that was also in our Indian school playground repertoire. I have only now been told that it originated in the days of African slave-markets and it contains what Britain alludes to as the unmentionable “n-word”. This is a code used for the taboo argot of “f-words”, “c-words” and, for all I know, “x, y and z-words” — a modern linguistic algebra where letters stand for unacceptable expletives. Clarkson’s rhyme as you may have guessed begins “Eeny meeny miney mo…”
As children in the 1950s, we inherited this rhyme from our ex-Raj schools as did our parents before us. At the time I had no idea that the n-word was offensive.
I won’t pretend that I didn’t know that it alluded to people of African descent, but I was totally ignorant of its etymology and had never come across it as a derogatory term, possibly because I had, at that age and in Pune and through my travels in India, never met an African or Afro-American or Afro-Caribbean.
It was only in early adolescence when I began to read periodicals such as Time magazine, met African co-students at college and was delegated to show a contingent of visiting students from UCLA around Pune that I realised how offensive racial slurs in this historical context could be.
In common usage at the time (which usage hasn’t disappeared but merely has suffered some restraint) were derogatory Hindustani, Gujarati and Marathi terms for people of different castes, religions or regions. “Bawaji” for us Parsis was as respectful as “Sardarji” for Sikhs, but we were also called the half-jocular “Khekda Khao” and I can recall very many epithets I would be ashamed to use now for Maharashtrians, Sindhis, Muslims, dalits and, collectively, for south Indians.
To be fair, Clarkson reached the offensive “n-word” in his recitation and, like a man hesitating at the edge of a cliff as he blithely progressed, attempted to muffle the word.
In his rendition, which has two years later been fetched from some archive of waste footage to finger him, the word is at first mumbled in sudden, self-conscious inhibition. He repeats the rhyme and substitutes the word “teacher” saying “catch a teacher by his toe”.
When the footage was made public Clarkson apologised saying, in effect, that he wouldn’t in his own discourse use the “n-word” and that he had tried to avoid it by mumbling even when he inadvertently employed a rhyme which is still in use in British playgrounds with the one n-word altered to “tiger”.
When as a teenager, I first thought of myself as a socialist and egalitarian and later a confirmed Marxist, I didn’t give much credence to the reform of linguistic use as a tool of revolution.
In the United States and Great Britain of the 1960s, the word “coloured” fell out of favour. Black people said they wanted to be called “black”! Words were intended offensively. (Though Clarkson didn’t use it on any person!) As the demonstrative movements of blacks, feminists and later gay people spread, the linguistic revolution made headway.
Not saying certain words, banning or rewriting and re-illustrating popular books with words, names or images, which were deemed insulting to certain ethnic or gender groups, became its banner and populations formed up behind it. To someone who had worked actively and agitationally, had fought on the streets and been arrested several times in the battle for the material rights of the British immigrant population, this emphasis on banning words seemed at the time feeble and even a cop-out.
I — and I know others — felt we were sticks-and-stones-wallahs and the word-ban-wallahs were second rank, even lip-and-mouth revolutionaries. Questioning and banning words was their revolution, while we were out for Leninist domination and considered lexicographic correctness a triviality.
I have since been battered into partially realising the error of my ways and will try to refrain from even thinking the words of the forbidden lettered lexicon, including the “P-word” applied to us Asians. Of course, groups of people ought not to be labelled with contemptuous words. Of course, these offensive epithets sho-uld not be used and are bad taste, bad manners and injurious.
But should Jeremy Clarkson lose his job, or should God, the BBC and black people — in that order — forgive him?
