Confessions of a Briefless Barrister by Harry Mitchell QC

Author:Harry Mitchell QC
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2018-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

Hindi Classes

We gradually got used to the routines of daily living and working in India. Living at Mulund meant enjoying the semi-rural ambience of Palmacres but it had the disadvantage of having frequently to face the chaos and congestion of the Agra Road on a journey into the centre of Bombay which normally took over an hour. Only a limited range of groceries was available at Mulund, so Megan quite often had to go into Bombay to shop. I often had to go in on business and for some time travelled in early on two mornings a week to attend classes in Hindi. The main vernacular of Bombay, capital of the state of Maharashtra, is Marathi, but Hindi is widely spoken in the city, is the main language of Madhya Pradesh and other states, and is the lingua franca of northern India generally. The classes were organised by the Bombay Chamber of Commerce for the benefit of expatriate executives of member companies and held in the Chamber’s offices opposite Ballard Pier. Our teacher was Mr Vaswani, a middle-aged Hindi munshi with many years’ experience of teaching Hindi to foreigners. His teaching was geared to our needs in having to deal with mainly junior employees such as drivers and chowkidars (security staff) who might have little or no English. Managers, even fairly junior managers, would normally speak good English and work all the time in English. I have always had an aptitude for languages and I picked up basic Hindi fairly quickly. I found it useful to be able to have simple conversations with junior office staff, our servants and with ordinary people generally. As well as learning the spoken language we were introduced to the Devanagari script in which Hindi is written and which was to be seen everywhere – on advertising hoardings, buildings, buses and trains, sometimes with the same message in Roman script but often alone. There were also books and newspapers published in the Devanagari script. After some months of attending classes I was happy to take and pass the Lower Standard Hindi examination, a survival from the days of the British Raj, when newly arrived members of the Indian Civil Service had to learn and demonstrate proficiency in the language.

My fellow pupils were of different nationalities – British, Swiss, Irish and German – and all more or less the same age as me, with the exception of a British woman who was probably in her early forties and therefore in the view of Mr Vaswani entitled to slightly more deferential treatment. With all his years of teaching foreigners he spoke excellent idiomatic English, but went slightly astray in regularly addressing or referring to this woman as ‘the Madame’. On one occasion when our teacher was briefly out of the room, she said to the rest of us, “If Mr Vaswani keeps referring to me as the Madame I am going to ask him, where are my girls?”

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