The traffic sign at the Kolkata crossing had me a bit bemused. "Compulsory left" it said. That was rather odd for several reasons. "Compulsory" is a big word. Why not say "Left turn must", or "Only left turn allowed", or better still, something a bit more racy, "All turn left"?
If "Compulsory left" was also a bit too cryptic for comfort, then in terms of incomprehensibility the classical old sign, the much written about "No infiltration left" is difficult to beat. Belonging to another era, the boards bearing that sign have got worn out and virtually disappeared. So those who care about how social forces shape language should pinch one of the remaining signs and keep it as a fun thing.
All that the sign meant was that when the light goes green don't imagine you can, other than going straight, turn left too. Wait for pedestrians to cross and then turn when the signal for turning left also goes green. But what on earth is "infiltration"? Yes, it is a big word to mean sneaking in without permission. In a land in which most have difficulty using even a simple word or two of English, "infiltration" is used only by strategists and those who want to pedantically show off their knowledge of a foreign tongue.
The roots of the usage are not difficult to work out. Time was when to be considered educated, the Babu had to have a minimum working knowledge of the language of the sahib. Never mind if that knowledge remained bookish and inappropriate for common use. What was important, to be considered educated, was to have a minimum vocabulary and an adequate amount of grammar, drilled into you by most likely a dhoti and Afghan kameez type shirt clad mastermoshai, with round glasses perched on the nose's edge, who lived by the gospel according to Nesfield.
The result was that official communication and even signage, penned by those who had no idea of informal usage, was in an English that went way above the common man's head. There was no place for simple words that could be easily understood. Just as the Brahmin pundits of yore derived their legitimacy from their knowledge of Sanskrit which the laity did not understand, babudom in colonial India set itself apart by communicating in an English which few understood. It was as Greek to the people in general as it would be to the Greeks themselves, I suspect.
The desire to stick to English, come what may, still survives, for an entirely different reason of course. The gated community in which I live has a fair number of non-Bengali speaking residents. To conduct general body meetings and put up official notices in Bengali would be inconsiderate to them. So what we have is a lot of broken spoken English, interspersed with Bengali (Hindi is of course out), and notices that would make a stickler for correct English blush.
But I am happy to report that class distinction, based on knowledge of the ruler's language, or any kind of knowledge, is today a thing of the past. Those who run the show now have little formal education and hence use Bengali all right but of a particular kind.
During the recent Assembly elections, a poster in my neighbourhood, extolling the virtues of the local MLA up for re-election, caused a lot of amusement among the morning walkers, usually older, better-off people who have to combat diabetes and do not get enough manual exercise during the day with their sedentary lifestyle. It asserted that the government had ruled with "firmness", but the Bengali word dreerata was misspelt as deerata, just the way a person with little education would stumble and slur over the pronunciation of the "r" in the complex word. The poster was of course changed the next day but the point had been made.
From being ruled by the British to being ruled by educated gentlemen who proudly wore their badge of knowledge of an arcane form of English, true democracy has now passed the baton on to those who have very little education of any kind, even in the mother tongue. True people's rule, which could not be achieved by the bhadralok, symbolised by chief ministers like Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, has now been delivered by the leader of and from the masses, Mamata Banerjee.
History has its own sense of humour. Now that the Left has suffered not one but two defeats, it can be argued that it had not won victory the right way during the interregnum in which it ruled. It had somehow sneaked in - infiltrated. Hence the old street sign, "No infiltration left", has acquired a new meaning. Infiltration by the Left is today totally no no.
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