The story of Chinky, Thulla, and Tambi

What is more offensive and derogatory – a name that is spoken with some affection though sometimes with ignorance wrapped around, or the Shiv Sena asking Biharis, workers from UP and Gujarati businessmen to leave their ‘amchi Mumbai’? Or people in J&K, the NE, and a few other regions calling you ‘Indian’ when you go to these places as tourists? Or the Government in the Centre giving step-motherly treatment to governments in the States and UTs that are under the rule of some other political party? Or the LG of Delhi saying he is the government in Delhi? Or contest losers on twitter calling me ‘buddha’ and asking me to leave some contest winnings for them? Or words like ‘bong’, ‘punju’, ‘gujju’, ‘madrasi’, ‘sambhar’, ‘chinky’, ‘thulla’, ‘tambi’, and ‘sulla’ directed towards people from one community or the other?

Let me first tell you about an incident that I remember from my days in the Indian Military Academy where we had a sikh friend who was in our course but a couple of years elder and had streaks of grey hair. To top it all he was fond of staying away from pranks and troubles and was forever talking about ethics and remaining on the good side of the law. At some stage someone must have called him ‘buds’ which is like calling a 20-something a grandpa. No, I never called him buds but I did wonder then, as I do now, if there was anything offensive in the word. Most of us loved him and so buds as a form of address reflected affection. But this sikh Gentleman Cadet, despite all his wise outpourings was invariably peeved and did not appreciate his being called buds. I haven’t met him after we left the IMA and so I hope he either got acclimatised to this pet name, if I may call it that… or people just stopped calling him buds in his regiment.

If you think this kind of renaming happens only in India, look beyond our borders and hear ‘paki’, ‘negro’, ‘nigger’, or declared slurs like ‘bin laden’, ‘jehadi, and ‘cabbie’ for Arabs, or ‘jew’ during the nazi heydays, or ‘nazi’ now, or ‘bindi’, ‘desi’, and ‘patel’ for Indians, or ‘dubya’ and ‘jarhead’ for Americans, ‘bubba’, ‘pus’, and ‘gora’ for the whites, ‘nacho’ and ‘taco’ for the Spanish… so from ‘Alibaba’ to ‘zipperhead’ our world is full of interesting innuendoes that need not necessarily spend their lives being calibrated as offensive words.

These are the words that have made life just so much more interesting and injected with laughter… banning them or shunning them is like Modi taking offense to his 56 inch chest quote getting pulled apart and minced to prove some point or the other.

The other day Arvind Kejriwal referred to the Delhi policeman as a ‘thulla’ and everyone from Bassi to the media howled with displeasure. Come on, we’ve all had umpteen names for Kejriwal and ‘aaptards’ for his party is probably more known than even ‘thulla’. I decided to know more about the word ‘thulla’ and the first interesting derivation was offered by the BRFDictionary on the net that said: “The term is used to denote a stereotypical slow moving police constable with a big gut. The origin of this term has to do with the word for a sack made of jute fiber, which is "thula" in some languages in the Eastern part of India. As it happens, police constables in many states in India are issued a brown starched uniform that looks like it was made from a sack. Hence the word for "jute sack" was morphed into slang for "police".” By the way, our policemen aren’t just ‘thullas’ but are also ‘mamas’ and ‘pandus’… and our Bollywood movies make sure that we don’t ever forget these dear words. The online dictionary for Hindi words was predictably less brave and avoided any reference to this word which is ridiculous because the word is as much a part of the language as any other and deserves a place in history… I mean, do we just let lovely and much used (sometimes abused) words fade away and disappear?

I don’t think it is great idea to go guns blazing at all these forms of address that we classify as slur words… let them live their lives, accept them, and soon enough you’ll know that like ‘Uncle Tom’, ‘spook’, and ‘shine’ every word becomes a part of the glorious history of civilization.

The story of Chinky, Thulla, and Tambi is as interesting as is the story behind any other word in any other language and thus needs to be kept alive.