Murdoch University
The Krishna Somers Foundation presents a lecture on Salman Rushdie.
The lecture will be given by
Professor Vijay Mishra.
As usual excellent wine (and orange juice) will be available.
When: Wednesday September 9 2009 4.30 PM
Where: Education and Humanities 3.041
Title: "Salman Rushdie’s Hobson-Jobson"
Abstract
In 1886 Colonel Henry Yule with some help from the amateur Sanskritist and comparative philologist (but really a civil servant) A. C. Burnell, published his vocabulary of Anglo-Indian words. The title given to the dictionary - Hobson-Jobson - by Henry Yule ‘is a typical and delightful example of that class of Anglo-Indian argot which consists of Oriental words highly assimilated, perhaps by vulgar lips, to the English vernacular’ (Yule rpt 1986: ix). The example, apart from being quaint and delightful, it is suggested, is the archetype of the processes by which Indian words, largely from the Hindustani, were absorbed into the English language.
This paper critiques claims made on Rushdie’s behalf by almost every critic that Rushdie gives a new voice to India; that he creates a language which captures in a dramatic fashion the semiological complexities of India; that his use of texts ranging from the Qur’ān and Attar’s The Conference of the Birds to Vyasa and Somadeva creates an insider’s world view not available to say a Forster or a Kipling. The paper attempts to make a case, beyond grammatical analogy, for Rushdie’s use of primarily Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) expressions as an extension of the Anglo-Indian Hindustani compiled by Yule and Burnell. In other words, it is argued that Rushdie’s own use of non-English expressions takes shape in the shadow of Hobson-Jobson and continues an erstwhile Anglo-Indian ‘heteroglossic assimilation.’
The paper ends with a look at another variety of ‘hobson-jobson’ through an examination of Rushdie’s use of synchronicity and numerology.
Vijay Mishra is Professor of English Literature at Murdoch University. His publications include: Dark Side of the Dream; Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (with Bob Hodge) (1991), The Gothic Sublime (1994), Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime (1998), Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (2002; rpt six times) and The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007; rpt twice 2008). He plays the Indian harmonium, is a Beatles fan and reads Sanskrit.
