Fundoo Inglish

A delightful poem on Indian English by Punita Singh.


Fundoo Inglish

I am having a love for Inglish
my auntie tongue though she may be
so vivid in portraying
my reality

I did not learn it in my isskool
or in my phansy kollage
or from my guru cool
though all were fonts of knowledge

The ungrammatical grammar
may evoke a gasp or groan
The misuse of prepositions
some may not condone

We discuss about our projects
and pay attention on detail
We say “at the rate of”, not “at”
when addressing our email

We enter from the backside
when we go to home from office
We invite our next-door neighbour
for chai-shai and patiss

We have a lot many redundancies
and doubling of comparatives
Some are more better
for illustrating our narratives

We have penchant for dropping articles
in the whole of the region
or in few of the cases
adding them without reason

Actually, probably, basically
in fact and of course
are such useful fluffy fillers
punctuating our discourse

We have good names
and we are putting up in hostels
if the fooding isn’t decent
we’re eating out in hotuls


We open the light and close the fan
and when we want the volume lower
we translate from the vernacular
and ask to make it slower

Our tenses are not perfect
the continuous “-ing” deserves mention
But we are conveying what we are meaning
Kindly don’t take tension

Some archaicisms still abound
in our post-colonial angrezi
The circumlocutory gobbledygook
could forthwith drive you crazy

We use words like heretofore and whomsoever
juxtaposed in a polysyllabic jumble
We “beg to state” and “intimate”
We can be obsequious and overly humble

But our Inglish is absorbent
with our other tongues it can convolve
adding to our colloquial repertoire
as new dimensions evolve

We’re good at adopting words
and adapting local bhasha
to suit every situation
and depict life’s tamasha

We’re insouciant and bindaas
in morphing words to fit the need
we’re innovative with jugaad
“Chak de” is our new creed

We’ve contributed words like “shampoo”
to the world’s English lexicon
Arrey – “dandruff ko karey clean bowled”
don’t raise your eyebrows with such scorn

Some of our most eminent writers
are using this mixed patois
colouring the speech of their characters
despite the threat of a fatwa

English sounds are a mouthful
Some are difficult to articulate
The phonemes that we can’t deal with
we do our baste and extrapolate
Our vowels sometimes flip
and our diphthongs invert
making loins out of lions
and a bard out of a bird

Our “p”s and “b”s and “w”s and “v”s
may ocayyunally cauj confuzun
and those imported “zh”s and “z” and “f”s
may suffer some contusion

We can make questions out of statements
by pitching our intonation up a tilt
how we stress and unstress syllables
gives our accent its characteristic lilt

Before you pronounce a sentence
denouncing our pronunciation
consider how well we manage
unfamiliar enunciation

We may have inherited English
but now it’s heir to stay
We’ve nurtured it and made it our own
It’s our lingo for work and play

Esperanto-style lingua franca
or whatever you want to call it
Celebrate it or denigrate it
it has momentum, you can’t stall it

If language is a medium
meant for communication
then this medium rare is well done
in our multilingual nation

Yes, I am loving my Inglish
though it took some getting used to
It’s a member of the world of Englishes
but Indian through and through

To love and to cherish
in sickness and in health
for better or for verse
our lingual ability is our wealth



Punita Singh, 2008