Sea of Poppies

+bankshall: Neel would have been saddened by the demise of this beautiful word, once much in use: 'How well I remember the great Bankshall of Calcutta, which served as the jetty for the disembarkation of ship's passengers, and where we would go of an evening to gawk at all the griffins and new arrivals. It never occurred to us that this edifice ought to have been, by its oracular definition, merely a "warehouse" or "shed". Yet I do not doubt that Sir Henry is right to derive it from the Bengali bãkashala'. He would have been surprised to learn that a humbler kind of warehouse, the godown, had survived in general usage, at the expense of the now rare bankshall.

+banyan/banian: 'This is no mere word, but a clan, a sect, a caste – one that has long been settled in the English language. The clue to its understanding lies in the gloss provided by the Admiral: 'The term is derived from a religious sect in the East, who, believing in metempsychosis, eat of no creature endowed with life. It derives, in other words, from the caste-name "Bania" or properly, "Vania", the last s yllable of which is sometimes nasalized. This caste, long associated with banking, commerce, money-lending and so on, was of course famously vegetarian and this was why the word served for centuries as an essential part of the English nautical vocabulary, being applied to the one day of the week when sailors were not served meat: banyan-day.'

But all this being accepted, how did this word come to assume its present avatar, in which it represents the humble and ubiquitous undergarment worn by the men of the Indian subcontinent? Neel was of course in an exceptionally good position to observe this mutation, which happened largely within his lifetime. His tracing of the genealogy of this series of incarnations counts among his most important contributions to the etymologist's art and deserves to be quoted in full. 'The word banyan's journey to the wardrobe began no doubt with the establishing of its original sense in English, in which it served merely to evoke an association with India (it was thus, I imagine, that it came also to be attached to a tree that became symbolic of the land – our revered ficus religiosa, now reincarnated as the banyan-tree). It was because of this general association that it came also to be applied to a certain kind of Indian garment. It serves no purpose perhaps to ask what that garment originally was. To anyone who has lived as long as I have, it is evident that the garment in question is not so much an article of clothing as an index of Hind.'s standing in the world. Thus, in the seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries, when ours was still a land of fabled riches and opulence, the word banyan/banian referred to a richly embroidered dressing gown that fell almost to the floor: it was modelled perhaps on the choga or the caftan/qaftan. [Here the present writer ca

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+banyan-/banian-day: See banyan.

+banyan-fight (*The Glossary): 'A tongue-tempest', as recorded by Sir Henry, 'that "never rises to blows or bloodshed" (Ocington, 1690)'.

+banyan-tree: See banyan.

+barbican: 'A sewer- or water-pipe,' as Sir Henry correctly notes, 'that leads back to the Bab-Khana of Kanpur'.

bargeer (*The Glossary): 'It is my conviction that this derivative of the marathi word for "soldier" made its way into The Glossary not through the battlefield but the nursery, being employed, as it was in Bengali, to strike terror into the hearts of budzat butchas.'

bas! (*Roebuck): The Lieutenant glosses this as the Laskari equivalent of the English 'avast', but Neel believed it to be a sibling rather than a synonym, both being derived, in his view, from the Arabic bass, 'enough'.

+ bawhawder / bahaudur / bahadur: 'This once sought-after Mughal title, meaning literally "brave", took on a derisive undertone in English. Sir Henry is right in noting that it came to "denote a haughty or pompous personage, exercising his brief authority with a strong sense of his own importance". Curiously, no taint of the derisive attached to this term where it would have been most apt – that is, in its application to the East India Company, which was known in Hind. as Company Bawhawder'.

+bayadère: 'Those who believe that Portuguese was a language of the decks and had little to contribute to the bedroom would do well to note that bayadère is not a French but of Portuguese derivation (from bailadera – "dancing girl").' This was the euphemism that BeeBees used to speak of the women their husbands referred to as buy-em-dears – a motley collection of cunchunees, debbies, dashies, pootlies, rawnees, Rum-joh