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| Sunday, 30 June 2002 |
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English usage -the hilarious andstrange aspects:The hunt for Orangotan by Padma Edirisinghe Individuals qualified to deliver judgement on the world we live in, sometimes label it as a stage where the tragic, the comic, the queer and the hilarious occur in almost equal proportions. Sometimes salads or hotch - potches are made of all these aspects.
We searched high and low for Orangotan or Orangotun (the spelling was not clear in the time-worn and defaced records). But the fellow seems to have fled for good into its homeland, the dense forests of Sarawak in Malaysia. Then as Alice said, the world got curioser and curioser for Mrs. Fernando, the handicrafts instructress made her own discovery. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed "Here is the crown of King Ravana. I made it about 30 years back for the stage play Ramayana." But to be fair by the readers I must begin the tale from its beginning and not from the end. One of the most unpleasant duties I had to perform as an administrator was the taking over and handing over of property belonging to the institutions I happened to head. Though many suggestions were made to assign a separate officer for this arduous task, they were not acceded to on the ground that an institutional head is personally responsible for the college property, and she or he and no other should take over it and hand it over. The longer the life of the institution the larger the property and more the lists of inventories. Sometime these inventories ran to about 20 or 30 involving weeks and weeks of checking that meant juxtaposing the actual objects with the listed items in the inventories. Though initially I found the work completely irritating, at a certain institution I headed. Later certain staff members helped me and we began to enjoy the sort of jig saw puzzle game, especially as there was no other alternative. They say if you cannot bite the hand just kiss it. This particular institution has its beginnings in colonial times and the person who made the initial inventories perhaps stooging to George VI who was the monarch of Lanka then had made all the entries in English. There was also a social prestige attached to its usage. However it was obvious this acolyte of colonialism and the imperialist language was far from being proficient in it. But her innovative mind made up for the lapses. For examples there were items listed as, A square round table (furniture inventory), Aluminium vessel with bottom up (kitchen inventory), Manufactured breasts (health inventory), human skeleton in action (do). The third and fourth need some explanation. The item "Manufactured breasts" was in the health inventory and was a teaching aid to demonstrate the spread of breast cancer. The human skeleton we came across of course had long ceased action. But the quandary raised was, was it in action when the entry was made? If it did it would have hit the world's headlines which I do not remember. Finally the whole juxtaposition was almost over when we came across an item against which the material object was not found. The item was Orangotun. I had read much about these dear creatures clinging to the branches and twigs of the dense forests of Sarawak and Borneo and doing clever somersaults. But never had I seen any one of them in the college premises. Further all the items inventorised were inanimate objects and the sprightly orangotun could never have found a place in the inventories carrying the cobwebs of about a half century. The problem was mine and I searched and searched for what could be the corresponding object. But it was a futile search. Helping me much was an elderly instructor in handicrafts who had been seconded for service even after retirement. Now she made a dramatic announcement. "Good heavens! Here is king Ravana's crown." Said, Alice, the world is getting curiouser and curioser. How true! She was fondling a worn out crown, of gaudy orange in colour but still looking rather fabulous. Mrs. Fernando went on to give details. "I made this myself when the college produced the stage play "Ramayana." It was such a big hit at the time." As Mrs. Fernando ruminated on her dramatic past with nostalgia something clicked in me. The unidentified item was orangotun. This crown was orange in colour. What could have happened was that the original recorder of the inventories could not recall the English word for crown. So she Anglicized the Sinhala word "Otunna" as "Otun" and listed the orange coloured item as Orangotun. For it was the only object there yet unidentified and Orangotun was the only listed item again unidentified. But the story did not end there. To prevent future confusion and waste of precious days and weeks by heads of educational institutions whose time should be used for more positive things I made a footnote in the particular inventory page, after placing an asterik against "Orangotun." The footnote ran as follows. "Crown worn by the great and powerful Ravana of pre-historic Lanka and reproduced by Mrs. E. Fernando for the play "Ramayana." The story did not end there either. The head of the audit team who came a few months later to check whether I had stolen anything from the college property but was disappointed, made amends by making another footnote castigating me. "It is the other side of the law to make footnotes in inventories" he wrote breaking his own rule. What he meant was that it was against the regulations to make footnotes in inventories. So I limited myself to drawing a red line under "the other side of law" for after all I was not only an administrator but a teacher who is very handy with the red pen. |
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Incidents connected to the use of the language of the Anglo race in the
colonial empire it began to build up somewhere around the 18th and 19th
centuries throw up such salads, a few of which are recounted by the writer
based on her own experiences, observations and readings. The occasional
series begins today.
