The name game

The town named for General James Abbott was back in the news last week. Zero Dark Thirty didn't win any significant Oscars, but it did keep the conversation — or controversy, depending on your perspective — going. It has already been dissected to bits in Pakistan, owing, no doubt, to the excellent ‘For Your Consideration’ prints circulating through humankind's universal lending library, Pirate Bay. Most commentators appear to be fixated by one of the film's many ambient clashes, the totally bizarre recasting of Arabic as the lingua franca of Pakistani streets.

For what it's worth, here are some more: Chandigarh's Sector 15 market stands in for Rawalpindi, but the result is more Chandigarh and less Rawalpindi, especially when a store-front cheerfully announces itself as "Bhatiasons"; the exterior of the protagonist's house in Islamabad, shot on location in Amman, looks exactly like a house in Amman and nothing like anything in Islamabad; and a group of local goons make a glamorous getaway in a vehicle unlikely to be used by even the most fashion-forward hitman — an elegant 1970s Mercedes Benz.

But perhaps, the most glaring mistake in this firecracker of a film is the gratuitously incorrect rendering of the town that ended it all. Harking back to the inglorious summer of 2011, Zero Dark Thirty calls it Ab-bott-abad, completely ignoring the fact that people in the country of its existence have long eliminated that inconvenient second syllable and call it A-btabad, thereby turning a 19th century Anglo-Hindustani tongue-twister — Abbott-abad — into a coherent local name. Yes, it isn't even being mispronounced correctly. There is something quaintly perverse about this wilful disregard for tropical names, as though imperial tone-deafness was a kind of moral duty — what else could explain the British media's 60-year-long persistence in reminding Indians that the man who set us free is spelt "Ghandi"?

Unfortunately, we have more than a little explaining to do ourselves on this front. Names hurt in many ways and not just by being mangled. Sometimes, they hurt by simply staying alive.

Consider, for instance, Habshi Halwa — a rich, delicious, dark and sticky sweet that is commonly available all across South Asia. Then consider its literal English translation — ‘nigger toffee’.

Millions of people can go about eating Habshi Halwa every day, without blinking — as well as buying it, making it and hosting instructional sessions on You Tube around it — because we have little understanding of what the word means. For those of us who know exactly what it means — and enough do — it really doesn't matter, since the offence isn't directed at anyone powerful enough to count.

At the peak of the Ottoman Empire, the region encompassing present-day Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa was known to Turks as Habeshistan, and the popular English variant of the name was Abyssinia. The Arab slave trade trafficked human cargo from this region to our land, and Sheedis — or Siddis — as they would prefer to be known, have been a part of us for at least the last 10 centuries.

Along the way, as would happen with other terms for oppressed people, Habshi turned into a slur, in part at least because — like its politer North American equivalent, Negro — it was a name thrust upon the oppressed by their oppressor.

No one in South Asia has taken any notice of the change and Habshi continues to be cheerfully hurled at hundreds of thousands of people who live on the edge of our own internal-imperial past, along the coasts of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka, in the South Indian city of Hyderabad and in Makran and Karachi.

In Empires of the Indus, Alice Albinia's unusual travelogue of the Indus River, a good section is devoted to the Sheedi experience in Pakistan. Islam had a place for black people that Hinduism could not provide and even today, Sheedis are mainly Muslim. In Sindh, she finds, being black is a source of pride — and hence, the high visibility of Sheedis in places like Lyari Town. Along the Balochistan coast, she finds people beaten down by centuries of being told they are inferior, foreign and sub-human. The effort there is to assimilate, not separate. "Why are you studying these things? Why are you highlighting black people? I am fed up with black issues," an angry correspondent says to her.

Insults have a lovely way of being repurposed, but it's generally not a good idea to casually invoke ‘fag’ or ‘cripple’ or ‘nigger’ in conversation, unless you are very sure that the insult could be directly applied to you in the first place. The deliberate, continued use of a word like Habshi in India and Pakistan, however, is not an in-joke; it's a straightforward slur, born out of a frightening insularity, a pathetic reminder that cruelty can inexplicably serve as catharsis for our own collective inferiority complex.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 4^th, 2013.