Amidst a non-Vegetarian Durga Puja feast in my locality in South Kolkata , I found a religious lady telling the organizers of the feast that she would eat vegetarian, “niramish” being the Bangla word for “vegetarian”. A couple of meters away, the linguist in me started tossing up the word in his mind,while munching on the cushy mutton meat.
A minute into the dissection of the word,I found an interesting and unique character of the Bangla word,” niramish ” ,parallel to the culture to which the word belongs. “niramish“, is a word formed by affixing the prefix “nir” to the word “amish“Which means non-vegetarian. So,the root is “amish” and ” niramish” is the affixated form. The principal noun here is “amish” or non-vegetarian and the affixation is “niramish” or vegetarian. This is a unique character of the Bangla language as most other Indian languages having affixated terms for meat-eater and non-meat eater have the word for non-meat eater as the principal noun, and the word-for meat-eater being the conjugate. For example,the word for vegetarian in Tamil is “caiva” and for non-vegetarian is “allata caiva“. the Malayalam word for vegetarian is “vejirreriyam” and for non-vegetarian is “nean-vejirreriyam” . This is also found in Indian English where “non-vegetarian” is a affixation of the principal noun “vegetarian”. Note that Non-vegetarian is a word of the Indian dialect of English and is relatively unheard in native-English countries.
After seeing this Linguistic Uniqueness of Bangla, let the Picture be zoomed out and observe the scene in the larger context. West Bengal,the homeland of Bangla, is primarily a state with culture where Non-vegetarianism isn’t ostracized a and is accepted with the 2nd largest number of Meat-eating percentage in any state of India . With the local Cultural values accepting meat-eating and no bar on eating meat even in Festivals like Navratri when most of North India practices Abstinence from meat, the Bangla counterpart for “Non-vegetarian” has earned a principal status in the Bangla Vocabulary pushing “vegetarian” counterpart to less importance.
Herein, due to large scale acceptance “amish” or non-vegetarian is the principal word and “niramish” the affixation. This is in the line of how most people in the State are non-vegetarians ,which makes the usage of “amish” or non-vegetarian very natural,it being a meat-eating culture.
This is how words serve only as transluscent windows to the culture of some place. If one goes by the logic of “non-vegetarian” and “Vegetarian“, one might end up mistaking Kerala for a Vegetarianism-based state,which it is not by any parameter . This is because words tell not the culture of present,but of the past when they were conceived. When the Malayalam was being conceived in ancient times, Malayali culture was prominently vegetarian,with Malayali festivals still ostracizing non-vegetarian food in their festive cuisine.
Languages and words are interesting ways to study culture and history,but are a slopy incline and hence must be handled with care. Chaos sets when,in the study, a lot of oversimplifications are made one over the another. The Infamous “Aryan Invasion Theory” finds its foundation in etymology and the connection of Sanskrit with familial languages like Latin of the west. Modern genetic studies and carbon dating are slowly eroding the theory away exposing fault lines in the lens of Language to study history.
Nemonia 