But to return to bandanna, Neel's own use of this term never came into conformity with its dictionary definition, for he continued, in his lifetime, to apply it to kerchiefs, handkerchiefs, gamchhas, and especially to the cummerbunds and head-cloths that lascars and other working people commonly wore in order to restrain their hair and their kameezes. His descendants, as was their custom, were even more conservative, and would vie among themselves to find uses for the originary forms. Well do I remember the response of an elderly uncle, who, when invited to join a family expedition to a well-reputed cowboy movie, cried out: 'Arre! You think I'd spend good money to watch a band of budmashes running around in dungris and bandhnas?'
+bandar: Neel was totally mistaken in his forecast of how the common Hind. word for monkey would fare in English. One of his pet theories was that migrant words must always be careful to stand apart from each other, in sound and appearance: uprooted homonyms and synonyms, he felt, had little chance of surviving in pairs – in every couple, one would perish. In this instance the beastly sense of bandar was, in his view, uncomfortably close in sound to an unrelated nautical term of Persian derivation: bander/bunder ('harbour' or 'port'). He was persuaded that of the two it was this latter form that would survive in English – partly because the use of bunder in the nautical sense had a very long pedigree in the language, going back to the seventeenth century, and partly because the root was uncommonly fecund in English derivatives. It was these derivatives, he felt, that were most vulnerable to the possibilities of confusion posed by the zoological sense of bandar. True enough that the frequently used term bander-/bunder-boat, ('harbour-boat') was in little danger of being mistaken for a simian conveyance, but there remained another word that might well be the cause of misunderstandings and confusion. This was the venerable sabander/shabander ('master of the harbour' or 'harbour-master'), a term which had so long a history as almost to be considered Middle English, and was thus possessed of a powerful claim to protection from the sort of abuse that might result from compounds like shah-bandar. As for the animal, there was another word that would serve it just as well, he felt, and this was wanderoo (from wanderu, the Sinhala cognate of Hind. bandar) which was also in wide circulation at the time, although it was generally used to mean langur. It was on wanderoo that Neel pinned his hopes while predicting doom for its synonym. Little did he know that both bandar and its collective +log would be given indefinite prolongations of life by a children's book, while the beautiful wanderoo would soon disappear into a pauper's grave. [See also gadda/gadha.]
bando/bundo (*The Glossary): See bandanna.
+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[5]: '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 cannot refrain from interjecting that although this species of robe is extinct in India today, several noteworthy specimens are on permanent display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.] Even in my own childhood the word banyan referred always to these sumptuous robes. But at that time, of course, none but the most Anglicized Indians used the word in this sense, the potential for harm being very great. Well do I remember the fate of the unfortunate Raja of Mukhpora, who had a habit of peppering his Bengali with English words. On a garment-buying expedition to the bazar, he was heard to boast, in the hearing of all, that he intended to have his banyans beaten and washed before they were locked away for the summer. This greatly alarmed the moneylenders, who lost no time in calling in their debts: the results were ruinous for the poor Raja, who had to live out his days in an ashram in Brindavan, with nothing but a pair of saffron chogas in his wardrobe. Thus did he learn why it's best not to get into a banyanfight.
[5] The reference here is to Admiral W. H. Smyth's