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.
'From that pinnacle of magnificence, this article of clothing has unfailingly kept pace with India's fortunes: as the land's inhabitants grew ever poorer and weaker under the British yoke, the garment to which the word was applied grew ever meaner and more humble. In its next incarnation therefore the banyan was reborn as the standard article of wear for the lowliest of workmen: thus does the Admiral describe it as "a sailor's coloured tunic". In this form, too, the garment was still a stranger to India: it was the lascar, undoubtedly, who was responsible for introducing it into his native land. It was he, too, who was responsible for snipping off the arms it possessed in its European avatar. In clothing, as in language and food, the lascar is thus revealed to be the pioneer in all things "Indian". No morning passes when I do not think of this as I slip my hands through those familiar armholes; nor does the notion fail to bring to my nostrils a faint tang of the sea.'
+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-johnnies and nautch-girls. Curiously, the word "mistress", which has a close Hind. cognate (by way of the Portuguese mestre) was never used in its English sense, it being considered quite unusual for a man to share his bed with his mistri'.
+BeeBee/bibi: 'Why this word prevailed over its twin, begum, in being applied to the more eminent white wives of Calcutta, remains unexplained. In recent times, it has fallen out of favour and is now applied ironically to European women of low rank: this happened because there came a time when the great BeeBees began to insist on being called ma'am-sahibs. Their employees shortened the prefix to "mem-" (and occasionally, in the case of the most bawhawder of the tribe, to "man-")'.
[5] The reference here is to Admiral W. H. Smyth's