This is where, I, as an Indian-more specifically a Hindi speaker from the heartland-got confused. We would say, ‘Come-a-la’. I haven’t heard anyone on American news TV using ‘Comma-la’ though. It hasn’t caught on. Most still say: ‘Come-aa-la,’ stretching out the middle syllable. Or ‘Kaam-a-la’, where ‘Kaam’ rhymes with ‘farm’.
Only Donald Trump has problems enunciating this simple Indian name. Mysteriously, he has no problem pronouncing the name of his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. What Trump doesn’t know is that most Indians pronounce his name as ‘Dough-naald’.
While we’re at it, it might be a good idea to look at how the rest of the English-speaking world pronounces Indian names. Australian and English commentators had a funny way of pronouncing Sunil Gavaskar’s name. To me, it sounded like ‘Guv-as-kah’. And the last bit was like Kahlua, the liqueur.
Tendulkar, one would expect to go the same way. But here, they tend to drop the ‘r’ rendering it silent: ‘Ten-dull-ka’. ‘Dull’ is pronounced like in ‘full’ and ‘ka’ like in Robert Calasso’s novel, Ka. In both cases, the correct pronunciation would be to rhyme ‘kar’ with ‘fur’.
Amitabh Bachchan-now that’s a tough one. An American would say it like: ‘Amit’, to rhyme with the ‘amit’ in ‘amity’, ‘tabh’ to rhyme with ‘tab’, as in ‘tablet’. Bachchan is when they get confused: ‘Bachch’ to rhyme with ‘batch’, and ‘an’ to rhyme with ‘un’, as in ‘fun’. How does one teach someone to pronounce Amitabh Bachchan the Indian way?Let me try: ‘Amit’ as in ‘commit’; ‘tabh’ needs to be broken in two: ‘taa’ as in ‘tower’ and ‘bh’ as in ‘abhorrent’.Which brings us to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Here, we can drop the first two names. No non-native speaker even tries. But Gandhi, yes. It becomes ‘Gandy’, to rhyme with ‘randy’. Wrong. Try: ‘Gan’ to rhyme with the way an American might say ‘gone’, like in ‘Gaan with the Wind’. Or try stretching out the ‘a’ like in ‘far’. The ‘dhi’ should rhyme with ‘he’.
In the Hindi heartland, no one can pronounce ‘Shakespeare’ in the Queen’s accent. Everyone naturally, unselfconsciously, says: ‘Sexpeer’. So ‘sex’ as in sex, and ‘peer’, as a peer in the House of Lords who gets caught up in a sex scandal. In North India, gardeners call the bougainvillea creeper, ‘begum-millea’. It’s nice. It gives this humble flower a touch of royalty: begum, the queen.
My English pronunciation isn’t the best. A friend recently burst out laughing when I said ‘generic’ as ‘gen-ee-ric’. But here’s the thing: it’s fine to pronounce words in a way that feels natural. In India, our many languages shape how we say foreign words, and that’s beautiful. This is true for all languages. Accent-free English is just a myth.
James Murray, first editor of the OED, thought pronunciation to be a matter of taste. In his 2001 biography, Caught in the Web of Words, written by his granddaughter KM Elisabeth Murray, a quote from his correspondence illustrates his thinking: ‘Language is mobile and liable to change, and… a very large number of words have two or more pronunciations current… and giving life and variety to a language… it is a free country, and a man may call a vase a vawse, a vahse, a vaze, or a vase, as he pleases.
‘And why should he not? We do not think alike, walk alike, dress alike, write alike, or dine alike; why should not we use our liberty in speech also, so long as the purpose of speech, to be intelligible, and its grace, are not interfered with.’