Brown for the bidet

Spanish invaders in Mexico discovered vanilla in 1521. Its pod looked like a sheath—vaina in Spanish—so they called it vainilla. Vaina is the same Latin vagina which ejected an English word that rhymes with hunt. Eve Ensler has tried to revive the word in her Vagina Monologues, though she didn’t dare put it in the title.

Vanilla has long ceased to be the spice of life. The word vanilla now means conventional, even boring. But vagina hasn’t shed a bit of its mystique. It has become more exalted that many women wouldn’t use it for delivery.

The UNDP says one in four children born in Mumbai bypasses the birth canal. They get ripped from their mothers’ wombs, like the man who killed Macbeth. Many women who prefer caesarian section hate to lose their grip down there. In some hospitals in Brazil, all births are caesarian.

Don’t blame Julius Caesar for the fad or the word. The claim that he was born in a caesarian section is baseless. Surgical deliveries in his time were always fatal for the mother. Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, lived long enough to see him marry three times. But there was a Caesar’s law that forbade burial of pregnant women before taking the foetus out. Caesarian section probably was named after it.

The word caesar became kaiser in Germany and tsesar (later tsar) in Russia. The Old Norse word for Caesar was keisari. This could be related to the Sanskrit kesari, meaning lion.

Manmohan Singh—a lion—likes the colour blue, not kesar (saffron). He sticks to blue turbans, and uses green against the Maoists in the Operation Green Hunt. The hunted in Chhattisgarh have fled to Andhra Pradesh, where the Greyhound commandos are alert. The Greyhounds may not know that the ‘grey’ in their name came from an Old Norse word for bitch. It had nothing to do with the colour grey. Grighund (bitch-dog) became greyhound.

Some colours have humbler origins. Crimson was made from insects called kermes. Arabs had called them qirmiz, borrowing the Sanskrit krimi, meaning worm. Another worm produced vermilion, sacred for Hindus. The colour was obtained from vermiculus, which is Latin for ‘little worm’.

Magenta is more inspirational. It was named after the Battle of Magenta, which furthered Italian independence. Indigo, named after India, had a role in the Indian freedom struggle. Indigo farmers in Bengal revolted against the British in 1859, and Gandhi led their Champaran struggle in 1917.

An associate of Gandhi in the Dandi march, a young Hindu, figures in Tropic of Cancer. Henry Miller takes him to a whorehouse in Paris, where "he was like a dog with his tongue hanging out". Unfortunately, he decides to use the bidet. Writes Miller: “As I am putting on my pants suddenly I hear a commotion in the next room. The girl is bawling him out, calling him a pig, a dirty little pig.”

The madam rushes in and drags Miller to the Hindu client’s room. “The five of us are standing there looking at the bidet. There are two enormous turds floating in the water…. The Hindu boy looks at me reproachfully. ‘You should have told me!’ he says. ‘I didn’t know it wouldn’t go down.’ He is almost in tears.”

Elmer Gertz, the lawyer who fought the ban on Tropic of Cancer, shed light on the Hindu boy in his book To Life. One of his fellow students at Chicago University was “Haridas T. Mazumdar, a Hindu who had written the first book in the English language on his master Gandhi.… I did not hear the name of Haridas after I left college, until I was discussing Tropic of Cancer with Henry Miller in 1962, in Minneapolis, and learnt the amazing fact that Haridas was the model for the Hindu in some fantastic passages in that highly original work.” Part of the originality came from the liberal use of the word that vagina usurped.
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in December 2009.