Hee Hee! He Said “Bhenchod!”

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Beneath the horrendous headline “Gangsta Raj,” New York Times reviewer Paul Gray opens his treatment of Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games with the kind of snark that will dissuade anyone who only reads the first paragraph from buying the book:

This immense, demanding novel can be recommended, with scarcely a cavil, to well-educated Indians who have lots of free time, are fluent in (at the very least) English and Hindi, and have a thorough knowledge of South Asian politics; Hindu, Muslim and Sikh religious practices; and the stars and story lines of hundreds of Bollywood films. Longtime Bombay residents will have an extra advantage, since they will know, without consulting a gazeteer or Google, why the city is now called Mumbai. Prospective readers who donÂ’t fit this profile will have some catching up to do.

In the end, it’s a positive review, though the term “damning with faint praise” sure came to my mind several times as I went through it. And do the Gray Lady’s editors know they just printed the words sisterfucker and motherfucker?

So it goes here. Those who plunge into the novel soon find themselves thrashing in a sea of words (“nullah,” “ganwars,” “bigha,” “lodu,” “bhenchod,” “tapori,” “maderchod”) and sentences (“On Maganchand Road the thela-wallahs already had their fruit piled high, and the fishsellers were laying out bangda and bombil and paaplet on their slabs”) unencumbered by italics or explication.

Seriously though, I still haven’t read the book (the US edition comes out this week, hence the review) but one thing I appreciated about Chandra’s last book, the amazing collection Love and Longing in Bombay, is precisely how he manages to introduce large amounts of local color and vocabulary in ways that connect even if you don’t know what exactly every term means. Surely the review could have taken a more productive approach than to lead with this literalist harping?

108 thoughts on “Hee Hee! He Said “Bhenchod!””

  2. BTW, if anyone is still reading this thread, what exactly is a “lodu”? I’m reading the Indian version of the book (no glossary), and there’s actually some Bombaiya words I don’t know…

  5. Thanks, Kush. My wife actually grew up in Bombay, but she doesn’t know all these galis.

    I’m kind of curious to see the glossary in the American edition. It will be basically every bad word ever heard of — the language in Chandra’s book is something else!

  6. Amardeep, Somewhere up, there’s a link to glossary. If you don’t feel like going through all the comments, here’s that link again.

    My wife actually grew up in Bombay, but she doesn’t know all these galis.

    Taporis usually don’t cuss around elders and women. At leat the ones I grew up w/ tried to follow that rule.

  7. For anyone still interested in this topic, Shreeharsh points out in the comments on Amardeep’s post on Vikram Chandra (at Amardeep’s blog, not here) that at some point the offending words including bhenchod and maderchod were quietly expurgated from the New York Times website… without any editorial acknowledgment.

    I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Amardeep, but the gaalis in the NYT review (which were mentioned in siddhartha’s sepia mutiny post) have now gone! Looks like someone finally told the New York Times what they printed! Hee hee. Or maybe Paul Gray just looked at the glossary. (Are the offending words in the glossary?)

    Original line (from the post):

    So it goes here. Those who plunge into the novel soon find themselves thrashing in a sea of words (“nullah,” “ganwars,” “bigha,” “lodu,” “bhenchod,” “tapori,” “maderchod”) and sentences (“On Maganchand Road the thela-wallahs already had their fruit piled high, and the fishsellers were laying out bangda and bombil and paaplet on their slabs”) unencumbered by italics or explication.

    Now:

    So it goes here. Those who plunge into the novel soon find themselves thrashing in a sea of words and sentences (“On Maganchand Road the thela-wallahs already had their fruit piled high, and the fishsellers were laying out bangda and bombil and paaplet on their slabs”) unencumbered by italics or explication.

    Nice catch Shreeharsh!

  8. Well, they’ve come now, cap in hand, to seek forgiveness. From today’s Times, a priggish editors’ note:

    If readers of the Book Review have been considering picking up a little conversational Hindi, they would probably do well not to begin with the sample list of words in the Jan. 7 review of “Sacred Games,” a novel by Vikram Chandra that sprinkles untranslated Hindi throughout its English text. Indian readers pointed out that while most of the Hindi terms in the review were innocuous, several were in fact obscene — suitable for Chandra’s tough-guy characters, no doubt, but not for the Book Review, where editors failed to check the meaning of the words in the novel’s glossary. link