S.W. Fallon

A Dictionary of Hindustani Proverbs, 1886.

Benares, Medical Hall Press

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More than a century after it was published, Fallon’s dictionary stands as a finely detailed snapshot of Hindi-Urdu at a particular moment in its history. It offers a total of some 12,500 proverbial phrases over 320 pages. The first alphabetical list takes us as far as p. 265, where starts an 11-page ‘Addenda’; the remaining pages are taken up with shorter sections that repeat material drawn from the main section, on ‘Bhojpuri Proverbs’, ‘Eastern Proverbs’, ‘Hindoo Proverbs’, ‘Mercantile Proverbs’, ‘Muhammadan Proverbs’, ‘Persian Proverbs’, ‘Rustic Proverbs’, ‘Superstition’, and, in the longest category, ’Women’s Proverbs’; these categories seem rather random, and the logic for allocating items between them is not always clear. Readers can judge for themselves by finding the full text in Google Books.

Nineteenth-century windows on earlier or contemporary materials are as interesting for their framing as for the materials themselves. Captain Temple’s preface to the dictionary is redolent with attitudes of his time:

Like Spain, India is a land of proverbial sayings:—their name is legion and their use constant and never ending. The natives employ them in their daily intercourse, in their commercial and social correspondence, in all the many vicissitudes of every day life, even in the very Courts of Law. I have often heard a witness reply to a question put by a pleader with a proverb, and in altercations and disputes the natives hurl them at each other by the dozen. … They are familiar to all; the women sing them as they do their household work; the men employ them for purposes of condolence and congratulation; the children are taught them as soon as they can speak; many persons largely interlard their conversation with them.

The method of the alphabetically-organised dictionary is to give the entry in roman script, together with a translation and, where necessary, a commentary — which may offer an equivalent English proverb as a parallel:

Desā desā chāl, kulā kulā beohār.Every country its fashion, and every family its custom.

(Each to his own taste: de gustibus non disputandum.)

Ek āve ke bartan haiṅ.Vessels of the same kiln.

(Chips of the same block.)

Ek bār jogī, do bār bhogī, tīn bār rogī. An ascetic once, a glutton twice, and a sick man thrice.

(Allusion to the state of health as judged by going to stool.)

Jis kā khāīye, us kā gāīye.Sing his praises who feeds you.

Jis ki lāṭhī, us kī bhaiṅs.Who has the cudgel has the buffalo.

(Might is right. Club law. The good old rule, the honoured plan, that he should take who has the power and he should keep who can.)

Proverbs thrive on parallelisms of various kinds, and relative-correlative constructions provide the most economical and satisfying parallelisms of all: I count nearly a hundred proverbs based on the jis/us construction alone, and another long selection beginning jo. Another kind of parallelism is provided by jingle rhyme, which we see in countless entries here:

Jīte haiṅ, na marte haiṅ, sisak sisak dam bharte haiṅ.I neither live, nor die, I breathe in agony.

Kāsā dīje; bāsā na dīje.Give food [the pot], but never give lodging.

(To strangers: be cautious in your dealings with strangers.)

Mā elī, bāp telī, beṭā shākh-i-zāfrān.The mother a daily labourer and the father an oilman and theson a bunch of saffron.

(The metaphorical epithet of the son means a person who gives himself airs.)

Yet another type of parallelism is the Q&A, when a question, usually somewhat rhetorical, is immediately answered within the saying. This one is on the very common theme of caste status and rivalries:

Bābhan hūe to kyā hūe? Gale lapeṭā sūt.If he became a Brahman, what is it? Only the winding of string round his neck.

The rhythm of this suggests that it is a line detached from a dohā, as also with the following:

Jā ko rākhe sāīyāṅ, mār na sakke koë. 1Whom God protects none can slay.

(What God will, no frost can kill.)

And many a full dohā is also quoted, this being the ideal vehicle for the proverb, thanks to the parallelism of its paired rhyming lines:

Second line (from memory, hence unreliable): बाल न बाँका कर सके जो जग बैरी होइ ॥1

Jas kele ke pāt meṅ, pāt pāt meṅ pāt,Tas gyānī kī bāt meṅ, bāt bāt meṅ bāt.

As the plantain leaves are leaves within leaves,So the wise man’s words are words within words.

Prīt ḍagar jab pag rakhā, honī hoe so hoë.Neh nagar kī rīt haë, tan man dīno khoë.

When once you tread on love’s true path;let it happen as it may; In the region of love you lose both body and soul.

On occasion, the lexicographer sees fit to supply the back-story to a narrative proverb that would otherwise be quite obscure:

Kavvā kān le gayā.The crow has carried off his ears.

E Spoken of a fool, who believes whatever is said without examination. The saying is taken from the story of a silly fellow, who being told that a crow had taken away his ears, began to pursue the crow, without waiting to examine if it was so.

Here is another such case, shown in facsimile for local colour:

A playfulness of language lends an extra edge to many of the proverbs, as here in one of the many misogynistic items that throng the collection:

Aurat ki mat mān.Don’t act on your wife’s advice. Or, accept your wife’s advice.

(According to the sense of the words.)

That is, the interpretation can either be “accept your wife’s opinion (mat)”, or “Don’t (mat) accept what your wife says — aurat kī [bāt]”.

My copy of Fallon has extensive marginalia additions by a previous owner. Many of these are bad-tempered corrections — “Not a proverb!” or “Incorrect!” —but the reader also added several entries missed by Fallon:

Chintā burī balā. Care killed a cat.

ek parhez na sau hakīm. Diet cures more than doctors.

Occasionally a margin addition provides a new parallel for a translated proverb:

Bhekh se bhīk hai.Alms are given to the beggar’s dress.*

(The dress commands respect.) * “A saint in crape [sic] is twice a saint in lawn” (Pope)

The effect of reading several hundred muhāvare in sequence, as I have just done, is like that of an overdose of bumper stickers in a supermarket parking lot. Proverbs are the antithesis of intellectual discourse: their purpose is to cap an argument rather then advance it. Nevertheless, I vow to use more proverbs in my speech in future, perhaps even to interlard my conversation with them and to hurl a few at natives. After all…

Tole muhāvare, bole so bhāva re.To gauge an idiom well is to speak from the heart.

You won’t find this last one in Fallon: I just made it up.

Rupert Snell — HINDIDOX