This one comes from the scraps of folklore going around the Indian community in the US. It’s Chicago, let’s say, the terminus of one of those arthritic flights where they serve you ‘Hindu food’ over the North Pole and you arrive the previous afternoon. A girl with the perfectly kosher name of Nidhi Gangwar is passing through airport security. The burly official, friendly but gimlet-eyed, looks her passport over, turns to her slantwise, and says: "Your surname, Gang War, well, that’s fine...but your first name, Nye-Dye, never heard that before."
Intrepid consumers of television news would have observed how America is woefully out of step with the international consensus on Iraq—on how to say it, that is. From the most cussed neocon, to the Dems, the think-tankers, to whatever passes for leftwing that side of the Big Pond, there appears to be a pan-gringo unanimity on this: it’s not Ee-raq, like it is for the rest of humankind, it’s always Ay-raq this, Ay-raq that.
We don’t know if they extend the courtesy to Iran—it’s reasonable to assume so. But before we pass a law in Parliament against attempts to inveigle India into a sinister global design on American pronunciation, there may be a case for voting with the US on the question of Ay-ran. A quick wiki on etymology reveals the name ‘Iran’ derives from—hold your breath—‘Aryan’. The proto-Iranians, like all good people invested with abundant self-belief, evidently assigned to themselves that noblest of lineages familiar to us all.
There’s a twist, though. Remember Ahura Mazda, the Supreme One of Avestan legend? Well, it turns out Ahura—the generic term for divinity—is simply Asura (the ‘s’ going to ‘h’ by the same quirk that turned ‘Sind’ into ‘Hind’). And the bad guys? You guessed right, they’re called ‘daevas’, nasty beings with horns on their heads and other subhuman traits, adept at putting all manner of obstacles in the path of righteous ahuras. Behold, dear reader, our myth in the mirror! India and Iran must jointly thank the brain-dead US soldier, strutting around witless in the desert, for stumbling on to this rich vein of history: perhaps the oldest sibling rivalry ever.
(PS: Nidhi, if you are not merely an apocryphal artefact, and exist in the corporeal sense, apologies for being turned, sans informed consent, into a two-penny narrative device by a stand-in comic.)
(Our regular columnist, Rajinder Puri, is away)
