Foreword

Summary

Of the numerous scholars of Hindi among the British administrators and European missionaries who came to India over the last two hundred years – most notably John Gilchrist, George Grierson, F. W. Keay and Edwin Greaves – and lately among the post-colonial ‘South Asianists’, only Camille Bulcke seems to have the distinction of becoming a household name in the extensive Hindi-speaking areas of the country.

That is because one can find in countless Hindi homes a copy of his Angreji–Hindi Kosh (English–Hindi Dictionary), first published in 1968, in its third revised edition by 1981, and reprinted altogether 19 times already by 1991 when I belatedly acquired my copy. As Bulcke explained in his preface, he intended it for the use of those who already had English but wished to learn Hindi (like himself) and hoped that it might prove useful ‘also to those whose mother tongue is Hindi, especially those engaged in translation work’ (like myself). But he also added a third category of people to whom this work might be of help: ‘Indian students who wish to improve their knowledge of English’. One may suspect that it is this last category which has benefitted the most from Bulcke's triple-function dictionary, for it nicely supplements or even supersedes the usual English–English dictionaries, where the explanation given is, for many early learners, nearly as challenging as the words they look up.

Bulcke also provided the correct pronunciation of each word in the Devanagari script, which is incomparably more phonetic than the Roman script. Moreover, he cut out the frills which needlessly complicate the life of a language learner. For example, the title of his work has for its first word not the English word ‘English’ but the Hindi word ‘Angreji’, which is here spelt not as ‘Angrezi’ with a z but as ‘Angreji’ with a j, the common pronunciation of the word without the non-native sound z. Bulcke had obviously learnt his Hindi well enough to know what is indigenous to it and what is not (Bulcke 1968, vii).