Word: wallah
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Shakespeare Wallah is a wry, wistful look at what is left of the English in India. It has been nearly 20 years since the British hauled down the Union Jack and went back to their tight little island. Even so, a poverty-ridden troupe of English Shakespeare players still continues its work, bringing the Bard to the provinces. But India no longer has time for the old gentilities, and wherever the itinerant Shakespeareans try to move their goods (wallah is Hindi for peddler), they meet stiff sales resistance. Indians, like most of the rest of the world, have forsaken...
Into Politics. White neighbors complain that the "nig-nogs, wogs, wallah-wallahs and coolies" use their milk bottles for chamberpots (and then return the empties), spit in the streets, and boost the crime rate. Many local police disagree. In Manchester, says Deputy Chief Constable William J. Richards, coloreds actually commit fewer offenses in proportion to their numbers than whites, though they are more often related to dope and prostitution, and thus more likely to hit headlines. "As a police problem," says Richards, "they are no more noticeable than the Irish were 25 years...
...Indian-V. B. Patel, the timber merchant; H. J. Peerani, the baker; Mohanlal, the tailor. In Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Indians are called Banyans, and elsewhere whatever the African wants to buy-a bolt of cotton, a kerosene lamp, a bicycle-it is almost invariably an Indian dukah wallah in a filthy, tin-roofed shop that sells to him. In Kenya, Asians pay one-third of the colony's indirect taxes and run some of Nairobi's smartest shops; in Zanzibar they control the clove market; in Tanganyika they dominate the economy. In Uganda, where before...
...British army lingo of the Far East, "I-Wallah" means intelligence officer. He keeps the books of combat and, as far as possible, tries to make sense of the gruesome gibberish...
Author Campbell puts the story in the mouth of an unnamed, fictionalized I-Wallah, but even the chairbound reader will recognize that every accent has the authentic tone of a man who has seen combat and can still think about it. The commonplace names−John or Bobby or Tommy or Donald−come completely alive, showing men at their best. Dug in among the wild rhododendron bushes, outgunned, outnumbered and outmortared, the West Kents put on a memorable show: at the end it is clear that men can be pitiable even in their finest hour...