From Mohenjo-daro to modern-day English

The story of the bangle

Created on Canva Pro…

It has been fun exploring those words that immigrated from India and ended up settling into the fabric of society - the English language.

It also reconfirms that each word has a life.

And moves as much as we have done.

We all have a story of immigration.

I think I’ve been most surprised so far by the word ‘jungle’, which I discussed last week; mostly because I didn’t expect it to be linked to India in the way that it was.

The words from India also feel a little close to home, as my own history has Indian roots too.

It all feels so familiar.

This week I discovered the word ‘bangle’ has roots from India as well.

I’ve been wearing bangles all my life.

My Mum used to buy me colourful ones for my small wrists when I was a toddler.

It was another tangible method to keep my culture alive whilst building on a British identity that would be unique to me.

Those bangles were plastic which Mum bought from Indian shops near us, and we’d try and get them to match the Indian outfits that I would wear on special occasions.

I even had family members who would send over different bangles from India too.

I have kept them all, even though they’d never fit my wrists now.

There was so much joy around being that ‘girly girl’ and the fact that bangles signified a sense of femininity too.

I call them ‘bangri’ when I speak to my Mum about them in Gujarati.

But I learnt this week that ‘bangle’ evolved from the Hindi word ‘bangri’ too.

When I found this out, it seemed odd to me that the word ‘bangri’, as per its Hindi (and Gujarati) root, didn’t just stay as it was.

Why was there a need to change it when it arrived on these shores in 1787 (most likely through trade and cultural exchanges with the British East India Company) when they both meant the same thing?

It seems, like other words around that time, ‘bangri’ became ‘bangle’ due to linguistic simplification and phonetic adjustment, which is apparently common when words are borrowed between languages.

There’s also a claim that English speakers may have found ‘bangle’ easier to pronounce.

But I assure everyone that ‘bangri’ is not that difficult to say because it sounds very much like it is spelt.

The meaning of ‘bangri’ in Hindi means ‘coloured glass bracelet or anklet’.

It is also fascinating how far back in our history the ‘bangle’ has featured as an ornament to wear too.

In the 1920s, a bronze statue called ‘the dancing girl’ was excavated at Mohenjo-daro, an Indus Valley Civilisation site in present-day Pakistan.

The statue depicted a girl wearing approximately 24 or 25 bangles on her left arm and four bangles on her right arm.

The statue can be traced back to 2,500 BC.

Ernest Mackay, an English archeologist, is said to have been present at the time of discovering the statue at the site.

However it is claimed that in reality, an Indian worker would have found the statue.

The name of the Indian worker is not logged anywhere, and the Linda Hall Library in Missouri claims that ‘Mackay is the only human involved whose name we know’.

It is quite a travesty that we will never know who actually found the evidence that bangles have been around for over 4,500 years.

But there is some respite to know that there is a link between India and the modern day bangle we find in mainstream fashion outlets in the West today.

Whilst I’ve kept my end of the bargain in terms of keeping my culture alive, it seems that the West, through the arrival of the ‘bangri’ in the 1700s, has also helped ensure this ornament is a permanent fixture in the English language too.