HAATHI KA ANDAA

I was in the Jayanti Janata from Trivandrum to Bombay. This was in the last decade of the last century. The train was running late. Around 10 in the morning, a brother-sister pair, the older of them under eight years, got into the train at Erode. Or, was it Salem? Anyway, that is immaterial. They were beggars, seeking alms in return for the entertainment they would provide in the form of songs. This twosome chose to sing "Aati kya Khandala?" from the old (1990s?) Hindi movie Ghulaam. That was all fine, but these Tamil-speaking kids got the words all wrong and the boy merrily sang, "Haathi ka andaa laa!"

That reminded me of our English Professor Baliga who introduced us to spoonerisms and malapropisms. He had referred in passing to another variant with the unlikely name mondegreen but did not tell us more about it. That reference, however, had stoked my interest in it and the college library had given me some information.

This piece is about mondegreens. What exactly is a mondegreen? The "Haathi ka andaa laa!" is a perfect example of a mondegreen. If someone mishears a song and genuinely believing that this is the correct version, sings the lines like that, you have a mondegreen. Like me, you might have heard many mondegreens but not have known that it had a name too!

The refrain of the well-known Bob Dylan song "Blowin'in the Wind" (https://youtu.be/sPbfJAIugIQ) is "The answer, my friend, blowin' in the wind". It is supposed to have the mondegreen version in "The ants are my friend..."

The origin of the word mondegreen is fascinating. A Scottish ballad featured in Percy's Reliques was "The Bonny Earl o' Moray". The first four lines of the ballad go thus:

"Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands
Oh where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o' Moray
And lay'd him on the green."

When author Sylvia Wright was a child, her mother used to read aloud this ballad to her. The child misheard the last two lines as:

"They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen."

When Sylvia grew up to be a writer, she wrote an article titled "The Death of Lady Mondegreen" in the Harper's Magazine in November 1954 referring to this misinterpretation of the song. Well before writing the article, she had, of course, realised her mistake but, being a creative writer, she went onto coin a term for that form of error. She wrote, "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original." The term was popularized by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll.

When mondegreen happens, it results in the song acquiring a different meaning. And obviously, the second meaning is often hilarious - or at least different. As in what is arguably the most famous example of mondegreen in rock music: the line "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" from 'Purple Haze' by Jimi Hendrix (the actual line is "Excuse me while I kiss the sky".)

According to J A Wines, mondegreens often occur because English is "rich in homophones - words which may not be the same in origin, spelling or meaning, but which sound the same".

Mondegreens are not the exclusive preserve of English; other languages too could have them, as we have seen. You certainly recall the song "Aap jaisa koi meri zindagi mein aaye, toh baat ban jaaye" from Qurbani (early 1980s), don't you? My son, all of five years, would go about on his tricycle in gay abandon, singing "Aap jaisa koi meri zindagi mein aaye, woh baap ban jaaye".

And there was this girl who had heard, rather misheard, the song "Meri kismat mein tu nahi shaayad..." from Prem Rog as "Merry Christmas mein tu nahi shaayad...", but in my opinion, "Haathi ka andaa laa!" stands tall among all the mondegreens.