How do people from diverse lands share experiences and emotions as they work together in the tight confines of a ship vessel? Sometimes, th...
How do people from diverse lands share experiences and emotions as they work together in the tight confines of a ship vessel? Sometimes, they create new languages to bridge the divisions. That’s what the lascars did – with a salty, colourful vocabulary.
A group of sailors and militiamen who served on European ships from the 16th century to the 20th century, lascars were drawn from several colonised lands – Chinese, East Africans, Arabs, Malays, Bengalis, Goans, Tamils and Arakanese. The word by which they were known was derived from the Persian word “lashkar” for army. But their nation was the Indian Ocean and they negotiated their worlds speaking a composite language they evolved called Laskari Baat.
Laskari Baat draws not only from the various languages that lascars had grown up with but also from the Portuguese and English of their masters on the ship.
While vestiges of Laskari Baat are still found in words spoken by South Asians at sea, this creole language is significant because it echoes a larger lesson for our polarised world today: it shows how finding a way to share experiences can help transcend seemingly insurmountable chasms.
Lingering memories
Though lascars no longer exist, they linger in our cultural imaginations. For instance, Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy of novels...
