Hindi has three words for “you.” Tu is for people one is very close to, for small children and for gods. It can also sound contemptuous. Tum is for friends, colleagues and relatives. Aap carries the highest respect. It is the form for elders, seniors and anyone met for the first time.
The World Atlas of Language Structures, citing a 1963 grammar, also lists tum for people of lower status, such as servants. Respect can be added to a name as well. The suffix ji, as in Alisha ji, does this.
In 2021 the village council of Mathur, in the Palakkad district of Kerala, passed a unanimous resolution. It banned the words “sir” and “madam” in its office. Reports called them colonial honorifics.
The council has 16 members and is led by the Congress party. Seven CPI(M) members and one BJP member backed the resolution.
On November 3, 2023, Justice P. S. Narasimha of the Supreme Court of India interrupted a lawyer in court. “How many times you will say ‘My Lords’? If you stop saying this, then I will give you half of my salary,” he said. He asked the lawyer to say “sir” instead.
According to the legal news site LiveLaw, the Bar Council of India passed a resolution against such terms in 2006, calling them “a relic of the colonial past.”
In the Mahabharata, the young archer Ekalavya outshines Arjuna, a student of the teacher Drona. Arjuna complains. Drona then asks Ekalavya for his right thumb as gurudakshina, the fee owed to a teacher. Ekalavya gives it willingly, and his archery is weakened.
The Taittiriya Upanishad gives a departing student four instructions: Matru devo bhava. Pitru devo bhava. Acharya devo bhava. Atithi devo bhava. Treat the mother as a god. Treat the father as a god. Treat the teacher as a god. Treat the guest as a god.
The lines come from the Shiksha Valli, section 1.11.2, an instruction to a student leaving his teacher.
In the film Mohabbatein (2000), Amitabh Bachchan plays Narayan Shankar, the strict principal of a school called Gurukul. His rule has three words: Parampara, Pratishtha, Anushasan. Tradition, honor, discipline.
On the film’s twentieth anniversary in 2020, Bachchan posted the three words again. “Mohabbatein is special for many reasons,” he wrote.
“India is Indira. Indira is India.” The line is attributed to Dev Kant Barooah, a Congress leader and minister under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. He is chiefly remembered for it.
Wikipedia dates it to 1974 and cites the historian Ramachandra Guha. The wording and the year differ between accounts, and Wikipedia describes the statement itself as alleged.
In September 2013, Rahul Gandhi walked into a press conference held by his own party’s spokesman at the Press Club in Delhi. He attacked an ordinance of the Congress-led government that protected convicted legislators. “It’s complete nonsense. It should be torn up and thrown away,” he said.
The government had been defending the ordinance, and the outburst embarrassed it in public.
Rahul Gandhi was not a junior. He was vice president of the party.
In 2008, when Virat Kohli joined the Indian cricket team, Yuvraj Singh, Munaf Patel and Irfan Pathan told him about a dressing-room custom. New players, they said, touched Sachin Tendulkar’s feet. Kohli did it.
Tendulkar later recalled the moment. “I asked him ‘what are you doing?’,” he said. He told Kohli that there was no need for this and that such things did not happen.
ValueNotes, an Indian research firm, gives foreign partners ten tips for doing business with Indians. One of them reads: “In a meeting, we don’t like to contradict the boss, especially if he’s wrong!”
The tip continues: “The flip side is that those in powerful positions expect deference, and consensus.”