Indian words — Words of the week

Photo by Mitchell Ng Liang an on Unsplash.

Doolally is a term for someone who’s a bit mad or eccentric, usually temporarily. It’s a shortened version of a British military slang expression, ‘doolally tap’. This basically means ‘camp fever’ (‘tap’ being an Urdu word for fever). The doolally part is a corruption of Deolali, the name of a military camp near Bombay (now Mumbai) in India.

Established in 1861, Deolali had a large barracks and was a chief staging point (i.e. a transit camp for troops or equipment), acting both as a training camp for soldiers who’d just arrived, and a place for British troops whose enlistments had expired to hang out while they waited for transport home. Because ships only sailed between November and March, this could mean some men stayed at Deolali for months waiting for repatriation. This is where we get the ‘losing your mind’ part from. Conditions in the camp were pretty awful – malaria was rife and soldiers were bored, driven nuts by sandflies and often afflicted with all the fun stuff you got from hanging out in the brothels and gin palaces that inevitably sprung up near to barracks (alcoholism, syphilis and other delightful venereal diseases). These men were described as being in ‘full doolally tap’, which we’ve since shortened to just ‘doolally’.

If you’re of a certain age then you might remember a 70s sitcom called ‘It Ain't Half Hot Mum’ which was set in Deolali. Like most British sitcoms from the 70s it’s since been accused of racism, homophobia and pandering to imperialism, meaning it’s now been assigned to the recycling bin of TV history.

Obviously you know what shampoo is. But have you ever wondered where the word comes from? Luckily you have me to do that for you. So, let’s start with the most important question – does it have anything to do with poo? No, is the slightly disappointing answer (or is it just me who’s disappointed by that…?).

Shampoo is an Indian word which goes all the way back to 1762. It comes from the Hindi word chāmpo, which is derived from the Sanskrit root chapati (yes, as in the flatbread), which means to press, knead or soothe. The word came over to us dirty Europeans from India by way of one Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian traveller, surgeon and entrepreneur, who used it to describe a form of massage. In 1814 he and his Irish wife Jane opened the first commercial ‘shampooing’ vapour masseur bath in Brighton (I don’t know what a ‘vapour masseur bath’ is, but it sounds like the sort of thing that would cost several hundred pounds to use in a health spa). He described shampoo in a local paper as ‘…a cure to many diseases and giving full relief when everything fails; particularly Rheumatic and paralytic, gout, stiff joints, old sprains, lame legs, aches and pains in the joints’. At some point after this ‘shampoo’ was used to refer to a scalp massage and then, in the 19th century to the soap used during that massage.