A couple of days ago, over dinner, I got into a debate with a few friends over what was Goddess Durga's chosen mode of transport. Bhavya, who is suitably named after the Goddess, pointed out that the fact that she was referred to as 'sherawali' clearly suggested it was the lion. I had always been under the impression that her vehicle was the tiger. A cursory picture search on Rishabh's cool new Blackberry showed her mounted on a tiger, and the question seemed settled.
But, I brought up the matter with my uncle when I went home and the issue got more complicated. My uncle insisted it was the tiger, my cousin Shipra, also funnily named after the Goddess, felt it was the lion and the servant added his two bits stating the issue was redundant as she came on a different vehicle every year. A search on Google proved even more inconclusive with divergent views supporting the two and even throwing Gajasimha, some ancient Oriya mythical animal with an elephant's head and a lion's body into the fray. Finally, we called my grandmother who affirmed that she had nine vehicles in all, but the simha was her prime mode of transport. The simha primarily means the lion but can be supposed to refer to most of the Indian big cats, including both lions and tigers.
The feline debate for the evening wasn't restricted to Durga's vehicle. After dinner, we headed to Prithvi for a play, where the stage was replete with fake leopard heads, which inspired a semantic discussion on the Hindi name for the leopard.(tendua) Cheetah, as we know is also the Hindi name for cheetah, and it is one of the many words which entered the English language during the period of colonization of India. Other interesting ones include the following.
Avatar comes from the Hindi word avatar, derived from the Sanskrit word avatara(root ava = down, tarati = cross over) meaning a descendant of a deity. The sense in which it was used in the movie means online virtual forms which comes from the 80s video game Habitat, popularized by the Neal Stephenson novel, Snow Crash.
Anaconda was used for the first time to describe a now extinct South Indian python, known in Tamil as Hennakandya. The Tamil snake was nothing like the South American boas and it was by pure accident that the term came to be applied to the snake we know as Anaconda today
Blighty comes from the Hindustani vernacular for Brits during period of colonization. The Hindustani word for foreign country is vilayat, (Arabic in origin) and for foreigner vilayati, the more corrupted form being bilaiti. It gained prominence during the First World War, when the phrase ‘Dear Old Blighty’ was used commonly by homesick British soldiers. It was used even now more commonly by expatriates Englishmen to refer affectionately to the motherland.
thank you soooo much! i totally needed this for my school project. my friend and i are supposed to be doing a poster board about Durga. She picked Durga out of all the Hindu gods because she knew Durga rode a tiger, which just happens to be one of her favorite animals. But when doing the research, all of the websites said it was a lion. we got so confused. but u totally cleared it up for us! thank you!
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