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From: harshawardhan_bosham nimkhedkar <>
Subject: Gandhi
Date: Sun, 16 May 2004 12:24:50 +0530


My 84-year old Swedish linguist friend Birger Drake (who knows some
Sanskrit) yesterday asked me the following --

From: Birger Drake ---- Here a question: (Mahatma) Gandhi (by some
mis-spellers called Ghandi) has a name which can be interpreted as
"fragrant". Besides, my textbooks say "gan" = 'count', and "dhi" =
intelligence. What is the proper translation? And how do you write Gandhi
(in, say, devanagari) ?

Here is my reply.

G'morning Birger,

You are confusing between two roots. "gan" = 'count', and "dhi" =
intelligence, are correct in their own place, but here the root is
"gandh" -- the previous "gan" has no connexion with this. 'Gandh (gun-dh)'
means smell, scent, perfume. This word is derived from the Sanskrit root
"Granthi" (grun-thi), meaning a gland. It then became "Granthali" in
Sanskrit -- meaning a smell-secreting gland. Finally it became 'Gundhi'. The
smell from the 'gundhi' is 'gundh'. The Sanskrit word is used as it is in
most
Indian languages. We then add prefixes to it -- so "su- (soo) gandh" means
sweet, good smell, and "dur-gandh" means bad smell. 'Gundhee' itself means
bad
smell in Marathi / Gujarati. The other meaning of the word 'Gundhee' is a
perfumier, one who sells perfumes. 'Gundhee' is transcribed as 'Gandhee' in
English. Later on, the "a" came to be pronounced as "ah" -- so it became "
'Gaa'
(or 'Gah') n dhee". In short, 'Gandhee / Gandhi' means a perfume-seller, and
later on this occupational name became a surname for the members of that
community. They are mostly Gujaratis, but since the Zoroastrians or Parsis
in India basically belong to the Gujarat province, they also picked up that
name. My dictionary also says that the word 'Gandhi' can mean an
"apothecary".
There is yet another, unrelated, meaning of the word = 'gaandhi' is the
small
swelling one gets on the skin when a wasp or an ant stings. A kind of rash.

The British / American pronunciation of the proper name 'Gandhi' is totally
wrong -- it's not 'Ghan-di'. It's 'Gaa n dhee'. Don't forget to aspirate the
'H'
in 'dh'. The 'd' is French as in 'de'. The combination of that 'de' plus 'H'
will give you the 'dh' sound in 'Gandhi'.

'--- Harshawardhan
May 16 2004


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