I have been waiting for a queue of pedants, armed with the great Monier Williams Sanskrit Dictionary, or with Hobson Jobson, Hanklyn Janklyn (or, perhaps, if they are lucky, like me their Whitworth's Anglo-Indian Dictionary of 1885) to opine on the great jungle debate.
The scene was set by Claudia Hyles in a review on Saturday, of a book largely set "in a village in the lawless tracts of country along the Ganges and then in the jungles of Delhi. Jungles? It is a Sanskrit word meaning not 'impenetrable forest' but a 'desert' of sorts.".
In a burb such as Canberra, where word experts are two bob a dozen, such a remark cannot be allowed to go without comment. We published a letter yesterday from Dhrubajyoti Sen, saying that "jungle" could have that meaning, apart from thick forest, but that its origin was Hindi, not Sanskrit. In the novel reviewed, he conceded, it seemed that the author had referred to jungle in what he called the metaphorical sense - as desert.
This is an ideal controversy between pedants of the sort that many readers of the letters page, including myself, love. All the better since there is no correct answer - not that this will deter some saying that there is. Jangala, a Sanskrit word, said to suggest aridity, dry ground or desert, and usually found in Sanskrit literature, apparently, in medical texts. The closely related (descendant) Hindi and Marathi word, jangal, is said to mean desert, waste or forest. All things being equal, I would say that Sen is right in suggesting that the words drifted into English, via the Raj, from Hindi rather than Sanskrit; Hyles, on the other hand, is perfectly correct in pointing to its Sanskrit root, and, certainly, in interpreting it as meaning, in context, a wasteland.
(The same root, apparently, is evident in the Persian and Turkestan and French words for what? Let's, for the moment, say a wilderness rather than getting stuck on whether it is a desert or a forest.)
We have much the same breadth of meaning embracing an apparent contradiction with the Australian use of the English word bush. I come from the bush, from flat grazing lands of north-western NSW. A bushie, generally, is anyone from rural parts.
When Pommie convicts first used the word in any local sort, they meant it rather in forest terms. The area around Sydney Cove was thickly wooded, and a fellow could easily get lost in the scrub, thickets of trees, bushes, long grass and marsh. A person who was bushed was lost. A person who was bushing it was camping out.
In due course, however, the word came to mean something similar to what jangal primarily means in Hindi, or for that matter in Sanskrit: the wastelands, the backblocks, the uninhabited country, the lawless patches, the sparsely settled areas, a wilderness. That might be a dense forest; it might equally be a desert. In just the same way, I am told by Hanklyn Janklyn, Scots call uncultivated country out of town a forest, whether it is a grassland, or moor, or dense woods. Perhaps a place where you could easily get lost.
Scrub is up there with bush in Australian English as one that has very local meanings that a Pom might not understand. The early settlers had no vocabulary for the many things which were different about Australia. A completely new animal a wombat, say could be given a new name, perhaps from an Aboriginal one, but natural objects, such as trees, rivers and grasses, tended to be labelled, as common nouns, with the English terms, even if it were soon pain fully apparent that they did not behave like their English counterparts. Our rivers were not as English rivers were. English synonyms brook, stream, rivulet and so on seemed even less apposite for smaller rivers, what we these days generally call creeks. Itself an English (originally Dutch) word, if not one so immediately evoking a peaceful stream leading to a larger river then the sea. Indeed, strictly, a creek had meant a tidal inlet rather than a little river, while here it usually meant a smaller, generally shorter, stream feeding into a larger one. But then again, as with tidal creeks, our creeks were often backfilled by flooding rivers, the more so on the flat plains where rivers tended not so much to have tributaries, but distributaries.
We gave English names magpie, pine and bear to natural Australian things thought to resemble things known to Poms back home, and tried to describe our landscapes in terms that Poms might understand. We coined English phrases to describe some new things in ways that contained allusions Poms could grasp. Often, of course, this included free borrowing (of the sort that English has always done) from everyone else around: Aborigines, Irishmen, sailors from all over, and, later, miners from all over. The language even picked up (via the Anglo-Indians) quite a few words from Hindi and Sanskrit, because there was plenty of movement between India and Australia. Here though, I think jungle, if used at all, nearly always meant thick scrub.
Had that scrub contained the acres of ti-tree and lantana much of its remnant now contains, thanks to the tender ministrations of those who want it a "wilderness", we might have called it jungle, in the sense of suggesting that one would need a machete to get through, as in the jungles of, say, India or New Guinea. Too often, alas, these are now wastelands deserts even so both sides of the definition, Hindi or Sanskrit, are satisfied.