Borrowed Words Almanac
Between 1600 and 1900, English in India built a working vocabulary from Urdu and Hindi. This page sorts it into four shelves — household, wardrobe, kitchen, and office — with dated examples.
'Anglo-Indian' is used here only in its linguistic sense: the vocabulary that grew between English and the languages of India under the East India Company and the Raj. The fullest record of it is Hobson-Jobson, the glossary published by Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell in 1886, which catalogues more than two thousand such words with their first records.
The household shelf holds bungalow (recorded 1676, from Hindi banglā, 'Bengali'), veranda (1711, from Hindi varandā, perhaps by way of Portuguese), cot (1634, from Hindi khāt), and shampoo (1762, from Hindi chāmpo, 'to press'). These are borrowings of daily life — words taken because the house and its habits needed names.
The wardrobe shelf is the largest. Pajamas (c. 1800, from Urdu pāyjāma, itself Persian pāy-jāma, 'leg-garment'), khaki (1857, from Persian khākī, 'dusty'), bandana (1752, from Hindi bāndhnū, 'to tie'), dungaree (1696, from Hindi dungrī), chintz (seventeenth century, from Hindi chīnt), and cummerbund (1616, from Persian kamarband) all name cloth or clothing.
The kitchen shelf holds chutney (1813, from Hindi chatnī) and punch (1630s, from Hindi pānch, 'five', for the drink's five ingredients); curry, often assumed to be Hindi, is in fact from Tamil kari — a useful warning against guessing. The office shelf holds sepoy, nabob, pundit (from Hindi pandit), mogul, and thug (1810): the vocabulary of rank, revenue, and report.
Every word on these shelves can be checked. The Oxford English Dictionary gives dated first quotations; Hobson-Jobson gives the contemporary usage and the stories the words carried. Where the two disagree on a date, the difference is worth noting rather than hiding.
Further reading