Sometime over the last three decades, God became god in media publications, throwing all those into confusion who believe reverence and respect must be expressed through capitalisation. It must have felt particularly odd to them because the President and the Prime Minister didn’t have to suffer the ignominy of being demoted to the lower case.

It seemed the atheists had unilaterally decided to embark lexically on the path of secularisation, giving two hoots to the sensitivity of the religious. This imposition was undeniably also a function of power – no Indian publication would care to take into account the sensibilities of the readers, let alone consult them, before deciding on its style book.

Yet, grammatically, god and God convey two different meanings. This is because, as a rule, capitalisation is used to distinguish the specific from the general. Thus, "god" or "gods" relate to a set of beings people worship or hold in esteem. By contrast, God refers to a particular concept of god, or the Supreme Being. Here is a parallel – you write kutta for a dog, but I have a dog whose name is Kutte, and so he must have his K in capital letters.

Secularisation process

Rarely does anything in India escape the net of history. This is true of god, too. Since it was the British from whom we learned the English language, we inherited the Christian idea of God and began to capitalise the G in it, regardless of whether or not it was the idea we sought to convey. From this perspective, god is a pronoun and God a noun.

Ignoring this subtle distinction, we began to use God in India as a substitute for Bhagwan or Allah or whatever the name we give Him (or Her?). This substitution presumably posed no problem to the Muslims, whose profession of faith in English reads thus: “There is no god but God.” The late Bharatiya Janata Party ideologue KR Malkani devised his own rule and, in a sense, lexically rebelled against the norm of capitalising only the monotheistic God. He would write Gods and Goddesses, thereby underscoring that polytheists are reverential to all who constitute their pantheon.

It is hard to figure out why God in India has been increasingly diminished to god. My own bet is that we have a colonised mindset. As the process of secularisation gathered steam post-World War II, and writers in the West began to treat the Christian God as a pronoun, we too, as it often is, followed in their footsteps, at times consciously, but often without a thought.

Even as Indian publications chose to turn God into god, we have persisted with using BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini – In the year of Our Lord) to mark dates. A good many writers, particularly historians, prefer to use CE, or Common Era, for AD and BCE, or Before Common Era, for BC. The dates don’t themselves change – 200 BC becomes 200 BCE and 200 AD becomes 200 CE.

The use of BCE and CE was propagated to show sensitivity to the followers of faiths other than Christianity. Western scholars who were Christian argued that “Our Lord” is not everybody’s Lord and, therefore, it is unjustified to impose  Christendom’s idea of the sacred on people who don’t subscribe to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

They also argued that the use of CE and BCE would help de-link education from religion and assist in the ongoing secularisation process. But it was also considered necessary because, as former UN general-secretary Kofi Annan once pointed out, “people of different faiths and cultures” must have “some shared way of reckoning time… And so the Christian Era has become Common Era."

Grammatical revolution

But whether or not BCE or CE should be substituted for BC and AD remains a prickly issue. In 2011, Australia reacted with fury to a news report that said the education authorities there planned to substitute BC with BCE and AD with CE. The then Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, thought the plan was an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history”. Several political parties expressed outrage, prompting the authorities to retain the notation of AD and BC, leaving the use of CE and BCE optional.

Some scholars in India have indeed taken to using CE and BCE, yet BC and AD are too deeply ingrained in us to abandon the habit overnight. When I interviewed historian Romila Thapar weeks ago, she requested I run the transcript past her. I had assumed she would replace BC with BCE. I was proved wrong.

The Times of India presumably gave a lot of thought before it decided to usher in a grammatical revolution by writing the first-person pronoun I as i on its edit page. It seems the egoistical I was slashed to i in accordance with that idea of Hindu philosophy which, wisely, asks human beings to overcome their ego. It was achieving lexically what all of us are supposed to spiritually.

But, really, can you by writing I as i shrink your ego to the extent it doesn’t remain an impediment in your spiritual evolution? This is the question a friend asked, not even caring to wait for the journalist me to answer. He said, “The slashing of I shows you can overturn the rules of grammar in case you have the money and the power to print.”

Respecting practices

At times, we choose certain words that inappropriately describe noble values and intent. Take the word toleration, much in currency over the last few months. A lot of us have started to say that India has become less tolerant, or increasingly intolerant. The BJP bigwigs claim India is a tolerant country.

But what we forget is that the word tolerant has a negative connotation. It means to endure, to bear with what is unpleasant or you abhor. To say you must learn to tolerate is to not retaliate against someone whose ideas or actions you are repulsed by. It also presumes you possess the power to express your resentment.

However, tolerant is used in India in the sense of accepting or respecting opinions and practices different from ours. Or is it the case of the Freudian slip? What we say reveals the truth even though we seek to conceal it. It is possible we deeply dislike the differences among us, erupting as soon as our threshold of tolerance is crossed. And this threshold is getting lower and lower over the years, whether regarding food habits or how we view a particular parsonage, dead for centuries.

Is it not infinitely better to substitute tolerance with words such as respect or appreciate, which express better the idea of equality of citizens, irrespective of their religious beliefs and opinions? Perhaps the use of words like respect and appreciate might just inspire us to learn how to actually respect and appreciate.

But we also choose words to conceal our guilt. Over the last two decades, the servant is increasingly referred to as "domestic help". In most cases, the servant wouldn’t know he or she has been dignified with the term domestic help; he or she wouldn’t know the more modern term is less insulting to him or her.

For sure, regardless of whether you use servant or domestic help, it doesn’t alter his or her work profile nor get him or her a better salary. In choosing to call the servant domestic help, it is we the employers who dignify our act which we suspect borders on enslavement.

Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, has as its backdrop the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It is available in bookstores.