Chapter PESHCUBZ to PHOOLKAREE of P by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

was the infamous Nana Sahib.

Mr C. P. Brown gives a feminine peshwin: “The princess Ganga Bai was Peshwin of Purandhar.” (MS. notes).

1673.—“He answered, it is well, and referred our Business to Moro Pundit his Peshua, or Chancellour, to examine our Articles, and give an account of what they were.”—Fryer, 79.

1803.—“But how is it with the Peshwah? He has no minister; no person has influence over him, and he is only guided by his own caprices.”—Wellington Desp., ed. 1837, ii. 177.

In the following passage (quandoquidem dormitans) the Great Duke had forgotten that things were changed since he left India, whilst the editor perhaps did not know:

1841.—“If you should draw more troops from the Establishment of Fort St. George, you will have to place under arms the subsidiary force of the Nizam, the Peishwah, and the force in Mysore, and the districts ceded by the Nizam in 1800–1801.”—Letter from the D. of Wellington, in Ind. Adm. of Lord Ellenborough, 1874. (Dec. 29). The Duke was oblivious when he spoke of the Peshwa’s Subsidiary Force in 1841.

PETERSILLY, s. This is the name by which ‘parsley’ is generally called in N. India. We have heard it quoted there as an instance of the absurd corruption of English words in the mouths of natives. But this case at least might more justly be quoted as an example of accurate transfer. The word is simply the Dutch term for ‘parsley,’ viz. petersilie, from the Lat. petroselinum, of which parsley is itself a double corruption through the French persil. In the Arabic of Avicenna the name is given as fatrasiliun.

PETTAH, s. Tam. pettai. The extramural suburb of a fortress, or the town attached and adjacent to a fortress. The pettah is itself often separately fortified; the fortress is then its citadel. The Mahratti peth is used in like manner; [it is Skt. petaka, and the word possibly came to the Tamil through the Mahr.]. The word constantly occurs in the histories of war in Southern India.

1630.—“’Azam Khán, having ascended the Pass of Anjan-dúdh, encamped 3 kos from Dhárúr. He then directed Multafit Khán … to make an attack upon … Dhárúr and its petta, where once a week people from all parts, far and near, were accustomed to meet for buying and selling.”—Abdul Hamid, in Elliot, vii. 20.

1763.—“The pagoda served as a citadel to a large pettah, by which name the people on the Coast of Coromandel call every town contiguous to a fortress.”—Orme, ed. 1803, i. 147.

1791.—“… The petta or town (at Bangalore) of great extent to the north of the fort, was surrounded by an indifferent rampart and excellent ditch, with an intermediate berm … planted with impenetrable and well-grown thorns. … Neither the fort nor the petta had drawbridges.”—Wilks, Hist. Sketches, iii. 123.

1803.—“The pettah wall was very lofty, and defended by towers, and had no rampart.”—Wellington, ed. 1837, ii. 193.

1809.—“I passed through a country little cultivated … to Kingeri, which has a small mud-fort in good repair, and a pettah apparently well filled with inhabitants.”—Ld. Valentia, i. 412.

1839.—“The English ladies told me this Pettah was ‘a horrid place—quite native!’ and advised me never to go into it; so I went next day, of course, and found it most curious—really quite native.”—Letters from Madras, 289.

PHANSEEGAR, s. See under THUG.

[PHOOLKAREE, s. Hind. phulkari, ‘flowered embroidery.’ The term applied in N. India to the cotton sheets embroidered in silk by village women, particularly Jats. Each girl is supposed to embroider one of these for her marriage. In recent years a considerable demand has arisen for specimens of this kind of needlework among English ladies, who use them for screens and other decorative purposes. Hence a considerable manufacture has sprung up of which an account will be found in a note by Mrs. F. A. Steel, appended to Mr. H. C. Cookson’s Monograph on the Silk Industry of the Punjab (1886–7), and in the Journal of Indian Art, ii. 71 seqq.

[1887.—“They (native school girls) were collected in a small inner court, which was hung with the pretty phulcarries they make here (Rawal Pindi), and which … looked very Oriental and gay.”—Lady Dufferin, Viceregal Life, 336.]