The history of Homo sapiens is, in a way, the history of a long struggle against the dark. Biologically, humans are creatures of the day, and our eyes are built to see by sunlight. For our ancestors, night was a dangerous time, when predators came out to hunt. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors learned to control fire and use it as they needed, and this freed them from many of the limits of biology.
Fire was not only for cooking or warmth. It was the first technological weapon humans had against the night. Flaming torches (mashala), oil lamps, candles, small kerosene lamps (dibiri) and lanterns were all different ways of managing that fire. But they shared a big weakness. They were unsteady. The wind could blow them out, they could start a fire, and nobody could run with them easily. Until the late nineteenth century, humanity's kingdom of the night stayed inside this small circle of flame.
The revolution came when humans learned to harness electricity. But early electrical systems were huge, tied to big generators and networks of wires. You could not carry them around, let alone run with them. The dry cell, developed in the late 1880s, and the small incandescent bulb gave new hope. In 1899, David Misell, a British inventor living in America, put three D-size zinc-carbon batteries, a small brass reflector and a tiny bulb inside a cylindrical paper tube. A contact switch sat at one end. This was one of the first hand-held electric lights in human history, the first torch or flashlight. Misell's patent went to Conrad Hubert, a Russian immigrant whose company sold the device, and who later built the well-known Eveready company.
In its early days, the device's name reflected both the technology of the time and how people thought about it. In America it was called a "flashlight." The zinc-carbon batteries of the day were weak, and the carbon-filament bulbs drew a lot of power. So the light could not be kept on for long. After a few seconds, the battery had to "rest." People used it to catch a quick flash of the scene in the dark, and the name stuck. Tungsten filaments and better batteries arrived in the following decades, and the light could burn continuously, but American English kept the name "flashlight" for good. British English called it a "torch." The word comes from Middle English torch or torche, which meant a large candle, a burning stick, or, figuratively, a ray of sunlight. Its roots go back to Old French torche or torque, meaning a flaming brand or a twisted bundle of straw or grass. After that the trail is uncertain. It probably comes from Vulgar Latin *torca, "something twisted or coiled," perhaps because early torches were made of twisted plant fibres dipped in something flammable. Torca is a form of Latin torqua, which is itself a variant of torquis, "a twisted metal necklace" (the source of the word "torque"). Torquis is related to Latin torqueō, "to twist or turn." Linguists therefore trace the word back to a Proto-Indo-European root, *terkʷ-, "to twist or turn." If so, "torch" may be a distant relative of the Sanskrit words tarku (a spindle) and tarka, which linguists also trace to the same root.
In Britain, "torch" had long meant the flaming brand. When the hand-held battery light arrived, the British simply carried the cultural image of their old flaming torch over to the new electric device.
The torch was more than an object. It changed the psychology of people and the dynamics of society.
A lantern or lamp spreads its light in all directions, so both the watcher and the thing watched are lit up. A torch's beam is one-sided and sharp. The person holding it could stay hidden in the dark while shining the light on whoever or whatever stood in front. It became a powerful tool of control and power. During the First World War it became an essential piece of equipment for soldiers fighting in the trenches. For police, night watchmen and ordinary people, it turned the night from something to fear into something manageable. Homo sapiens was no longer a slave to fire. We could now carry a small piece of the sun in our pockets.
Its arrival in India, however, was not a natural commercial process. It came as a symbol of imperial power. At the start of the twentieth century, India was a farming land under British rule, and largely dark at night. Apart from a few big cities such as Calcutta and Bombay, the whole country depended on kerosene lanterns, dibiri and clay lamps once the sun went down. At dusk, people stayed indoors for fear of wild animals. If they had to go out, they carried a lantern, a nianhula (a burning bundle of straw) or a flaming torch. But rain and wind could put out the flame, and there was always the danger of fire. People wanted a safer way to get light without these two problems.
At that time, British officers, police administrators and rich landlords began using imported hand-held torches. To India's poor villagers, who lived in darkness, the device looked like magic and power. It gave a blinding light from an iron tube, with no wick and no oil. It was the most astonishing display of modern science they had seen.
By the 1920s, the National Carbon Company (which had by then become part of Union Carbide, maker of the Eveready brand) had set up a commercial base in India. At first they imported batteries and torches from America and Britain. But the Indian market was huge, and in 1939 the first battery factory was established in Calcutta. This began a major change. What had been a luxury for white sahibs and landlords slowly became part of everyday life for the Indian middle class and for villagers. With torches, moving around the village at night got easier. The fear of snakes and wild animals eased, and farmers could go out at night to water their fields. The torch was more than a machine. It was a symbol of modernity that connected rural India to the world's industrial revolution.
The most fascinating chapter of this technological arrival lies in the linguistic and cultural history of Odisha. When a completely unfamiliar technology enters a society, that society's collective mind tries to understand it through its own vocabulary. Language is more than a means of communication. It is a living mirror of how people think and know. When the hand-held torch reached Odisha, Odia speakers did not simply take over one foreign word. They gave it several names based on its qualities, its use and its technology. These names were bijuli bati, tipabati and chorabati.
The first name was bijuli bati. According to the Purnachandra Bhashakosha, the Odia dictionary compiled by Gopal Chandra Praharaj, it means "a lamp lit by artificially produced electric power," and it specifically links the word to the "torch light." There is a lovely philosophical blend in this name. Bijuli means the natural force that falls from the sky, once a source of fear and wonder. Bati comes from the Sanskrit varti (a wick, or a lamp), and stands for an ordinary household object. By joining the two words, the Odia mind accepted a new reality. Humans could now hold the terrifying lightning of the sky in the palm of a hand, like a lamp. The word was built around the technology's real source, electricity.
The second name was tipabati. This word came from the physical relationship between a person and a machine. The dictionary gives many meanings for tipa, such as a written note, a spot or drop, and stitching with a needle. But here tipa comes mainly from tipiba, "to press," as in pressing a switch. For thousands of years humans had made light by rubbing, striking flint or lighting a fire, which took physical effort. This new device brought a great change in understanding. Pressing lightly with a fingertip was enough to make the light come on. This simple mechanical action was so new and amazing to people then that they named the device after the way it was used. A lamp that lights when you press it is a tipabati. It is a neat linguistic reflection of technological control.
The third name, and the most interesting, is chorabati. In some areas the word also became churabati. According to the dictionary, chora means hidden, secret, or out of public view (as in chorapriti, a secret love). This name reflects more than the build of the device. It reveals a deep social insight. From ancient times, the flaming torch, the lantern and the lamp were social lights. When someone walked at night with a torch or lantern, the whole village knew who was coming. The light of lamps, dibiri, nianhula, torches and lanterns spread in all directions, and lit up the face of the bearer or of the person beside the flame. The light of the hand-held torch was different. It travelled in a straight line in one direction. The person holding the torch could stay hidden in complete darkness, yet clearly see whatever he shone it on. It was a way of seeing in secret. Thieves used it to hide in the dark and search for things, and householders used it to catch a thief in hiding. Because of this secret, directional nature of the light, people called it chorabati. The word shows how finely the Odia language could measure the social effect of a technology.
But over time, these three meaningful and culturally rich Odia words, bijulibati, tipabati and chorabati, faded from everyday speech, and the English word "torch" took their place for good. How and why this happened is a story less about linguistics than about globalisation, capitalism and commercial imperialism. When something enters industrial mass production, its local identity begins to disappear. When torches and batteries came out of the factory in packets to village shops in Odisha, the packets carried the English word "Torch" or "Flashlight" in big letters. Advertisements, newspapers and company agents always promoted it as a "torch."
There was another reason. With the spread of education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, English had become a symbol of power, modernity and the upper class. It is common human psychology to imitate the powerful. Senior officers, doctors and English-educated babus went to the shop and asked for a "torch." Ordinary villagers, hoping to prove they were modern too, preferred to give up their own words and say "torch." Shopkeepers, for their part, found it easier to use a single common name because of commercial standardisation. When the market takes control of language, subtle, philosophical or descriptive words die out, and commercial brands or easily imported words survive.
Today bijuli bati is used for ordinary electric light rather than the torch. Chorabati and tipabati survive only on the yellowing pages of dictionaries and in the memories of old people. For its own convenience, Sapiens has not only tamed fire and darkness. It has also sacrificed its own many-coloured words of cultural depth for the convenience of a single global market. On this journey of victory over the dark, several beautiful words of the Odia language have gone dark themselves, lost for good in the womb of history.
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