Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive c10.9094

c10.9094

The word is really a slight corruption of Hind. (from Skt.) mantri, ‘a counsellor, a Minister of State,’ for which it was indeed the proper old Mahommedan term in India. It has been adopted, and specially affected in various Indo-Chinese countries, and particularly by the Malays, among whom it is habitually applied to the highest class of public officers (see Crawfurd’s Malay Dict. s.v. [and Klinkert, who writes manteri, colloquially mentri]). Yet Crawfurd himself, strange to say, adopts the current explanation from the Portuguese (see J. Ind. Archip. iv. 189). [Klinkert adopts the Skt. derivation.] It is, no doubt, probable that the instinctive “striving after meaning” may have shaped the corruption of mantri into a semblance of mandar. Marsden is still more oddly perverse, videns meliora, deteriora secutus, when he says: “The officers next in rank to the Sultan are Mantree, which some apprehend to be a corruption of the word Mandarin, a title of distinction among the Chinese" (H. of Sumatra, 2nd ed. 285). Ritter adopts the etymology from mandar, apparently after A. W. Schlegel.* The true etymon is pointed out in Notes and Queries in China and Japan, iii. 12, and by one of the present writers in Ocean Highways for Sept. 1872, p. 186. Several of the quotations below will show that the earlier applications of the title have no reference to China at all, but to officers of state, not only in the Malay countries, but in Continental India. We may add that mantri (see MUNTREE) is still much in vogue among the less barbarous Hill Races on the Eastern frontier of Bengal (e.g. among the Kasias (see COSSYA) as a denomination for their petty dignitaries under the chief. Gibbon was perhaps aware of the true origin of mandarin; see below.