The evolution of 'auntie', from a respectful greeting to an annoying title

Auntie has long been an awkward term. In Rupert Christiansen’s quirky study, The Complete Book of Aunts, he notes that in addition to insinuating age, it often adds layers of class and race. Vikram Doctor reports.

Smriti Z. Irani can be a polarising figure. But few would have not felt a shred of sympathy when she wrote on Instagram of “the someone shoot me moment” when a young person, Janhvi Kapoor in her case, “sweetly apologises for calling you aunty.”

This is a moment that has come to us all – or which we await with dread. And as Irani notes, it is worse when the person who calls you aunty (or uncle) then apologises profusely since that acknowledges that your reclassification to an older, presumably, less relevant generation really matters to you. ‘Aunty’ is annoying, but it is the apology that really twists the knife.

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“The someone shoot me”moment —When #jahnvikapoor sweetly apologises for continuously calling you aunty & you say “ koi baat nahi beta “ #totalsiyapa 🤦‍♀️ye Aaj kal ke bachche #auntykiskobola 🙈🚶‍♀️

A post shared by Smriti Irani (@smritiiraniofficial) on Dec 26, 2018 at 6:49pm PST

Irani is, in any case, hardly unfamiliar with this labelling. In 2016 a newspaper headline called her ‘Aunty National’, a somewhat laboured pun that was promptly called out for being sexist. As many noted, men who took the sort of passionate positions she did were never denigrated in this kind of fakely intimate way.

Auntie has long been an awkward term. In Rupert Christiansen’s quirky study, The Complete Book of Aunts, he notes that in addition to insinuating age, it often adds layers of class and race: “In Britain, it has historically been a word and a concept more prevalent among the working class; the middle class has tended to be more particular about distinguishing an honorary auntie from a blood-related aunt.”

Christiansen writes that the Oxford English Dictionary records ‘auntie’ as used for African-American women, perhaps slightly older servants, like Mammy in Gone With the Wind.

In 1984 the Times of India (ToI) noted a similar usage in communist China where ‘auntie’ meant a maidservant. The superficial respect presumably concealed an inequality of work that was at odds with communist ideology: “Senior party officials have, of course, long had the benefit of domestic help, but today others can apply for aunties at the newly set up Housework Service Co.”

The Indian usage of auntie has evolved rather differently. Before it took on the slightly mocking tone given to it today, auntie managed to combine both respect and familiarity. Far from being used downwards, it was used where respect was required, but not the level of formality which demanded a word like ‘ma’am’. Christiansen quotes one view that it emerged when “middle and upper-middle class children who go to Englishmedium schools address their friends’ mothers as Auntie.”

The diplomat PL Bhandari, writing in ToI in 1991, but recalling earlier decades, neatly illustrates this elite and clubby world when he writes how Vijaylakshmi Pandit, Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister, who was posted to head several Indian embassies, was affectionately called ‘Auntie Ambassador’ by his daughters.

But as time progressed the usage spread beyond just these narrow circles to the wider world, until it reached today’s tendency where everyone from neighbourhood kids to auto rickshaw drivers and security guards use auntie, regardless of the shock it gives those addressed this way.

This indicates perhaps that auntie fills a real need. At the start of his book Christiansen notes that the basic term, aunt, is not that universal: “not all languages have bothered to develop a single word to describe a mother’s or father’s sister.” Many languages, as with many in India, developed different terms for maternal and paternal relatives in order to make clear the different community obligations or duties that attached to them: all the variants of dada-dadi, kaka-kaki, phua-phuphi and so on.

Christiansen quotes the anthropologist Jack Goody to explain how undifferentiated terminology of aunt and uncle “developed first in the late Roman Empire, then spread through the Romance languages, reaching England with the Norman Conquest.” This delinking from specific family linkages freed aunts to become aunties, older ladies who were addressed with some respect, but also some intimacy.

It was this balance, combined with the specifically English origin, that expanded the usage in India. Auntie could be used in contexts where an Indian term would have been inappropriate, since the family linkage didn’t exist, or a bit too intimate, as with simpler terms like behenji, didi, akka or edathi, all broadly meaning elder sister.

As Nergis Dalal noted, writing in ToI in 1987, about how servants and delivery boys were increasingly using auntie and uncle: “Perhaps the use of those two words offers a passport from one human to another – an easy accessibility producing the feeling of social equality.” Viewed this way the ascent of uncle and auntie is a positive step away from the Rajera obsequiousness of sahib and memsahib.

Dalal also suggests where the change has come from. When she admonishes her servant girl for calling a neighbour ‘uncle’ “she looked at me bewildered: ‘But everyone says it,’ she said, ‘even on TV. What does it mean?’” When Dalal explains it means chacha “she was aghast. She certainly wouldn’t dream of addressing the doctor as ‘chacha’ but uncle was an English word, incomprehensible, culturally endorsed and transcending all class barriers, making her feel more like the people she watches on television.”

The sociolinguist expert Probal Dasgupta has taken this usage and made it a neat metaphor for India’s relationship with English. It is not a mother tongue, he argues, but not an entirely strange one either: “We conclude that English is ‘not one of us’, but an important presence that one must be polite to, and Auntie is the way we express our politeness in our current social conjuncture; so the term ‘Auntie Tongue’ best expresses what English is to its users in India.”

It is a useful metaphor since it suggests both what aunties can accomplish. A mother tongue has unique value, for shaping how we think and understand the world, but it doesn’t have to be the only way. Sometimes a different language can help us think in ways that are different and useful to help us grow.

The use of auntie as a respectfully friendly term shows how we can use a word from a different language to help us make connections that our native tongues might have constrained.

And that in a way is the value of what actual aunties do too. They use their intimate, yet slightly distanced links to help push us in ways we need to go. Christiansen’s book is a celebration of the aunts who have helped their nieces and nephews, whether related by blood or affection, to develop in ways that parents might not or could not have provided.

Like all things, English in India included, these links can be abused. In 2005 ToI reported the startling story of Kidnap Aunty, a lady who had used her friendliness with neighbours’ kids to facilitate the kidnapping of one of them. ‘Auntie’ has been a synonym for the madams who run brothels and during the era of hard Prohibition illegal drinking shops were run by aunties who stocked the booze beneath their beds. Anyone who reads PG Wodehouse will get a crash course on the awfulness of aunts.

Yet such antagonistic aunties are more than balanced by the benign kinds, and some of the most entertaining examples aren’t exactly aunties at all. Christiansen notes how easily aunties lend themselves to drag, with men dressing up and passing as them.

The eternally popular play Charley’s Aunt features a famous one, but today you are as likely to find them on YouTube.

The popular Pammi Aunty character is one example, and for a diasporic counterpart there is Aunty Sheila from South Africa. Ssumier Pasricha, the actor who created and plays Pammi Aunty has no doubt about why she is popular: “It’s because she tells the truth. She says what people really feel but might not want to say – and she has no problem saying it.”

It helps, of course, that she’s funny and doesn’t mind doing it with face mask, hair in towel and nightie all openly presented to the world, but it stems from honesty and lack of inhibition and that is what we look to aunties for.

Being an auntie is an attitude, says Pasricha, and it doesn’t even have to be limited by gender: “Kirron Kher is an aunty, and so is Karan Johar!” It might seem a shock to be anointed as an auntie, but once you get over it a whole world of auntie-lead audacity could lie ahead.