Skip to main content

Pygmalion’s correct pronunciations


Liza: You are sheer humbug, Professor Higgins. You think you’re great because you have a lot of knowledge. And because you belong to the wealthy class. But I know what you are. Sheer Humbug. And I also know how to deal with you.

Dear Reader, I’m writing this post for a blog hop on Rewriting the ending of a book. The character who speaks the above dialogue belongs to George Bernard Shaw’s classic play Pygmalion which Hollywood converted into an eminently successful movie, My Fair Lady. The movie did give a different ending to the play doing some injustice to Shaw.

Shaw was not alive when Hollywood made the movie. He wouldn’t have liked the movie’s alternative ending simply because he was against sentimental romance. Even love was a philosophy for Shaw. He would have condemned the movie quoting Walter Savage Landor that “to those who have the greatest power of loving, love is a secondary affair.”

Let me offer a different ending. For Blogchatter blog hop.


Liza is ordered by Prof Higgins to bring his chappals before she will be asked to get out of the house since the Prof’s job with her is over. Liza brings the chappals but throws them on to the Prof’s face.

Well, if you’re not familiar with Shaw’s play… here’s a summary copied from the internet:

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw is a witty and socially critical play that follows the transformation of Eliza Doolittle, a poor flower girl with a strong Cockney accent, into a polished lady capable of passing as a duchess. This transformation is orchestrated by Henry Higgins, a linguistics professor, who takes on the challenge as part of a bet with Colonel Pickering. As Eliza masters the art of speech and manners, the play explores themes of class, identity, and self-worth, questioning societal norms and the true nature of independence. Ultimately, Eliza asserts her autonomy, refusing to be treated as Higgins' creation or subordinate, leaving their relationship unresolved but deeply thought-provoking.

Now, back to my alternative ending:

Higgins: [shocked at his chappals falling right on his face] Eliza Doolittle, what the hell are you doing?

Liza: Showing you where you belong. To the hypocritical, shallow middle class. Col Pickering once told me about the caste system in India wherein the highest caste called Brahmins decide what all others should do. But who are they to decide all that? They make a religion, they create gods in the name of that religion, they enact rules in the name of those gods. And thus they, the Brahmins become the greatest, and others become what the Brahmins decide. You are just that sort of a Pygmalion, Professor Higgins. You sculpt people’s destinies. And you think you are the greatest. What is your greatness except the fortune you inherited from a class that the so-called Great Britain created with the same villainy that the Indian Brahmins possessed. When you tell me to get out from your house now because you’ve proved what you wanted to by using me as a mere tool, you think you are becoming a great Brahmin. Am I right, Col Pickering?

Col Pickering smiles benignly.

Liza gives him a thumbs-up. The director of the play will have to make all this dramatic enough. Liza has the spirit of the elite but she was unfortunate to have been born in a poor class. It is not the class that matters, director. The spirit. The spirit that can throw chappals on to the faces of those who make the rules and swindle us.

Liza continues her dialogue since Prof Higgins is rendered silent by the chappals thrown on to his face by a Dalit whom he picked up from what he called the gutters and made a Duchess. Not just a Dalit, but a woman too! Double disqualification in India. Even today. In spite of India becoming an economic superpower!

Well, director, how do you show all that? Your house will be raided tomorrow by the superpower’s police. Your office will be raped. Your bank accounts will be blocked.

Prof Higgins will deliver his lecture then to the whole nation. On the importance of correct pronunciation.

PS. This post is written for the blog hop run by Blogchatter – as you understood obviously.

 

 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Adaptation to the events of the times - I think Shaw might approve! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. We read Pygmalion in my 12th grade English class. As a class. My fellow students did not like the ending. Then the teacher showed us the movie, and my fellow students were relieved. (I had seen the movie prior to this, so none of this was a surprise.) The older I get, the more I think the play's ending was actually better.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I too went through similar feelings about the play and movie. Higgins is not a hero for me now as he was when I was an undergrad studying this play.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...