Published: Pioneer, October 1888; Pioneer Mail, 10 October 1888; The Week's News, 13 October 1888.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 4 (28/4, p. 87).

Text: Pioneer.

Notes: RK wrote on 5 October 1888 that ‘I did this morn horribly oversleep myself and eat too heavy a breakfast which led me to write a pasquinade in the Pi on the text of a telegram from Bombay’ (to Edmonia Hill: Letters, i 256).

The telegram reads: ‘The Bombay Corporation being anxious to secure a greater measure of dignity for their newly constituted body, resolved to apply to Government for sanction to their President being termed “the Honourable” or “Worshipfull”’ (Pioneer, 6 October 1888: RK evidently saw the telegram before it appeared in the Pioneer).

Reprinted in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets and in Harbord, iv, 2109–11.

Board Room of the Purkeshaditvarsubhana Municipality. Revenue Rs. 3,671: population 22732: local death-rate 39. per mile.

Babu Chuchundra Bandra Sen, President (addresses his colleagues).– And how shall fair flower of this our local self-government flourish not ingloriously in all the divisions, sub-divisions, pergunnahs, mahals, and general auditoriums if she is left in naked barrenness unadorned with raiment which well becomes, as Shakespeare says, “this mortal trick before high heaven?” I pause for a reply.

Municipality (generally).– Shabash! How a peroration!

Babu C.B.S. (waving copy of “Englishman”).– I observe in this truly inimical journal, injurious to best interests of nature's gentleman that on Bombay siding such a flower doth not so flourish. (Thunders of applause.) I repeat categorically she doth not so flourish, and why? Because the just and benevolent Lord Reay, truly actuated by high motives that always will and always shall govern all political crises and contingencies, has been graciously pleased, in response to the humble memorial of the Bombay Municipality, to abrogate excessive titular distinctions upon native gentlemen, who at vast sacrifice in time and personal predilections steer the organ of State to its destined haven here below. And if Bombay, how, my brothers and sisters, not Bengal?