You're walking down a road. It's a perfectly lovely day, the kind where the breeze smells of early summer and two-stroke engine fumes. A group of men passes you—just friends returning from chai. You catch a scrap of their conversation. It's not much, just four syllables. Three are profane. The fourth is "aap".
Welcome to Bhopal, where gaalis are not just expressions of rage, but an essential part of the city’s linguistic identity. In this city, cussing isn’t always offensive—it’s sometimes affectionate, often humorous, and almost always loud.
Even if Bhopalis use this phraseology to replace everything from nouns to adjectives, cussing people out with the respectful second-person pronoun "aap" is deemed acceptable. But say the same thing with the informal pronoun "tu", and you might get mugged in a city alley.
"The nuance is delicate. It comes with time, perfected over decades," says Faiyaz Khan, a resident of Kaziq Camp, whose audience of friends and acquaintances swears by his ingenious application of profanities and humour.
Khan refutes the idea that gaalis are an extension of patriarchy. "Perhaps you've not been around much. You have to hear the more creative use of these phrases by the ladies. The biological absurdity of it will leave you in splits."
Viewed as a rite of passage, gaali-spewing uncles often weaponise baby babble as a form of entertainment by teaching young ones to hurl abuse at those who irritate them.
"Fathers let it pass a few times, but matters become serious after the child's pronouncements embarrass parents in public," says Sohail, a prominent member in Khan's group.
"It's unfair to first teach the child foul language and then reprimand him for parroting the expletives," adds the father of two.
Psychologists say cussing is cathartic. It’s a way of releasing stress and asserting identity. In Bhopal, it’s also a way of telling someone you like them—or that their scooter, or anything else, is cool.
Naqi Haroon, who belongs to a well-known family of poets, says, “It is unfair to single out Bhopal. The gaalis in Delhi are much worse and blurted out with the intention to offend.”
He believes the use of expletives in Bhopal is more subtle and creative—a quality that, he says, would do Manto and Bukowski proud.
Saadat Hasan Manto, a 20th-century Urdu writer, often found himself on the wrong side of purists who accused him of meddling with linguistic filth. His response was plain: as a writer, his job was to record his times with accuracy—without fear or favour.
In recent times, Charles Bukowski has also been accused of similar literary philanderings. He survives the outrage only because his prose came in English, and somehow, swearing sounds less scandalous when it crosses a few oceans. Manto had to defend his work in a court of law.
Haroon calls out the hypocrisy: people today are more accommodating of expletives in a foreign language but view vernacular gaalis as a sign of classlessness—without once analysing the dichotomy in their behaviour.
Even if these linguistic excursions are scoffed at by a majority of the educated middle class, cities like Hyderabad, Lucknow, Delhi, Kanpur, and Bhopal have perfected the unsavoury nuance into an art form.
That said, Bhopal may tolerate profanities as a form of linguistic playfulness, but it is quick to take offence when boundaries of familiarity are breached. A cuss word from a friend might earn a laugh—uttered by a stranger, it could end in blows or worse. Beware!