“Going Doolally” Over Deolali [Part – I]

Photo : A British Soldier (by the name Smith) sent this
 photograph home on new year. (Deolali, 1/1/1937)

Doolally. Pronunciation: [DU-lah-lee]. 
Function: adjective.
Meaning : Crazy or at least very eccentric or like in our case completely deranged!

All the beer lovers of Pune must have heard about the “Doolally Handcrafted Beers” on the NIBM Annexe, South Pune, Pune. This place claims to be the first microbrewery in the town. But little do we know about the origin of the word “Doolally”

Deolali is a town situated about 10 km from the neighboring city of Nashik, which was once served as a transit camp for British troops in India, notorious for its unpleasant environment, boredom, and the psychological problems of soldiers that passed through it.
Its name is the origin of the phrase "gone doolally" or "doolally tap", a phrase meaning to 'lose one's mind'. 'Tap' may refer to the Urdu/Marathi word “tap”, meaning fever. This arbitrariness is due to it being an Anglicized version of an Indian place name rather than any English word.

The term is British Army slang, from the Deolali sanatorium, Maharashtra, India and is first cited in Fraser & Gibbons', Soldier & Sailor Words, 1925:
"Deolali tap (otherwise doolally tap), mad, off one's head. Old Army."

Photo : British soldiers; George Jacobs & Unknown
with Indian kids (Camp Deolali, India. 9 March 1943)

Frank Richards, (Francis Philip Woodruff) was a soldier in the First World War and wrote a classic account of it in Old Soldiers Never Die. Richards was also a veteran of the Indian campaign, which he wrote about in in Old Soldier Sahib, 1936:

"Time-expired men sent to Deolalie from their different units might have to wait for months before a troop-ship fetched them home... The well-known saying among soldiers when speaking of a man who does queer things, ‘Oh, he's got the Doo-lally tap,’ originated, I think, in the peculiar way men behaved owing to the boredom of that camp."

The phrase is quite archaic now, even in its 'go Dolally' form. The tap is now rarely heard, but hasn't quite died out of everyday use.

Sources: wikipedia.org, warren421.home.comcast.net and other websites.

© Gaurav Ghosh (2014). Please do not reproduce without prior permission.