A Brief Biography Of Slapping

Gautam Patel

Few words have the immediacy of this one. In its first known usage in English, it’s nearly 400 years old, going back to the mid-1630s. Its roots are probably from the very similar Germanic, schlappe, and both are onomatopoeic, suggestive of the sound they make.

From the trigger for duels at dawn to jazz, slap has adapted to a variety of situations and there seems to be no limit to its colloquialisation: we have slapstick comedies and hockey players use the slapshot, and there are back-slapping chums much given to being slap-happy. Jazz musicians slap that bass, a form of pulling back the strings of a double bass or an electric bass guitar and allowing them to, well, slap against the instrument for a sharp retort-like sound.

Something more than a pat and less than a punch, it’s usually more insult than injury. We know it from early childhood as a form of domestic corporal punishment. Between husband and wife, it is an indicator of physical and mental cruelty (though I believe at least one absurd decision found nothing wrong with the occasional slap to instil discipline in the errant spouse).

It’s not just physical either: parties in litigation routinely ‘slap’ notices on each other, and that tells us of the word’s other implication: unexpectedness. The slappee seldom expects the slap and the slapper’s actions are often impulsive rather than premeditated. It is not always unhappy either: the high five and its predecessor the low-five are both expressions of excited accord.

The primary intention of the traditional slap is, of course, to humiliate. Even when it’s not physical, this is its meaning when we speak of a “slap in the face”. Nothing quite matches the shock, the momentary intensity and the impact of a slap in the face (a slap on the bottom might be something else entirely).

Of all its many variants, the most dramatic is the slap with footwear. For some reason, slipper-slappers seldom seem sufficiently sane. The ultimate humiliation is to receive on your visage a resounding smack with the dirt (and possibly the imprint) from the bottom of the slapper’s footwear. Even hurling shoes — especially at ministers and war-mongering presidents — doesn’t have quite the same punch, though some of these ICBMs (inter-cultural boot missiles) fetch extraordinary prices on eBay.

A more recent, and far more disturbing, trend is the one known to law as the SLAPP suit, the Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. This is a sort of anti-PIL action, filed with little hope of winning, and meant to threaten, intimidate, insult and humiliate the proponents of an anticipated class-action suit or a PIL and to bludgeon them into submission. SLAPP suits are beginning to surface in India too, as ominous weapons in corporate hands.

Slapping may not be an art form, but it forms part of a lot of art. Othello slapping Desdemona is the stuff of theatrical legend, and there’s much slapping in the Bard’s works from King Henry V (using a white glove) to The Taming of the Shrew. The word slapstick comes from theatre, too, the batacchio or a club of two wooden slats struck together to produce a sharp slapping sound effect. From Renaissance theatre to Rowan Atkinson, slapstick has never gone out of style.

Movies are the happy hunting grounds of the slap. There’s a lovely 7-minute video of the greatest movie slaps in history called “Glove, Actually: An Ode to Cinema’s Greatest Slaps”. The acknowledged cinematic slap-king is from In the Heat of the Night when, in 1960’s Mississippi, a white racist slaps Sidney Poitier — who slaps him right back. Some moments are truly memorable: Humphrey Bogart to Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon: “When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it!” Gone With The Wind, Godfather (both I and II) and Chinatown all have a claim to fame; as indeed does James Bond in more than one movie (Sean Connery in From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and Diamonds are Forever) — but he also gets it back (Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies). Connery also got at least two metaphorical slaps in the face from George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service when Lazenby shows up in a kilt and when he talks to the audience about “the other guy”.

Bollywood is no stranger to the onscreen slap either. Raj Kapoor whacked Nargis in Awaara, Sunil Dutt and Saira Banu went at each other in Padosan and Vinod Khanna rose to the occasion in Khoon Pasina. Perhaps the most delightful is the ‘torture’ scene of Dev Anand in Johny Mera Naam where delicate little slaps are administered to our dandy chair-strapped hero by a villain who, by today’s standards, is about as threatening as milkman. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, luscious heroines in saris draped like the wrapping of fruit baskets from Crawford Market would, when a drainpipe-trousered, gel-haired, skin-tight-shirted villain tried to ‘outrage their modesty’, call him exquisite names (“Neech! Kamine! Teri yeh himmat!”) and, to protect their ‘virtue’, deliver a resounding slap-in-the-face, a unique pre-pepper-spray-era method of female self-defence. As shock value, it counted for precisely zero and only triggered a more villainous response.

Depending on where you are, slapping techniques vary a great deal. There’s the full-on faceslap where the arm swings with an open palm, the wrist slightly cocked, and the follow-through continues across. There’s the backhander, where the backs of the fingers are used in a reverse swing — this is often perceived as harder. The calculated insult slap is little more than a flick across the face, enough in another time to demand satisfaction, the selection of seconds and a choice of weapons. A backslap, usually on the shoulder or upper back, is more of a thump and conveys friendship, amity, solidarity. The high- and low-fives are slaps of their own. And the self-face-slap or forehead-slap is used to express exasperation and irritation. Across countries and cultures, and though it says different things at different times in different situations, the language of the slap is universal.

So long as there are actors and writers, parents and politicians, friends and enemies, musicians and sportsmen, there will be slaps, slappers and slappees and we’re seldom any the worse off for it.

Postscript: My friend Chetan Gupta recommends this one too: