On Mudi, Tong, and the Perils of Asking Simple Questions

This is a tale of my journey down a linguistic rabbit hole from which I have yet to find an exit.

How It Started

My wife asked me a simple question. She wanted to buy a bunch of those little local deshi snack packets, you know, the ones hanging by roadside tea stalls. Jhaal muri, chanachur, that sort of thing. This was for one of her 12-days of holiday spirit activities at school, where each day features some gleeful staff competition involving spinning wheels, winning prizes, and general festive chaos.

Long story short: she needed snacks from those ubiquitous street-side stalls.

“What do you call those stalls?” she asked.

I hesitated. “Hmm … either mudir dokan or tong-er dokan?”

Her next question was inevitable: “What’s a mudir dokan?”

And that’s when I realized something embarrassing. I was this many years old and had absolutely no idea what “mudi” actually meant. Or “tong” for that matter.

Dokan (দোকান) in Bangla is shop. That much I knew. But mudi? Tong? Total blank.

And therein began my descent into the warren.

The Mudi Detour

Turns out mudi (মুদি) in Bengali means grocer or steward. So mudir dokan is literally a grocer’s shop, a grocery. Unlike English, where “grocery” defines what the grocer sells, in Bangla, the grocer apparently defines the place. Fair enough.

But where does mudi come from?

This is where I made a spectacular wrong turn.

I stumbled onto the Arabic word Mudi (مدير or Mudir), which means “director,” “manager,” or “administrator.” For a glorious moment, I drew parallels between mudi (steward) and manager, and then, because I’m apparently incapable of just looking things up properly, I wondered if there was some connection to mu’addib, the word for educator in Arabic.

And because I’m a Dune fan, I then spent several pleasurable hours wandering through the arcane byways of Frank Herbert’s Arabic-inspired terminology, convinced I was onto something profound about Fremen linguistics and Bengali grocers.

Eventually, sanity prevailed.

Back to the Main Tunnel

Actual research (as opposed to sci-fi fantasy etymology) revealed that the Bengali word Mudi is a direct borrowing from Hindi and Marathi Modi (मोदी). Which historically meant a steward, bursar, or keeper of supplies.

But it goes deeper.

During the Mughal and Maratha eras, the official in charge of grain supplies and rations for royal households or armies was called the Modi. The storeroom where provisions were kept? The Modikhana: Modi plus Khana, the Persian word for house or room.

Over time, as these supply keepers set up public shops to sell grain and spices to regular folk, the title Modi (or Mudi in Bengal) just became the word for “grocer.”

Down Another Level

But wait, there’s more.

Linguists trace the ultimate origin of Modi to a specific trading community in Western India, Gujarat, to be precise, The Modh Banias, a mercantile community named after the ancient town of Modhera (famous for its Sun Temple).

Because people from this community were so prominent in the grain, oil, and grocery trade, their community name became synonymous with the profession itself.

So the word traveled: Town (Modhera) → Community (Modh Banias) → Profession (Modi/Steward) → Bengali word for grocer (Mudi).

A 500-year journey from a Gujarati town to the street corner near my house in Dhaka.

The Tong Side Quest

Having navigated one linguistic labyrinth, I naturally decided to explore the other fork: What about tong?

This is where things get murkier. There’s not much to go on.

Tong (টং) isn’t formal Bengali. It’s colloquial slang. And in various regional dialects, Chakma, languages from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a tong or tong ghor refers to a raised platform, watchtower, or house built on stilts. A macha (মাচা), basically.

The connection? Many roadside stalls in Dhaka and other cities were historically built as makeshift structures raised slightly above the ground, often perched over open drains or uneven footpaths using bamboo poles or bricks. Because the shop sits on this raised platform, it became known as a tong. I think.

From architectural feature to street slang for “that place where you get tea and cigarettes at 2 AM.”

The Exit That Isn’t

So here I am, hours later, with etymological knowledge about grocers and raised platforms that I will almost certainly never need again, having traversed linguistic crevices connecting Gujarat to Dhaka via Mughal grain storage facilities and bamboo scaffolding.

Any linguists out there want to help extricate me from this maze of tangential caverns and arcane side-tunnels? Or should I just accept that this is my life now, forever wandering the labyrinthine passages of South Asian mercantile etymology?

Next time my wife asks me a simple question, I’m just going to say “Google it.”

Dr. Zunaid Kazi is an AI visionary and entrepreneur who has spent over 30 years turning complex ideas into intelligent systems.