In the book I'm reading right now - my third novel by Rohinton Mistry in the last few months - there's an interesting intermingling of English and, presumably, Hindi, as the books all take place in India. The word they use for goon, in the sense of "an enforcer, a thug, sent to deter troublemakers", is goonda. I looked up goon in my dictionary and it more or less waffled, gave some excuse about some radio show (name escapes me at the moment), but didn't seem very certain. Is the similarity in the sound of the word, with the same definition, just coincidence, or did one come from the other? And if they are related, who stole the word from whom? Anyone with an OED or some working knowledge of India, please help me...it's been bugging me since I looked it up in the dictionary last night and got this silly excuse for an etymology.

And when did the word first come into use? This book is set in the mid-1970s.