Manas Ray
Old Bengali dictionaries give the meaning of adda as the meeting place of the mischievous – wasting time in idle frolic and meaningless chats. As a cultural phenomenon, adda has, however, grown in prestige and popularity from the early twentieth century, attributing a distinct texture to Bengali modernity. Venerable cultural critics like Buddhadev Bose and Gopal Haldar maintain that, notwithstanding some ambiguity about the origin of the word, as a cultural practice, adda blossomed in Bengal. As a matter of fact, there seems to be unanimity among commentators that nothing expresses the ‘soul’ of modern Bengali culture better than adda. The way the history of adda links with the emergence of Bengali literary modernity, the cultivation of a distinct cultural and political self and the formation of a reading public with its attendant spaces of the coffee house, bookshops, movies, plays and magazines is not to be found in otherwise similar patterns of socialization in the rest of India.
Like any other evolving cultural practice, adda defies neat definition. Broadly speaking, addas are spontaneous, free-flowing talk-shops of a group of mostly men (never less than three and rarely more than ten) where all topics under the sun, no matter how serious or trivial, global or local, public or private, are welcome. No digression causes any disruption in such discussions, which are often spiced with good-humoured banter and leg-pulling. Narration of events (invented or true) are quite often exaggerated. Backbiting and a tinge of mischievous – even malicious – criticism of those not present give adda its special flavour. Its gradual democratization, as part of the rise of the urban middle class and an emerging nationalist modernity towards the beginning of the last century, has endowed the environment of adda with a sense of assumed equality. This was also the time when the venue of addas started shifting from the drawing rooms of the rich to tea shops, cafes and, what in Bengali is called, rawk – an outdoor verandah or raised slab of a house, mostly adjacent to the road. Showing off or name dropping kills adda, and habitual do-gooders are better kept outside the ambit of adda.
While discussions must never touch vulgarity, adda is not responsible for guiding the world or achieving any practical purpose. Here lies its essential difference from the Habermasian public sphere which, as a matter of fact, is neither private not public – it is not private because members are not supposed to talk about their personal problems and it is not actually public, for only a select few have access to it. Ideally, these are spaces of normative freedom for making principled arguments based on rational, critical discourse. In contrast, there is no obligation for addas to be politically correct or didactic or to offer practical solutions. Though issues (especially political but at times even aesthetic) may invite fervent discussion, addas are far less about knowledge transacted and much more about presentation and performance. They are a mode of living in the world, giving meaning to it and thus making it habitable. What matters is a sense of intimacy and informality. This is in sharp contrast to Western club gatherings, which are formal affairs with specific codes of dress and conduct and which require a monthly or annual subscription. Each adda has its own sense of relevance and propriety as well as its own repertoire of private jokes and references – in short, its own poetics. While topics can quickly change and the tone varies from very serious to utterly frivolous, all must gel during these chats. Hence, addas are a form of life – an accepted and recurrent cultural practice with their own style of language, specific patterns of behaviour and an embedded history.
From early in the last century, poets and writers have had their own addas, as have journalists, all of which has had a ricocheting effect on the addas of student hostels in the city. From the 1930s onwards, addas in drinking places have become a regular feature. More well known of these is the heady, dimly lit joint at Khalashitola in the port area of the city. Such places (including inner-city pubs and the coffee houses) with all the fervent literary and political discussions give Calcutta its reputation as a city of caffeine, alcohol, brawls and floating tar.
If adda has genealogical links with chandimandap – the age-old homosocial culture of gossip at the courtyard of the temple of goddess Chandi by the upper-caste village elderly – it also carries elements of majlish – gatherings in the drawing room of the affluent in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Between these two ends, that is, rustic vulgarity and show of pomp and erudition, adda as a cultural practice paved its way into the twentieth century as part of the trajectory of Bengali cultural modernity. In the course of this contingent journey, it has also become hegemonized by the Bengali middle class. The highbrow literary adda of the first half of the last century was replaced in the post-partition era by a group of angry young writers, whose ‘addresslessness’ was their much-vaunted identity. This was also a booming time for government jobs and there was a consequent rise of the salaried class as well as the coming into being of a kind of cinema, music, literature and the phenomenal growth of little magazine culture that catered to the middle class’ tastes. All of these served the right dispositif for the popularization of adda, which became the principle vehicle for world-making in a vastly transformed urban scenario. With the spread of university education, women’s participation remained less remote.
Recent decades have witnessed a decline in the culture of adda, as erstwhile residential houses have given way to multi-storeyed apartment blocks, street corner teashops are being taken over by chains of cafeterias, the educated youth has begun to out-migrate and evenings are monopolized by different televisual fares and social media playing the role of what might be called electronic chandimandap. Thanks, mainly to the television channels, adda is now an important item in the ongoing retro celebration of Bengali culture, much of which looks out of place, even fossilized. Here, the anchor takes the role of an adda jockey as prominent personalities ‘engage’ in an adda that is solely meant for consumption.
References
Bose, Pradip. ‘Adda, Parocharcha, Gultani’. In Bangali Jiboner Tattatalash. Delhi: Parampara Publication, 2016.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity’. In Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Santosh Desai
The idea that life is a ceaseless state of negotiation between one’s desires and one’s circumstances and that some room can be contrived through inventive forms of compromise is what animates the idea of ‘adjust’. Encountered, most graphically, when travelling by public transport, being asked to adjust is, in effect, a way of squeezing in twice the number of people in any defined space. The entreaty to adjust a little is met with a look of resigned acceptance and some shuffling takes place – the new entrant gets a small perch which is, over the course of journey, gradually expanded till all the passengers have an equal if constricted amount of space.
The underlying logic of the idea of adjust is that if everyone settled for a less-than-ideal solution, then perhaps the desires of an incremental few could be accommodated. Desire for a little more is not considered illegitimate, nor is its complete fulfilment considered essential. Located firmly in the group of people that call themselves the ‘middle class’, making adjustment is seen as a way to contrive aggregate satisfaction at the cost of the individual. It highlights the belief that compromise is inevitable and, in fact, desirable for life to proceed at a permanently imperfect level. Adjustment allows things to move forward with relative ease – something that the quest for perfect solutions does not allow.
Implicit in the idea of adjust is the idea of a commons that precedes the claim the individual has over any product or service, particularly one which is present in a public space. In this sense, the notion of ownership eludes definitiveness; in practical terms, it becomes the right to first use, rather than an absolute entitlement. Newspapers carried in a bus or a train can be picked up by one’s neighbour without a need felt to seek permission, and the notion of ‘reserving’ a berth is seen more as a convention than a rule. The ability to extract value out of suboptimal and partial answers is visible in many ways. Matric-fail is deemed a qualification, as is chauthi-pass (one who has passed the fourth grade). Reservations in trains carry an intermediate classification – that of RAC (Reservation Against Cancellation) which assures one of a seat and keeps hopes of getting one’s berth alive. The ‘missed call’ made from overseas communicates the safe passage of a loved one without incurring any cost.
Over the years, ‘kindly adjust’ has become an established Indianism and finds mention in popular culture particularly in television parody shows and advertising. As a mark of Indianness, it represents both scarcity and a reluctant form of generosity that allows the collective to accommodate the needs of the (n + 1)th person and contrive a degree of satisfaction out of constraints. It has its critics too – people who argue that this trait of suboptimal accommodation becomes a disincentive in the pursuit of perfection. The idea of order, which rests on the ability to separate categories and drawing lines between things, gets compromised when one is open to ‘adjusting’ one’s needs.
References
Kundani, Lalit. ‘Kindly Adjust: The Spaces Of India’. Huffington Post, 13 December 2014. Available at: www.huffingtonpost.in/lalit-kundani/kindly-adjust-the-spaces-_b_6273698.html.
Singh, Amita Tyagi and Patricia Uberoi . ‘Learning to “adjust”: Conjugal Relations in Indian Popular Fiction’. Bulletin (Centre for Women’s Development Studies) 1, no. 1 (1994): 93–120.
Aditi Mukherjee
The Sanskrit word Akshara literally means ‘imperishable’, ‘indestructible’ or ‘fixed’. It is derived from the root kshara, meaning ‘perish’ or ‘melt away’, and the prefix a- which indicates ‘not’. Sanskrit phrase, na ksharati iti akshara would translate as ‘something/someone that does not perish’. The word is used to refer to the Supreme Being. It is also one of the thousand names of Lord Vishnu – one whose greatness never diminishes over time. In the Sanskrit/Indian writing system, Akshara refers to a character that represents a syllable, a minimal unit of sound, that cannot be further atomized. Also, it could perhaps be related in some way to the literal meaning of the word – imperishable – in the sense that the written symbol, which is the visual representation of speech, is relatively more permanent than an oral utterance.
In the Devanagari script and its derivatives in different Indian languages, vowels (long or short) and consonants, are represented by distinct characters. The vowels, by definition, form the nucleus of a syllable and, therefore, represent the syllable. Each vowel has two forms – one, when it occurs independently and, the other, known as matra, when it is attached to a consonant. On the other hand, each character for a consonant includes a default short vowel to form a syllable. In Hindi and many other Indian languages, this vowel is schwa. In Bengali (Bangla), Assamese and Odia, it is ‘o’ pronounced as in the English word – call. In some Dravidian languages, like Telugu and Kannada, the presence of the default vowel is indicated by a mark on the top of the character. The word for this mark, in Telugu, is called talakattu – literally meaning ‘a mark on the head’. To indicate the absence of the inherent vowel in Sanskrit, a mark known as halant is added to the bottom of the consonant character; the halant is still in use when writing Sanskrit. However, due to certain historical processes of sound change, many Indo-Āryan languages have lost the final vowel syllable. For example, the Sanskrit words veda ‘Veda’ and samataa ‘equality’ are pronounced as ‘ved’ and ‘samtaa’ in Hindi. The default vowel after ‘d’ and ‘m’, in the two words, respectively, is absent and, in the written form, the halant, which should have been used is, likewise, absent. The use of the halant sign is becoming increasingly rare in most languages of Indo-Āryan origin. However, the Dravidian scripts like Telugu and Kannada behave differently; they not only indicate the presence of a vowel including the default vowel but also maintain the tradition of signalling its absence with a sign (equivalent to the halant) that replaces the ‘presence’ sign on top of the character.
When two consonants come together, without a vowel between them, they form a consonant cluster. For example, ‘pr’ in the English word ‘pride’ is a cluster. Indian scripts have different ways of representing consonant clusters. These are known as yukta akshara (yukta ‘combined/joined’ + akshara). Some of them have merged into distinct characters. Thus, there are specific yukta aksharas for clusters such as ‘tra’, ‘kta’, ‘ksha’, etc. The yukta aksharas usually have complex shapes and new learners find them difficult to acquire.
There are two interesting derivatives of the word akshara – saakshara ‘literate’ and nirakshara ‘illiterate’. These two terms have acquired a social value now. They are used in connection with ‘education’. A saakshara person is deemed to be educated and thus socially empowered as opposed to the nirakshara person who is perceived as ignorant and, thus, backward.
Rama Kant Agnihotri
The origins of baat-cheet (feminine noun) may be from the Sanskrit words vaartaa meaning ‘speech, story, dialogue’ – leading to baat – and chintan ‘to think/reflection’ leading to chiit, but etymological enquiry is hardly ever foolproof. For us, in contemporary India, the Sanskrit vaartaa and chintan are two distinct words, while the Hindi baat-cheet is just a single word. Even if the words are related, it remains difficult to trace the exact trajectory of the journey. Even though baat does exist on its own, there is no word like ‘chiit’ in Hindi. In fact, there must be very few words in the Hindi language that would match the frequency with which baat-cheet is used in North India; there may also be only a handful that cover a comparable semantic range.
Kumar and Kumar mention several, including kaanaaphuusi, phusphusaahat (focus of the talk ‘secrecy’) and vaartaalaap. Other words like samvaad (serious conversation/dialogue), khickhic (annoying talk), charchaa, paricharchaa (discussion), bhentvaartaa (interview) and paraamarsh, vichaarvimarsh (focus on advice) may have the meanings associated with baat-cheet; none of these words, however, quite have the semantic scope of baat-cheet. This polysemous word could mean anything from an ordinary conversation between two or more friends to the most serious international negotiations of nuclear weapons (a summit MoU) between two countries.
Consider some everyday uses of the word in Hindi – ‘aaj hamein apne bete ki shaadi ki baat-cheet karne jaanaa hai’ (‘today we will go to talk about our son’s wedding), ‘un donon deshon ki baat-cheet kaa vishay duniyaa kii aarthiik stithi hai’ (‘the subject of discussion between those two countries is the economic condition of the world’). The conversational use of baat-cheet could include, say, matrimonial negotiations and also religious discourse; hence, the high frequency of its use is no surprise and its functional relevance is enormous. As noted above, the word also subsumes the meanings of words like dialogue, discussion, discourse, consultation, interview, conference, conversation, etc. There exists something of a parallel in Bangla, in the East, with the word kothaa batraa and in Malayalam, in the South, with vaartaamaanam; as a result, the pan-Indian flourish to the word baat-cheet is indubitable.
References
Kumar, Arvind and Kusum Kumar . Brihat Samanta rKosh. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2013.
Verma, Ramchandra, ed. Manakhindikosh. Allahabad: Hindi SahityaSammelan, Prayag 1990.
Karthika Sathyanathan and Rajesh Kumar
The word bhasha, in Hindi, means ‘language’. As per the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, our country is a land of over 780 languages and 66 different scripts. They are all spread over five different language families. According to the Government of India Census of 2011, there are about 122 languages (spoken by more than ten thousand people) and numerous minority languages; of the 122 major languages, 22 are scheduled languages (included in the ‘Eighth Schedule’ of the Constitution of India). The linguistic diversity of the country is well depicted in the aphorism kos-kos par badle paani, chaar kos par baani (‘The language spoken in India changes every few kilometres, just like the taste of the water’). The etymology of the word bhasha is in the Sanskrit word bhasha, which also translates to ‘language’ and, thus, cognates with multiple Indian languages such as Marathi, Nepali, Nevari, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.
Synonyms of bhasha in Hindi are jabaan, baat and boli. On hearing the word bhasha, the first thing that comes to the mind of a Hindi speaker is standard language(s). Jabaan literally means tongue and boli could mean spoken languages, dialects and slangs. The word boli derives from the verb bolna (meaning, to speak), as is evident from the example, ‘kya tum Bhojpuri bolti ho?’ (‘Do you speak Bhojpuri?’). Bhasha and boli are sometimes interchangeably used in spoken Hindi; one may ask ‘kya tumhari boli Bhojpuri hai?’ (‘Is your dialect Bhojpuri?’). However, in the written language, the terms are marked by clear distinctions. Bhasha stands as a symbol of formality and purity, while boli is used to imply colloquialism. Hence, it is seen appropriate to write ‘uski boli Bhojpuri hai’ (‘His/her dialect is Bhojpuri’) as opposed to ‘unki bhasha Bhojpuri hai’ (‘His/her language is Bhojpuri’). It also becomes evident with word collocations such as maatri-bhasha ‘mother tongue’ and rashtra-bhasha ‘national language’, wherein the term boli cannot replace bhasha. When the term bhasha becomes a part of the words rashtra and maatri, the compound word stands as a marker of identity and nationality. Quite often, Hindi speakers distinguish bhasha from boli in its association to a written script, antiquity and number of speakers. Bengali (Bangla) has a script and is, hence, considered a language, while Maithili, in lacking a script of its own and possessing lesser number of speakers, is seen as a spoken language/dialect of Hindi. Many people believe that Sanskrit, being one of the oldest languages of the country, is the mother of all Indian languages. Such distinctions are people’s perceptions built around languages; these constructed notions are proved wrong by linguists. Language and dialects, therefore, are attached to dichotomies such as the standard and the local, the pure and the impure, the formal and the informal.
Jabaan, on the other hand, is an Urdu word with the literal meaning ‘tongue’. The usage of tongue to imply language is prevalent in English language as well – an example is the compound word ‘mother tongue’. Slip of the tongue, for example, translates to jabaan fisalna. A few more examples are as follows – ‘apni jabaan par kaaboo rakho’ (‘hold your tongue’) and ‘jabaan sambhaal ke’ (‘mind your language’). The use of jabaan is predominant in areas dominated by Urdu-speaking communities. Another synonym of bhasha is baat, as used in the sentences ‘mujhe tumhari baat samajh me nahi aayi’ (‘I didn’t understand what you said’) and ‘mujhse baat mat karo’ (‘don’t talk to me’). In this context, baat refers to talk, speech or saying.
The term bhasha exposes quite a few sociolinguistic realities. The very fact that the term has travelled from Sanskrit to multiple Indian languages is indicative of the porousness and flexibility of languages. Languages do not have rigid boundaries. They borrow and mix with one another very easily, thereby proving that notions about purity of languages are constructed and do not exist in actuality. This leads one to the fact that there exist numerous misconceptions and myths surrounding language. It is quite ironical that the word bhasha, the supposedly standard and pure form of usage (to imply language or speech), brings to light the myths constructed around purity and standards of language.
References
Agnihotri, R. K. ‘Multilinguality, Education and Harmony’. International Journal of Multilingualism 11, no. 3 (2014): 364–379.
Singh, Shiv Sahay. ‘Language Survey Reveals Diversity’. The Hindu, 22 July 2013. Available at: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/language-survey-reveals-diversity/article4938865.ece (accessed 18 June 2018).
Om Prakash
Following Macaulay’s famous Minute on Education in 1835 and Charles Wood’s Education Dispatch in 1854, it was the Constituent Assembly of India, which discussed the issues of languages and policy in India extensively. The Constituent Assembly Debates continued over a period of almost three years from 1946 to 1949 and culminated with the enactment of the Constitution of India on 26 January 1950. Given the multilingual and pluricultural context of India, the Constituent Assembly Debates and consequent language policy framing drew a far-fetched impact on administration, education and functioning of constitutional bodies in Independent India.
The Constitution of India had a dedicated section in Part XVII on ‘Official Language’, consisting of Articles 343–351, dedicated to the matters of official languages of India and the states. The section is devised in four chapters: Chapter One addresses the issues of the official language of the Union and the Commission and Committee of Parliament on official language in Articles 343–344; Chapter Two addresses regional languages, covering the issue of official language or languages of the state, official language for communication between one state and another or between a state and the Union and special provision relating to language spoken by a section of the population of a state in Articles 345–347; Chapter Three addresses the issue of the language to be used in the Supreme Court and in the High Courts and for Acts, Bills, etc., and the special procedure for enactment of certain laws relating to language in Articles 348–349; and Chapter Four is concerned with the language to be used in representations for redress of grievances, facilities for instruction in mother tongue at the primary level, special officer for linguistic minorities and the directive for development of Hindi language in Articles 350–351.
The Constitution has twelve Schedules for detailing and specifying matters contained in the corresponding Articles. The Eighth Schedule mentions all the languages that have been recognized by the Constitution of India as official languages of the Union and the special provision relating to languages spoken by a section of the population of a state. In accordance with the Articles 344(1) and 351, twenty-two languages are included and listed as official languages of the Union in the Eighth Schedule. These languages include Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. These languages have appeared in alphabetical order, with various amendments and renumbering, and do not represent any hierarchy. Originally, the list contained fourteen languages, besides Hindi. In subsequent amendments – Seventh Amendment in 1956, Twenty-First Amendment in 1967, Seventy-First amendment in 1992 and Ninety-Second amendment in 2003 – eight more languages were added to the list: Sindhi in 1967; Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali in 1992; and Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali in 2003.
It was conceived that all the languages included in the list would qualify for representation on the Official Language Commission, and they would be the enriching sources for strengthening Hindi: ‘The President shall, at the expiration of five years from the commencement of this Constitution and thereafter at the expiration of ten years from such commencement, by order constitute a Commission which shall consist of a Chairman and such other members representing the different languages specified in the Eighth Schedule as the President may appoint, and the order shall define the procedure to be followed by the Commission’ (Article 344 (1), pp. 212–13).
The inclusion of languages in the Eighth Schedule mandates the Government of India to promote Hindi along with other languages included in the list as Official Languages. The Official Language Resolution 1968 states, ‘WHEREAS under article 343 of the Constitution, Hindi shall be the official language of the Union, and under article 351 thereof it is the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi Language and to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India.’ Thus, it is imperative for the Government of India to work towards promotion and development of the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule, as resolved in the Official Language Resolution of 1968: ‘WHEREAS the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution specifies 14 major languages of India besides Hindi, and it is necessary in the interest of the educational and cultural advancement of the country that concerted measures should be taken for the full development of these languages; … The House resolves that a programme shall be prepared and implemented by the Government of India, in collaboration with the State Governments for the coordinated development of all these languages, alongside Hindi so that they grow rapidly in richness and become effective means of communicating modern knowledge.’
The importance of the Eighth Schedule also gets underlined as it offers equal opportunity to the speakers of other languages listed in the Schedule as the 1968 Resolution mandates the same: ‘AND WHEREAS it is necessary to ensure that the just claims and interest of people belonging to different parts of the country in regard to the public services of the Union are fully safeguarded:
This House resolves –
a. that compulsory knowledge of either Hindi or English shall be required at the stage of selection of candidates for recruitment to the Union services or posts except in respect of any special services or posts for which a high standard of knowledge of English alone or Hindi alone, or both, as the case may be, is considered essential for the satisfactory performance of the duties of any such service or post; and
b. that all the languages included in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution and English shall be permitted as alternative media for the All India and higher Central Services examinations after ascertaining the views of the Union Public Service Commission on the future scheme of the examinations, the procedural aspects and the timing.’
This is the reason that has fuelled demands for inclusion of more languages to the Eighth Schedule and ‘at present, there are demands for inclusion of thirty-eight more languages in the “Eighth Schedule” to the Constitution’. These languages include Angika, Banjara, Bazika, Bhojpuri, Bhoti, Bhotia, Bundelkhandi, Chhattisgarhi, Dhatki, English, Garhwali (Pahari), Gondi, Gujjar/Gujjari, Ho, Kachachhi, Kamtapuri, Karbi, Khasi, Kodava (Coorg), Kok Barak, Kumaoni (Pahari), Kurak, Kurmali, Lepcha, Limbu, Mizo (Lushai), Magahi, Mundari, Nagpuri, Nicobarese, Pahari (Himachali), Pali, Rajasthani, Sambalpuri/Kosali, Shaurseni (Prakrit), Siraiki, Tenyidi and Tulu.
The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India reflects the statutory acknowledgement of Indian linguistic diversity and plurality. The growing demand for inclusion of more and more languages in the Schedule represents the aspirations of other languages that require institutional support and constitutional protection. This tendency is encouraging and required, to keep the multilingual fabric of India intact.
References
Department of Official Language, Government of India. ‘THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE RESOLUTION, 1968’. Available at: http://rajbhasha.nic.in/en/official-language-resolution-1968 (accessed 28 June 2018).
The Constitution of India. Available at: https://www.india.gov.in/my-government/constitution-india/constitution-india-full-text (accessed 28 June 2018).
About twenty years ago, Ken Hale of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), linguist and language activist, while expressing concern about language death, observed that when a language is lost, a culture is lost because the latter is encoded in the former. A knowledge repertoire is lost too. When Boa Sr – an Indian Great Andamanese elder, the last person fluent in the Aka-Bo language – died in 2010, the language Bo died with her as did the knowledge that came with the language; she could correctly anticipate a tsunami and knew precisely where she would be safe. The British linguist and language activist, David Crystal, has remarked that of about the six thousand languages in the world today, about a half of them will be extinct by the end of this century and just around six hundred languages would be ruling the world of language.
As part of some affirmative action in this regard, UNESCO has categorized languages in terms of their endangerment status: safe, at risk (shrinking domains of use), disappearing (speakers noticeably shifting to another language), moribund (not transmitted to children), nearly extinct (very few elderly speakers alive) and extinct (one or no speakers alive). In the UNESCO list of the endangered languages, there are 197 languages of India. There is disagreement about a few of the entries on this list, but that does not reduce the gravitas of the matter.
Responding to this situation, in 2014, the Government of India instituted the Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages (SPPEL) of India. Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore, which monitors it, has collaborated with some of our universities for this project. Documentation of the languages or tongues spoken by less than ten thousand people is the main aim of this effort, since threat perception is more crucial for these languages. Documentation of these languages cannot simply be restricted to the preparation of their grammars and sample lexicons. The tales, songs, proverbs, wise sayings, naming systems and beliefs, among others, of the concerned speech communities, their knowledge of their environment and the way they negotiate with it must also be carefully documented by properly trained and sensitive persons.
In multilingual environments, because of various pressures and, sometimes, governmental policies, people shift to other languages and a stage comes when the language comes under the threat of extinction. Let not a language die when its last speaker dies; with proper documentation, the language can have, at the very least, an archival life.
References
Pandharipande, Rajeshwari. ‘Minority Matters: Issues in Minority Languages in India’. International Journal on Multicultural Societies 4, no. 2 (2002): 213–234.
Sengupta, Papia. ‘Endangered Languages: Some Concerns’. Economic and Political Weekly 44, no. 32 (2009): 17–19.
K. Narayana Chandran
The first learners of English were the two hundred-odd Indian employees of the East India Company (EIC), on the eve of the Battle of Plassey (1756). They probably spoke a ‘pidgin’, which was effectively the lingua franca of the local traders and suppliers of victuals for the Company officials. The Indian record keepers of the Company were dubashis who widened its trade network in India. They were fluent in multiple bhashas (languages) and in English as well. By 1660, the Company’s trade posts and factories, besides the Christian mission schools, made for the wider use of English among the Indians. In 1792, Charles Grant proposed to the Court of Directors of the EIC that the Indians will benefit from English education. The language, he hoped, would instil noble Christian values among the superstitious, though intelligent, Hindus who might even begin to appreciate the munificence of their trading partners. It is not surprising that Ram Mohan Roy’s letter to Lord Amherst, demanding modern English education and the institution of a General Committee of Public Instruction, coincided in 1823. The Indians were demanding English and the British were all too willing to oblige them.
It was, however, T. B. Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’ (1835) that proposed and institutionally heralded English education in India. While Macaulay had the whole-hearted support of Anglicist British administrators and scholars, he was opposed by the Orientalists and the Vernacularists who pleaded for the promotion of an education in Indian classical and local languages, respectively. The first Indian universities were located in the three presidencies – Madras, Calcutta and Bombay – in 1857. English has, since then, remained the sole medium of modern education throughout India. The passing of the Official Languages Act of 1967 by the parliament settled, once and for all, the case for English and its inevitable presence in India as the first language of civil administration and higher education. English continues to be the ‘associate official language’ besides Hindi, the official language of the Indian Union.
As English became more entrenched in India, it began to establish a small but influential tradition for itself. Its growth among and coexistence with at least two other bhashas in nearly all linguistic regions, besides Hindi, in most Indian cities, have contributed meaningfully to a triadic multilingualism among the professional middle classes. Despite its non-Indian provenance, English graduated into a ‘second language’ for many Indians who completed their university education and joined the ranks of civil and military administration. In the 1960s and 1970s, the spread of English was phenomenal, despite some political opposition to its manifest power and the values it was alleged to espouse. If it was not quite the mother tongue for the upper and upper-middle classes, it was allegedly the ‘other tongue’. In the absence of the native tongue, English was perhaps, for the elite young of India, their ‘auntie tongue’. Even today, we occasionally hear the rumblings of this old debate when political leaders and intellectuals see English as both enslaving and dominating our minds on the one hand and their opponents seeing the great opportunities India has had among the new globalizing economies on account of its demographic dividend strongly fostered by its command of English. The influential public and electronic media call the political bluff of angrezi hatao (‘English out!’) campaigns of the bhasha fanatics, who, ironically, send their wards to the elite English-medium schools in the country.
Even the Indian nativists concede the easy adaptability of English, one that they find both charming and irresistible, while mixing or switching codes in their respective languages. Salman Rushdie’s chutnification comes closest in characterizing this linguistic mix and adaptation of English by creative users in India. The word, of course, captures the ease, instantaneity and pep that the regionally varied chutneys have for those Indians who cannot do without them.
In an awkwardly curious way, English has become increasingly aspirational and covetable for the youth of economic-liberalized India while it continues to retain its colonialist aura of privileged distance and exclusivity. In other words, English shares the basic characteristic of the club (pride in the privileges it bestows on its highly selective membership) which the colonial administration brought to India. It is, still, not quite readily accessible to larger sections of the economically and socially disadvantaged Indians. Put differently, English has some strange way of distancing Indians from themselves and making way for unfair discrimination and stigmatization, for engineering and sustaining democratically untenable schisms between and among workers, institutions and communities. More perniciously, all these divisions and differences are hard to trace directly to a language or a culture – a source called English – an authority that seems to emanate from some unknown centre outside India; a supervening power to which none of the privileged classes in India are able to meaningfully respond, let alone offer self-determined resistance. In absenting itself from the immediate scene of political action, English has succeeded, nonetheless, in promising to the new India a modernity other societies are unlikely to acquire without it or in offering multiple projects and prospects under its aegis that are bound to remain unfinished. The crucial question English raises, now, is whether the Indian elite wants the modernity that still remains unfinished even in their own understanding of it. Certainly, this grim vindication of the Gandhian scenario of ‘English rule without the English’ calls for debate every time someone calls English one of our bhashas.
References
Kachru, Braj B. The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-Native Englishes. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Ramanathan, Vaidehi. The English-Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language, Politics and Practice. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2005.
Shiv Visvanathan
In a Gutenburg Galaxy, a file is a cosmos that determines your existence. When you begin life, a file is opened on you, that means you demand and require attention. A file exists because citizenship is an act of the continuous processing of information. Your life ends when your file is closed. You disappear when your file disappears. Your embodied existence does not matter, your presence lies in the file so that in Decartian sense, you are when your file exists. When your file goes missing, you enter a world of Kafka and Alice rolled in one. The lethal power of the file to make or unmake a people as an act of governance needs to be understood. Right to Information (RTI) activists have shown that government departments have declared many villages as dead. As a result of being non-persons, they lack claim to retirement benefits, the right to apply to a loan. Resurrecting a file is an act more miraculous than reincarnation. A file is cartography of identity and entitlements. It defines the very ontology of being, stating when you were born, when you died and both need the gravitas of a certificate. A file archives the rites of passage in a modern world. A certificate is a statement of the veracity of existence, a verification of a claim to entitlements. The survivors of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy were often denied entitlements because they lacked existence in a file. An unrecorded suffering is meaningless as an untold story. A file legitimates you as in being. Without a file, modernity as non-being begins.
A file captures the universe of power of a bureaucratic thought. A file conveys a sense of the sacred. Filing and defiling citizenship are real acts of governance. When a file is opened, it is the inauguration of a creation; when a file is closed, it is a closure of a textual kind. A file as archive captures memory. I remember an anecdote related to me with a grin by one of India’s finest scientists. He had met P. N. Dhar, director of the Institute of Economic Growth. Dhar had told him that the two doyens of social science – V. K. R. V. Rao and M. N. Srinivas – were squabbling over a petty decision. Dhar had patiently listened to Rao complain about Srinivas and quickly forgot it. One day Rao came and demanded an old letter of complaint. Dhar was in a panic as he had forgotten all about Rao’s complaint, and he appealed to his assistant, who assured him that that was not a problem at all. He brought out a file labelled ‘Fight: M. N. Srinivas vs V. K. R. V. Rao’.
A file captures the ethnography of decision making in bureaucracy. When you enquire anxiously about your application, the clerk assures you indifferently, File abhi tak pass nai hua. (‘Your file has not been passed as yet.’) It implies you belong to the liminal world of in between, where waiting as time can extend from a day to a lifetime. It captures the sheer helpless of citizenship and invents a new space for corruption. A bribe is an incentive to open, close or speed up a file. A bribe provides the alchemy of the file, turning it from an indifferent space to a miracle of concern. Rules define the mechanical universe of a file. Bribes define the alchemical world of a file. A file and the permutations of a file define the infinite possibilities of corruption. A file is inert, till a bribe declares it alive. The elasticity of a file to move from delay to miraculous speed is one of the great events of modern governance. Corruption is a rule game that increases the infinite possibilities of a file. A cynical observer with an acute sense of power said, ‘It is a pity that Marx talked of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He had no sense of the clerk as a Leviathan of the archive, of the dictatorship of the Filariat; for that you needed Weber and Kafka.’ Modern sociology or management theory has still not captured the world of a file. A file is geography of an imagination, it encodes the everyday and provides a chronography of time and is the ultimate act of violence. All genocide or displacement demands is that a clerk closes the file on you.
References
Patel, Sheela and Carrie Baptist . ‘Documenting by the Undocumented’. Sage Journals 24, no. 1 (2012): 3–12.
Subbaraman, Ramnath, et al. ‘Off the Map: The Health and Social Implications of Being a Non-Notified Slum in India’. Environment and Urbanization 24, no. 2 (2012): 643–663.
Firangi/Angrez (phiraṄgī/aṄgrēZ)
Gilian Wright
These two words are used as an adjective, meaning ‘Western’ or ‘British’, or as a noun, meaning ‘Westerner’ or any ‘white person’, sometimes disparagingly or with hostility. The word firangi, often spelt firinghee, is derived from the word ‘Frank’, referring to Germanic peoples who established their rule in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire and from whom France takes its name. In Arabic, the Franks were known as al-faranj or firanji and the Persian term was firingi/firangi or firing/firang. Persian was, in earlier days, a widely used Indian language and it may be from Persian the term became common across India. In Hindi/Urdu, as well as many other Indian languages, firangi now means a Westerner or Western and particularly those of the colonial period. In Tamil, the term parangi was originally used specifically for Portuguese. The scholar Jonathan Gil Harris has demonstrated that before the British raj, firangi was also used for Christian migrants from non-European countries – Christian slaves from Africa, as well as for Jewish migrants, aside from Muslims who had once served Christian masters. The word angrez is derived from the Portuguese ingles meaning English, and angrezi is therefore the English language. Like firangi, angrez can be used for Westerners generally. In the context of India’s experience of colonialism, it too can be used negatively.
Both terms imply foreignness. For example, a Hindu ascetic objected to the American-born Baba Rampuri from becoming a naga sadhu by saying, ‘Many of our lineages have been filled up with non-Brahmin castes, but there are no … angrez! They will say … that you are a bad omen.’ The Bengali author, Sunil Gangopadhyay, in his historical novel Those Days, plumps for firinghee over angrez to describe the British, for example, ‘The firinghee is our common enemy and must be driven out.’ Modern writers also use the term to describe the European soldiers in Indian armies, for example, those employed by Shah Jahan or Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Punjab, and the term is also used for Europeans who came to India, adopted Indian customs and settled here. The historic European presence is remembered in place names like Chittagong’s Firinghee Bazaar, Kolkata’s Firinghee Kali Bari (temple) and Firangi Mahal, the Lucknow centre of Islamic learning, at first housed in a building formerly owned by a European. It has also been argued that paintings of the ‘Company School’, commissioned by Frenchmen in India with no links to the East India Company, should be called ‘firinghee Paintings’.
In modern times, author and conservationist, Mark Shand, describing his experience of riding across India mounted on the elephant Tara, recalled people straining to get a glimpse of ‘the firinghee mahout’. The naturalist M. Krishnan noted in his article ‘The Genus Feringhee’ that the Tamil version of the word, parangi, also means a pumpkin and a disease that Westerners brought with them to India. However, it is not used for an Indian who apes the West – for which the Tamil term is dorai – but rather Europeans of the past, for example, the one depicted being devoured by Tipu Sultan’s famous clockwork tiger. For Krishnan, the firangi, as a rule, completely missed the culture of the country and led insular lives; but this was not true of all. ‘But for the Feringhee’, he writes, ‘there would have been no rich lore of natural history in India’. He concludes, ‘I am quite willing to confess that my life has been profoundly influenced by Feringhee values – you may, probably, deny this influence in your own, though I am writing this in the language of the feringhee and you are reading it!’
References
Crooke, William, ed. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1979.
Harris, Jonathan Gil. ‘India, The Firangi Mahal’. Outlook, 2 February 2015. Available at: https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/india-the-firangi-mahal/293191 (accessed 26 May 2018).
Praveen Singh
The Hindi word gaalii – may be translated as ‘profanity’, ‘swear word’, ‘cuss word’ or ‘slang’, among others. It is the kind of language used to offend or revile someone when you want to hurt them because you are angry or want to be disrespectful. However, it would be wrong to suggest that only the strong words/phrases used in this manner are understood by the term gaalii. It may be that two people use expressions that would otherwise be offensive to an outsider but form a way of bonding the two and serve as a mark of informality between them. Gaaliis may also be used to draw someone’s attention to a point being mentioned or to convey one’s disapproval of someone or something. In other words, they perform many more functions in speech other than merely serving to offend others.
Gaaliis can be measured for their impact on people, if one wished to do so – people of a given community, speaking a particular dialect, will be expected to agree on the extremity of the ‘swear word’ used which would involve finding out what and how something was said. A word such as chuutiyaa, in Hindi, has come to mean ‘stupid/dumb’ (even though it literally means ‘having been born of a vagina’) and is considered less offensive than the extremely vulgar bhos(a)Ri-ke (meaning ‘born of a loose vagina’). Even a phrase like ullu ke paTThe (meaning ‘son of an owl’) evokes less extreme emotions amongst people. Some other more common abuses are haraamii (‘of illegitimate birth’), namak-haraam (‘treacherous’), bak-chod (‘stupid blabberer’), behen-chod (literally ‘sister fucker’), beTii-chod (literally ‘daughter fucker’), bhaRwaa (‘pimp’), maadar-chod (literally ‘mother fucker’), suar kii aulaad (‘son of a pig’) and so on.
There is no doubt that there exists a general tendency among people to avoid being rude or impolite, so much so that we tend to use euphemisms such as swarg sidhaarnaa (literally ‘go to heaven’) or parlok siddhaarnaa (literally ‘go to the other world’) instead of the more common expression mar gaye (‘to die’); but, there can be contexts in which a person may choose to use a taboo word to express a fact if only to emphasize the point. So, in a context where a widow (vidhvaa) or a widower (vidur) is getting married for the second time and if someone wishes to reveal their disapproval, the person may use taboo words such as raanD and ranDu(v)aa to emphasize the inadmissible social status of the widow and widower, respectively.
Nevertheless, gaaliis are so much a part of our everyday existence that it is really difficult for one to get away without hearing it in the streets and, in fact, very few can claim to have never used them. Psychologist Timothy Jay found that ‘on average 0.7 per cent of the words people use in a day are taboo ones’, notes Melissa Mohr (2013). They also impact us differently psychologically and physiologically. For instance, Mohr mentions that research has shown that it is easier to remember swear words compared to other new words that are learnt and also that they help increase one's ability to ‘deal with physical pain’. They may be used to humour oneself or others too. Songs and verses based on taboo words can be heard on occasions of marriages and other events where they are intended to offer richness to the whole event. Of course, sometimes they are also sung to register protest of some kind but only in a symbolic manner. For instance, the songs sung by the bride’s side on the event of her send-off from her parents’ house after the wedding ceremony is over.
Gaaliis in languages can be based on any number of things. People may use the region, religion, class, caste, race/ethnicity, sex, birth, occupation, physical appearance, resemblance to another animal, kinship, colour of skin, behavioural traits, skill levels, efficiency, etc. of a person to revile him/her. Just to give a few examples: nauaa (‘barbar’), chamaar (‘member of an Indian caste whose caste-occupation is leatherworking’), kaafir (‘infidel’), moTaa (‘fat’), sikRaa (‘very thin’), kaaliye/kaale-kaluuTe (‘of black colour’) and so on. Almost anything can form the basis for a gaalii. Even an individual’s or a group’s ideological and/or religious leanings can be used as a word to abuse them or their whole group.
Several extremely offensive gaaliis are based around the female/male sexual organs or around notions of incest. Even among those, it is common for people to use taboo words that mostly involve females and incest, such as maadar-chod, behen-chod, beTii-chod and so on. One can learn about the history and cultural practices of a community through these swear words for they, like any other word of the community’s language, carry a thread of history in them and it is possible for etymologists to find out more about societies/communities and their practices (Hughes, 2006). Different societies have, at different times, adopted some or the other approaches to cope with what they believed about swear words – some have curtailed the use of swear words through regulations while others have been just casual about them. No matter what we think about them, gaaliis in Hindi have a texture which is hard to translate or describe, and perhaps the same may be said of the swear words of all the different languages of the world.
References
Hughes, Geoffrey I. An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. London: M. E. Sharpe, 2006.
Mohr, Melissa. Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Maidul Islam
Hello-ji is a form of greeting in North India. Generally, it is used in a casual manner for an informal greeting instead of the anglicized ‘hello’. However, on some occasions, it is used as an expression of surprise in order to attract someone’s attention. The cultural equivalents of hello-ji in India are many; while namaste or namaskar is a more traditional and formal greeting in Hindi, adaab serves the same purpose in Urdu. Similarly, in Assamese, nomoskar is used. In Bengali, nomoshkar is the cultural equivalent of a formal greeting, while pronam is often used as an informal greeting. In Odia, namaste or namaskar is also regarded as a general greeting. In Telugu, namaste is also known as dandamuor namaskaram for singular use and dandaalu or namaskaralu for the plural form. Unlike the Bengali pronam which is used primarily as an informal greeting, pranamamu is also used in formal Telugu. In Kannada, namaskara is used for the singular and namaskaragalu for the plural. In Malayalam, namaskaram is used. In Tamil, namaste is known as vanakkam which is derived from the root word vanangu meaning to bow or to greet. Namaste, in the Hindu custom, means, ‘I bow to the divine in you.’
Hello-ji is devoid of any religious cultural connotations unlike namaskar or its various regional forms in India. Similarly, it is also devoid of several religious cultural connotations other than the Hindu custom, like sat sri akaal (true is the name of God) used as a greeting by the Sikhs or Salaam meaning peace (the short form of Assalaamu’alaykum – may peace be upon you – or of the further extended form, Assalaamuʿalaykum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh – may the peace and mercy of Allah be with you) used by the Muslims or ‘grace and peace to you from God, the Father and the Lord, Jesus Christ!’ used by the Christians. In various parts of North India, the word ‘ji’ is used at the end of someone’s name to convey respect. In this regard, hello-ji is relatively more non-traditional than a simple hello, it is often used as a respectful greeting, although it sounds strangely synthetic.
The mildly autobiographical novel of author, commentator and corporate manager Gurcharan Das, A Fine Family (1990), has a reference to hello-ji as a form of greeting. In the novel, a character jokingly responds to ‘hello-ji’ by laughingly saying ‘what an odd thing to say. Either you say “hello” or you say “namaste ji”. You don’t mix them up.’ It is also referred to as a form of greeting by those desis (native Indians) who want to be anglicized. Hello-ji has, thus, been used in several Indian novels in English and has become a part of the postcolonial vocabulary of popular Indian fiction in English. Hello-ji is often expressed with the following three words: ki haalchaal or ki haal hai (meaning ‘how are you?’). A song named ‘Beautiful’ by, the popular Punjabi music composer and singer, Honey Singh, starts with ‘Hello-ji, ki haalchaal’.
References
Anand, Mulk Raj. ‘Pigeon Indian: Some Notes on Indian‐English Writing’. World Literature Written in English 21, no. 2 (1982): 325–336.
Das, Gurcharan. A Fine Family. Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1990.
Indian Writing in English (IWE)
G. J. V. Prasad
IWE (Indian Writing in English) is now the most accepted term/acronym for the work produced by Indians in the English language. It has taken a while to arrive at this nomenclature. This literature has been called by many names – Anglo-Indian literature, Indo-Anglian (even, for an awful, though short, time, Indo-Anglican) literature, Indo-English literature, Indian English literature (or, less frequently, Indian Literature in English) and Anglophone Indian literature. Anglo-Indian literature, now, denotes writings by the British who lived in India during the Raj.
The term Indo-Anglian literature was popularized by K. Srinivasa Iyengar and stood its ground for a long time; indeed, it is not uncommon to see it being used even now. However, this seemed to indicate a relationship between two nations, something Iyengar seemed to endorse when he said that the writer can be called an Indo-Anglian but not an Indo-Englishman, which would be unthinkable. Thus, Indo-Anglian writing would have its feet in both nations. Indo-English literature fell out of favour, to denote original IWE, soon after it was proposed; many, including Sujit Mukherjee and V. K. Gokak, preferred the term as a signifier of Indian literatures in English translation. It must be noted that Iyengar moved on to call this literature IWE (the name of his iconic book published in 1962). Indian English literature has had the strongest run so far, with the Indian Academy of Letters – Sahitya Academy’s – acceptance of the term and its use, in M. K. Naik’s ever popular History of Indian English Literature which was first published in 1982 and is still in print.
However, the emphasis, in this term, is on the language – Indian English – and thus, its fate is twinned with that of the existence and validation of such a language (this, perhaps, is the reason some prefer to call this Indian Literature in English). Indian English seems to be a language, often artistically created by writers themselves, with constructions and words from Indian languages, appearing to mimic Indian languages by seeming to be translations while actually being original constructions! Thus, Indian English literature seems to be one that plays with and constructs a language, and it should not surprise us that the best-known writers in Indian English live or lived outside India, starting from G. V. Desani.
Anglophone Indian literature bestows a global context and makes this literature a part of various literatures in English that have emerged from different parts of world, expectedly, due to colonialism or other contacts. However, this term is more inclusive than simply ‘postcolonial’ literature (since it also looks at contemporary forms of imperialism, the impact of globalization, etc.) as well as more exclusive (not including any indigenous language or, indeed, any other language of colonization). Thus, it seems to be an avatar of new literatures in English or commonwealth literature. IWE does not have any special advantage over Indian literature in English – both can be erroneously assumed to include works in translation and both have the same problem of definitions of boundaries in that they must decide who is an Indian writer, one of Indian origin writing anywhere or of Indian origin, writing from within the nation-state. It seems that IWE seems to lay emphasis on Indian writers writing from within the boundaries of India, but perhaps IWE scores as an acronym over IEL (Indian English Literature) or ILE (Indian Literature in English), in popular academic imagination, and is thus used more often.
References
Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. Mumbai: Asia Publishing House, 1962.
Naik, M. K. A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1982.
Lallan Baghel
Etymologically, the word jugaad has its origins in the Sanskrit word yukti and means making an effort to produce something new by bringing together something existing (samayojan in Hindi). In colloquial Hindi, the word jugaad has emerged from the word jugat which goes back to its Sanskrit origin yukti. Hence, in day-to-day language, it denotes jugat lagana or coming up with makeshift changes/solutions, pertaining to material as well as non-material processes.
There are two ways in which the term jugaad is used. The first, is when it is used for local technological innovations and the second usage is to denote the gain of personal favours through the bypassing of formal institutional norms and procedures in the public domain. In the first sense, jugaad came into popular usage to describe indigenous technological innovations to meet local needs at nominal costs, by creative individuals with not much formal training in the realms of science and technology. Jugaad is not as much about a new innovation as it is about the assembling of already existing technology, in order to make it more suitable to local needs while also being cost-effective. One example includes an indigenous vehicle developed, in the hinterlands of North as well as South India, by farmers by attaching a mechanical irrigation pump to a cart, to transport the produce to the market or to fetch fodder from the farm to their home. This jugaad item has multiple uses as it is used as a tractor also. Another example is the use of electrical mixer-grinder without using electricity – put on the backseat of a bicycle and connected by a pully, the jar of this Jugaad mixer-grinder churns perfect lassi and milk shakes for the workers of a local NGO in cities like Chandigarh. It is in the mechanical domain that most of the jugaad happens in small towns and villages of India. However, in cities like Bangalore, it is put to creative technological use by entrepreneurs who want to save money on research and development in order to reduce cost value of their product and to maximize their profits. Jugaad, here, applies to any kind of creative and out-of-the-box thinking or life knacks that maximize the resources for a company and its stakeholders. It is not that jugaad has not been recognized by the formal scientific community in India; some of the noted scientists, including Professor Yash Pal – a leading science communicator – have endorsed and recognized the value of jugaad for economically poor societies like India’s.
In its second sense, it is difficult to find an exact translation of the word jugaada. A very close translation could be ‘to fix matters through hook or crook’. In this sense, it is used to denote the bypassing of formally laid down institutional norms and procedures, by a person, in order to gain special favours from the system. It is important to note that in everyday life, it is an accepted norm in the political and bureaucratic culture of India. ‘Promotion/posting/naukri ke liye jugaad lagana’ (‘to use jugaad to get a promotion, a posting or a job’) is an acceptable norm which, on one hand, points towards the malleability of the system and, on the other, hints at the vulnerability of the masses who have to find a ‘connection’ in order to get things done. In a way, jugaad is an apt example of the working of Indian democracy where, despite formal equality, there lies a wide chasm when it comes to sharing the pie that the state has to offer. For a slum dweller, it might mean finding the right connections and some money to get an electricity connection. For a local businessman, it might mean being able to tweak the system to run a private university.
The word jugaad is also used to denote the formation of governments by political parties, in a way where they bypass the constitutional norms. Jugaad ki sarakāra (Government of Jugaad) has been much in use during the past few decades, in Hindi media, to denote the moral corruption of political parties when it comes to the formation of the government. Jugaad, here, means not having the required mandate and yet the formation of a government, by influencing the political office of a state governor or the president or indulging in horse trading or other such manoeuvring tactics to gain power.
Jugaad, as a word, ironically expresses the strength as well as weakness of Indian society and democracy. In its more positive sense, it points to the creative enterprise of Indian masses who innovate and use technology for their own empowerment, without ever bothering to claim the jugaad as their own. Jugaad, here, is innovation sans patents. In its negative connotation, jugaad points to the vulnerability of masses and craftiness of the society and system at the same time. In a deeper sense, jugaad points to where the Indian democracy falls short.
References
Jauregui, Beatrice. ‘Provisional Agency in India: Jugaad and Legitimation of Corruption’. American Ethnologist 41, no. 1 (2014): 76–91.
Prabhu, Jaideep and Sanjay Jain . ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship in India: Understanding Jugaad’. Asia Pacific Journal of Management 32, no. 4 (2015): 843–868.
Antony Arul Valan
This Tamil term is often translated to mean ‘chastity’ or ‘conjugal fidelity’. While the ancient texts Tirukkural 1 and Tolkappiyam (karpiyalcutrams) discuss karpu, the concept finds a strong advocate in the epic Silappadikaram by Ilanko Atigal, dating back to the time of the three Tamil kingdoms, a little after the Sangam Age. The second, of the three stated aims of the epic, is, in fact, to show how ‘great men everywhere commend [the] wife of renowned fame’.
Since ‘Indianness’ transcends today’s geopolitical boundaries, it would be pertinent to draw upon perspectives from another country in the subcontinent – Sri Lanka. Pertinent because the protagonist of Silappadikaram, Kannagi, is the guardian deity of the island and is worshipped, as Pattini, even today by Sinhala Buddhists and ethnic Tamils, as documented by Gananath Obeyesekere. Mala Kadar, of Ilankai Tamil Sangam, describes the evolution of the concept of karpu with the progression of Kannagi’s character arc in the epic: ‘urged on by a patriarchal, hegemonic principle, the concept of chastity (karpu) for Tamil women evolved as a form of learned self-denial of sexuality, tolerance, submissiveness and bashfulness that combined to form a benevolent power (sakthi).’ She reports the two etymological observations of the word karpu – the first is from Tolkapiyar (who composed the Tolkappiyam), who defines karpu as ‘the act of giving away the bride to the bridegroom’. This view finds support in Abraham Mariaselvam, who notes that according to the Tolkappiyam, karpu is ‘the life of wedlock’. However, as Kadar notes, ‘By the Sangam age, karpu exclusively referred to marital fidelity.’ The Tolkappiyam is the earliest extant work of Tamil literature, predating works of the Sangam Age. Moreover, this also corroborates with the second etymological observation that Kadar makes, offered to her by Dr Selvy Thiruchandran: ‘the word “karpu” has its origins in the word “kal” which means to learn.’ V. S. Rajam notes that karpu meant ‘acquiring profundity’ in the time of the Sangam Age and, in course of time, male learning (man’s karpu) was ‘separated from the overall semantic realm of learning (karpu)’ and ‘equated with acquiring traditional skills or education (kalvi), whereas “female profundity/learning” (woman’s karpu) was restricted to mean “chastity”’. So, while the word karpu is not gendered, the act of learning chastity seems to have become confined to women.
What does karpu mean to Tamils today? According to Jacob Pandian, the word ‘evokes a number of associations that include supernatural power, sacrifice, suffering, penance, virtue, morality, justice, ethics, austerity and ascetism’. George Hart argues that the contemporary pan-Indian chastity/spirituality complex had its origin in Tamil civilization. According to Periyar, Rajadurai, Geetha and Rawat note, chastity and prostitution were dialectically linked to each other – that is, ‘one cannot exist without the other’. The concept is also a frequent plot device in popular culture, more specifically movies and serials on the television – women kill themselves once they are raped, women are threatened with rape, women are blamed for what they wear, how they speak and walk if they are raped. Today, Karpu exists all around us as part of the popular imagination and is invoked to mark the ‘fallen’ woman. There are at least two ways in which news articles about rape refer to the act – they call it karpazhippu (literally, the destruction of chastity) or vanpunarvu (literally, forced coitus). While in progressive media and Tamil LGBT/queer circles, the latter is used to refer to rape, the former is widely used among the general public. It is to this expression of the concept, karpazhippu, that I refer when I say karpu is all around us.
Kadar poignantly notes that after her death, Kannagi is worshipped ‘in temples as a paragon of wifely loyalty [and] chastity’ today and, I would add, she is studied in schools today as a symbol of Tamil virtue, but ‘the idea of Kannaki as a vociferous, eloquent woman who argued for justice, who put forth evidence, was not to be entertained’. 2 Much, perhaps, like women in our country today, whose chastity is perceived to underpin the honour of their family – even when it is a small girl of 8 from a nomadic community in faraway Kashmir who had to be punished because the presence of her family and community was not desirable for some.
References
Kadar, Mala. ‘The Myth of Kannaki: The Concept of Chastity and Power’. Sangam.org, 13 October 2003. Available at: http://www.sangam.org/articles/view/?id=27 (last accessed 31 May 2018).
Rajadurai, S. V., V. Geetha and Vidya Bhushan Rawat . ‘Periyar and His Ideas’. CounterCurrents.org, 28 September 2016. Available at: https://countercurrents.org/2016/09/28/periyar-and-his-ideas/ (last accessed 31 May 2018).
Katha, Kahani, Qissa, Dastaan (Kathā, kahānī, kis’sā, dāstān)
Mahmood Farooqui
The Sanskrit word katha, the Arabic qissa and the Persian dastaan are all subsumed under the common Hindustani word kahani. All describe a story, a tale, a speech, discourse, a fable, recital narrative or even a recitation. South Asia is a land of stories where all stories flow and from where stories flow out. An Arabic qissa, like the One Thousand and One Nights, becomes a filmy kahani in the 1980 film Alibaba aur Chalees Chor. The dastaan, a long oral epic meant to be performed, takes on a different valence to become a part of the famous Hindi song, ‘ajeeb dastan hai ye, kahan shuroo kahan khatam’.
In one word, all of them mean a tale or a story, but in practice, their usages differ greatly. Katha, the oldest of them, is in simple words, a story. A katha is also a mythological tale, like a tale from the Puranas. So then, katha becomes more open-ended, more timeless and also acquires an element of sacrality. In this last sense, the Jataka about Buddha’s life is also a katha. To recite a katha is to provide its varnan (description); it is to present a scene, a vrittant. In Sanskrit theoretical and poetic usage, a katha is a distinct literary form and has its own offshoots such as katha prabandh (a composed story), katha prasang (a literary composition) and katha rup (the context). Katha sanyukt refers to the literary composition; katha vartta to speech, discourse, controversy, news, report and rumour; and, finally, kathopkathan referring to conversation, dialogue and narration.
The dastaan is the other end of the spectrum. It is derived from the Arabic and Persian long narrative tradition and refers to an exalted performance form, dastangoi. Dastans emerge from telling, often improvised, possibly never-ending narratives where adventures, love, war and romance are the dominant themes. In India, the dastaan took on a very distinctly Indic life when trickery or aiyyari and sorcery or tilism became more and more important and, with that, the dastans began to grow longer and longer until, when finally published at the end of the nineteenth century, the Indian Dastan-e Amir Hamza came up to a whopping forty-six volumes. That is over forty-six thousand pages of a single narrative cycle, consisting of high-quality Urdu poetry and prose, almost all of which was generated during oral performances and much of which was extemporaneously composed. The mastery of literary language thus required and the calibre of drama that it could create on the spot – suspense, mystery, action and most of all humour – make this the greatest achievement of Indian oral storytelling.
Qissa and kahani, often compounded together as in qissa-kahani, is the most demotic and democratically used of all these words. The great eighteenth-century poet Mushafi used the phrase as ‘na vo raatein a vo baatein na vo qissa kahani hai’ (‘neither those nights, nor that talk, nor that qissa-kahani remain’). A qissa is a short tale, sometimes related, but also meant to be recited. Whereas the katha often contained a moral lesson, the qissa was a mere fable, possibly an invention. To create a qissa was also to create friction or discord hence leading to the innumerable Urdu-Hindi compounds such as qissa khatam karna (to end a chapter or to finish the matter), qissa barhana (to aggravate matters), qissa faseel hona (all meaning to resolve matters), qissa khara karna (to create a discord) and qissa mukhtasar karna (to cut a long story short).
Kahani is, in a nutshell, a story. Kahani sunana is, of course, the most popular pastime in South Asia. But kahani banana is to embellish, to falsify or to tell a fictitious tale. In that sense, a kahani is not real and hence, the couplet: ‘Khuda mile to mile ashna nahi milta/Koi kisi ka nahi dost sab kahani hai’ (‘it may be possible to find God but not a comrade/nobody is anybody’s friend, it is all mere fiction’).
In modern Hindi writing, the word kahani has also come to stand for a self-conscious modern short story. It could also refer to a modernistic story as in the Nai Kahani movement of the 1960s. The modern Urdu short story, on the other hand, calls itself an afsana, derived, in turn, from fasana which, colloquially, means an invented or an exaggerated tale. In the early 1950s, after he published his short story Kata Hua Dibba or ‘The Severed Coach’, the Urdu writer Intizar Husain was told by the poet Nasir Kazmi ,‘yaar Intizar, this kahani of yours has become a katha’; what he probably meant was that the story contained such different variations of time and space that it had the hallmark of a katha and thus, in its open-endedness and its infiniteness, it had become bigger than a story. When all is done though, all that we are left with is a story, a kahani. ‘Teri kya kahani hai bhai’ (‘Brother, what is your story?’); nobody writes qissas anymore.
References
Cowell, Edward Byles , ed. The Jātaka: Or, Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, vol. 5. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publ., 1990.
Pritchett, Frances W., ed. The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Abhay Kumar Dubey
The linguistic entity called Khari Boli was the main vehicle of conversation for the speech community that lived in and around the Meerut–Delhi geographical area, also known as Kuru desh. However, unlike several other dialects of Indian subcontinent, it refused to remain confined in its original cultural zone and the conspiracy of history pushed it to travel across regions and religions. Perhaps this tendency of proliferation, along with other unique qualities, made it attractive to the nationalizing elite who were looking for the possibilities of a pan-Indian link language. This might be considered one of the main reasons why the onset of Indian modernity, especially in the post-1857 period, saw a complex process involving the tools of Khari Boli that ultimately got metamorphosed into the principal harbinger of modern Hindi, today’s superordinate link language. Khari Boli not only provided the basic vocabulary, grammatical structure and tone that gave Hindi its initial register but it also went on to stamp its name on a long-running unique linguistic experiment through which Hindi evolved in various stages as the lingua franca and literary apparatus of North India. Not only this, the basic structure of spoken Khari Boli paved the way for various Hindi(s), such as Dakhani, Kalkatia and Bambaia, which gave it the aura of a link language for non-Hindi provinces.
The prose and poetry, that Hindi users of today take for granted, took roots and later developed through a highly contested cultural politic. Annals of linguistic history remind us the number of battles fought by Khari Boli, initially for its gadya and later for its padya. Looking at the positive side, it is precisely due to this cultural politics that we have, today, a developed language which can be used for various discourses across distinct cultural zones. Contemporary proponents of Hindi do not even acknowledge its historic role as the precursor of the language of the Indian Union. Khari Boli was the marker of difference that gave Hindi its distinctiveness in the era where Braj Bhasha ruled the courtly and other domains of culture.
It is difficult to find a consensus about the origins of such a historically significant linguistic entity. Scholars are still debating whether it sprung from Kauravi or Shaurseni or if it emerged from Apabhransha or Prakrit. Dr Bhola Nath Tiwari tells us that this Boli is structured into a sophisticated mixture of the elements of Eastern Punjabi, Bangdu, Braj and other dialects of Punjab, Delhi and Western Uttar Pradesh. However, this does not spell out the full import of the creative impact that Khari Boli has on our day-to-day expressions. Dharmavir, a great scholar of Khari Boli, ventured to link this impact with Sadhukkari Bhasha and regaled us with a series of words that sound the same but have different meanings, such as sadhukkad, akkhad, dhumakkad, bhujhakkad, bhukkhad, piyakkad, nukkad, fakkad, bakkad, jhakkad, dhaakkad, kakkad, lakkad, bhulakkad, rokkad, makkad, thukkad and tukkad.
Even the simple meaning of the word ‘khādī’ eludes scholarly unanimity. For some, it means a language which always stands and fights, but for others, khādī means khari that is more or less, pure or unadulterated. While the former characteristic denotes the constant struggle of this boli against the well-entrenched janpadeeya bhashas of the early nineteenth century, the latter one can be corroborated by at least one historical fact. John Gilchrist of Fort William College instructed his portage, Lalluji Lal, to look for a linguistic register which can claim equal distance from Arabic and Persian, on the one hand, and from the Sanskrit, on the other. Accordingly, Lalluji Lal decided to compose his Prem Sagar in Khari Boli, due to its relative independence from these classical languages. In fact, Khari Boli was culturally embedded with two major sociological tendencies: it had a constant aversion to the dominance of Brahmins and Sanskrit and never found itself at the right side of Arabic and Persian influences. This is not to suggest that Khari Boli and Urdu do not converge; in fact, the original habitat of Khari Boli also proved to be a fertile ground for Urdu. Dharamvir recommended the inclusion of Urdu poetry in Hindi courses for the obvious affinity between the two, in contrast to Braj or Awadhi, for instance. When the members of a twenty-first-century literati conduct political-cultural discourse across the vast area of more than 350 million people (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh), it hardly occurred to them that it was the inherent power of Khari Boli that gave them the ease and precision to communicate with the masses as well as classes.
References
Dr Dharamveer Hindi ki Atma. New Delhi: Samta Prakashan, 1998.
Dwivedi, Mahavir Prasad. Hindi Bhasha ki Utpatti. New Delhi: Anang Prakashan, 1907/2001.
Fahima Ayub Khan
There are words, across languages, which distinctly represent the zeitgeist of a certain period in history. Sometimes, cultural contact and other intractable interactions might lead to the borrowing of words from one language to another by speakers of that language. It happens rarely that a word from a language represents the spirit of people across the world. The word kolaveri from Tamil became an epochal referent that appealed to people, especially the Tamil diaspora. It is a compound word formed by the free morphemes kolai and ve r i in the noun form. The first morpheme translates as ‘murder’ and the second refers to a mad fury. When translated, it literally means ‘murderous rage’, referring to the immense irrationality that affects one’s decisions. The implementation of the word in everyday conversations is not given a conscious thought. It functions as a rhetorical device and, in most cases, it is used to express sarcasm.
For a word that is colloquially used in conversations among Tamil speakers, it became a phenomenon by late 2011. It came to light with the song ‘Why this kolaveri di?’, written for a Tamil movie 3 that was released in 2011, as Singhal notes. The song captures the use of Tanglish, among the young Tamil speakers in South India. Tanglish is a mixed code of Tamil and English, a product of widespread code-mixing which is considered to be ‘a spontaneous behaviour of bilinguals’, observes Kanthimathi. Despite the lack of syntactic coherence in the lyrics, the song gained unusual popularity, particularly, among the younger generation since ‘code-mixed songs tend to be more attractive for the younger generation, who find them relatively easy to connect with’, Kazim argues. The word kolaveri, transcending linguistic borders, can be perceived as a result of the song’s unprecedented acclaim. This word was infrequently used by the Tamil speakers before it featured in the song and eventually emerged as a pop culture phenomenon. In the time that followed the release of the song, kolaveri, as a word, lost its literal meaning in contemporary usage. The repeated mention of the word in the Tanglish song has reduced the scathing intensity of rage expressed by the word and in turn rendered its connotative meaning redundant. The song quickly gained prominence among youngsters across India, generating the catchphrase, ‘Why this kolaveri di?’ Now the word exists only in rhetoric and appears as a hyperbole in common discourse.
References
Kanthimathi, K. ‘Tamil-English Mixed Language Used in Tamil Nadu’. The International Journal of Language Society and Culture 27 (2009): 47–53.
Kazim, Rafia. ‘Subverting the Rules of Grammar: Is Kolaveri Di the Subalterns’ English? Does the Tamil-English Code Mixing in a Popular Song Herald a New Variety of English?’ English Today 29, no. 2 (2013): 27–32.
Singhal, Divya. ‘Why this Kolaveri Di: Maddening Phenomenon of Earworm’. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1969781.(2011).
Languages and linguistic states
Rama Kant Agnihotri
Indian grammarians and philosophers of language have always been concerned about the ontological and epistemological issues concerning language. The tension between language as a rule-governed, homogeneous system and language conceptualized as fluid and heterogenous has always been there. Bhartihari was, indeed, a class apart and argued that the only path to cognition is through language. However, we all know that Vedic Sanskrit and Sanskrit, like Greek and Latin, soon ceased to be living languages and gave way to Prakrits and Apbhranshas and, finally, to the contemporary Indo-Āryan languages of North India including Hindi, Punjabi, Awadhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese and Odia, among many others, each defined not so much by its homogeneity as by its heterogeneity. All these languages celebrate their glory in the multiplicity of their linguistic and literary articulations rather than in just one codified shuddh (pure) norm.
Given this background, it is unfortunate that elite cultures have forced social groups to see themselves as predominantly monolingual rather than multilingual. What has been central to human existence is variability in linguistic behaviour which, as Pandit tells us, has been a facilitator in human communication than an obstruction. It is not just in India, but across the world, that languages tend to flow into each other rather than remain contained in social groups and geographical boundaries. Sounds, words, syntactic structures and patterns of discourse do not require passports and visas to walk across to other languages in spite of social, political, geographical and linguistic boundaries. It is not the elite culture, cultured in terms of select refinement of exclusive texts, arts and monuments, that encompasses multilinguality; it is the cultures and languages (bolis, as they are called) of the common people that celebrate multilinguality through katha, kahani, satsang, vrat and pravachan in the North and burra katha and villu paatu in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, respectively. Every part of the world has similar celebrations of multilinguality.
In this multilinguality, the division of human articulation of the aesthetic experience into oral, musical, visual, performative and written breaks down. In a 2008 work, I discussed the case of the barahmasa (twelve months) in Bengal, also found, in variable forms, in other parts of the country including Rajasthan, Bihar and Gujarat. It could be associated with the agricultural calendar or songs of separation; there is no reason to believe that similar folk traditions will not be available in other cultures as these are always fluid and open to other varieties. As Madan points out, ‘These songs are a well-known and well-developed component of folk culture all over north India, from Bengal in the east, to Gujarat in the west.’ It is rooted in the folklore associated with agriculture and complex relationships between man and woman and nature. This folklore is not normative in character and is marked by patterns of behaviour that are in a state of flux.
These spaces of multilinguality, in fact, constitute spaces for protest and subversion, I had noted in 2002. Satchidanandan discusses forms such as vacanas, warkari, chandayan and lallesvari and makes a distinction between the sramana and the brahmana traditions, the former being associated with protest and innovative heresy and the latter with the Vedic hegemony and power even though there were always points of intersection. The Vachankaraka and Warkari traditions used symbols and structures that would make sense to the common people across the country. All of these traditions revolted against the elite cultural and linguistic norms.
Even the myth of ‘one nation-one people-one religion-one language’ which had gained considerable supremacy during the colonial and post-war period was seriously questioned and it became obvious that the countries, hitherto regarded as the ultimate examples of monolinguality like the United States, the UK and various European countries, were essentially multilingual. Even when ‘a language’ was associated with ‘a community’, it was obvious that the range of variability in terms of region, age, sex, socio-economic status was so substantial as to merit different linguistic labels. This multilinguality is, of course, built on a shared ‘universal grammar’ that informs all linguistic behaviour at some abstract level. We need this multilinguality not only to negotiate our day-to-day encounters that multiply exponentially in complexity as persons, places and topics of conversation change but also to construct, transmit and continuously enrich our culture.
The paradigm example of documented multilingualism is India. Despite Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India and several Census surveys, it has not been possible to precisely determine the number of languages spoken in India. According to the 1961 Census, India had 1,652 languages belonging to five different language families: Indo-Āryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic and Andamanese. The 1991 Census showed that there were 10,400 mother tongues used by the people of India. Through a ‘thorough linguistic scrutiny, editing and rationalization’, the number of these mother tongues was reduced to 216 and 85 were subsumed under the 18 (now twenty-two) languages listed in the ‘Eighth Schedule’ of the Constitution. Languages such as Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Bundeli, Chattisgarhi, Mewari, etc., most of which had a long literary heritage, were subsumed under the rubric of Hindi. Today, these parents of Hindi are called its dialects. G. N. Devy’s People’s Linguistic Survey of India showed that there were 780 languages in India and of these 480 were spoken by tribes and nomads. What it showed, once again, was that India spoke in a multiplicity of languages and scripts. It also showed, clearly, how cultures of the elite ignored the cultural heritage of those it had pushed to the margins.
The linguistic and cultural ethos of India forbade its division on the basis of language and in spite of the promises made by the Congress Party, great visionaries like Gandhi and Nehru were against it. The JVP (Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabh Bhai Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya) Committee dismissed the idea of reorganization on a linguistic basis in April 1949. Yet, within a span of three years, the Government of India was forced to create the state of Andhra Pradesh. There was turmoil in the Telugu (once a contender for being the national language)-speaking state and the leader of the movement, Poti Sriramulu, died after a fifty-six-day hunger strike on 15 December 1952. Since then, there has been no respite in demanding separate states in India. The country that started as a Union consisting of nine provinces, some princely states and five Union Territories today has twenty-nine states and seven Union Territories. Even though in the creation of all new states, language was a main factor, all states ended up being multilingual. Ambedkar put forth three basic considerations for setting up the linguistic states: first, viability of the state should be ensured; second, the communal balance should be taken care of; and third, all people speaking one language need not be put in one state. India has always maintained the spirit of having multiplicity of languages and people in the same place. All this has helped to sustain and nourish the multilinguality that has been constitutive of the Indian genius.
References
Agnihotri, Rama Kant. ‘Identity and Multilinguality: The Case of India’. In Language Policy, Culture, and Identity in Asian Contexts, edited by A. B. M. Tsui and J. W. Tollefson . Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007.
King, Robert D. Nehru and the Language Politics of India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Shiv Visvanathan
Indians discovered their own response to power and their adaptability to power and success centuries ago. It is embodied and epitomized in the word matlabi. Matlabi combines shades of nuance. One is calculating, pragmatic, amoral, devious, deceptive, adaptable, even rational, as one enacts the world of the matlabi. The word goes beyond the pragmatic and the instrumental and commands a polysemic calculus of its own. A matlabi maximizes the intentions of his world while ignoring or manipulating the interest of the other. It is an art of survival which is indifferent to ethics. As a matlabi survives and grows in power, he develops his own vocabulary.
Think of words which exude a hybridity of meaning like ‘contact’ or ‘oblige’ or ‘service’. These are English words which have a Hindi or Punjabi meaning. Indians use English to say what the English could not say. Let us consider the word ‘contact’. Contact is an open sesame of a word going beyond what Ali Baba can dream. A friend of mine was teaching Kafka’s The Castle to a bunch of students from the north, explaining the pathos and poignancy of the hero’s entry into the castle. His students looked puzzled. One of his students asked, ‘Kuch contact nahin tha?’, meaning ‘Didn’t he have any contacts?’ Contact conveys the magical, matlabi sense of entry. Entry and access are the first rituals of matlabi strategy. To know the right place and to sense the right man ushers the matlabi into the world of power. A matlabi needs to understand middlemen, brokers, because it is they who oblige you. The way the tout says Kuch oblige kar sakte hai (literally, ‘Can you please oblige?’) opens out the world of reciprocity, of service, of mutuality. A dog should not eat dog when it can accommodate the other.
Matlabi is a keyword in the folklore of corruption. Corruption secularizes power, the matlabi instrumentalizes entry and a utilitarian world of service and reciprocity is born where a matlabi maximizes survival and mobility. The word matlabi conveys the sense of tactics and strategy in world of everydayness. A matlabi has no permanent friends without permanent interests. He becomes a cameo contrast with the innocent idealist bumbling in a world where values are stumbling blocks and interests grease the way to power. A matlabi is the power politician of the ordinary. If goodness can be used to maximize gain, a matlabi would be angelic. A matlabi created the folklore of Machiavelli long before Machiavelli was born. Mobile, fluid, protean, a matlabi demonstrates the art of survival in an unforgiving world. Yet, he is creature of the folk imagination, envied, immortalized in many Bollywood film. The following fragment from Roy captures it: Matlabi ho ja Zara Matlabi/Duniya ki sunta hai kyu/Khud ki bhi sun le kabhi (‘Become self-interested, dear Matlabi. Why listen to the world? Sometimes, just be interested in yourself’).
References
Kingston, Christopher. ‘Social Capital and Corruption: Theory, and Evidence from India’. Amherst College, 2005. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/918a/673257256f78779801f8ec9afb717a31b935.pdf (accessed 30 August 2019).
Ruud, Arild Engelsen. ‘Corruption as Everyday Practice: The Public—Private Divide in Local Indian Society’. Forum for Development Studies 27, no. 2. Taylor & Francis Group, 2000.
Navprit Kaur
Etymological roots of the word nara could be traced back to the Arabic word naar. In English, the word nara can be translated into slogan. Naras are short phrases or words, generally coined or weaved together by a leader (ranging from the leader of a local sweeper’s union to the prime minister), a group of people, social, religious, cultural and political movements, a political party or a government. Naras are the most common mode of raising demands, political mobilization, protest and collective expression in the public domain in India. Naras express disapproval or support for public authorities and governments (slogans against the local junior engineer for lack of electric supply or for demands of azadi [freedom] in Kashmir), events and happenings (such as a dowry death or the American president’s visit to India), ideas and movements (from a Bollywood film to the Naxalite movement) and policies. Expressed through a variety of mediums, naras are an integral part of the spatial composition of a public place in India. Naras could be found in the form of posters hanging from electric poles, pasted on public chowks or scribbled on walls. One example is the naras by Indian Railway’s workers on walls all along the railway tracks throughout India. During protests, public meetings and political rallies, naras are raised in a high-pitch voice and are accompanied by the raising of a fist. Prefixing with a word, which could be the name of a person, a public authority, a government, a political party or a nation, and following it with either zindabaad (‘Hail!’) or murdabaad (‘Down with!’) are two most commonly used naras to express support and resentment, respectively.
In fact, one can trace the journey of India, and gauge the political mood of its people at a particular time in history, or simply get to know the issues faced by masses at various junctures by looking at the most popular naras. In the context of the Hindi-speaking regions in contemporary India, naras could be divided into two: those belonging to the colonial period and those belonging to the postcolonial period. The naras of the colonial period represented the various streams of thought within the Indian freedom movement. If angrezo bharat chhodo (‘Britishers quit India!’) represented Gandhian aspirations of peaceful mobilization of the Indian masses, then jai hind and tum mujhe khoon do, main tumhen azaadi doonga (‘Give me your blood, I will give you freedom!’) by Subhash Chandra Bose represented the radical stream of gaining political independence. Slogans like vande mataram (‘I praise you, motherland!’) by Bankim Chandra, satya mev jayate (‘Truth alone triumphs!’) by Madan Mohan Malviya and swaraj mera janam sidh adhikaar hai (‘Self-government is my birth-right!’) by Bal Gangadhar Tilak represented the Hindu nationalist thought within the Indian freedom movement. Inquilaab zindabaad (‘Hail the revolution!’) by Maulana Hasrat Mohani, and popularized by Bhagat Singh, reflected the radical stream of thought but is now used in a more popular sense by the left during protests.
In the postcolonial period, there were naras related to the new vision of independent India. Naaras like roti kapda aur makaan (‘Food, clothing and shelter’) represented the socialist vision of Indian state during the Nehruvian era. Similarly, Lal Bahadur Shastri talked of jai jawan, jai kisan (‘Hail the soldier, hail the farmer!’) in the backdrop of the Indo–Pak war and the food crisis of the 1960s. Indira Gandhi produced the slogan garibi hatao (‘Alleviate poverty’) to build a self-sufficient India. In the post-Emergency period, the Jayaprakash Narayan-led movement popularized the slogan of Indira hatao, desh bachao (‘Remove Indira, save the country!’). Apart from the governments, various political and social movements have also coined their own slogans. Some of the most famous slogans of the women’s movement are naari shakti zindabaad, pitrasatta murdabaad (‘Hail women’s power, down with patriarchy!’) and halla bol halla bol, pitrasatta pe halla bol (‘Attack patriarchy!’).
Apart from this, the most common slogans used across the political spectrum are jo humse takrayega choor ho jaayega (‘Those who challenge us, will bite the dust’), awaaz do hum ek hain (‘Hail our solidarity’) and taanashahi nahi chalegi, nahi chalegi, nahi chalegi (‘Down with dictatorship!’).
References
Ahmed, Ishtiaq. ‘The 1947 Partition of India: A Paradigm for Pathological Politics in India and Pakistan’. Asian Ethnicity 3, no. 1 (2002): 9–28.
Nayar, Kuldip. The Martyr: Bhagat Singh Experiments in Revolution. New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2000.
Manish Thakur
Neta, in singular and masculine meaning leader/political leader, has its etymological roots in Sanskrit and is a ubiquitous term in many Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi and Bengali; netri is the singular and feminine term for the same. In Urdu, a leader is called quaid – the term is famously used to refer to Mohammad Ali Jinnah (Quaid-e-Azam/Great Leader); a political leader/politician is also called siyasatdaan, particularly by the Urdu speakers of Pakistan.
While many terms exist for the leader in India, it is neta (masculine, singular) which is the most common. Generally speaking, it exhibits a range of connotations from respect to parody. When suffixed with the honourific ji as in netaji, it refers to some of the tallest mass leaders marked for the reach and scale of their support base. For example, in the Hindi-speaking belt, Netaji has come to stand for Mulayam Singh Yadav, the founder of the Samajwadi Party and former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. However, not all political leaders, some perhaps more eminent than Mulayam Singh Yadav, are addressed as Netaji. Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, for example, are called Atalji and Advaniji, respectively; they are neither netaji nor Netaji.
At a pan-Indian level, Netaji is recognized to be used for Subhash Chandra Bose, the famous freedom fighter and nationalist leader. His name is either prefixed by Netaji or simply used as a proper noun. A large number of public roads, buildings and localities in post-Independence India carry his name in either of the two forms; history (text) books do the same too. In this usage, evidently, the term Netaji is used as a marker of some of the stellar attributes of leadership like courage, conviction, valour and other cognate abilities to lead the people. Bose’s founding of the Azad Hind Fauz/Indian National Army and his victory as the president of the Indian National Congress (despite Gandhi’s opposition to his candidature) and his bold and radical attempt during the Second World War to ally with the Axis powers for the sake of India’s independence, might have cumulatively given him that sobriquet. Here, again, no other leader of the nationalist pantheon has this moniker. There are others like Sardar, Maulana, Mahatma, Pandit, Lokmanya, Deshbandhu, but there is only one Netaji with a capital N.
The term neta, in itself, though, does not necessarily mean a political heavyweight or a leader who has a pan-Indian (visibility and) recognition. It denotes leaders of all sorts – from those stationed in New Delhi with access to a lāla battī (red beacon) Ambassador cars, down to a village leader. At times, it is locally used in a pejorative sense to make fun of unemployed youth who idle away their time gossiping and are always ready to offer opinion on any issue. Such people are seen as indulging in netagiri (the act of being a neta) rather than providing netritya (positive, sincere, ideal) leadership. There are also combinations of multiple types where a person is a trader and a neta, a paan shop owner and a neta, a teacher and a neta, a lawyer and a neta and the likes. Such netas, in popular parlance, are an inalienable presence in the Indian landscape, both urban and rural. It is no hyperbole to suggest that every neighbourhood, village and town has their own netas. They are a common sight in the teeming bazaars (markets) and mohallas (streets) and they become more visible and approachable during elections. Local people know them by their sartorial distinctions, food habits and/or penchant for good life and other related traits that matter locally.
Generally, anyone who takes to politics in a recognizable way or is concerned with public/community affairs is a neta in the eyes of the locals even when (s)he might be just an ordinary member of the local branch of a state- or national-level political party. Moreover, unlike their more established, bilingual and sophisticated metropolitan colleagues, the political universe of the local netajis goes beyond the requirements of electoral arithmetic and attendant mobilization. They are not merely confined to party offices and do not always follow the diktats (dictates) of the party high command.
The adjective neta has given rise to an interesting verb netagiri karna, which is the act of being a neta. It is quite common to hear the expression in the Ganga-Yamuna plains: tum netagiri kar rahe ho or netagiri karne ki zaroorat nahi hai. Here, netagiri is seen as an act of creating unnecessary public nuisance. Effectively then, neta means someone who can mobilize others on an issue or a set of issues. This mobilizational power of the neta can very well act as a threat to those who maintain the status quo in manifold ways. They are scorned because they seem to unsettle the status-quoist common sense of the day, where public affairs are, more often than not, merged with the hitherto existing power hierarchies.
In many cases, political parties do not have permanent offices worth their name. Yet, many makeshift offices crop up during election times. The lack of a permanent address is hardly a deterrent, both for the neta and the hoi polloi. A visitor to a small town will, in all likelihood, encounter the neta either in the party office (if there happens to be one) or, say, in prominent and not-so-prominent public places.
(S)he, in the second case, may come to know that a particular small teashop is the parking place for Sharmaji’s vehicle (usually a two-wheeler), Sharmaji being the local neta who religiously visits it at a preordained time and delivers all-absorbing lectures on themes ranging from Bush to Saddam, Ghulam Nabi Azad to Lalu Prasad Yadav, cricket diplomacy to Pakistani threat and so on. Similarly, one may run into a Vermaji in a sweetmeat shop, relishing his usual staple of Aaj and Dainik Bhaskar and talking animatedly on the sociopolitical problems facing India and the world in contemporary times.
The predominantly male, local universe populated by netas like Sharmajis and Vermajis, as is obvious, hardly finds any mention in standard textbooks on theories of democracy and the state. It connotes a political world where old values sit comfortably with the new-found radicalism emanating from the ideas of rights and equality. It is a world where democratic values and articulations collapse into the conventional hierarchies of status and wealth. However, it is not that nothing is changing. It is a world which reminds us that there can be something more to our lives than the traditional obligations of caste, kinship and village. With all their limitations, our mofussil netajis are the creators of the public sphere in a country in which one’s understanding of the world is always circumscribed by one’s location in a particular social station. Our omnipresent netas, despite the occasional pun and general disdain, reveal the most significant and contemporary facet of our Indianness, which is that democracy has struck deep cultural roots in India.
References
Krishna, Anirudh. ‘Gaining Access to Public Services and the Democratic State in India: Institutions in the Middle’. Studies in Comparative International Development 46, no. 1 (2011): 98–117.
Manor, James. ‘Small-Time Political Fixers in India’s States: “Towel over Armpit”’. Asian Survey 40, no. 5 (2000): 816–835.
Rama Kant Agnihotri
The words pravacan and bhaashan can, in many contexts, be used interchangeably; in fact, all pravachans could legitimately be called bhaashans (speeches). However, the vice versa is certainly not true. Pravacan, by definition, carries religious, spiritual and moral connotations. In principle, a pravacan can be delivered anywhere but it is generally marked for person, place, topic and audience. The place may be a temple, a mosque, a church or a gurudwara or places specifically designated for religious discourses, such as the Ramakrishna Mission or the Radhaswami Satsang (satsang literally means a gathering of religious people). The person, pravachankaarak – a saint or a monk – delivering the pravacan, is generally a theology scholar/ philosopher; the topic invariably concerns the way we should live our lives, with frequent references to moral consequences and life hereafter.
This word owes its origins to Sanskrit; it is a masculine noun, referring to the recitation and exposition of religious texts, consisting of philosophical, spiritual and ethical ideas, shared with a sense of gravity for the welfare of the listeners. Rig Veda verses 10.35.8 and 4.36.1 use the word in the sense of recitation of Vedic texts. It is the Vedic pravaachan which becomes the post-Vedic Sanskrit pravacan. A satsang, or a religious congregation, is the place most commonly associated with pravacan and in India, there are hundreds of such sects. One of the leading spiritual forums is the Ramakrishna Mission started by Ramakrishna Paramhamsa and his disciple Swami Vivekananada. Another, the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) has millions of followers. In recent years, we have unfortunately seen some such ‘spiritual’ satsangs which, under the garb of religious activities, indulge in crime, money laundering, rape and murder.
The word bhaashan could also subsume some religious discourses, but is often used for a public lecture; it covers a wide semantic range. It could, in Hindi, refer to a public lecture given by a philosopher, historian, sociologist, linguist or a scientist. Lectures given by politicians may often be called a bhaashan; they would never, however, be called a pravacan. The lecture given at a university convocation is referred to, in Hindi, as dikshaant bhaashan – a lecture given by the chief guest at the moment when students have completed their education (dikshaa means ‘knowledge’ and ant mean ‘end’, in Sanskrit). The art of delivering bhaashans does involve a certain oratorical skill – the use of rhetorical devices that help capture the attention of the audience. ‘Dr. Ambedkar Ke Bhaashan’, ‘Bhaarat Ke Mahaan Bhaashan’, ‘Bhaashan Kalaa’, etc., are all possible titles of books that one may come across. The way one speaks has remained a central concern in all cultures; for example, when in the Bhagavad Gita (2.54), Arjuna wants to know the defining features of a person with a stable mind (his own mind being so unstable), he asks Lord Krishna – sthita-prajnyasya kaa bhaashaa samaadhi-sthasya keśhava | sthita-dhiḥ kiṁ prabhaasheta kim aasita vrajeta kim (‘Oh Lord, how do you define a person with a stable mind? How does he speak, how does he sit and how does he walk?’). The widely used term bhaashan often carries a note of sarcasm in almost all the Indo-Āryan languages. When you get irritated by someone constantly getting on your nerves by suggesting ‘do this, do that, this is not what you should be doing’, etc., your reaction might be ‘stop your bhaashan baajii’.
References
Apte, Vaman Shivram. Sanskrit-hindi kosh. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986.
Beckerlegge, Gwilym. The Ramakrishna Mission: The Making of a Modern Hindu Movement. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Shiv Visvanathan
The word settled should rank high in any Hobson-Jobson of the modern world. It captures the common-sense art of problem-solving, the result of looking at the world not as a given but as something to be constructed out of negotiation. A problem is settled but never settles down. The ritual of settle demands skills of diplomacy, adjustment, adaptation of a mutual give and take which makes society possible as a coexistence of difference. Hum settle kar dege (literally, ‘We will settle [it]’) is a promise of delivery. Settle ho gaya (‘I/they have settled’) gives a sense of comfort, closure and ease, a promise that worry does not crease your eyes. Settle evokes both open-endedness and promise of closure. It needs brokerage, the tout and that great invention of modern power, the personal assistant (PA), who can settle any bureaucratic problem even if his bosses cannot, if given the right incentive. Settling is an art, a craft, a repertoire of skills which power demands. Nothing is unsolvable in a world of touts, brokers and PAs.
Settling also gives the sense of a different kind of social. Here the social bridges two worlds, inner and outer, indigenous and alien, and the word ‘settle’ derives from the hybridity of a mind that is at home with differences and yet seeks an ease of translation where a solution does not have to be ideal or utopian, merely something which allows for adjustment and adaptability on both sides. A bribe also provides the poetic grease, the incentive to adjust between two cultures or contending groups.
The idea of settling is always easy with difference and asymmetry. The negotiator seeks adjustments, bringing his skills of negotiation and reworking the word to recreate the world as it exists. Settling is thus a perspective about the world, a way of resolving differences and the skills that it demands. Most ‘settlers’ are middlemen and as a villain in a movie toasted them, ‘Thanks for middleman, for those who settle things, they make the world possible.’
Settled also is a signal for not touching or tinkering unnecessarily with an issue, of not reopening it too often. Settled ho gai hai is a way of saying cease worrying about it when the world is at peace with itself. A tout put it succinctly, Shadi ho ya supari, settle to karna hi padega (It may be a wedding or a killing: either way, the matter has to be settled).
Shruti and Smriti (śruti and smr̥ti)
Praveen Singh
Shruti (also spelled Śruti) has its roots in Sanskrit which means ‘that which has been heard’. In the context of Hinduism and Indian Philosophy, it refers to that strand of knowledge which is said to have been ‘revealed’ to the ancient Rishis also referred to as drishtaa (seers) who were able to ‘hear’ the divine word through their meditation and discipline. They were, in some sense, the drishta or the ‘seers’, who were not only able to understand the vibrations of the cosmos but also able to pass it on to the progeny (see Lochtefeld 2006). This knowledge was initially in the form of oral knowledge that was handed down and which later got codified in the form of the Vedas, the most authoritative of all texts considered to be sacred and having no known origin in any human being. These have, thus, been called apaurusheya (without any origin in humans). This divine origin thus adds to their authority and status of being the revealer of incontrovertible truth and any doubt cast on their authenticity is deemed unacceptable.
The term Veda comes from the Sanskrit root ‘vid’ which means ‘to know’ and implies divine knowledge, Dalal argues. The Vedas are said to be four in number, namely the Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda and each of these have their special functions. The Vedas comprise four kinds of texts, namely, samhitas or ‘the hymns to the gods’, brahmanas or ‘the ritual manuals’, the aranyakas or the forest books containing some speculative thought and the Upanishads, which may be said to be the earliest texts carrying the germs of serious philosophical enquiry (ibid). Scholors, such as Sharma (1960) have observed that the Vedantins consider even the Upanishads as shruti and treat them at par with the Vedas. The shruti texts are said to enjoy the highest authority in all matters and in the case of any dispute between the texts that have been referred to as the smritis and the shrutis, it is the latter that is to be considered as the final having a privileged status. However, we are told that Sankara, a great exponent of Advaita Vedanta, was of the opinion that even the shruti should not be believed blindly and that reason should be used to determine if what it says is correct.
While the shrutis are said to have no human authors, there is another body of texts in Hinduism, generally referred to as the Smriti texts which are said to be compositions by humans. The word ‘Smriti’, too, comes from Sanskrit which means ‘that which is remembered’. In other words, smritis are the result of some kind of reminiscence or recollection of something that one may have heard or thought about. Since it is remembered and has human authorship, there is a likelihood that the smritis may be wrong. That possibility is accepted and in case of any doubt, the shrutis are expected to form the basis of the final knowledge or understanding. Smritis comprise a greater body of work which includes ‘dharma literature, the sectarian compilations known as Puranas, the two great epics (Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa), the Bhagavad Gita and the Tantras, which are manuals detailing the secret, ritually based religious practice of tantra followers’, according to Lochtefeld. Some of the famous smritis are the Kalpa Sutras that are books that carry ‘aphorisms on sacred law’ and are comprised of three parts, namely ‘prescriptions for Vedic rituals (Shrauta Sutras), prescriptions for domestic rites (Grhya Sutras), and prescriptions for appropriate human behaviour (Dharma Sutras)’, Lochtefeld notes.
The Puranas are another genre of popular smriti texts that are full of sacred Indian mythologies. There are said to be eighteen major puranas, of which some of the major ones are Markandeyapurana, Shiva Purana, Bhagavata Purana, Agni Purana and Vishnu Purana. Among the popular Dharmashastra texts, which are another genre of Smriti texts, are the Manu Smr̥iti (a book on the laws of a good social order and life) and Yajnavlakya Smr̥iti. As has been mentioned earlier, the Smriti texts are less authoritative than the Shrutis but they are more in number and have been known to undergo changes with time and different commentators have offered different interpretations of the original smriti. They are, in that sense, a little flexible and undergo change, whereas shrutis are not expected to change with time.
References
Grimes, John, Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby . ‘Hindu Dharma’. In Religion of South Asia: An Introduction, edited by Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby . London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Lochtefeld, James G. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2006.
Sudarsan Padmanabhan
The Tamil term thalaivar is equivalent to the term ‘captain’ in English, derived from its Greek and Latin origins. Thalaivar is a reference to a leader in masculine gender. In the ancient Sangam literature, the term talaivan, in singular-masculine, is always accompanied by talaivi, its feminine. In latter genres of Tamil poetic and prose literature, the talaivan–talaivi template has continued as nayaka–nayaki bhava, in Vaishnavite Puranas, incandescently beautiful verses of medieval Vaishnative and Saivite poet-saints, Alwars and Nayanmars, respectively, and, more contemporaneously, in theatre, films and creative art forms as hero–heroine duo.
Thalaivar, in classical Tamil literature and ancient and medieval social milieu, also indicates a leader of stature in military, royal court, local village bodies, religious institutions and artisanal or business classes. Interestingly, there are also exceptions in the Sangam literature to this talaivan–talaivi categorization by way of the Buddhist and Jain literature. Texts such as Manimegalai and Neelakesi are against the traditional Vedic asrama system that believes in the four sequential stages of life leading towards final release and follow a sramana philosophy, which emphasizes renunciation as the direct path to liberation. The main characters in most of these epics are renouncers or aspiring ones. The term thalaivar, in the contemporary context, is twofold, one is salutary and the other mirthful. As in the Classical literature, the term thalaivar carries the mantle of leadership, especially in politics.
In movies, the talaivan–talaivi trope reaches its apogee due to the confluence of poetry, prose, drama, music, dance and comedy. During India’s freedom struggle, many powerful leaders emerged over the course of two centuries with the tallest of them all being Mahatma Gandhi, who also matched the categorical characteristics of thalaivar. Two of the most famous contemporary actors in Tamil are, first, Rajnikanth known as Thalaivar, affectionately by his film aficionados but less seriously and in jest by those who are not inimical to his on-screen persona.
The other popular actor, who is laconically called tala, which literally means the head, is Ajith Kumar or simply Ajith. While Rajnikanth’s thalaivar is expansive and theatrical, Ajith’s tala is measured and understated. The original Thalaivar, in whom the on-screen persona and real-life personality seamlessly coalesced to create Tamil Nadu’s most charismatic and talismanic political icon, was, however, the late M. G. Ramachandran or known as just MGR. M. G. Ramachandran understood the power of the mass media and used the talaivan–talaivi archetype in his films, tellingly to capture the imagination of the people of Tamil Nadu and India in general. Even when MGR was not given any official political position in his parent Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the leadership recognized his immense popularity and harvested it for many an election victory; he was an undisputed mass leader. As his popularity soared, the DMK expelled MGR from the party on a flimsy pretext, which only culminated in astounding political success during the most testing period in Indian politics, the Emergency. His protégé, the late J. Jayalalithaa, who was his on-screen romantic interest, also used the talaiva–talaivi topos to achieve great political success.
Another thalaivar figure who was also associated with Tamil films, theatre, poetry and literature, who successfully transitioned into a powerful political leader rivalling both MGR and Jayalalithaa, was Muthuvel Karunanidhi who is known for his bewitching oratorical skills, prolific writing and unabashed espousal of Tamil causes. The term thalaivar, therefore, reveals a dynamically evolving broad appeal yet at once a rootedness in the social context of the epoch.
References
Herbert, Vaidehi, trans. ‘Sangam Poems’. Available at: https://sangamtranslationsbyvaidehi.com/ (accessed December 2018).
Ramanujan, A. K. The Interior Landscape: Classical Tamil Love Poems. New York: New York Review of Books, 2014.
Anushka Rajesh Patel and Merdijana Kovacevic
A word is rarely just a word. The subtext undergirding a single word – navigating context, tone, speaker and listener – can render it a dynamically coded message. ‘Tension’, is one such word that has been absorbed into the Indian ethos with a ubiquity that is equally intriguing and confusing.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines tension as ‘the act of stretching’. Technical, as this definition is, it aligns perfectly with how we understand tension in inanimate objects. Tension is a term used in physics to animate properties of inanimate objects and create quotidian appliances. For instance, a tension rod strains itself to perform the arduous work of holding up our curtains! However, the meaning of tension does not stop at defining a physical property. In fact, it is contextually rich and alludes to complex and lively states. The same dictionary, thus, proffers another definition that aligns more closely with how tension is socially constructed and reified among Indians: tension connotes ‘a strained condition of feeling or mutual relations which is, for the time, outwardly calm, but is likely to result in a sudden collapse, in an outburst of anger or violent action of some kind’. Indeed, when tension is understood this way, it exemplifies our inner emotional experiences and the impact it has on complex social relationships.
Scholars from medicine, anthropology and psychology have been intrigued by the use of tension in India. It has been culturally appropriated – verbatim in the English form – into several linguistic groups including Kannada, Hindi and Marathi. Similar to its physical meaning of being stretched, the use of tension in relational contexts conveys a sense of feeling stress from being pulled in many directions. Tension is crucial for understanding mental health, because it acts as a loaded message, coded in sensitive cultural information. In other words, tension is an idiom of distress. An idiom is a way of communicating one’s distress to optimize the chance that it will be recognized in a cultural setting and addressed by people who can decode the meanings laden within the idiom. As such, this concept helps convey a complex set of psychological states with mere mention of ‘taking tension’, ‘having too much tension’ or stating a desire to ‘get rid of tension’. Every culture has its idioms of distress. Unlocking the wealth of culturally coded information embedded, in tension, can improve communication around it. In turn, clearer communication impacts healthcare dialogue (by recognizing, diagnosing and treating tension) and everyday discourse (by destigmatizing the experience) in powerful ways.
Careful anthropological study has revealed how people experience their tension, what they believe causes it and how they seek help for the same. For instance, tension is commonly thought of as an idiom conveying depressive and anxious symptoms, particularly among women. However, tension encompasses various components beyond this symptomology. Individuals using tension largely describe bodily distress, including episodic somatic problems (such as increased blood pressure, headaches, malaise, fatigue, insomnia, lack of appetite, aches and pains) and chronic ailments (such as gynaecological problems and stress-related diabetes). Tension may also encompass cognitive complaints (e.g. rumination, increased worries, suicidality), behavioural symptoms (e.g. crying, hitting others) and negative emotionality (e.g. persistent irritability, anxiety).
Interestingly, the types of problems most emphasized during tension depend on the group in question and the research foci. While women in psychological research have emphasized the depressive and anxious pathology when ‘having tension’, women examined for physical health conditions (e.g. sexually transmitted diseases or diabetes) highlighted their medical health concerns as related to/caused by tension. Despite diversity in symptoms of tension, some common ideas prevail regarding how tension relates to health. A prevailing notion across most groups is that ‘taking too much tension’ can impair one’s health. Additionally, physical discomfort – be it through episodic somatic problems or chronic physical conditions – is a commonly reported feature of tension. As such, tension has been identified, most often, in primary care settings.
Given the complex states conveyed by tension, what could possibly cause it? The causes of tension are as wide-ranging as its symptoms. Simply put, tension has been linked with anything from daily irritants and chores causing low-grade cumulative stress to more severe and chronic forms of structural violence that are cyclical and entrap people in vicious cycles of tension. Interpersonal stress has emerged as a common theme across research, particularly among women. For example, concern for loved ones, inability to meet others’ expectations, and marital/domestic discord or violence cause tension.
So far, tension has emerged as an idiom conveying complex psychological states of distress, with somatic symptoms being more commonly reported. This finding has intriguing implications: if the experience of tension includes both somatic and psychological symptoms, why are somatic problems being highlighted more often? We conjecture two reasons for this premised on Dr Lawrence Kirmayer’s work on the significance of somatic idioms of distress. First, tension is an idiom operating in a healthcare context with limited psychological avenues for seeking recourse. As such, it may be more functional to highlight the somatic experience involved in tension as these symptoms can be ‘fixed’ through the healthcare infrastructure of doctors and holy healers already in place. Indeed, when doctors query people about tension, people readily discuss the symptoms and causes of their tension; in turn, doctors take tension to mean depression. Second, Dr Leslie Jo Weaver, a medical anthropologist who has studied tension among diabetic women in India, posits that tension conveys distress effectively precisely because its ambiguity is its strength. Put differently, reporting tension allows a woman to articulate distress vaguely enough that she cannot be faulted for ‘complaining’ about her mental health or relational problems in a highly relational cultural context. In turn, this idiom can garner psychosocial support without being alienated.
Recalling how relationally linked the causes of tension are, this ambiguity is necessary and adaptive for expressing distress without rupturing relationships. Thus, the richness of using tension to convey one’s distress is situated precisely here. Tension is a cultural chameleon. It allows one to hint a wealth of charged information without giving much away at the surface. Tension can unlock a great deal – including symptoms, causes and coping – without saying much more than the three little words: ‘I have tension.’
References
Cork, Cliodhna, Bonnie N. Kaiser and Ross G. White . ‘The Integration of Idioms of Distress into Mental Health Assessments and Interventions: A Systematic Review’. Global Mental Health 6 (2019).
Pereira, B., G. Andrew, S. Pednekar, R. Pai, P. Pelto and V. Patel.‘The Explanatory Models of Depression in Low Income Countries: Listening to Women in India’. The Journal of Affective Disorders 102, 1–3 (2007): 209–18.
Weaver, Lesley Jo. ‘Tension among Women in North India: An Idiom of Distress and a Cultural Syndrome’. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 41, no. 1 (2017): 35–55.
Jatindra Kumar Nayak
In 1968, after consultation with the states, the union government formulated a policy of language education at the school level (classes one to ten), known as the ‘three language formula’ and expected the state governments to implement it in their respective states. According to this formula, the student has to learn three languages but learn them in a graded manner. First, from classes one to four, (s)he must learn only one language, namely the mother language or the regional language. Then, in addition to this, a second language was introduced between classes five and seven, which could be Hindi – the official language of India – or English – the other official language of the country – or a modern European language. Finally, a third language is added to the aforementioned two for classes eight to ten; this language, for the Hindi-speaking states, would be a modern Indian language (preferably one of the southern languages) and for the non-Hindi-speaking states, Hindi, if not already learnt as the second language. The objective was to develop emotional integration among the people and to enable them to study science and technology, the main language of which is English.
This well-intentioned formula has, however, not worked. Tamil Nadu was very uncomfortable with it, viewing it as strategy to impose Hindi on the non-Hindi states. The people of the Hindi-speaking states were reluctant to study a southern language; for them, it was an unnecessary burden – if everyone in the country was studying Hindi and English anyway, the third language would have no real function for them. So, many states found ways of avoiding learning either Hindi or a southern language, as the case may be for them. Besides, this policy privileged those whose mother tongue was the regional language of the state and those who did not benefit from mother tongue education were among the marginalized sections of the society – tribal language speakers, temporary migrants and even speakers of the non-standard varieties of the regional language. Despite all its limitations, this formula, even in its defective implementation, provided bilingual education, making people bilingual in the process.
References
Annamalai, E. ‘Nation-Building in a Globalised World: Language Choice and Education in India’. In Decolonisation, Globalisation: Language-in-Education Policy and Practice, edited by Angel M. Y. Lin and Peter W. Martin, 21–38. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2005.
Mohanty, Ajit. ‘Multilingual Education in India’. In Encyclopedia of Language and Education, vol. 5: Bilingual Education, edited by Jim Cummins and Nancy Hornberger, 1617–1626. New York: Springer, 2008.
Vanamala Viswanatha
Craig Jeffrey’s book Timepass (2010) refers to the politics of a new India in which its youth, especially young men, while away hours of their waiting for something to come about – a job, an exciting or exacting event or even a romance. These ‘in between’ passages of time are spent in banter, in movies, theatres or simply doing nothing. Yet, such is the cultural variation in India that the very same compound word, in a different cultural space, namely the state of Karnataka in South India, has a slightly extended connotation. Pronounced tamepas, this supposedly English phrase (to pass the time) refers to peanuts in Kannada. Typically, you hear this expression from vendors shouting, ‘tamepas, tamepas, tamepaaaas’, in as many unusual, insistent intonations (a simple fall, an uncomplicated rise, a fall-rise, etc.) as they can manage, to grab your attention to the roasted, unshelled peanuts they sell in the bus and train stations, between Bengaluru and Mysuru. Another scenario is, there is a mound of roasted but unpeeled nuts with their brown/dark brown shell intact; people sit around this mound as the sun goes down, feeling the warm peanut shell in their hands as they break the shell expertly between their left forefinger and right thumb and throw the nut into their mouths, while chatting interminably about things.
There is a brilliant scene of tamepas in a classic short story by the Kannada Dalit writer, Devanuru Mahadeva, titled, ‘Odalaala’. Pushed to the brink, a deprived Dalit family is forced to steal a sack of peanuts from their landlord. The hungry family sits around the fire and polishes off the entire sack of nuts, throwing the shells into the fire. When the police arrive, there is no sign of either peanuts or the shells, anywhere! Tamepas had swallowed up both evidence and time.
References
Fuller, Chris. ‘Timepass and Boredom in Modern India’. Anthropology of this Century, no. 1 (2011).
Jeffrey, Craig. Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India. California: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Rita Kothari
On an extremely congested road, ironically called Relief Road, in the city of Ahmedabad, is a city civil court. As you navigate that traffic to reach the court, you come across some people who have their chairs and desks laid out outside the court. They translate documents from English and other languages into Gujarati. In the world of Europe, this form of legal translation would require formal training and a licence. In this case, it is done out of experience, intuition and, more importantly, as one of the means of livelihood. Incidentally, the current cost of translating a document from English to Gujarati is 80 rupees, approximately one US dollar. This purely functional and pragmatic need is in no conversation with the medical, literary or corporate translation.
A classic question about India, and it’s over a thousand recorded languages, is how does India manage communication amidst such linguistic diversity? Surely translation must be the only way. And yet, as mentioned above, a large number of untrained translators go through ad hoc assignments for a very meagre pay. While a small number does derive intellectual joy from it, translation as a practice is mostly perceived as a means towards an end. If the movement from one language into another happens all the time at home, at work, on trains and buses, how is translation special? It is ubiquitous and pervasive, not requiring a name, leave alone training. The ‘excess’ of a multilingual reality has made translation not distant enough for cerebral theorization or economic compensation and social or intellectual recognition. That being said, a gamut of forms and approaches of cultural and linguistic transfer obtain under different names in different languages of India.
If one were to look at the various ways in which translation evolved and was termed in various Indian languages, a host of varied names crop up – sometimes one language has several words for the process of ‘rendering’ or retelling, sometimes several languages having common words albeit with different shades of meaning. Some of the terms for translation include anuvad (to speak after or to tell in turn), bhashantar (a change of language), roopantar (a change of form), mozhipeyarttu (mozhi meaning language and peyarttu meaning ‘to dislodge, to carry across or to migrate’ in Tamil), parivartan (a transformation), tarjuma (used in Islamic literature to refer to the biography of a Sūī, saint or scholar but later came to be used for translation), deshantar (a change of locale), veshantar (a change of dress or attire), kaalantar (a change of historical period), bhavanuvad (a rendering of emotion), gagdyanuvad (a rendering of prose) and so on.
Anuvad, or speaking in turn, is often elicited as a distinguishing temporal aspect of the Indian notion of translation when compared to translation in the West, which, etymologically, has the spatial aspect to ‘carry across’. Several words for translation in India involve the suffix antar which generally denotes change. For instance, deshantar would be a rendering in which the original locale or setting is adapted to the target locale and country. The notion of change or ‘antar’, as already inherent in the activity of translation, means that a translated text is, already and always, distant from the ‘original’. However, this difference is not seen as a dilution or a corruption of the ‘other’. Antar, which is both a spatial and a temporal metaphor, denotes simultaneously ‘interval’ and ‘distance’. Furthermore, antar also refers to ‘the inner’ or ‘of the self’, which implies an organic link between ‘text’ and ‘translation’.
The activity of translation, thus, is not a movement away from the text but a change within itself. This notion of internal change and interaction seems vital to an understanding of an Indian sense of translation. The philosophical underpinnings of the terms demonstrate how the idea of the ‘original’ and the treachery attached to the history of translation in the West, as also its attendant anxieties of fidelity, have not been central to the Indian subcontinent. In fact, the word ‘translation’ falls less easily on the tongue, signalling a degree of formalization and self-consciousness. Unsurprisingly, the term bahubhashiyata for multilingualism also has a touch of new coinage to it. Both terms point to an imaginary formation through a process of translation.
The puzzling absence of translation theory in India’s long-standing linguistic and civilizational life has been seen by scholars like Harish Trivedi as constituting ‘the history of non-translation’. Trivedi’s much-cited article ‘In Our Own Time, on Our Own Terms: Translation in India’ is an extremely important intervention and argues that ‘the traffic in translation was never thick throughout the premodern period in India, that is, right up to the impact of the West in the eighteenth century, and whatever little translation there was, was all in one direction, from the Indian languages out’ (Trivedi 2006). But what is translation in the Indian context? Does it have to be linguistic in nature? Does it need to refer to written texts only? Does ‘it’ need to be called translation, or is it an unstable and hybrid category that has increasingly begun to get stable in a more self-conscious and academic understanding of translation? Does criss-crossing of languages, often captured in misleadingly transactional terms such as ‘borrowing’ and ‘loan words’, not constitute translation? Do vocabularies from diverse regions not constitute what comes to be claimed as ‘purely’ indigenous languages, hinting at yet other processes of translation at work? To ask such questions is to remind ourselves not to assume what is perhaps best not assumed – the absence of a presence, called translation.
References
Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi . Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 2012.
Trivedi, Harish. ‘In Our Own Time, on Our Own Terms’. In Translating Others, vol. 1, edited by Theo Hermans, 102–111. Manchester : St Jerome, 2006.
Shiv Visvanathan
Modern democracy needs a language of conspicuous consumption not for commodities but for power, to demonstrate an ethology of display, a ritual dance of power. No word captures it better than VIP. A VIP is a ‘very important person’ who has to be seen as a very important person. In a world of scarcity, he is surrounded by excess. He can demand entry, space, the right seat and the best chair. When everyone is sitting on the ground in a community of equals, the VIP needs a sofa. In a community of equals, he is more equal than others. His power always needs a noisy display, a semiotics of access ranging from sirens, to security, to a chorus of sycophants fluttering over his presence. A VIP who is not noticeable is a non-person.
A VIP is singular but never single. He needs an entourage around him, a combination of kin, sidekick juniors who thicken his presence. These are roles to be taken seriously. Without it, power cannot be an act of conspicuous consumption. Someone must fan him, repeatedly offer him that fresh glass of water, flatter him with attention and excessive concern, because without excess, that abundance of attention which must evolve into a ritual of display a VIP diminishes in power. Excess as display is the only economy he can understand. A potlatch of sycophancy must accompany him. If a VIP visits an area, it must be cleaned, whitewashed, even if it is abandoned for a year later. A VIP’s visit to any area must be an event, at least for a day, even if cows sit lazily munching posters, he has left behind, a day later. A VIP’s presence in an area is a historical marker which divides history into before and after. If a VIP visit does not cause unnecessary traffic jams, delay traffic, create obstructions so that people feel his presence, he does not feel like a VIP. A VIP is a man who has the right access or can provide the right access to power, to exclusive spaces. He is pampered as patron of an entourage whose well-being he caters to.
The ritual of time and space becomes critical to a VIP. If an event is packed with people, seats will be reserved for him. He does not have to join the Darwinian world of the ordinary. He is above subsistence. His absence, like his presence, must exude power. A VIP who is punctual is an oxymoron. Being late is a sign of power; keeping people waiting shows how busy you are. Punctuality is one art that eludes the VIP. In fact, in a world obsessed with ranking, there could be a delay index of power. Politicians and film stars would head the list, with bureaucrats playing lesser mortals. Conspicuous delay is a VIP art form. There is also a temporariness to VIPs. Government secretaries in Delhi who walk like lions around India International Centre (IIC) shrink bodily when they retire. The absence of power literally deflates them. An ex-MP, an ex-bureaucrat is emasculated when he loses the hyperbolic power which officialdom confers on him. It is this sense of closure that makes VIPs as theatre hyperbole. They lack the authenticity of power. As actors they lack an epic quality, convey the sense of a skit, the spoof, an absurd drama of power without the sense of brutality or ruthlessness. They always remain part of the scaffolding of power, people who are important because they are seen as important. Their image defines their reality.
References
Thakur, Ramesh. ‘India’s VIP Culture: Forget Lincoln’s Definition of Democracy. India’s Government Is of VIPs, by VIPs and for VIPs’. Times of India, 4 September 2018. Available at: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/indias-vip-culture-forget-lincolns-definition-of-democracy-indias-government-is-of-vips-by-vips-and-for-vips/.
Thakur, Ramesh. ‘VIP Culture Is a Blight on India’s Democracy’. Policy Forum, 1 May 2018. Available at: www.policyforum.net/vip-culture-is-a-blight-on-indias-democracy/.
NOTES
1 Kural 54, G. V. Pope’s translation reads ‘what is more excellent than a wife, if she possesses the stability of [Karpu]?’ Pope translates ‘karpu’ as ‘chastity’.
2 A popular 1964 film production on the epic (Poompuhar, directed by P. Neelakantan) nuances Kannagi’s argument in the Madurai Royal Court after her husband’s execution. According to the film script, penned by Karunanidhi, her argument is threefold – the unjustified haste in executing the accused, lack of trial or even permitting the accused a hearing and a convincing physical demonstration that the anklet is hers. It is important to mention this here because Karunanidhi’s literary output, among that of others, was important to the cementing of Dravidian politics in Tamil Nadu. As Perianayagam Jesudoss observes, ‘The DMK’s unchallenged grip over the audience is thanks to its rhetoric on “Tamilness”, which was constructed in part by notions of maanam (honor) and valor.’ And, therefore, bringing Kannagi’s story of karpu and valour on-screen was a powerful political project.