Arjun Appadurai (Anthropology, NYU)

Upendra Baxi (Law and Development, Warwick)

Akeel Bilgrami (Philosophy, Columbia)

Zoya Hasan (Political Science, JNU)

Sudhir Kakar (Psychology, Goa)

Sunil Khilhani (Intellectual History, King’s College London)

Ashis Nandy (Psychology, CSDS)

Deepak Nayyar (Economics, CSDS)

Bhikhu Parikh (Politics, House of Lords)

K. Satchidananan (Literature, Sahitya Akademi)

Romila Thapar (History, JNU)

We have many beautiful words in the Indian languages that we can draw upon to thank the large number of people who have helped us take this project from conception to creation. This book has grown from the germ of an idea to a volume with over two hundred contributors – each one of whom has, ironically for a keywords volume, left us speechless. Their combined wit, wisdom and, above all, generosity of spirit has been an object lesson in the power of words to constitute communities. In Konkani, the phrase ‘dev borem korum’, literally translated, means ‘may god do good to you’. One of the editors of this book believes this benefic phrase works for both believers and non-believers; the other is more sceptical but both are equally and profoundly grateful. We want to say to all who have helped us ‘dev borem korum’. We thank you for your marvellous contributions, your patience and most of all for your belief in the viability and worth of what we set out to do.

It would be impossible for us to list all those who have made this book possible, so we will mention only those who, at various stages in the life of the book, were involved in tying up stubborn loose ends, foremost among them Gorki Bora and Banasmita Bora. Without them this book might have remained a great tangle of loose ends. Ekta Khemchandani, Nonita Oberoi, Shikha Vats, Priyanka Sharma, Priyanka Verma, Dipti Kulkarni, Manaswita Bharadwaja, Sanchita Sharma and Nivida Chandra all helped give the project a form. Their assistance, across digital space and different time zones, was truly outstanding. It is noteworthy, too, that they were all women, reminding us that in India, women’s names encompass every virtue, such as Ekta (unity), Shikha (peak or high point), Sanchita (collection, a gathering), Dipti (lustrous, shining), Manaswita (mind aspiring, intelligent). The women who helped us were all these things and more: they drew up lists of contributors, prepared Excel monitoring sheets, sent endless reminders, intrepidly helped us convert long biographies and entries into brief bio notes and svelte slim-fit essays and dealt with the disappointments of regret in rishi fashion but celebrated acceptance with Bollywood fervour. Dev Borem Korum to the women who assisted us; they richly deserve every blessing.

Then they were those who were our genies, appearing magically when the going got rough, such as Ramakant Agnihotri, Hoshang Merchant, Antony Arul Valan, Chandrika Pandey, Amit Bhaya and Satish Padmanabhan. All of them made this project happen. Dev Borem Korum to them.

The detailed comments made by the two anonymous reviewers for the book proposal much before it fully came into being were enormously helpful and helped shape our vision for the book. That they were both based in the United States and that both frankly admitted that they were not South Asia specialists was a great bonus because the perspectives offered seemed so clear-eyed and unbiased. One of them wrote at the time with great prescience: ‘Such a volume – with the right contributors and a strong editorial hand – could be extraordinary. It is hard to imagine that it could even pretend to cover the topic adequately. But it could be an interesting spur to conversation, debate, and more research.’ The reviewer was wise. To ‘even pretend to covering the topic adequately’ would be a farce when the topic in question happened to be India. It would be like trying to pour the sea into a pail or balti (one of the material culture keywords in our volume). However, we feel that as far as our contributors go, we have more than fulfilled expectations. The flaws in the text are surely our own and can never be theirs. We are not so sure about those ‘strong editorial hand(s)’, though. Despite genuine doubts on this front, however, we shall keep our fingers crossed about the ‘extraordinariness’ of this book and the promise that it will yield fine conversations and research in the years to come. Meanwhile, Dev Borem Korum to both reviewers.

We would be remiss not to record our gratitude to several institutions where several formal and informal brainstorming, sessions took place, vivacious suggestions were received on what words to include and sage advice given on how to avoid the hegemonic trap of the globally dominant languages. The Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, hosted one such meeting, as did the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library which supported a fellowship for one of the editors. Their support was invaluable. The IIT Delhi and the CSDS Delhi, our respective home institutions, enabled us to host small informal meetings with groups of potential contributors, many of who contributed substantially to our project. We value their support. Our publishers, Bloomsbury, and our editors, Gurdeep Mattu, Andrew Wardell and Becky Holland, deserve our thanks for believing in this marathon project and urging it to the finish line. Given the fact that India’s verbal zest is infinite, we have already started preparing for next year’s race, such is the energy that we have drawn from our engagement with this volume.

Finally, to our families who offered unsolicited advice and who, for affective reasons, gave us unstinting support, we are truly grateful. Dev Borem Korum.

Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza Delhi, 1 June 2019

Note: This diacritic table does not correspond to the standard IPA chart. Rather, it comports with the syllabic system of writing used in most Indian languages. Also known as the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST), this is the most familiar system of transcription in India. However, since modern Indian languages, such as Hindi, no longer use the mid central vowel ‘schwa’ at the end of most words, we have deleted this phoneme derived from the Sanskrit from our entries so that they are closer to current pronunciation: for example, ‘Dalit’ rather than ‘Dalita’. Further, many of the words in our lexicon have long been familiar to the Indian public in the Roman script, even if not quite accurate in terms of their phonological representation: ‘dharma’ or ‘kahani’, for instance. Given this complex orthographic scenario, we have provided the familiar ‘demotic’ version followed by the IAST transcription in the case of each of our keywords but then reverted to the more usual form for ease of reading. The stylistic choice made in this volume to have diacritic marks on capital letters is also slightly unusual. Finally, despite the careful attention that we have attempted to pay to these issues of transcription, errors and idiosyncratic uses remain. For these, we apologise most sincerely.

PROLEGOMENON: HOMOLOGIES

There are times in history when patterns of memory shift, geography is reconfigured and language unpredictably mutates. Raymond Williams’ iconic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) seems, in fact, to have been written in response to just such a realization that he had been witness to a transformative break in hitherto familiar cognitive habits. In the opening paragraphs of his Introduction, he recounts this anecdote about how his book came to be:

In 1945, after the ending of the wars with Germany and Japan, I was released from the Army to return to Cambridge University … but in the movements of war I had lost touch with all my university friends. Then, after many strange days, I met a man I had worked with in the first year of the war … He too had just come out of the Army. We talked eagerly, but not about the past. We were too much preoccupied with this new and strange world around us. Then we both said, in effect simultaneously: ‘the fact is, they just don’t speak the same language’. (p. 11)

Such an acute feeling of suddenly inhabiting a ‘new’ world, where the language of thought has changed so radically that the state of mind individuals seem to share most in common is simply the perception of estrangement, can also afflict us in times of peace. At the uncertain beginning of the present millennium, in the midst of a communications revolution so profound that it has redefined even that ancient and atavistic word ‘war’ in terms of cyber fortifications and breaches thereof, it is no surprise that we are subject to bewildering psychological dislocations similar to those described by Williams. In short, we are forced to recognize certain homologies or ‘family resemblances’ (Wittgenstein, 1953) that seem to exist across cultures and between times, when the linguistic signposts we have long relied on no longer help predict future directions, prompting a sphota moment out of Bhartrhari (sixth century CE) or that dramatic shock of recognition that Aristotle (first century BCE) called anagnorisis. At such times, a civilization reviews its discontents, its loss of bearings.

How, then, do societies reorient? How do they use the habitus of the familiar to engage with the unknown in times of unusual social perturbation? In this volume, we ask this question with respect to India, a civilization space distinguished by its diehard pluralisms as well as its mnemonic continuities of language, culture, religion and belief. Nothing in India is ever conceptually singular and, by the same paradoxical token, all concepts are remarkably singular. We have so much to remember that to forget efficiently is a homological trick the subcontinent has mastered for ages. Our linguistic wealth is exhaustive but it is also exhausting. It is in this context that the Indian lesson in verbal stress busting could be critical in a world bending and cracking under the burden of information overload and social media tribalisms. How does one reflexively engage with conceptual hubbub, with language medleys coming at one from all sides that persistently threaten to crowd out a sense of inner peace, of foundational certainties? It is, after all, no accident that India has presented itself and the world, over time, with various routes towards simultaneously expressing spiritual dispassion and earthly engagement. From dharma to yoga to Sufism to the reams of sophisticated linguistic theories it has produced to explain our place in the world as creatures committed to symbolic thought, India seems to have acknowledged that verbal cacophony and calm of mind are inseparable. Spend an hour at any street-side chai stall, taking in the no-holds-barred conversation while the hot, sweet comfort of tea repairs you from within, and this hypothesis should be amply confirmed.

Another commonplace but powerful strategy that Indians may also have an inside edge on is the rehearsal of synonymy. Indian schoolchildren in large swathes of the country memorize multiple words for concepts like the ‘moon’ or ‘spring’ or ‘water,’ even today, as an integral part of their classroom routines – a tradition that could date back to the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsanam, popularly known as the Amarakośa (rough translation: ‘collection of immortal words’, a bit like Roget’s Thesaurus but of a much earlier origin, somewhere between the fourth and seventh century CE). Such embedded and commonplace iterations in Indian word space have been little remarked on, but it seems to me incontestable that they constitutes a long-standing investment in verbal banking, a widespread network of small-scale semantic savings accounts to rely on in times of need. Keeping this background in mind, our current preoccupation with keywords seems not to derive only from Williams’ extraordinary achievement but also from inherited procedures of memorialization on the subcontinent.

To reiterate, focussing on ‘keywords’ as cultural enchiridions is a time-tested strategy in India that could offer a partial answer to what might be called the ‘reorientation problem’ that India and the world are up against today. While it is undeniable that speed at which we communicate and the speech in which we communicate is astonishingly febrile at present, our mutable bodies, our affective inclinations and our attachments to verbal and visual simplicities appear somehow curiously untouched by all this linguistic canoodling. We remain quite as nasty and violent towards each other as we ever were. Our words are not our bonds. Yet, it could be precisely for this reason that our keywords volume matters. By its very structure, its generic design, a keywords book is as much about antonyms and antagonisms as it is about synonyms and sweet accord. It brings disagreements – even disagreeableness – into the open. It forces us to examine old linguistic wounds and scrutinize the roles of the new language band aids we’ve invented to cover them up. In this sense, India is a fascinating exemplar. However, the implications of the language quarrels and categories we suggest here seem universal. The basic methodology of a ‘keywords’ volume directs our attention towards a disturbingly obvious question: can the culling of 259 keywords over hundreds of others, especially in a country almost the size of Western Europe and arguably far more culturally diverse, and then presenting them globally in English, a language of immense elite power, in any way a justified procedure? Does this not reinforce rather than remedy old language hegemonies? In any case, to what extent can any ‘keyword’ truly be declared part of a global cultural vocabulary and to what extent does it remain specific, born out of particular local circumstances?

Queries such these are hardy perennials in every garden variety of academic enquiry as well as popular debate. Our contention in this book is that they are valuable for that very reason. Consider, for instance, the subtitle of the present volume, Keywords for India, which seems to suggest that words such as ‘dharma’, ‘caste’ or ‘Bollywood’ possess meaning primarily in the sub-continenmal context; they are keywords ‘for India’. Yet, we know that these words have long been part of a worldwide diaspora of the imagination. They have immigrated not just into the parts of the world where English dominates but also have found conceptual niches in languages as different as Portuguese, Indonesian and Russian. In this respect, they are keywords from, as much as for, India. Their global relevance might, as a consequence, have been severely underestimated.

One had only to consider commonplace words in the world lexicon such as avatar, guru, karma, kismet, mantra, nirvana, pundit or yoga to grasp that these do not just constitute what we have long characterized as an ‘alternative’ mythos but rather make up an integral part of the linguistic atlas of the world, multiplying opportunities for theoretical problem-solving, concept formation and critical self-reflection in various arenas of the humanities and social sciences. The import of this volume is that it seeks to provide, via a constellation of words such as those mentioned above, a discourse mapping of the present that pertains to India, certainly, but also to a global world desperately in need of new vocabularies. As it happens, this is a time in world history when major social movements ranging from Dalit mobilisation in India to the Me-Too protests in the United States to dispossessed ‘refugee’ voices from Syria to South Sudan have at their disposal new technological tools to promote a fresh awareness of ‘what it means to be human’. Coincidentally, these vital ‘free speech’ cultures have also been accompanied in the present century by a deep geographical disruption that has a uniquely Indian aspect. The influential global suggestion that the early twenty-first century should usher in a new epoch to be called ‘the Age of the Anthropocene’ is, of course, well known, since it has now become blindingly clear that human inventions and interventions have had a severe effect on the wellbeing of the planet. Our 2020 lexicon appears in a diachronic era in which the entire geological division of time is itself being hotly contested, but what has gone unremarked is the part that India plays in this project of grand epochal renaming, not only because it is a steadfast supporter of environmental accords but also in terms of its pre-history. It turns out that the last phase of the Holocene epoch in which we now live, spread over the last 4500 years, has recently been renamed the ‘Meghalayan’, after a small state in India’s extreme north-east known as Meghalaya or ‘the abode of clouds’ on account of the fact that in its caves are perfectly preserved the climate records of that remote age of extreme drought and hence likely large human migrations. Perhaps the word ‘Meghalayan’ is, in this sense, a key contribution to a global understanding of shared world prehistories, perhaps not; but at a time when data is increasingly being stored in ‘clouds’ of infinite extension, we must surely wonder at the cross-cultural serendipities of conceptual lexicons such as this one. In this regard, ours is an intervention within a series of encounters that the Indian subcontinent has long held with the future. Far from calling a halt to a process of documentation and debate, this volume marks what we expect will be a significant step forward in maintaining that ‘argumentative’ spirit held to be central to India’s being (Sen, 2005).

In curating these varied ‘talking points’ describing the Indian ethos in the second decade of a new millennium, it is our hope that at its learned and animated best, as well as at its unruly and unscholarly worst, our volume constitutes an adventure of ideas; that it will foster an understanding of ‘culture’ from a set of perspectives that counterbalance but also encompass and engage with forms of possible western ethnocentrism in an increasingly interconnected, verbally syncopated virtual world. Thus, while its scholarship may be ‘India-centric’, this book does not shy away from the challenge of contributing to a vigorous global debate on the very idea of ‘culture’. This introduction begins by offering five preliminary reasons as to why we are emboldened in this ambition.

INITIATION: FORMS OF THE COLLECTIVE

We should begin by acknowledging that our enterprise is uniquely a collaborative one in that it involves not only a distinguished editorial board but also an impressive host of over 200 contributors, mostly based in India, many of whom have already contributed significantly to a study of the more than 250 topics on which we requested them to write. Indeed, I’d suggest that there are one or more subjects for PhD theses or book monographs embedded in each of these keywords, not to mention fodder for much self-directed humour, irreverence and delight.

A second feature of this book is that it contains several words intimately familiar to Indians at large (anganwadi, chappal, danda) that may nevertheless be unavailable even to scholars of South Asia domiciled in the west, simply because they are not necessarily part of their lived experience. These words fall into three categories not, to my knowledge, included in previous ‘keywords’ volumes: one, material culture words that are part of the everyday vocabulary of Indian citizens such as chulha and balti; two, acronyms such as RTI and BDO; and three, ‘borrowings’, usually from the English, such as public and beauty parlour, where the usage is so different from the original and so attuned to the Indian cultural scene that entire meditations on the semantics of contextual interpretation are called for. So far, most keyword volumes have focussed almost entirely on grand narrative (see Browning 2000, on this point), high-culture terms such as ‘nation’, ‘bureaucracy’ or ‘nature’ that populated the pioneering Williams volume. This meant, in effect, that the little narratives of lived experience went almost unnoticed in the design of these works. One of the strategies of ‘reorientation’ that the present volume adopts is to include quotidian material culture words cheek-by-jowl with the great philosophical abstractions that have stereotypically been associated with Indian thought. It is quite possible that our book does no more here than reflect the democratization of culture and knowledge brought about by the explosion in e-interactions over the past decades. Nevertheless, I was surprised by and grateful for the enthusiastic support that this hybrid approach received from all quarters, not least from my wonderful co-editor, Peter deSouza, then Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study – which brings me to a third aspect of our sub-continental language inheritance.

A certain wry skepticism, an attitude of mind, seems to be shared by all Indians about the ‘meaning of meaning’, to borrow C. K Ogden and I. A. Richards immortal 1923 book title. In a culture so linguistically heterogeneous, no Indian can afford to take words for granted. India is routinely referenced as a ‘subcontinent’, but I have always thought of it as linguistically incontinent, spilling over with puns and unexpected language contretemps. For example, in a casual conversation during a flight, I once dared laud the robust quality of our modern Indian democracy. It had, I proclaimed, survived extraordinary travails since its formal birth in 1947 when India became an independent nation state. There could be few rivals when it came to such a triumphant achievement. The Uttar Pradesh politician beside me would, however, have none of this maudlin sentiment. He punctured my ballooning thought at once with a bilingual pun: hamare yahan, he said, ham to ise kahte hain ‘de more kursi’ (translation: ‘in our part of the world, though, we call it de-more-kursi or ‘give me that chair!’, where more is a local variant of the Hindi possessive mereko, and kursi or ‘chair’ is understood to be a metonym for political power and corrupt influence). From the accretion of small incidents of this sort in our collective memory banks, it can be asserted with some degree of confidence, I believe, that not even the most sacred of words, such as ‘democracy’, is immune to the multilingual forces of satire in India.

Our joint effort in this book offers reliable evidence of such manifold ironies of language throughout. It is also, I believe, why even the supposedly most straight-laced of Indian scholars generously supported the move to let words of the upstart variety (‘beauty parlour’ or ‘gym’) share a terrain with superior and time-tested concepts (‘maya’ or ‘shakti’) in this lexicon. If we were for a moment to think of language in terms of the pervasive Indian metaphor of caste, we may see in this book a concerted attempt to challenge accepted norms of verbal conduct, a sort of structural move towards the breaking-down of oppressive conceptual barriers. A related, optimistic surmise: if ever Indians sense a threat to their democratic freedoms, they know they can draw on oceans of language so deep and buoyant that the ship of swaraj will not sink. We might recall here that for Gandhi, Tagore, Ambedkar, Azad, Sarojini Naidu and so many others during the movement of independence from colonial rule, the concepts swaraj (self-rule, freedom) and shiksha (education) were inseparable. Yet, as Gandhi wrote wryly then, ‘The real difficulty is that people have no idea of what education truly is.’ Insofar as the keywords in this volume succeed in offering us some lessons in the exercise of freedoms of speech and the ethics of open conversations, they could constitute a contribution to a no-holds-barred Gandhian exploration of what ‘education truly is’.

Fourth, it cannot be sufficiently stressed that this conceptual lexicon is interdisciplinary in a manner quite hard to imagine in the ‘developed world’ where most disciplines support a critical mass of scholars. Despite its approximately one thousand universities, India does not yet possess all that many experts in any discipline and is unevenly ‘professionalized’. Yet, this is perhaps as much an advantage as a disadvantage, since it means that scholars are less likely to remain in disciplinary silos. Crosstalk across disciplines is the norm, not the exception in India. Although our volume is excitingly unique in that it brings together, probably for the first time, over two hundred voices speaking on subjects of concern to Indians, it is also emblematic. The panoply of contributions to this book includes insights from activists, anthropologists, economists, educationalists, engineers, environmentalists, doctors, historians, journalists, lawyers, linguists, literary theorists, novelists, performers, politicians, political theorists, philosophers, psychologists, scientists, sociologists, teachers, translators and still others who do not see their professional identities as paramount. It is hard to imagine such a collective effort emanating from conventional ‘Western academia’. I would even go so far as to claim that this is a cultural ‘style’ of intellectual cooperation that India would do well to retain, sustain and perhaps export.

Fifth, by evolving loose thematic categories that take cognisance of this exuberant will to converse across disciplinary boundaries, we have here for the first time a ‘keywords’ book written in English that is not regimented entirely according to the Roman alphabet – a difficulty that Williams also wrestled with, confessing that a strict alphabetic order failed to capture the ‘clustering’ between words that he wanted. Our volume has attempted to cut this Gordian knot via a sort of blended editorial solution. In it, our keywords are sorted into seven broad sections but retain ordering by alphabet within each. If one were being fanciful, one might suggest that if the ‘magic pentagram’ of culture, democracy, art, class and industry provided the structure for Williams’ book, ours, I realized once I’d intuitively come up with the general classification below, seemed to call up memories of T. E Lawrence’s marvellously asymmetric Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) written in an autobiographical (and far from un-empathetic) mode as he led his wild charges against Turks and Arabs and assorted ‘others’. Our categories, at a glance, are:

1. Classical Heritages: Databases Of Memory

2. Contemporary Aesthetic Modes: Reimaginings

3. Economic Mantras, Media and Technological Change

4. Intimacies: Culture and Material Culture

5. Emancipatory Imaginaries

6. Language and Self-Reflection

7. Politics and the Political

Unregimented categories such as these, it goes without saying, leave their flanks open to attack. For example, the choice of the word ‘lexicon’ as the container for our collective semantic speculations is in itself a risky one. Williams himself was infinitely more cautious. He humbly described the words he had assembled as a ‘vocabulary’, going to great lengths to distinguish his keywords volume from a dictionary and, in particular, the OED. Williams underscored the fact that, unlike the makers of the OED, he was interested in the historical and cultural connotations of words. He did not, however, consider ‘lexicon’ as part of his title for one moment. Yet to me, lexicon seemed an obvious choice since the word ‘lexis’ refers specifically to ‘the stock of words in a language’ – not to pronunciation or even to grammar and vocabulary but to words. Our asymmetrical sorting into ‘sections’ allows for a host of broad discourse associations. Ideas about inherited memories in the first chapter, shared cultural aesthetics in the second, notions of economic power and technological change in the third, the intimacies of everyday experience in the fourth, the nature of freedom in the fifth, the language of thought in the sixth and the structures of political power in the seventh hardly ever stay within their assigned boundaries. They spill incorrigibly spill over. For example, the keyword ‘dharma’ in our first chapter, is retooled as a political concept in the widely used collocation ‘coalition dharma’ which occurs as an entry in our seventh and final chapter; similarly, the words ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Hindutva’ jostle for conceptual space in the volume, demonstrating once again that subtleties of language are key to interpreting the ideological and philosophical currents of thought on the subcontinent.

The point has already been made that this lexicon selects unevenly and often ‘unfairly’ from the huge stock of interrelated words generated in the subcontinent. Likewise, we took a tactical decision to mainly invite scholars based in India because of our emphasis on ‘lived experience’. In the end, though, we left even this boundary fluid. There are contributors to this volume who are not Indian citizens and never have been. This is because we strongly believe that intellectual property rights belong, in the last resort, to a universal commons. An American scholar who studies Bhartṛhari or Kabir in Chicago has as much ownership of these texts as an Indian who pores Borges or Kierkegaard in Chennai. Several of our contributors, moreover, confidently live out lives in more than one continent, sometimes three or four. This constitutes an impressive range of habitations, but every contributor to the book shared with Peter and myself, I think, an implicit premise. Our project ruled out comprehensiveness; comprehension of divergent perspectives seemed to us a more sustainable goal. As a group, we shared only an intuitive, emotional, sometimes over-determined and stereotypic and sometimes under-determined and chaotic, engagement with the multidimensional space of the Indian bhāṣhās. Words performed their functions within this contentious cultural matrix. Ethically and psychologically, this meant that we had constantly to remind ourselves to take no one’s participation in our provisional collective for granted – from which it followed that every contributor ‘owned’ and still owns his or her entry even as it belongs to our keywords ‘commons’. In this work, we have implicitly attempted, I think, to prevent a tragedy of this great commons (Hardin, 1968) by working together in the full knowledge that we did not always hold with each others’ views. Not just asymmetry and disputation but frequent misunderstandings are therefore part of the book’s schema, which is not unsurprising given that it emerges from one of the world's most linguistically, ethnically, religiously, economically and socially diverse places. Moreover, 65 per cent of India’s population is less than thirty-five years of age. This generation is trying to imagine itself in the mirror of an urbanized India at a moment when the country emerges as the fifth largest world economy – but there’s no denying that this not always trustworthy looking glass is still, by and large, framed by a set of ornate, stereotypic images that celebrate a ‘village’ India immortalized by writers from Kipling to Raja Rao, not to mention the mainstream as well as regional Indian cinema. Such an uneasy lack of fit is apparent throughout the book. Thinking in terms of the histories of the future that Keywords for India might predict, it seems probable therefore that it is this e-savvy demographic, including large cohorts of sub-continental immigrants, who could make substantive decisions as to which of our keywords will last and which disappear into cloud-cuckoo land. Many of them have written for us in this volume and may down the road reconfigure the whole idea of what a ‘keyword’ is – or could be.

LEXIS: FORMS OF THE KEYWORD

What is a keyword? In a rough first reckoning, it might be characterized as encapsulated and enduring thought, part of an architecture of concepts that cultures tend stubbornly to uphold. At the same time, because culture building is, unavoidably, a work in progress, new keywords are constantly on offer, especially in times of technological transformation that have already impacted our ancient, slow-moving evolutionary modes of communication. Worth noting, though, is the fact that a naturalistic metaphor remains core to e-interpretations of the meta-term ‘keyword’.

Online, ‘keywords’ are routinely referred to as ‘seeds’ or potential kernels that generates rich series of ‘search queries’, fresh hypotheses, communicative interchanges and conceptual experimentation. Changing metaphors, but staying in the domain of nature still, the best keywords are believed to be those with ‘long tails’, such as that, let’s say, flaunted by the peacock, India’s national bird. Such a tail is memorable, marked, exquisite; its heavy weight keeps the peacock close to the ground, assists directional navigation – and yet does not prevent flight. Long-tail keywords, that is, are those where the basic keyword attracts more precise, longer phrases, so that word searches on the web become more accurate. Consider the Indian keyword azan that heads up Chapter 4 of the book. The entry for it is unpretentious, down-to-earth. Yet this word, as the entry shows, could attract a host of phrases such as ‘azan for Sunnis’ versus ‘azan for Shias’, ‘the significance of azan in Indonesia’, ‘the muezzin’s role in azan’, ‘the historical spread of azan’ or even ‘the use of loudspeakers in azan’. All these ‘long tail’ permutations indicate that azan is a highly productive keyword with global outreach.

Such an evolutionary dynamic that supports the creation of new tools for meaning-making is underscored in an essay on ‘linguistic diversity’ by Shaylih Muehlmann (2004). Intriguingly, for a technical piece by a cultural anthropologist interested in environmental conflict, Muelhmann invokes Raymond Williams’ work, arguing that:

Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (1976) provides a useful framework for understanding the complexity of meanings. Williams’ notion of a ‘keyword’ is one whose complexity is the result of … three effects: a keyword connect areas that are generally kept separate, masks radical semantic variation by its continuous verbal identity; and often expresses a contradiction (p. 140).

Ideally a keyword is an ‘Open Sesame’: it throws open a myriad windows and doors that might admittedly slam shut on occasion, yet can lead to sudden breathtaking insights and reveal unexpected cultural verandahs and courtyards, vistas and walkways. Games of historical hopscotch and geographical gilli danda are commonplace in any keyword space. Extrapolating from Muehlmann’s reading of Willams, a ‘keyword’, as I see it, links conceptual lexicons; it is a spur to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural cooperation; it reflects kinetic processes of continuity and change, structure and variation in language. In addition, it possesses a linguistic design robust and capacious enough to make room for differences of perspective and competing grammatical explanations. With this background in mind, the general format specified for entries in our volume appears below: with suitable modifications and stringent criticism once this book appears in print, it could just provide a general template for writing keyword entries on cultural topics, no matter which culture(s) claim our allegiance.

• A keyword entry should be between 300 (minimum) to 3000 (maximum) words. This flexibility is required because the word sarkar (government) may, for example, merit a much longer entry than the word samosa (a popular snack). Most entries should ideally include the following information:

• The origins of the word, its etymological past and its possible cognates in other languages

• Common current usage, that is, examples of the ordinary uses of the word in conversations, newspapers, jokes and so on, as well as possible anecdotal perspectives

• The general significance and association of the word, its importance in philosophical, literary, legal and/or psychological terms

• Statistical side-lights or other unusual ‘facts’ about the word, e.g. the entry on the word akshara might note that the phoneme ‘r’ is held to be the most ubiquitous across Indian syllabaries

• Contribution of the word to the cultural context to which it belongs, for example, ‘India’ and its possible future as part of a wider world lexicon of ideas

• A couple of references at the end of each entry

Needless to say, given the large number of participants in our project and the disinclination of Indians to ever march in step, the format outlined above was never followed to the letter and often not in spirit either! At the same time, as a collective, it gave a degree of coherence to our efforts to capture the ‘meme-tic’ quality of a keyword. In this connection, it is tempting to connect the notion of a ‘keyword’ to the idea of the ‘meme’, first adumbrated by Richard Dawkins (1976). Now popularized as the ‘internet meme’ by netizens across the globe, one way to think of a keyword is as a ‘viral’ meme.

Daniel Dennett (1995), explicating Dawkins, writes that the meme is a ‘new kind of replicator’. This is the “meme” which obeys the laws of natural selection. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene-pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves by leaping from brain to brain by a process which can, in a broad sense be called imitation.’ Ten examples of memes that Dennett cites are: arch, vendetta, wheel, clothes, alphabet, calendar, the Odyssey, chess, calculus and impressionism. As I have argued elsewhere (Nair, 2011, 2012, 2014), there can also be niche intra-memes that circulate mainly, if not exclusively, within cultures. As long-tail ‘peacocks’, such keywords possess cosmopolitan, bio-diverse, potential. Should the right historical circumstances come about, they can take flight across international barriers and enchant audiences across the world.

Perhaps such a time is now, with our selection of Indian keywords. Ten specifically Indian memes might include, for example, the Hindu/Arabic numeral system which includes the ‘zero’, long acknowledged as an ‘Indian invention’ in world mathematics; the idea of ahimsa or non-violent action; the Taj Mahal; the sari; hot pickles; the aesthetics of ‘rasa’ theory; the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata; the notion of reincarnation or avatara; yoga; Mughal miniature paintings and so on. In this first pass at a conceptual lexicon ‘for’ and ‘from’ India, we have begun by including some of these memes in our book.

Memes obviously possess great symbolic value. The difficulty lies, of course, in having to reassess the strength and endurance of key memes in an e-age when regular info-bombardments are the order of the day. All those over-simple indices of discrimination between true and fake knowledge that we had earlier used, such as resort to scholarly authority, seem to have become outmoded in such a world. It is now commonplace to remark that cell phones and other apparently non-threatening devices have humbled old-fashioned scholarship to the extent that the world’s information base can now, so to speak, be held in the palm of one’s proletarian hand. Infinities of holes have, as a direct consequence of such technological legerdemain, been drilled in the wall between academia and media, between cloistered expertise and popular understanding, between fact and opinion, and even between humans and machines, revealing to us that sticking one’s finger in the dyke to bravely save the citadels of knowledge is no longer an option – if ever it was. At its most useful, a keywords volume such as this should encourage the articulation of bold, yet untested sets of ideas around the geopolitics of ‘walls’ and other hitherto sacred barriers (see also Nair, 1997, 2002a). After all, encyclopaedic entries these days seem to require ‘updates’ almost before the last word is keyed in. Collaboration at such a time of instant communication is not an option; it is a prerequisite to the dissemination of resilient memes. This ‘Indian keywords’ book as a concept repository is potentially such a cross-cultural meme.

GENEALOGY: FORMS OF THE BOOK

Like its cousins, the dictionary, the thesaurus and the encyclopaedia, a lexicon is a very particular genre of book. A dictionary concentrates on as straightforward an explanation of meaning as possible, on grammar and on pronunciation; a thesaurus on synonymy and antonymy; an encyclopaedia, which often runs into multiple volumes, on whole fields of human knowledge. A lexicon, however, should not be confused with these lookalikes. Its focus is on semantics, usage and the interconnections between words and their corresponding concepts. Put simply, our project valorises ‘lexis’ or the power of words to organize our lives and give social and political meaning to our actions – intellectually, individually and institutionally. As Foucault (1969) pronounced long ago, even before Williams,

The book is not the simple object that one hold in one’s hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it. Its unity is variable and reflexive. (p. 23)

A ‘unity variable and reflexive’ is a fine description of the imaginative task that we have set ourselves in this volume. Once we recognize the inevitable dissonances between the great unifying questions such as ‘what is a science? what is an oeuvre? what is a theory? … what is a text?’ and so on (p. 5), Foucault appears to argue, it seems easier to surmount academic barriers and enter a ‘complex field of discourse’ (p. 23). Judgements as to whether a lexicon, as a species of book, ought to be comprehensive, definitive and authoritative versus focussed, suggestive, open-ended; if it should adopt a ‘nativist’ as opposed to a ‘cosmopolitan’ stance; if it must perforce commit itself to explaining, let’s say, the etymological connections or breaks between old, ‘pure’ Sanskrit-based lexical resources and the new ‘hybrid’ language pluralisms’, appear less crucial. We can relax into a conversational mode, where history is not a weighty burden but a sort of therapeutic digging, an archaeology that may be patchy and discontinuous but never fails to reveal a vast subterranean genealogy of inter-texts. It is this putative inter-textual genealogy to which I next turn.

Returning to Williams’ inspirational Keywords, we recognize that in the present era of communicative unrest, Williams’ mode of singular scholarship, tucked away in a Cambridge college, appears a nostalgic dream. Nor is irony absent – for, as scientists currently debate whether it is time that we moved on from the era of the Meghalayan Holocene to that of the incorrigibly inventive but environmentally polluting and self-destructive ‘Anthropocene’, they seem to be in favour of fixing the date for this apocalyptic change at the exact moment that Williams presciently identified in his keywords book: namely, 1945, the end of the Second World War. Some texts, it appears, are never exhausted; rather they carry forward into new millennia and global scenarios the inherited wisdom of their local traditions. By bringing together some concepts that inform the ‘cultural unconscious’ of the subcontinent we take a step in this book, as Williams did in post-war Europe, in the direction of forging critical tools that might be put to use in cultural and cognitive studies, broadly defined.

It has often been suggested that the postcolonial discourse of the humanities produced on the Indian subcontinent functioned largely with interpretative categories borrowed from a canonical western tradition with little appreciation of the underlying universalist assumptions that might problematize such endeavours. Alternatively, attempts to read ‘Western’ texts from the perspective of Sanskrit poetics have not necessarily resulted in more than a few idiosyncratic readings with the constant dangers of an ill-conceived and naive nativism lurking in the background. The present volume shows that the Sanskrit language, like its cousins Latin and Greek, is a rich source for the lexicalization of critical terms in different Indian languages. However, it also reveals that we can by no means assume that Sanskrit is a primary source. In other words, even ‘Sanskrit’ can be read as just another theoretical category, which can only be rescued from a splendid isolation if it engages with a host of other critical terms thrown up by the complex discourses of contemporary India. One of the liveliest debates with contributors to this book was in fact on how the word ‘Sanskrit’ was to be transcribed. Should the hypercorrect form saṃskṛt be used or was the vastly more familiar Romanized transliteration ‘Sanskrit’ to be preferred? In the end, we settled for a commonsensical ‘hybrid’ solution, once again. As Indians would put it, we ‘adjusted’. Our entry on the key pair of words ‘Prakriti/Sanskriti’ indicates upfront the ‘classic’ pronunciation for these words but, for the rest, we stick to ‘Sanskrit’. More generally, we have consciously refrained in Keywords for India from trying to force our keywords in into a cohesive ‘nationalist’ idiom, led by Sanskrit or any other hegemonic linguistic force.

A quick look at our tesselated Index will show that, as 'long-tail' verbal species, each of our keywords belongs both to a local context and a cosmopolitan assemblage. Each, we claim, contains within it possibilities of structural stability as well as conceptual variability; has the capacity to arouse uproarious Hanuman laughter while being as serious as a Buddha; possesses a strong aesthetic resonance in conjunction with intellectual and ethical clout; and, finally, has the potential to offer succour in times of crisis, to be a talisman, a meme, an enchiridion. Our lexicon, in short, makes up in ambition what it lacks in its necessary incompleteness. As it attempts to open up a gateway to the dauntingly large number of intellectual possibilities that the Indian subcontinent has to offer at the beginning of a fraught new millennium haunted by old memories, it is simultaneously in search of new, invigorating myths. This is the sort of inclusiveness of the imagination, the ache for wholeness that is a constant affective refrain in this book, as it once was in William’s courageous one-man show.

Williams’ Keywords belonged, as we know, within a tradition of literary commentary that included, for example, Matthew Arnold’s notion of cultural ‘touchstones’ adumbrated in his influential Culture and Anarchy (1869). Like Williams, Arnold held that linguistic, artistic and literary touchstones were especially important when a society was in historical turmoil – caught between two worlds, ‘one dead and the other powerless to be born’. Then, twelve years after Williams’ ground breaking work, E. D. Hirsch undertook a similar exercise with his American dictionary Cultural Literacy (1988), which can partly be read as a plea for a common cultural curriculum in US schools. Arnold’s and Hirsch’s works have, however, been criticized for their conservative appeal to highbrow culture, where the ‘canon’ to be taught and transmitted is already well established. What is singularly attractive about William’s venture, on the other hand, is that it was clearly prompted by a deep sense of cultural disorientation. It is this vivid consternation, this perplexity that also seems to me absent from the admirably fluent New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (2005) edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meghan Morris. In this volume, the editors add several new important keywords like ‘alternative’, diaspora’, ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘narrative’ to Williams’ original list of 130 words. This ‘revised vocabulary’ of about 140 entries, however, crucially eliminates some words that Williams included. One of the most striking of these omissions is the word ‘violence’ – the single, stark entry that Williams had entered under the letter ‘V’. In New Keywords, ‘violence’ is replaced by the words ‘virtual’ and ‘value’ – impressive words, without a doubt, but can they counterbalance the engrained and haunting notion of ‘violence’ in cultures? Perhaps the editors would argue, convincingly enough, that since they’d now included words like ‘holocaust’, which cannot be discussed without a proper understanding of what violence is, the word violence no longer had special status. Discussions like this, concerning losing the long genealogy of ‘violence’ to the historically specific ‘holocaust’, raise an issue that is pertinent to our present project and also make New Keywords a distinguished predecessor.

In our book, a hard lesson we learnt from earlier books, not to mention our everyday experience of being Indian citizens, was not to jettison words like ‘violence’ (Sen, 2006). This is just too pervasive a word to be left out of a sub-continental or even a world keywords lexicon. So, we chose to retain ‘violence’ as an epistemic concept in our book while also trying to draw attention to its simulacra. We have included, almost instinctively, the various cruel guises of violence in historically inherited, culturally particular words such as ‘sati’; in the entries on physical locations such as ‘slums’; in political settings when a dread acronym like AFSPA (the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) is strategically deployed; in cases where the old French-English word ‘atrocity’ acquires a new set of meanings in the Indian context; and not least, in relation to its moral other, the embedded idea of ‘ahimsa’ or non-violence in India’s composite culture. That is, in almost every section of our lexicon, the concept of violence runs like a binding thread, as do many other concepts such as ‘dharma’ in the ethical domain and ‘economics’ in the social. Ours is a book that begins with atma, the enduring Sanskrit word for ‘soul, and ends the English word ‘violence’ – in which simple, fated conjunction some might read the entire narrative of the subcontinent and, possibly, the human race.

Turning now to the far from non-violent colonial and postcolonial legacy of this volume, we owe much to the mammoth, truly astonishing Hobson-Job son: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive by Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell ( 1886 ) and to its grandchild, the Hanklyn-Janklin by Nigel Hankin, billed as a ‘rumble tumble guide to some of words customs and quiddities Indian and Indo-British’ (2003). Our volume appears, again, to be a hybrid in this respect, since it is as much in this line of quirky descent as it is in consonance with other more recent academic volumes such as The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the 21st Century by Vinay Lal and Ashis Nandy ( 2005 ); Keywords for Modern India by Craig Jeffrey and John Harriss ( 2014 ) and Key Concepts for Modern Indian Studies edited by Gita Dharampal-Frick, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach, Rachel Dwyer and Jahnavi Phalke ( 2015 ). Evidently, it is ‘keywords season’ with more such books appearing each year. Our text should ideally be read in conjunction with these other works, for it could be that the current search for genuine keywords has a common motive: they are a response to a sort of post-traumatic stress in civil societies the world over (see Nair, 2009). Keywords books remind us that we may need old-fashioned ‘talking cures’ ( Freud, 1930 ) to alleviate the widespread stress of being compelled to dress in full communicative regalia at all times and being under constant pressure to upgrade our images online everyday. This lexicon therefore invests in the idea of conceptual conversations that are not 'for' anyone or anything in a narrow sense but will stimulate fresh, perhaps directionless, enquiries, contributing to what K. C Bhattacharya has felicitously called ‘Swaraj in Ideas’ or independent thought. Our goal for this book is that it starts up the sorts of polyphonic conversations that we may want to live for but not necessarily die for.

CONVERSATIONS: FORMS OF THE UNPREDICTABLE

Speaking of conversation, polyphonic or otherwise, the fact is that one can ever quite know what’s coming next in a conversation, unless it is entirely staged. This feature gives every talk situation its stimulating interpretive ambiguity and interactive enchantment. It also could be the elementary appeal of our own lexicon, which presents a narrative in media res, the present being visibly remade back and forth in its pages. Taking a theoretical cue at this point from specific research by ethno-methodologists (see Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974; Nair, 2003) who have made it their business to study the structure of conversation in every minute detail, we find that the elaborate ‘turn-taking’ mechanisms characteristic of human colloquy have inbuilt resources for what is known as ‘repair’. That is, a participant in any conversation anywhere on the globe at any given moment, is evolutionarily primed to attend to the cues she get from others as well as from her own ‘feedback loops’ to constantly mend her utterances. As Alan Turing once brilliantly argued in his thought experiment comparing humans and machines in Mind (1950), an open-ended conversation may be the best measure we have of the fallible yet flexible computational power of human language.

Members of the human species seem instinctively recognize that incoming information in ordinary talk is processed under conditions of radical epistemic uncertainty. Ordinary, everyday conversations alert us, that is, to the pervasive, yet enjoyable and mutual presence of imperfection in our conceptual universes. Indians, in particular, are a nation of indefatigable talkers. We could argue that this makes us self-reflexively aware of the hidden snares of linguistic relativism (see Whorf, 1956), sensitising us to human infirmity in the form of conversations that are ever in need of ‘repair’. Inherent in any such exercise are the curative possibilities of crosstalk between all sorts of non-homogenous cultural formations from college undergraduates to ordinary citizens exploring new territories of the mind to scholars of South Asia seeking to refresh their scholarly memories. Most of all, we have in mind casual readers across the plurality of India’s twenty-nine ‘linguistic states’ who will dip into our book without inhibition or fear of being overawed. In the long run, our preliminary effort might even spur an interest in local ‘Lexicon Start ups’ across the regions of India, while Departments that teach South Asian Studies in the United States, UK, Europe and Asia might also decide to be part of our ‘joint venture’. However, even if such naive optimism is entirely unwarranted, we will still have begun an open-ended conversation. To my mind, this lexicon marks a transitive moment when the millennials of the selfie generation encounter their alien forebears where pre-history confronts post-truth. Cohabitations are not always legitimate in it: material culture and ancient culture are profiled side by side and consumerist appetites for glossy international brands confront a gnawing hunger for the imagined certitudes and scriptural benedictions of the past. Our lexicon offers a handy travellers’ guide into this treacherous but exciting terrain.

This hybrid text, as I’ve underlined, is both ‘for’ and ‘from’ India; if it is pedagogic, it is aimed mainly at self-education, in an India still trying to sort out the influence of its colonial past. An example: Indian society, across castes, classes and religious affiliations, acknowledges that it is obsessed with astrology in everyday life. Elaborate astrological charts or janmapatri are drawn up to indicate portents at birth and are matched for marriages. Even state sessions of the legislature may choose to wait for an appropriately ‘auspicious’ moment for new governments to be sworn in. Yet the odd thing is, colonial hangover or not, there are still no serious anthropological theses examining the phenomenon and few respectable academics will go anywhere near the subject! It was really hard to find any colleagues brave enough to discuss the topic, let alone do an entry on it. That a scholar did agree to do an entry on janmapatri in the end is a tribute to the collective trust we established during the making of this volume. But there will be others who ask why we were so foolish as to include ‘astrology’ in this postcolonial, purportedly progressive text. Containing within it these seeds of a potent instability, of fractious theoretical discord as well as ideological mockery, this book at its most basic is about the necessary fragilities of form: forms of community, lexis, grammar, genre, gender, translation and conversational polyphony, amongst others (see Nair, 1992, 2002b, 2003a,b, 2013).

A quasi-biographical note at this point: this Indian Keywords initiative was first given shape at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) during a fellowship I was awarded there in 2010. It was then followed by a workshop convened by my fellow editor, Peter deSouza, and attended by more than thirty scholars from all over India at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS) in 2013. At this seminar, experts from across India in a variety of disciplines commented animatedly – and not always approvingly – on my list of ‘keywords’. During our discussions, a number of useful methodological ‘how’ questions, on which I took rough notes, came up repeatedly. I list about a dozen below.

1. Recording the contemporary moment: how is this achieved through ‘keywords’?

2. According ‘respect’ to words: how does this happen?

3. How does one locate the universal in the local and the specific?

4. How have our ideas of ‘progress’ changed?

5. How do we record the changes in tradition/modernity over the last 150 years?

6. What is the place of memory and what is the relevance of classical lexicons today?

7. How can regional representation be meaningfully achieved in such project?

8. How to deploy humour and include taboo concepts in such a lexicon?

9. How might visual and auditory categories be captured in the lexicon? Will diacritical marks be included?

10. How does this work go about finding its audience?

11. How might the collaborative status of this work be highlighted?

12. How is the future relevance of this lexicon to be gauged?

It is because the grounds for debate round this book appeared so fertile that it seemed to us timely and appropriate to embark on the present keywords project – a twenty-first century biography, so to speak, of that imaginary yeti-like being, kindly dubbed the ‘speaking Indian’ in the annals of orientalism.

POSTSCRIPT: HOMO PHONETICUS INDICUS

‘Homo phoneticus indicus’ J. E. B Grey wrote in 1959, ‘was no mere cross-sectioned larynx under an empty cranium; on the contrary, the whole man, head, heart and belly, produced voice.’ Just six years later, in 1965, perhaps India’s most famous contemporary woman poet, Kamala Das declared, ‘I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar, I speak three languages, write in two, dream in one.’ Teasingly, Das maintained a decorous silence about the language she ‘dreamt in’ until, in one of her last interviews, she divulged that it was English! Such are the contradictions of the language scenario in India.

One way to characterize our volume is to view it as a record of the creative, often painful production of ‘voice’ in an India where no single identity is sufficient. In last two or three decades alone, ‘Indians’ have been depicted as lustful, corrupt and divisive (Khushwant Singh, writer, in We Indians, 1991); inclusive, tolerant, multilingual (Sunil Khilnani, historian, in The Idea of India,1997); entrepreneurial, energetic, materialistic, bureaucratic (Pavan Verma, diplomat, in Being Indian,2004); argumentative, intellectual, syncretic (Amartya Sen, economist, in The Argumentative Indian, 2005); undemocratic, indulging in family-oriented sexual fantasists (Sudhir Kakar, psychologist, in The Indian People, 2007); wise and enduring in the acceptance of their own traditions (Mark Tully, non-fiction writer and journalist, in Non Stop India, 2011); political, democratic and yet dynastic (Patrick French, historian, in India: A Portrait, 2011). All of which readings prompt us to unrealistically demand: Will the real Indian please stand up and be counted? In this book, we invite our unknown readers to encounter ‘the Indian within’ them by negotiating its winding labyrinths. For me, personally, the emancipatory possibilities that this ‘Indian’ maze of words have offered have been literally amazing. I end then with the personal that, as feminist theory has taught us, is always political. Kamala Das’s poetry has given us a glimpse into India’s non-trivial language politics. Here now, to complete the triad, is an oblique glance in the direction of two other women, makers of our ‘mother-tongues’: my mother and the anonymous woman on the cover of this book.

When my mother, Angela Soares, born into a Goan Christian family, married my Bengali father, she moved into a culturally unknown sphere, that of the Bengali bhadralok (a keyword in the present lexicon). A formal meeting was arranged between the new bride and the august male head of the household. Three staccato questions were then asked of her, which later became family lore. These were the following: ‘what is your staple diet?’ (my mother said she had a hysterical urge to answer ‘oats’), ‘do you wear a gown?’(my mother silently shook her heard at this) and ‘what is your native language?’ (this last question had my mother stumped; English was the language she knew best because of her historical placement but it was certainly not her native tongue). Diet, clothing, language, moral dilemmas, self-questioning: these basic intersections in the story of my mother’s life seem to me also to run through this joint work of ours, giving it at once the feel of experiential familiarity and cognitive distance.

Moving back more than a millennium to the woman from the eleventh century Khajuraho carving depicted on the cover of this book, she embodies like my mother, as I see it, those tantalizing ‘keyword’ qualities that I’ve tried to inadequately enumerate in this introduction. I first came across her many decades ago when I was in college and was instantly awestruck by her cool. Even then, I noticed that there was an unusual fit between her lower and upper half. Look closely. No ‘real’ woman could ever stand at that angle and yet her asymmetric posture spoke. It illuminated a realm beyond fact. It boldly spoke ‘the truth’ about cultural continuities and ruptures. In a society where women are still objectified as bodies on whom all sorts of unbearable tortures can be inflicted without pause and, at the same time, worshipped as pure, untouchable goddesses, here was a woman who calmly took her the buxom, unclad beauty for granted, absorbed in the task of writing and composition even as a child (her own?) tugs at her for attention. To me, this image represents the emacipation that the words in our book can, at their best, offer us all.

Rukmini Bhaya Nair

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