CHAPTER 4

AZAN (AZĀN)

Hilal Ahmed

Azan (adhan in Arabic) is an Islamic call delivered by a muezzin (person who recites the azan) from the mosque five times a day. The purpose of azan is to invite Muslims for the obligatory (farz) prayers, the salat (or what is also called namaz in North India).

There is no universally acceptable form of the recitation of azan. In fact, there is a debate between Sunnis and Shias on the very origin of the idea of azan itself. The Sunni sects argue that the azan – using human voice to call worshippers for prayer – marks the distinctiveness of Islam.

Shia scholars, however, do not subscribe to the Sunni argument. They suggest that the azan had a divine origin. They believe that Allah commanded the Prophet to tell his companions the words, sequence and mode of delivery of the azan. Shia schools also challenge the authenticity of the Sunni azan. It is claimed that a few words, such as ‘Prayer is better than sleep’ (recited only for the fajr prayer), were added by the second caliph, Umar. Therefore, these words are not divine.

Such Sunni–Shia differences aren’t the only unsettled issues with regard to the azan. There are a variety of azans among the Sunnis as well. For instance, the azan is recited very differently in North Indian Barelavi mosques. It begins with the durud (an Arabic dua [invocation] dedicated to the Prophet), followed by usual phrases of the Sunni azan and culminates with a na’t (a poem usually composed in Urdu to praise the Prophet), especially on the occasion of the weekly Friday prayer. However, this is not an acceptable practice in the Deobandi or the Ahl-i Hadis mosques.

The use of loudspeaker in mosques for azan is another contentious issue. Fatwas issued for and against the use of machines for Islamic prayers have had a long and interesting history in colonial and postcolonial India. It is believed that the loudspeakers were first introduced to mosques in the 1920s. These machines were used for two purposes – recitation of the five-time azan and the diffusion of the voice of the imam (lead worshipper) for a large congregation so that the worshippers might follow him directly, especially on the occasion of the Friday prayers and the annual Eid prayers. Azan, in this sense, was not a serious issue since using an efficient mode to call on the worshippers is religiously justifiable. However, the use of a machine for disseminating instructions during namaz was not so straightforward.

Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanwi, one of the leading Deobandi ulema, offered a way out. In his opinion, the loudspeaker actually helps in spreading the voice of the imam (in the case of namaz) and muezzin (in the case of azan) to the public and therefore does not distract the congregation at all. This fatwa paved the way for similar arguments in favour of the public address system of mosques. Despite this religious sanction, though, the debate on loudspeakers for azan has not died down. In fact, it has led to a new set of questions. What does one do when the azan is delivered from two or more mosques at the same time? What are the religiously permissible etiquettes, protocols and manners to recite the azan on the loudspeaker? How does one respond to a situation when the loud sound of the azan is opposed by non-Muslims? Different Islamic sects have responded to these questions in a variety of ways in postcolonial India. Despite this multiplicity, there is consensus that the recitation of azan – with or without a loudspeaker – should always create a soothing effect.

References

Khan, Naveeda. ‘The Acoustics of Muslim Striving: Loudspeaker Use in Ritual Practice in Pakistan’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 3 (2011): 571–94.

Metcalf, Barbara Daly. Bihisti Zewar: Perfecting Women (Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar: A Partial Translation with Commentary). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

BADH (BAD∙H)

Punam Tripathi

The Hindi word badh is akin to the English ‘flood’. It is a noun derived from verb badhna which is a modified form of the 0 word vardhan, meaning ‘increasing, growing and thriving’. The dictionary meaning of the term badh is ‘to overflow’. When a water body is unable to contain its water within its basin, it overflows and inundates the surrounding land area. This results in a flood, that is, an overflow of a large amount of water beyond its normal limits, especially over what is normally dry land. The synonyms for badh are jal pralay and sailab. In Sanskrit, the term plavan is used to refer to a flood. It is a feminine noun. Therefore, to denote an approaching flood, the phrases badh aa rahi hai and badh aa gayi are used.

References to badh can be found in many spiritual texts of Indian origin. The earliest records are found in Sanskrit texts. According to legend, Lord Vishnu’s first avatar was the matsya (fish), which rescued the first man, Manu, from a great flood. Across the varied belief systems of India, floods are the most common means employed by gods to destroy civilization as an act of divine retribution or out of jealousy. The oft-quoted legend of the sinking of Mahabalipuram (where the shore temple of Tamil Nadu is located today) is that the city was so magnificent that jealous gods unleashed a flood that swallowed the city up in a single day. It is also believed that the ancient city of Hastinapur was destroyed by a flood. In the Arthashastra, Kautilya has identified eight kinds of ‘providential visitations’ and includes the flood as one of those.

Today, floods are viewed as a destructive phenomenon that claims lives and livelihoods, damages crops, livestock and infrastructure. But, floods are not an ‘un-natural’ phenomenon in the northern plains of India. In fact, floods have contributed in the genesis and the fertility of the ‘Great Plains’, that is, the Indo-Gangetic plains. The Great Plain is a badh ka maidan (or floodplain) of the Indus and the Ganges–Brahmaputra river systems and encompasses an area of about 700,000 square kilometres. Floods are an annual phenomenon in these plains. The summer heat leads to melting of the glaciers and increases the volume of water in the river channels. The summer heat is also responsible for drawing monsoon winds, which are moisture-laden winds that move from the surrounding oceans towards the Indian landmass. Three-fourths of the annual rainfall in India occurs during the four monsoon months, that is, from June to September. Because of this concentrated rainfall and the melting snow, the rivers overflow their banks resulting in floods. The damage resulting from the encroachment of the floodplains for economic activities and various interrelated factors, such as deforestation in the watershed, sedimentation, change in land use, diversion of river courses and construction of dams, reservoirs and barrages.

Badh is a common phenomenon that occurs in all physiographic regions of India. Indeed, every Indian language has a distinct word for it. In Punjab, the land of five mighty rivers, where floods are very common, they are called hara. Another region characterized by annual floods is the lower Gangetic–Brahmaputra plains of Assam and West Bengal. In this part, floods are known as banna, while in neighbouring Odisha they are referred to as banya. If we come to the western part of the country, they are known as pur in Gujarati and Marathi. In the four Dravidian languages, namely Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil, floods are known as pravaahamu, huccuhole, veliyerram and vellam, respectively. Other related Hindi terms/phrases are badhgrast hona (under flood water), badh prabhavit (flood-affected areas), badh peedit (affected by floods), badh rahat (flood relief) and badh rahat kosh (flood relief fund).

References

Kapur, Anu. Vulnerable India: A Geographical Study of Disasters. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2010.

Williams, Monier. Sanskrit-English Dictionary (revised, 2008). Available at: http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/monier/ (accessed 12 August 2017).

BALTI AND LOTA (BĀLT∙Ī AND LOTA)

Shivani Chopra

Balti is a Hindi/Urdu word for ‘bucket’, and ‘lota’ is Hindi/Urdu term that could refer to a ‘mug or a small tumbler’, also referred to as mugga in some dialects. The lota is made of brass, steel, iron, aluminium or hindalium. Now a days, balti and lota are mostly manufactured in plastic because it is easier to maintain and cheaper to buy. The balti and lota are an essential part of bathroom use in Indian households across castes, classes and regions. Water would be stored in the balti and it would be poured out with the help of a lota. They are primarily used for bathing and washing clothes. Since bath tubs or showers are rarely found in middle-class homes, a large majority of the Indian population enjoys bathing with the balti and lota. Even today, many small-town hotels do not have a shower head in their bathrooms. They only provide a tap and a balti and lota for their guests to bathe. One is meant to fill the large balti with water and carefully use the lota to pour water over oneself. One may have to squat down or one can sit on a small raised platform or seat while bathing so that the water covers more surface area in one pour. This mode of bathing is also eco-friendly as one is constantly measuring out water, unlike in the shower, where one does not know how much water is spent. So, in regions where there is water scarcity, such as in India, bathing with the balti and lota is prudent.

The balti also represents a time gone by. The balti has replaced big clay or metal pots (matka) that were used for water storage in households. Even up till a few decades ago, tap water was still rare in many villages, and the main sources of water were rivers and wells or handpumps. In those cases, the balti arrived as a convenient alternative to the clunky and breakable matka, to effectively pull water out from the well or out of larger drums and tankers or at the base of a handpump. This is the reason why, for a very long time, brass or steel balti and lota were an essential part of the dowry that was given to the groom’s family, along with utensils and other utility items.

In Southern India, many restaurants use small baltis to store and serve rice, gravies and curries. In Northern India, sevaks (volunteer workers) in temples and gurudwaras serve food in a balti to every devotee or whosoever has come to the shrine. This is how food used to be, and still is, served for large gatherings, such as in weddings. This has changed, albeit slightly, with the advent of privatization and multinational companies. While serving food in the new set of Westernized restaurants, which is a popular choice among youngsters, is not with the balti and lota, we still see traces of the ubiquity of the bucket in the ‘bucket of fried chicken’ of KFC, and in South India where the current rage is the ‘bucket biryani’, where you can takeaway biryani for a small group of say eight people in a plastic bucket – and you can keep the bucket after polishing off the delicacy!

Reference

Balaram, Singanapalli. ‘Design Pedagogy in India: A Perspective.’ Design Issues 21, no. 4 (2005): 11–22.

BEHENJI (BAHANJĪ)

Ajoy Bose

The Hindi word behenji, which literally means ‘respected sister’, has three different connotations in the Hindi-majority states of North India.

The first and most common usage is to describe young ladies belonging to the middle and upper classes in a manner which is at once familial and yet respectful in tone. For instance, a shopkeeper addressing a woman client as ‘behenji’ expresses both regard and friendliness by adding the honourific ji to the familial behen (sister). This is the direct female equivalent to the term bhaisaheb (the honourific saheb added to the Hindi word for brother, bhai). Interestingly, in Bengali, the terms used to express the same are didi and dada, meaning elder sister and elder brother. In Hindi, since behen is usually qualified by badi (elder) and choti (younger), it became imperative to create the new word behenji as a key word in the Hindi lexicon that allowed men to address with a degree of familiarity, if not affection, and without any sexual connotation, women neither much younger than themselves to be called betis (daughters) nor much older to be addressed as mausiji (auntie) or dadiji (granny).

The term behenji was further amplified when it entered the Indian political lexicon after it became the title of the firebrand Dalit leader Mayawati from the early 1990s onwards. This appellation was popularized by her mentor Kanshi Ram, founder of the party she now heads, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Interestingly, Behenji for Mayawati has run parallel to similar terms combining endearment and respect for two other powerful women leaders in other parts of India in recent years. Didi is the popular title of Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal and chief of the Trinamool Congress, and Amma (meaning ‘mother’) is the title for the late J. Jayalalithaa, former chief minister of Tamil Nadu and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) supremo.

The third connotation of behenji denotes exactly the opposite of love and respect. It is a derisive term that the English-speaking upper-middle-class youngsters use for women who are considered sexually unattractive and not smart enough. The ‘behenji stereotype’ would be a girl who has her hair in oily pigtails, who only dresses in salwar kameez, is unable to speak fluent English and is timid in her interactions with the opposite sex. The term usually implies someone from a lower social – if not economic – status, from a conservative family background and possibly rural or small-town upbringing. While Behenji was a very common put down by the smart young set in the 1960s and 1970s for those who did not fit in with their social benchmarks, it has seen a decline in the past several years. This may well be because young girls, even from the lower social and economic strata, with small-town backgrounds, have started dressing quite sharply in Western clothing, if not in the original brands, and are also quite bold in their interactions and relationships with boys. Most importantly, the ability to speak fluent English in the correct accent, which was a clear distinction between the urban chic and the behenjis, is no longer considered a very important mark of social prestige.

References

Bose, Ajan. Behenji: The Rise and Fall of Mayawati. New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2012.

Sandhu, Priti. Professional Identity Constructions of Indian Women. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016.

BHADRALOK (BHADRALŌK)

Supriya Chaudhuri

The Bengali term bhadralok (from Sanskrit bhadra, ‘auspicious, blessed, good’, and loka, ‘the world’ but also ‘inhabitants of the earth, people’), as used from around the beginning of the nineteenth century and documented in early periodicals such as the Samāchār Darpan and the Samāchār Chandrikā, describes a respectable gentleman, usually belonging to one of the three upper castes of Hindu society, Brahmans, Vaidyas and Kayasthas. Over the course of the century, this meaning expanded to include the ideas of middle-class refinement or civility, education and a measure of prosperity. As a singular noun, bhadralok is initially restricted to a Bengali Hindu male with these caste and class attributes, the female of the same species being described, somewhat later in the nineteenth century, as bhadra-mahila (from Sanskrit mahila, ‘woman’). In Bengali, moreover, several other terms with a wider range of application are commonly used along with bhadralok, such as bhadra-samaj (polite or respectable society, the upper-caste Hindu educated class), bhadralok-gosthi (the social group formed by bhadralok families) or bhadra-sampraday (gentlefolk, the educated middle class). John Broomfield, therefore, describes the bhadralok at the end of the century, as ‘distinguished by many aspects of their behaviour – their deportment, their speech, their dress, their style of housing, their eating habits, their occupations, and their associations – and quite as fundamentally by their cultural values and their sense of social propriety’.

Thus, the bhadralok is a self-constituting, even aspirational category. Despite its initial, and persisting, religious and caste connotations, allows for some exceptions. Even low caste was not an absolute barrier to the acquisition of bhadralok status through education and economic empowerment, and right through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of other religious denominations in Bengal – Muslims and Christians in particular – formed bhadralok communities that intersect with those of the Hindus. While the term defines a social status – and most members belong to the professional middle class, espousing bourgeois ideals despite a largely non-bourgeois social base – bhadralok is not constituted as a class, and the label is more a marker of social pretension or ‘distinction’ in the Bourdieusian sense. Nevertheless, there are points of intersection with class, caste, interest group and status formation.

It remains to ask whether these intersect with the domain of gender. For some historians, such as Parimal Ghosh, the answer appears to be no. Yet, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the emergence of women in the public domain of professional and intellectual labour complicates the definition of bhadralok as a male category.

The decline of the bhadralok – a self-constituted elite seeking to instrumentalize education, professional skills and cultural investment to secure its social position – was inevitable, given the political and economic storms that shook twentieth-century Bengal. Ravaged by famine, Partition, migration, displacement, economic recession, Marxist class struggles and their populist counterparts, Bengali society entered a period of flux in the later twentieth century. The bhadralok, barely managing to survive the onslaught of workers’ movements and class wars, was finally undone by economic liberalization. Forced to surrender both the cultural field and the moral high ground, the figure of the bhadralok may appear today as no more than a phantom, a historical delusion.

References

Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi. ‘Notes on the Role of the Intelligentsia in Colonial Society: India from Mid-Nineteenth Century’. Studies in History 1, no. 1 (January–June 1979): 89–104.

Broomfield, John H. Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth Century Bengal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

Ghosh, Parimal. What Happened to the Bhadralok, 12–42. Delhi: Primus, 2016.

BHAILO/BHAIYA/GHANTI/PAKLO

Rochelle Pinto

Bhailo is a Konkani term that literally translates as ‘outsider’. The term is used in recent times to ‘other’ those who are not part of the mainland Goan identity. In a literal sense, the term is comprehensive as it does not denote any particular race or ethnicity or class. An entry in Fr Angelus Francis Xavier Maffei’s An English-Konkani Dictionary of 1883 translates the words ‘outer’, ‘exterior’, ‘exotic’ and ‘foreigner’ as bhailo. As ethnocentric anxiety shifts its focus, however, bhailo may be assumed to carry its most pejorative charge when referring to working-class migrants to Goa.

The three terms bhaiya, ghanti and paklo reference historical changes in the articulation of difference in colloquial Konkani as spoken in Goa. Of these, paklo may be the oldest, deriving from the time of Portuguese colonial rule between 1510 and 1961. Unlike the term aṅgrēja, which has quite a specific reference to the English, paklo originally referred to a generic ‘foreigner’, denoting whiteness rather than a specific nationality. It could be considered an emic usage along with mestis, a Konkani rendition of mestiço (mixed-race Goans), and cafre, denoting the black race. Both mestis and cafre are derivatives from other languages, but paklo is not.

Bhaiya connotes the labouring or small trading class that has migrated from the north of the country, without specifying a particular state or ethnicity, with the assumption that the migrant is Hindi-speaking. Ghanti refers to communities from the hill ranges, the Western Ghats that divide Goa from the Deccan. In the early twentieth century, lineage and family links persisted between the plains and the ghats, evident when families claimed their share in cultivable land in the village councils which were called gaunkaria in Marathi and Konkani.

The surge in land prices and neoliberal policies from the 1990s created an environment conducive to the unrestricted conversion and sale of land and a sharp increase in the number of migrants into Goa as property owners and labourers. The word bhailo in current use carries a pejorative connotation and the perception of threat to ethnicity, cultural continuity and the immediate physical neighbourhood. Likewise, with increased urbanity, the associations between urban life and civilization have intensified to the point where to call someone a ghanti is not only an insult denoting a lack of social grace but also an insult that approximates to caste insult, because the assumption is that ghantis are outside of settled society.

Given the preoccupation with caste-based purity, one might think that mestis and paklo, both denoting race, would also acquire pejorative overtones. In fact, some interpretations of these terms suggest that they express indigenous and/or casteist contempt for the other or humorous innuendo hinting at racial miscegenation. However, race, religion and caste simultaneously defined hierarchy and identity in Goa, and the interpenetration of their usages suggests that the term paklo after political independence is often used with no negative connotation, as it denotes fairness akin to that of a foreigner today, an attribute that hierarchises identity in former colonies. The term mestis may denote an actual racial group, but paklo, when not specifically used to indicate a foreigner, indicates lightness of skin colour.

The region was considered as marginal to the political formation of India and has been positioned within the national economy as a space for either stigmatized hedonistic excess or extraction of natural resources, providing a context within which such terms increasingly denote a polarized and xenophobic identity in Goa. Neoliberalism has facilitated a culturally and homogenizing populist discourse that favours singular aspirational identities and has increased hostility towards the bhailo, the bhaiya and the ghanti.

References

Goswami, Rahul. ‘An Accidental Bhailo’. In Behind the News: Voices from Goa’s Press, edited by Frederick Noronha , 148–156. Saligao, Goa: Goa, 1556, 2008.

Wardhaugh, Julia. ‘Beyond the Workhouse: Regulating Vagrancy in Goa, India’. Asian Journal of Criminology 7, no. 3 (1 September 2012): 205–23.

BHUKAMP (BHŪKAMP)

Punam Tripathi

The Hindi word bhukamp translates to ‘earthquake’ in English. Bhukamp is a tatsam word, that is, it has come into Hindi without any modification from Sanskrit. It is a blend of the words bhu and kampa. Bhu is a Sanskrit root word that has different meanings depending on how it is used. As a verb, bhu is used to indicate an action, a state or an occurrence. It also means ‘to exist’, ‘to dwell’ or ‘to be’. It also refers to ‘the place of being, space or world’ and is therefore a synonym for earth (bhumi). As a prefix, bhu in bhukamp refers to the ‘earth’ while the word kampa has been derived from the Sanskrit kampana, which means to ‘tremble’. Thus, the word bhukamp, means ‘the tremble of the earth’, as can be experienced during an earthquake. Synonyms of the word in Hindi are prithvikampa, bhuchal and bhudol: prithvi is a synonym of bhumi; the noun chal is derived from the verb chalna, which means ‘to walk or move’; the verb dol means ‘to sway’. In common parlance, however, bhukamp is also known as jaljala.

The word for earthquake is similar in all Indo-Āryan languages, differing only in its pronunciation, as these have all been derived from the same Sanskrit roots. In Marathi, for instance, it remains the same, that is, bhukamp, bhuchal, bhudol and sometimes it is also referred to as dharanikampa which is similar to Gujarati’s dharatikampya. Another word popular for earthquakes in Gujarati is bhumikampya. In Bengali, the word used is bhumikampa. In Assamese, it is bhuinkampa, while in Nepalese it is bhuinchalo. In Punjabi, the word is bhuchal. Out of the four Dravidian languages, in three the word for earthquake seems to have been borrowed from Sanskrit: in Kannada, it remains as bhukampa; in Telugu, it becomes bhukampamu; in Malayalam, it is bhuchalam. In Tamil, the word used is nilatukkam. Thus, bhukamp is the most common word used for earthquake across India.

The earliest reference to bhukamps can be in found in Varaha Mihira’s Brihat Samhita dated to the fifth or sixth century CE. The Brihat Samhita has postulated several causes for the bhukamp. One of the causes is that once upon a time the Himalayas could fly and they fell frequently on the earth causing earthquakes. At the request of the earth, Lord Indra (the lord of thunder) clipped the wings of the mountains so that the earth became stable but also added that the four elements, namely, wind, fire, varuna (water) and indra (thunder), would shake the earth from time to time from four directions in order to reveal the good and bad effects of actions to the world. Another explanation is that the earth was saved from sinking by Varaha, the boar avatar of Vishnu, and rests on its tusks. The earth quakes when Varaha is restless and needs to relieve his fatigue. Since powerful earthquakes result in damage and destruction, they have also been linked to the demonic forces.

References

Kapur, Anu. On Disasters in India. New Delhi: Foundation Books and Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Williams, Monier. Sanskrit-English Dictionary (revised, 2008). Available at: http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/monier/ (accessed 12 August 2017).

CHAPPAL (CAPPAL)

Gopika Nath

The Hindi word cappal, meaning ‘footwear or slipper’, has been in use in India since the third century CE. Related terms in Hindi and other Indian languages include panhi in Hindi, chappalan in Punjabi, chappien in Kashmiri, choutti in Bengali, saandala or chappala in Marathi, champalu in Sindhi, champal or pagarkha or panai in Gujarati, pagarki in Rajasthani, chaippulu and seruppu in Tamil, cheruppu in Malayalam and syaaṇḍal in Kannada. Most of these words have been derived from the Sanskrit roots pa or pada (foot), charan (foot/to walk) and upanat or upanah (to tie/bind). Combinations such as charan-panhi or charana-upanah to chapanhi or chapana may have led to the term now in use ‘cappal’. In fact, the word padaka is used in the Rig Veda to denote ‘a small foot’. In later texts, such as the Mahābhārata, this term becomes paduka to denote ‘a sandal or shoe or slipper’. The paduka, also called khadava or khadaun, was possibly the oldest footwear, whose earliest surviving example, excavated from East Bengal, is dated circa 200 CE. The attitude of reverence for the foot and the footprint followed with the footwear, where Rama’s paduka served as an object of veneration for his subjects until he returned from exile in the Rāmāyaṇa.

The religious and cultural significance of feet in Indian traditions is unique – both sacred and humble, it is paradoxically the most polluting part of the body. From within these concepts is the worship of feet and footprints, whether on the ground or on a fabric, and the romantic sentiment of cherishing the touch of the beloved’s foot, with particular attention given to the adornment of this icon of sensual desire. The wayward seek forgiveness by prostrating at the feet of the wronged, as a mark of the surrender of their ego. Showing the sole of the shoe or hitting someone with it is an ancient insult, and placing your shoe on your head signified ultimate humility and submission. In Rajatarangani (dated to the twelfth century CE), when cutting his finger didn’t appease his sovereigns’ wrath, Sanjapala tied a turban around his neck, placed a shoe on his head and ate humble pie. During the national freedom struggle, Gandhi had also urged Indians to make their own chappals, alongside promoting khadi, as a symbol of self-reliance.

Sculptures of Buddha from the Gandhara region depict footwear of the simplest kind with a sole at the base, a strap passing across the instep and another connecting this strap to the tip of the sole, at the gap between the big and second toe. From these depictions, the precursor to the modern cappal may have originated. Today, there are many different kinds of chappals in India. They range from the kohlapuris of Maharashtra to the blue- and white-rubber flip-flops or hawai chappals of Bata and Shantiniketan cappal of West Bengal. The cloth or grass pula cappal of the Paharis and the Osho cappal of Pune in Maharashtra. Right up to the fancy cappal, replete with heels and studded stones, worn by fashionistas, matching the mood of their dress or the occasion.

If one wonders why it is so important to discuss chappals, we need only turn to Anjali Joseph’s novel The Living, which paints a poignant picture of the kohlapuri through the eyes of a cappal maker, whose family has made chappals for generations but whose son is not interested in the trade anymore. Musing while varnishing and checking the chappals his family makes, the cappal maker’s son questions why he cares for something a man will put ‘between his feet and the ground’. He soon recognizes that the cappal is a constant companion, more so than a spouse. He also laments that ‘when they’re gone, it will be as though they had never been there’ but advises us that these old chappals that we have lived-in have to stay, for new ones inevitably harass the skin.

References

Jain-Neubauer, Jutta. Feet and Footwear in Indian Culture. Ahmedabad: The Bata Shoe Museum Foundation and Mapin Publishing, 2000.

‘Sole Stories: The History of Footwear in India’, Cox & Kings, blog post. Available at: https://blog.coxandkings.com/sole-stories-the-history-of-footwear-in-india/ (accessed December 2018).

CHOOLAH (CŪL’HĀ)

Shahzad Gani and Pallavi Pant

The Hindi word choolah (stove) refers to an apparatus that is used for cooking or heating. The word ‘choolah’ is similar to the Sanskrit word chuli and probably has a Dravidian origin. It generally refers to the traditional Indian cooking stove, which is heated by burning solid fuels such as wood (including twigs, sticks and logs), charcoal, animal dung briquettes or agricultural/crop waste. While its usage is more prominent in rural parts of India, it is also widely used in cities, typically in low-income households. Even modern stoves, which use cooking gas/electricity, are sometimes referred to as choolah in North India.

Prevalent societal norms across India, with a few exceptions, dictate that women take responsibility for managing the household, including cooking and procuring fuel (biomass) for the chulhas. This is best exemplified by the common Hindi phrase that is often used in daily life and can also be heard on TV shows and in movies: choolah chowka sambhalna aurat ka kaam hai (‘It is a woman’s responsibility to take care of the house’). Women often leave the safety of their communities in search of fuel and are also at high risk from exposure to a variety of harmful air pollutants while cooking with the conventional choolah. By virtue of spending most of their time with their mothers and other female relatives, infants and young children are also exposed to this risk from an early age. Clean alternatives to solid fuel-burning chulhas can drastically reduce fuel consumption and exposure to harmful emissions.

References

Cooking Clean Alliance. Website. Available at: http://cleancookstoves.org (accessed December 2018).

Subramanian, Meera. ‘Global Health: Deadly Dinners’. Nature, 28 May 2014. Available at: https://www.nature.com/news/global-health-deadly-dinners-1.15286 (accessed December 2018).

COOLIE

Harish Trivedi

Coolie is a word of uncertain origin and may have derived from a Tamil word through the Portuguese. The word signifies an indigent person employed to perform strenuous physical labour for low wages. The term came into wide use in English after 1833 when slavery was abolished. To replace liberated black workers on sugar plantations, etc., poor peasants mainly from India and China were recruited by British imperial authorities and shipped halfway across the world, mainly to the Caribbean, various parts of Africa, Mauritius and Fiji. Coerced into signing (or often thumb-printing) an agreement for indenture, usually for a period of five years, such labourers came to be called coolies by their white employers. They called themselves girmitiya, in a Bhojpuri adaptation of the ‘agreement’ they were bound by. This pan-imperial colonial practice, which Hugh Tinker has aptly labelled ‘a new system of slavery’, was strongly opposed by Indian nationalist leaders led by M. K. Gandhi, who saw it practised all around him during the early years of his career in South Africa. Most descendants of the original girmitiyas have stayed on and now form a substantial proportion of the population in many of the former British colonies named above, contributing vitally to the hybrid culture there and, after Independence, vying with native or black-immigrant populations to fill high positions, including those of the offices of the president or prime minister.

In India, the term is used for plantation workers and other labourers in the hills and, more ubiquitously, for porters on railways platforms. In Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Coolie (1937), the term is somewhat arbitrarily stretched as the 14-year-old Munoo is forced to work successively as a domestic servant, a market porter of old ladies’ shopping bags, as a millworker in Bombay where Communist union leaders seek to politicize him and finally as a rickshaw puller for a British memsahib in Shimla who even takes a passing erotic fancy to him before he dies of consumption at the age of 15. A more iconic Indian portrayal of the term is to be found in the Hindi film Coolie (1983), in which Amitabh Bachchan plays a railway porter. The theme song of the film, Sari duniya ka bojh ham uthatehain (‘We carry the burden of the whole world’), features him with a group of coolies in red kurtas who declare in the song that they earn their bread the hard way, have only one holiday in the year on the day of Eid (as all the coolies here happen to be Muslims, oddly enough), that they are exploited and may not have much to eat but try and cope with the help of a drink of water and paan-beedi and that while passengers come and go they remain forever on the platform which is their home.

Before wheels were reinvented, so to say, and attached to travellers’ bags a couple of decades ago, it was considered not only impractical but also infra dig for a self-respecting passenger to carry her or his own bags. Older Hindi films abound in scenes where the hero at the end of a rail journey stands in the doorway of his carriage and even before alighting shouts ‘Coolie! Coolie!’ Notions of class and (in)dignity are inseparably attached to the term ‘coolie’, which often carried a racist slur as well. The use of the word has recently been banned in several former colonies, including South Africa and parts of the Caribbean, where the practice was dominant; the preferred term now is ‘indenture’. In an ironic evocation of this complex history, call-centre workers in India who work at a fraction of the wages payable to white American workers whom they replace were called ‘cyber-coolies’, as a reminder that similar forms of neocolonial exploitation continue to exist.

References

Kumar, Ashutosh. Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Trivedi, Harish. ‘Cyber-Coolies, Hindi and English’, Letters. TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, 23 June 2003: 17.

CRICKET

Boria Majumdar

‘Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered in England.’ These poetic words were penned by Ashis Nandy in his seminal Tao of Cricket (1989). Given the financial muscle of Indian cricket in 2017, Nandy, it must be said, had prophetic foresight. It was in the early nineteenth century that the sport in its modern form was appropriated by the ruling English gentry and turned into a tool to bind the contours of the British empire together. It was brought to India around the mid-nineteenth century by men of the empire, and the first natives who played the game were the sepoys residing in cantonment towns across Northern and Central India.

It is an interesting question as to why the sepoys and then some Indian princes and middle-class patrons readily appropriated the British sport of cricket. From a pragmatic point of view, it may be surmised that they saw in them a worthwhile cultural tool to reassert their hurt self-esteem and injured masculinity. On the other, cricket had the potential to be assimilated as means of crossing swords with the British imperialist. At a time when the ills of an unequal political and economic structure threw up contradictions, which quite naturally had a deep impact on the social psyche of Indians, sport might have provided a level-playing field. Failing to attain power and prestige within the army or in the society, the sepoy and later the middle-class Indian nationalist searched for apolitical ways to counter British humiliation.

Indian cricket came of age when the erstwhile British colony played its first recognized test match at Lord’s on 25 June 1932 under the captaincy of C. K. Nayudu. And though it took India twenty years to win its first test match against England (at Chennai in 1952), the game was already well grounded in the country at the time of Independence in 1947.

Cricket as an industry, however, owes its origins to India’s World Cup triumph in England in 1983. Things changed overnight. A sport turned into a national obsession and corporate India was forced to take notice. Soon enough, the rights to host the World Cup moved to the subcontinent in 1987 and with liberalization and the opening up of the Indian economy in 1991, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) managed to sell telecast rights of Indian cricket for a whopping 650,000 dollars.

India’s position as the new nerve centre of world cricket has been strengthened in recent times, thanks to the impact of the IPL on world cricket, modelled on Major League Baseball and the National Football League.

The BCCI, which is entrusted with the task of governing cricket in India, is made up of multiple state associations. It governs and works on assignments for the Indian national cricket teams for both men and women and also for age group teams at the U-19 level. It also runs the IPL. Finally, it is entrusted with the task of setting up coaching clinics across the country and has established the National Cricket Academy in Bangalore and zonal cricket academies in Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. The adoption of a conscious talent-nurturing policy by the BCCI ensured that economically underprivileged youngsters no longer had to worry about training facilities. A look at the Indian national team and the impact is evident. More than half the team is from small towns, making Indian cricket a meritocracy of sorts.

References

Nair, Nisha ‘Cricket Obsession in India: Through the Lens of Identity Theory’. Sport in Society 14, no. 5 (2011): 569–580.

Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. Oxford University Press, 2000.

CYCLE-WALA (SĀ’IKILWĀLĀ)

Jean Drèze

The term Cycle-wala (or Cycle-wali, as the case may be) is being used here in the twin sense of ‘a person who cycles’ and of the ‘cycle mechanic’. Both seem to me to be endangered species in India, or at least in urban India, so let me try to contribute to their posterity.

I came to India forty years ago, and I swear not a single screw or other part of the ordinary Indian bicycle (say, your good old Hero Jet) is different today from what it was in 1979. The odd ‘mountain bike’ has appeared in the meantime, but the less said about it the better – it does not even have gears, in most cases. The ordinary bicycle, of course, has no gears either. Nor does it have lights, a striking fact if you think how dangerous it is to cycle at night without lights and if you compare the cost of a bicycle light with that of a road accident.

You might think that the Indian bicycle is the same as before because it has achieved perfection. This idea, however, is hard to square with the absence of gears or lights. And it is not just that. Over the same period, bicycles in other countries (from Europe to China), which already had lights and gears of course, have seen a series of technological innovations – electric bicycles, foldable bicycles, trottinettes and, yes, real mountain bikes. If this is possible elsewhere, why not in India?

The same observations apply to the Cycle-wala, as a mechanic. His dilapidated toolbox, like the bicycle itself, is exactly the same as forty years ago. It consists mainly of a few spanners, a bunch of ball bearings, some basic spare parts and of course a heavy all-purpose hammer. Oh, and I forget the museum piece, the heavy-metal bicycle pump with bits of tyre strung around it at the bottom. I doubt that there are many places left in the world where it often takes two persons to inflate a bicycle tyre, one to hold the nuzzle (because it has no screw) and one to pump.

The Cycle-wala is just one example of a class of occupations that might be called ‘stagnant jobs’. There are many other examples, from the chaiwala (tea-stall manager) to the street cobbler. Like the Cycle-wala, they are doing the same thing with the same tools or utensils as forty years ago, at least in the cities I am familiar with, mainly in North India.

I am trying to draw attention to the striking stagnation of the technology of everyday life in India or rather the everyday life of the poor. Not only do cycles still lack gears, but kitchens still have no chimneys, bathrooms no pegs, mosquito nets no stands and wall switches no colour scheme to distinguish fans from lights. And the failure rate of simple items like taps, latches, switches, zips, plugs, not to speak of toilets, is depressing. All this contrasts with the amazing speed of improvement, year after year, of the gadgets and gizmos used by the privileged classes – motorbikes, smartphones, drones, air conditioners and, of course, the world-class crazy-expensive trophy bicycle with more gears than you can count but which nobody actually rides.

I may be wrong, but I suspect that it has something to do with the caste system and its obsession with hierarchy and the division of labour. One principle of the caste system, for instance, is that the thinkers and doers are different people. The cycle mechanic is not expected to be a kind of barefoot engineer who also designs better tools. As for the accredited engineer, it is below her or his dignity to work on the design of a better bicycle pump – a rocket or laptop is far more suitable.

None of this, of course, is immutable. What I have said of bicycles would have applied just a few years ago to cycle rickshaws. But some people did apply their mind to the design of better rickshaws, and the new ones are far more driver-friendly than the old ones. Even the improved cycle rickshaw, however, does not have gears. And I was amazed, one day, when I asked a rickshawwala how he felt about gears and discovered that he had no idea what bicycle gears were. So, there is still much to do all around.

Mind you, the Hero Jet is really cool – I wouldn’t want a different bicycle.

Reference

Sainath, P. ‘Where There is a Wheel’. In Everyone Loves a Good Drought. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2000.

DANDA/LATHI/LATHI CHARGE (ḌAN∙D∙Ā/LĀT∙HĪ/LĀT∙HĪ CHARGE)

Manindra Thakur

Though the Hindi word ḍaṇḍa has multiple meanings in Indian intellectual traditions and in the wider social milieu, essentially it stands for the coercive power of the state. For instance, concepts like ḍaṇḍa samhita (penal code) or ḍaṇḍa vidhan (rules for punishment) mean the collection of rules or laws of the state for taking punitive action. Dandadhikari is the one who has the authority to punish. Ḍaṇḍa is also one of four classic strategies of confronting one’s enemy and settling disputes. The other three are sama (conciliation by praising, mutual benefit, using personal or social relations), dana (placating with gift) and bhed (using secrets, creating mutual suspicion). In this sense of the term, ḍaṇḍa stands for punishing by plundering or destroying the enemy’s property, harassing or killing the enemy.

In this tradition, the science of law enforcement is called dandaniti, and it is one of the four areas of knowledge. The other three are anwikshki (logic or philosophy), trayee (Vedas) and varta (Arthashastra). Dandaniti discusses the principles of just punishment. It is believed that unjust punishment would destroy the legitimacy of the punishing authority and that of the state or the king; therefore, it should be based on sound principles and should be adequate. Dandaniti constitutes a significant part of texts like the Manusmriti, the Mahābhārata and Kautilya’s Arthashastra.

In its material form ‘ḍaṇḍa’ stands for a stick, representing the state authority or hierarchy of the social authority. Officers of the state responsible for adjudication and announcing punishment used to carry such a ḍaṇḍa, symbolizing their state-sanctioned authority. In the social hierarchy in ancient India, the Brahmin, the intellectual class, was supposed to carry a ḍaṇḍa as tall as the person’s height; the Kshatriya, the warrior class, of the height of their forehead; and the Vaishyas, the trading class, was supposed to have it equivalent to the height of their nose. Also, the suggestion was made that the Brahmins should keep a ḍaṇḍa made of Palas wood or Bael wood, whereas the other two castes should use a Ḍaṇḍa made of Peepal or Pilu wood. It is interesting to note that all three plants are known for their medicinal values in Indian culture.

The more colloquial equivalent of ḍaṇḍa is lathi, a stick made out of bamboo, that the Indian police carries. In the hands of the policeman, lathi symbolizes state power in a cruder sense, as it is used to demonstrate the force of the state. During the early colonial period, the British government provided lathi to policemen to control the crowd and with this began the practice of ‘lathicharge’. The lathi also symbolizes power in a more general sense in the Indian villages, where most members of the agrarian classes carry it with themselves to public meetings or otherwise. Though it has multiple uses, such as to ensure protection from animals or reptiles and to carry something heavy by using the shoulder as a fulcrum, the central use of a lathi is to demonstrate force. During the zamindari system, people trained in using the lathi as a weapon were quite valued and they were appointed as security guards by the zamindars (feudal lords). During this period, demonstration of the skill of using lathi for defence and attack also became a kind of sport in Indian villages. There are several proverbs using the word lathi. For instance, jiski lathi, uski bhains (‘The one who has more power in his lathi gets the buffalo’, meaning, the powerful control the resources). Similarly, when someone says that he is oiling the lathi, it means that he is preparing for a fight.

References

Bhaduri, N. ‘Dandaniti: Prachin Bharatiya Rajshasira’. Sahitya Sangsad, Kolkata (1998).

Shah, K. J. ‘Of Artha and the Arthaśāstra’. Contributions to Indian Sociology 15, no. 1–2 (1981): 55–73.

FEMALE FOETICIDE

Ravinder Kaur

Foeticide is the deliberate act of causing the death of a foetus. The destruction of the foetus – or aborting the foetus – has a long history, both legal and illegal. The commonly used word in Hindi for foeticide is bhrunhatya. Stree or kanya bhrunhatya refers to the murder of a female foetus, the word stree referring to ‘woman’ and kanya referring to a ‘young female child’. It is interesting that although the sex ratio at birth is much worse in China than in India, the term female foeticide has clung much more to descriptions of the phenomenon of sex-selective abortion of females in India.

The term ‘female foeticide’ gained currency in India in the mid- to late 1980s. It was used to refer to the wanton destruction of female foetuses that was made possible by new procedures and technologies, such as amniocentesis and ultrasonography. With the arrival of ultrasound machines in this decade, non-invasive procedures of sex determination (jaanch karvana) became easy. If the foetus was detected to be female, it would be aborted (girva dena; literally, to let drop the child). This practice intensified both latent and overt son preference, especially in the north-west parts of the country, leading to a steep decline in the child sex ratio (the number of girls relative to a thousand boys). This was because female foeticide was seen to be more acceptable as it was facilitated by the use of technology and was therefore a modern way of shaping the sex composition of the family. It did not carry the shame or guilt associated with female infanticide; rather, it was seen as a scientific and rational way of planning the family.

Amartya Sen made the cause of ‘missing women’ popular through his 1990 New York Review of Books article, but it was somewhat later that the focus shifted to ‘missing daughters’, the phenomenon popularly captured by the Indian use of the term ‘female foeticide’. Writers in the media have evoked images of the holocaust by terming the sex-selective abortion of female foetuses as a ‘gendercide’. The Economist used the term in its cover story on 4 March 2010, calling the large-scale abortion of female foetuses in India and China ‘the war on baby girls’. With a yet to live down reputation of satī, dowry and female infanticide, this became the new scourge India became known for. Images of female foetuses being dumped in dustbins and discarded carelessly began to shock the world.

Feminists, however, were upset with the use of phrases such as female foeticide and gendercide as these terms collapsed the distinction between legal and illegal abortion, arguing that the use of the word foeticide brought to mind images of murder, making people fall into the trap of thinking of abortion as child murder. They therefore, popularized the use of the longer phrase ‘sex-selective abortion’ or ‘female sex-selective abortion’ to clarify their stand that while they supported women’s right to abort, they did not support selective abortion of female foetuses. The courts faced a thorny issue – if a woman could exercise the right to abort a foetus, why could she not, by the same logic, choose to abort a female foetus? Contextualizing the large-scale abortion of female foetuses that has led to a sharp skew in the child sex ratio, the courts pronounced that selective abortion of female children could not be allowed. Campaigns by women’s rights activists eventually led to the passing of a law in 1996 prohibiting sex determination.

While the feminist stand on the use of the term ‘female foeticide’ and its implications led them to coin a different vocabulary, the term continues to resonate with ordinary people and with activists. This is partly because it helps people distinguish it from ‘female infanticide’ and connect it to the use of modern sex-determination technologies that make possible the prevention of the birth of a female. Past histories of discrimination against girls and women provide resonance to the term female foeticide, and it is unlikely that the common use of the term will be abandoned in the near future in favour of more politically correct language.

References

Croll, Elisabeth. Endangered Daughters: Discrimination and Development in Asia. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

John, Mary E. ‘Sex Ratios and Sex Selection in India’. In Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia: History and the Present, edited by Leela Fernandes . Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.

FOOD

Jasmine Anand

Chai pani

This term is believed to have originated in India with the practice of tea breaks that factory owners and mill owners arranged to keep their workers happy during the First World War. This habit of drinking tea and its symbolic welcoming nature soon entered Indian homes. Today, the term is used for an arrangement of a cup of tea, coffee or soft drink and snacks for guests at home or for social obligation over work. Chai pani, or chai nashta/nashto, also refers to high tea or the welcome drinks that are served when a groom visits the natal home of the bride for the first time or arrangements made for a retirement party. Chai (tea) was a borrowed welcoming custom that the Indians took from British. Back then, for a majority of Indians, drinking tea was far too expensive. So, offering chai was a special endeavour. However, all over India today chai has become commonplace. There are many variants, such as ‘cutting chai’, which is served around middle part of India made with more water and less milk and served in a half-full small glass; gavati chai made with lemon grass served in Maharashtra; nathdwara/srinathji chai of Rajasthan, tea made with a tinge of mint; kulhad chai of Kolkata, which is served in earthen pots/kasauras; masala chai, which is a tea brewed along with spices like fennel, cinnamon, cardamom and ginger; kahwa served in Kashmir, which is a kind of black tea brewed with spices like nutmeg, fennel, cinnamon, cardamom and saffron and sprinkled with crushed nuts; and Sulemani chai, which is a black tea served with a slice of lemon in the Irani style. The chilled pani could refer to the roadside shikanji or nimbu pani, which is a mixture of lemon, cold water, sugar and salt; the sweet rose water or roohafza or jigarthanda, made of gond katira (the gum known as tragacanth) mixed with roohafza which is made with rose and watermelon juice; banta soda, which is a local aerated drink; and jaljeera, which is made of tamarind pulp, rock salt, mint leaves, roasted cumin powder and sugar mixed in cold water. The snacks offered along with tea and drinks are known as nashta or farsan. Biscuits, rusk, cake, brun maska, khaari, murukku, pakoda, bhajji, samosa, tikki, patty, idli, vada pav and dal kachori are a few snacks that are served as accompaniments to chai pani. India now has many thelas (tea huts/shops and cafes) that serve lavish chai pani. These chai pani thelas form the only spaces of aḍḍā (public sphere where discussions can be held). In offices, arrangement for chai pani is generally made through roadside thelas or khobchas (hole-in-the-wall establishments).

The phrase ‘chai pani’ can also allude to a small bribe to appease someone, specifically a bureaucrat. The usage is not negative but admissible everywhere; in fact, if the offering is not enough, the recipient may insist that the ‘chai’ was given but not the ‘pani’. An instance of Hindi usage of the phrase in a sentence is as follows: inke chai pani ka bandobast/intzaam kar do or kuch chai pani milega?. At times, chai pani may also be used to mean alcohol. Hence, the phrase ‘chai pani’ is ambiguously used materially, monetarily and metaphorically.

Dhaba

The term is believed to have originated after Partition in 1947. Dhabas were initially started by Punjabi refugees and catered to those who were uprooted by Partition by serving basic tandoori and Punjabi food. Generally speaking, the dhaba is an open-air informal resting and eating place on the highways, especially near petrol pumps. The word ‘dhaba’ probably also stems from the rustic Punjabi tradition of women preparing their dough at home and taking it to communal, open-air village tandoors to bake into rotis (breads). The tandoor is a traditional clay oven heated with hot charcoals placed inside it. Dhabas chiefly have an open kitchen with not much of a choice of Punjabi meals. Parathas with dollops of fresh white butter, curd, lassi and jaggery are staple in any dhaba. Cots with a wooden plank to serve as a table along with mud-plastered kitchen with chulhas (stoves), a tandoor and brass/steel utensils are characteristic features of a dhaba. Gradually, dhabas began to be mostly visited by men in transit or truck drivers. It gave them a feel of simple home-made food while on the road for days. Dhabas also became the centre of alcohol, gambling and sex work with the overwhelming footfall of primarily men. However, these days dhabas are visited by one and all. The place is typically inexpensive in comparison to restaurants. Currently, some dhabas are covered and fully air-conditioned and are also present within cities. Such posh dhabas serve an elaborate spread of Punjabi food such as daal makhni, kadhi pakoda, sarson ka saag, paneer bhurji, sabji, chole, rajma, kukad, meat, chawal, roti, parantha, makhan, dahi, lassi, gur, saunf and chaa. However, what remains the same with all dhabas is the major aromatic effect of charcoal that infuses every dish with a smoky flavour. Also, in dhabas, food is usually slowly cooked with whole spices that not only adds to the taste but also to the shelf life. The dhabas that serve only vegetarian food are known as ‘vaishno dhabas’. Today, dhabas have also begun to serve an eclectic mix of food not only from within the different parts of India but also from all over the world. Sometimes, entire meals, except the tandoori roti, are prepared on cooking gas rather than on charcoal. At a few places, a complimentary glass of chaas or lassi is given to every customer. Another important feature of the dhaba is that it provides a snippet view of Punjabi culture and life with the help of decoration and layout within the premises – such as statues, replicas, miniature setting of Punjabi village life and sometimes even small shops selling Punjabi clothing and accessories for women. Dhabas nowadays are all about good food, fun and are quirky, lively places. For instance, Rangla Punjab, a dhaba on Jalandhar Highway, has created a huge impact on youngsters and families due to innovations in space. Another example is Garam Dharam, a dhaba which projects an upscale exoticized Punjabi appearance along with cut outs, graffiti, dialogue and posters from the film actor Dharmendra’s Bollywood films especially Sholay.

Khichdi/khichda/dal chawal

The word khichdi originates from Sanskrit word khichha which means ‘a combination of rice and lentils’. Rice and dal (lentils) is a staple all over India. Generally, this one-pot meal khichdi is made using mung (green gram) or moongi–masari (red-and-yellow split dal). The pulses are cooked along with rice in equal proportions with water. Khichdi can be accompanied by pickle, curd, papad and kadhi. Nowadays, however, khichdi is cooked with all kinds of lentils, legumes, vegetables and caramelized onions and garlic. It is believed that the English kedgeree was influenced by the Indian khichdi. Ibn Batuta, the famous Moroccan traveller, refers to the dish in his travelogue as kishri. Abu Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari mentions several versions of khichdi preparations including those that used saffron, spices and dry fruits. Another travelogue by the Russian traveller Athanasius Niktin refers to Jahangir’s fondness for spicy khichdi that he had named lazeezan meaning ‘the delicious’. Aurangzeb is said to have liked alamgiri khichdi, which was cooked with a dash of fish and boiled eggs. Khichdi is both a low-key and high-end affair, depending on the addition of ingredients like ghee, spices, vegetables and nuts, or its usage for festivity or otherwise. Khichdi is both eaten for fasting as well as feasting. The festival of Makar Sankranti is marked by cooking khichdi. The khichdi is especially prepared to welcome a new bride and groom at their married home after marriage in northern India. This easy, comfort food is also a baby’s first solid food in many parts of India. Without the addition of ghee, khichdi is consumed by people who are sick. Ritualistically, in some homes, khichdi is consumed as a simple mourning food as well. A variant of this dish from the state of Karnataka is known as baath or bhath, the additions to the base dish being tamarind, jaggary and curry leaves. Another variant from Tamil Nadu is called as kanji. A Himachali variant involves cooking rice and dal in curd. The Hyderabadi khichda is cooked with an inclusion of minced meat. In north India meals begin with the khichdi, whereas in western India meals end with the khichdi. The term has also come to mean any work which takes a lot of time or is progressing at the pace of a snail with the commonly used phrase ‘Birbal ki khichdi’. According to legend, this kind of khichdi took a long time to cook as the cooking pot was kept 5 feet above the fire.

In literary tradition, the term khichdi has also come to refer to ‘polyphonic dialogues’ or ‘a heterogeneous mix of people sharing community life’ in India. To express someone’s unending love for a friend or loved one, ghee and khichdi are exemplified together as a reference point and the phrase used is ghee khichdi hona. Contrarily, the usage apni khichdi alag pakana refers to dissent and turning away from another. Recently, the Indian media unofficially designated the khichdi as the national dish and it is being globally promoted by the Government of India as the ‘queen of all foods’. The Union Minister of Food Processing Industries Harsimrat Kaur Badal is quoted by various news agencies as having said, ‘Khichdi is considered nutritious, healthiest food in India, and it is eaten by poor and rich alike, irrespective of their class. It symbolizes India’s great culture of unity in diversity.’

Tiffin/dabba

The word ‘tiffin’, which could also refer to the lunchbox or dabba, is believed to have come to India through the British. The English borrowing comes from the slang word tiff, which means ‘to eat and sip’. The word ‘tiffin’ is used to refer to a light midday meal after a light breakfast and before a heavy dinner. This meal is generally eaten between one and three in the afternoon. The city of Chennai has ‘tiffin rooms’ for people in transit. Maharashtra has dabbawallas who deliver home-cooked food as lunch to offices in dabbas or tiffins. Tiffins and lunchboxes are usually prepared in the morning for school-going children and used to be round or square containers made of brass, aluminium or stainless steel. With the coming of microwave ovens, tiffin boxes are today made of plastic, acrylic and glass. The equipment generally consists of vertical set of containers or a single container is divided into many parts. Usually, there are three separate containers: one for rice, one for meat or a vegetable dish and the other for chutneys or the bread. The three containers are then clasped together and loaded into an outer case that keeps the food warm and prevents spillage. While tiffin seems to refer to the equipment or a simple home-made food, in actual it has come to refer to a lot more in the form of the aesthetics of taste, nostalgia, love, caring and sharing. An internationally acclaimed film named ‘Lunchbox’ was recently made on the incident of an Indian wife preparing tiffin/dabba for her husband daily and the work of dabbawallas of Mumbai.

References

Achaya, K. T. The Story of Our Food. Hyderabad: Universities Press, 2002.

Sen, Colleen Taylor, Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India. London: Reaktion Books, 2015.

Sen, Colleen Taylor, Food Culture in India. Westport: Greenwood, 2004.

GODMEN

Akshaya Mukul

The concept of godmen is as old as the gods themselves. Among Hindus, holy men are variously referred to as sants, mahatmas, yogis, rishis, swamis, sanysasis or gurus and by several other names based on the differences in their approach, rituals and practices. The Vedas and the Upanishads talk of rishis and sages. There are hundreds of sampradayas (sects) manned by its own gurus.

Who is considered a sant or a yogi or a guru? Monier-Williams defines them thus: ‘One who lays down or deposits; one who abandons or resigns; an ascetic, devotee; especially one who retires from worldly concerns, and is no longer bound to read mantras and perform sacrifice, but only to read the Aranyaskas or Upanishads.’ There are other interpretations as well. According to Oriya Baba, sants have been categorized into acharyakoti (teacher-like) and avadhutakoti (one who has discarded the world). Avadhuakoti sants are not generally genial in behaviour, and their manners and teachings are not suited to everyone. Only a genius can fathom their talent. But even without the outward appearance, they are still considered sants. Acharyakoti sants are the ones who are the conventional gurus, endowed as they are with the qualities of peace, geniality, equanimity and complete lack of arrogance.

One of the very well-known orders of sants is the one established by Shankara to take on Buddhism in eighth century CE. Following this, highly orthodox orders were established at Puri in Odisha, Badrinath in Uttaranchal, Dwarka in Gujarat and Sringeri in Karnataka. The heads of each of these orders are referred to as Shankaracharya and exert immense influence in contemporary society. The vast network of educational and health institutions they run adds to their influence.

Then there are various other sects like Brahma sampradaya (founded by Madhava), Nimavats (founded by Nimbarka), Rudra (founded by Vallabha), Sri sampradaya (founded by Ramananda), sects of various denominations run by Nagas and the Swaminarayan sect of Gujarat. The followers of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu have carved out a distinctive place for themselves within the Madhava sect.

Among yogis, the best-known sect is the nathapanthi followers of Gorakhnath. The current chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, is the leader of this sect.

In post-Independence India, there has been a concerted attempt to control and use the influence of sadhus and sects over their followers for political ends. Be it the formation of Akhil Bharatiya Sadhu Samaj or nominating sadhus as contestants in polls, politics has entered the world of the godmen in a big way. The reputations of sadhus or gurus have also seen a decline in society. Since politics and power play were no longer anathema to them, there is no premium on renunciation, which was earlier a key ingredient to become a sadhu or a guru.

Today, a big cast of godmen has emerged in Indian politics, starting with Swami Karpatri Maharaj, the founder of the Ram Rajya Parishad; Mahant Digvijaynath of Nathpanth, who also became the head of the right-wing organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP); and Swami Rameshwarananda, who became a member of parliament and was a key actor in the 1965 attack on the parliament in the name of cow protection. Every five years, the BJP gives tickets to certain sadhus (or sant) or sadhvis (female sants) who enter parliament and have even become ministers. Former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Sadhvi Uma Bharati, is just one of them.

As noted in Controversial New Religions, the 1950s saw the beginning of New Religious Movements (NRMs) across the world. Controversy is second name to some of these NRMs that emanated from India. And, founders of these movements often had another career before turning spiritual and giving it a twist. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) was one such movement that was established by Swami Prabhupada, owner of a pharmaceutical business, in the United States in 1966. Taking advantage of the lifting of the Oriental Exclusion Act in 1965 that resulted in a big wave of migrants to the United States, Prabhupada set up his first temple in Manhattan’s lower East Side. Young Americans, primarily ‘hippies who had dropped out or disaffected hippies who had burned out’, were among Prabhupada’s early recruits. ISKCON soon spread all over the world. They even established a temple in Vrindavan, considered the birthplace of the god Krishna.

Mahesh Prasad Verma was also an engineer who left his material life after an encounter with his guru Brahmananda, one of the Shankaracharyas. His first ashram was in Rishikesh and in 1959, he set up his first US-based ashram in Los Angeles. But it was not until the visit of the Beatles to learn his Transcendental Meditation (TM) that he came to international limelight as Mahesh Yogi. This was because TM promised ‘bliss and prosperity not only to the mediators but also to the entire world’. But there was a precipitous decline in Mahesh Yogi’s stature as a new-age godman when he faced multiple challenges in the 1980s. First, there were a series of lawsuits in the United States, and in India his ‘right-hand man’ Ravi Shankar broke away from him and named his movement ‘Art of Living’. Ironically, the name of his movement was based on Mahesh Yogi’s book The Science of Being and the Art of Living. Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living has now spread all over the world and his vast network presents him as a spiritual man who has solutions for everything, from the crisis in Pakistan and Kashmir to the Ram Temple in Ayōdhyā.

The most irreverent of the NRMs was the one started by Bhagwan Rajneesh. His open advocacy of permissive sexual behaviour mixed with tenets of modern psychology had the world worshipping at his feet. From his ashram in Pune to the massive operation he started in Oregon, United States, in 1981, Rajneesh’s cult, popularly known as the Osho movement, faced massive legal problems in the United States. His lavish lifestyle – ninety-three Rolls-Royces and gun-toting bodyguards – created an outrage in Oregon and eventually he had to return to Pune. His death in 1990, followed by a period of intense succession battle, was a setback to the movement. But now Osho has been posthumously revived through his books, videos, tapes and films. Controversial New Religions notes that Lady Gaga endorsed Osho in 2011, and in India the Pune ashram attracts people from all over the world.

No account of Hindu gurus can be complete without the story of Sai Baba of Shirdi and Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi. The later claimed to be the incarnation of the former. Sai Baba of Shirdi was unlike all the godmen we have discussed thus far. He had disciples from across religions, lived a frugal life and performed both Hindu and Muslim religious prayers. He is believed to have had supernatural powers, and his fame grew steadily. Shirdi, where he stayed, is today a holy town. Sathya Sai Baba, a Telugu by birth, claimed at the age of 13 to be an incarnation of Sai Baba of Shirdi. This made him famous, but what drew people to him was his supposed magic powers that could heal. Politicians, bureaucrats and commoners became his disciples. In fact, a large Sai Baba network exists in government, especially among bureaucrats. A vast network of hospitals, schools and colleges are still run by his close aides after his death.

The past few years have, however, been particularly bad for godmen in India. Two of them, both prominent – Asaram Bapu and Guru Ram Rahim – have been put behind bars on charges of rape of their female disciples. The smartest of the modern gurus, however, has been Baba Ramdev, who is considered close to the ruling dispensation. Through his yōga and naturopathy, Ramdev now runs one of country’s biggest FMCG companies. Spiritual life to corporate ascendance is only the latest in the long history of innovations Indian godmen have made at home and abroad.

References

Baba, Oriya. Sant Ka Swarup (Types of Sants) Gorakhpur: Gita Press, 1937.

Lewis, James R. and Jesper Aagaard Petersen , ed. Controversial New Religions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Mukul, Akshaya, Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2015

GODREJ ALMIRAH (GODREJ ĀLMIRAH)

Dipti Kulkarni

The Godrej almirah is quite an important element of the India story. Born in 1923, this steel cupboard, manufactured entirely in India by Godrej, was to become a part of people’s lives. In those days of scarcity and limited resources, owning anything from a phone to a cupboard or a television was a matter of immense pride. For middle-class India, the Godrej Storwel (the brand name) had an aspirational value. People who could not afford it, rented it. The almirah was a sturdy steel cupboard which because of its weight was almost a fixture in the house. This cupboard was where the family kept all its prized possessions – from certificates to special clothes and sarees to gold and cash. The almirah was also an important part of the wedding trousseau. If the newly-weds lived in a joint family, who had the keys to the almirah’s locker was an important aspect of family dynamics. In those times when people lived in wadas or chawls, neighbours were like extended family and the family who owned a Godrej almirah often had to oblige neighbours by safeguarding their important goods. That the almirah was an important cultural artefact can be seen from its presence in literary texts, such as Satyajit Ray’s Adventures of Feluda in which a character named Dhiru Kaka offers to keep the doctor’s ring in his Godrej almirah and this offer completely relieves the doctor of his anxiety!

All of this has undergone a change in the decades gone by. The company altered the original and came up with newer offerings that were lighter in view of a more mobile customer. Today, there is more choice in terms of colour and size. From the point of view of the customer, the story of the Godrej almirah has gone from ‘pride’ to ‘hide’. Now that large wooden wardrobes are in style, people struggle to make space for this beast from the past. Some ‘hide’ their almirah by covering it with wallpaper or paint. Some make a wooden exterior and keep the steel almirah inside it. The altered sentiments towards the almirah are a reflection of the preoccupations of young Indians, who have very little to do with the India of the previous century. Global trends influence what they aspire in their lives as in the objects they wish to possess.

References

Alladi, Harini ‘Cultural Branding in India: The Case of Godrej “Storwel” Cupboards (1944-1991)’. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 10, no. 3 (2018): 224–241.

Ray, Satyajit. Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1. Penguin Books India, 2004.

HARAM/HALAL (HARĀM/HALĀL)

Amir Ali

The paired Islamic concepts of haram and halal are binary opposites. The dividing line appears to be extremely clearly demarcated, establishing what is permissible (halal) and what is absolutely forbidden (haram). It is important to stress that haram has a certain pre-eminence over halal as it forms one of the five values classifying the goodness or badness of human conduct, the ahkam-al-khamsah. The five ahkam-al-khamsah are acts that can be (a) obligatory, whose performance is rewarded and omission is punished (wajib); (b) recommended, where performance is rewarded but non-performance does not bring punishment (mustahab); (c) permitted, where there is an indifference to the performance or non-performance (mabuh); (d) acts met with disapproval but which are acceptable with reluctance (makruh); and (e) acts that are completely prohibited (haram).

For most people in India, the most familiar form of halal is meat from an animal slaughtered in the ritually prescribed Islamic manner. However, the category haram/halal is also applied to decide the legitimacy of money and wealth that is earned or inherited. Income from sources where there is commensurate effort on the part of the individual would be halal, whereas income from interest payments or usury, for instance, would be haram. Further, money from gambling or other such games of chance are haram. Any attempt to usurp the wealth of the vulnerable, such as orphans, is absolutely haram. Sexual morality would be another realm in which there are fairly elaborate and clear guidelines about what is permissible and hence halal. Homosexuality, for instance, is considered haram.

The haram/halal distinction applies most prolifically in the ethical realm. One however notices an uncoupling of the haram/halal binary in one realm – the theological. In the realm of Islam’s almost uncompromising monotheism, it is absolutely forbidden and hence haram for a believing Muslim to associate any god or deity with Allah. This would constitute shirk and can be considered as the most severe application of the category haram for the Muslim. One notices here an application of the concept of haram without the companion concept of halal playing any role whatsoever. This reinforces the point about the pre-eminence of haram mentioned earlier.

Quite often, it has been surmised that the implications of the categories of haram/halal are a clear demarcation of boundaries on the part of ulema (religious scholars) through the instrumentality of issuing fatwas (opinions). The influence of the ulema is then understood as a form of social control over the community. Thus, it is not unknown for practices that may have a syncretistic element in them to be declared haram and thereby forbidden, perhaps on the basis of not being Islamic enough. There have been instances when fatwas have disapproved the wearing of a sāṛī or short skirt on the basis of their being non-Muslim attire. The application of vermilion by Muslim women has been frowned upon. In this context, it may be kept in mind that the fatwa is a legal opinion and not a religious diktat, as is quite often projected through popular media representations. Once a person has received the fatwa, she or he is free to seek another religious opinion, much in the manner that an individual seeks a second opinion from a doctor. Also, it is common for fatwas to end with an admission of their own limitation by suggesting that it is only Allah who knows best. However, the more flexible and, dare it be said, creative role of the fatwa has undergone a change with the transformations wrought in Islamic jurisprudence by modern legal systems. As a result of such transformations, the haram/halal category perhaps lends itself to becoming more flexible as a form of social control.

References

Faruki, Kemal. ‘Al-Ahkam Al-Khamsah: The Five Values’. Islamic Studies 5, no. 1 (March 1966): 43–98.

Kugle, Scott Alan. ‘Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia’. Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2001): 257–313.

IZZAT/SHARAM/HONOUR KILLING (IZZAT/ŚARAM)

Shivangini Tandon

The word izzat refers to ‘honour, reputation or prestige’. It is an Urdu word derived from the Persian ezzat and the Arabic izza. In his work on the concepts of honour and grace in anthropology, Pitt-Rivers points out that honour is ‘the value of a person in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of the society’. The word śaram originates from the Urdu language and is translated as ‘shame’ in English. Michela Canepari argues that its English translation is restrictive in comparison to the original term. For instance, shame only denotes embarrassment, humiliation, disgrace, dishonour and being infamous. Śaram, on the other hand, means much more than that. It could mean modesty, decency, a moral act, being courteous and respectable. It is often used interchangeably with words like lajja and laaj, its synonyms in languages like Hindi and Bengali. Frank Henderson Steward, who has written extensively on the concept of honour, has emphasized that honour involves two aspects: inner and outer honour. He uses internal honour as a term for ‘a personal quality’ (honourableness) and external honour as a term for ‘reputation’. Following Steward’s theory, honour can be described as a concept which regulates the relationship between an individual and a group which they belong to or identify with. Honour groups could be large and extensive (e.g. nations, clan and family) or small and limited, but in either case they are defined and regulated by distinctive honour codes. It is actually this latter aspect of honour translating into reputation that has increasingly led to the crimes of killing in the name of safeguarding the izzat or śaram of the family or community or incidents of honour killing, in many parts of the world.

The term ‘honour killing’ refers to the structured practice of killing a woman (and, in some cases, her male partner as well) if her family believes that her behaviour has threatened the izzat of the family. In such a scenario, killing her is seen as the only solution to protect the honour and śaram of the family. The practice of honour killing has been known since ancient Roman times, when the seniormost member of the household had the right to kill an unmarried but sexually active daughter or an adulterous wife. Honour-based crimes were also known in medieval Europe, where early Jewish law mandated death by stoning for an adulterous wife and her partner. Today, this practice is common in regions of North Africa and Middle East. However, the aim here is to talk about the practice of honour killing as it exists in many parts of India, particularly in the states of Haryana and Punjab. In a largely male-dominated or patriarchal society, a family’s reputation is perceived to rest on a woman’s obedience and chastity. In case the woman marries without her father’s permission, marries outside her caste, seeks divorce or has an adulterous affair, she is considered to have violated the family honour and this becomes a justification for the endorsement of honour killing. The punishment given as a part of this practice can take multiple forms – shooting, beheading, dismemberment, flogging, burning by acid or fire, strangling, drowning and forced suicide. Prem Chowdhury, who works on popular perceptions of masculinity in rural North India through oral traditions, throws light on one such popular belief or cultural pattern that objectifies women and treat them as mere objects devoid of any subjectivity and agency. He writes, Zamin joi zor ki / Zor ghati hor ki (‘Land and wife can only be held by force / When force fails, they pass into other hands’).

Honour killing targets a woman’s autonomy and seeks to control her sexuality and choices. In India, women in interfaith and inter-caste relationships are subjected to immense torture and coercion at the hands of their families, communities and also fascist political parties. Since a woman is considered to be a man’s property, honour killings find an easy justification in society. In order to combat this practice in India, strict and specific laws against ‘honour crimes’ and a general change in mindset are sorely required.

References

Chowdhry, Prem. ‘Popular Perceptions of Masculinity in Rural North Indian Oral Traditions’. Asian Ethnology 74, no. 1 (2015): 5–36.

Lesnie, Vanessa. ‘Dying for the Family Honor’. Human Rights 27, no. 3 (2000): 12–14.

JAGANNATH/JUGGERNAUT (JAGANNĀTH/JUGGERNAUT)

Jatindra Kumar Nayak

It is rather strange that a deity supposed by many to be of tribal origin and with half-formed limbs should even be remotely associated with a word that means an unstoppable destructive force for over seven centuries in the Western imagination. The history of this imagination invokes among others, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1357–71), ‘The Curse of Kehama’ (1810) by Robert Southey, Balzac’s Le Pere Goriot (1835) and the bête noire in the popular American comics series X-Men, created by Stan Lee.

Situated in the coastal town of Puri, Jaganath (literally, ‘Lord of the Universe’) became the centre of the Vaishnavism, in what is today the state of Odisha, with the arrival of Ramanuja, a Bhakti saint from the south, in the twelfth century CE and the Bengali Bhakti saint Chaitanya in the sixteenth century. Jaganath embodies and stands at the centre of an assimilatory and fascinatingly syncretic culture that has its roots among the Sabara tribe of Odisha and was included in the Hindu pantheon much later. An exception on numerous accounts, Jaganath resides with his elder brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra (as opposed to living with his consort Lakshmi) in Jaganath temple which was built by King Ananatavarman Chodaganga Deva of the Ganga dynasty in the twelfth century. While some scholars contend that the temple was initially a Jain temple, there are others who are convinced of the presence of Buddhist relics in the temple. In fact, Buddha is considered an incarnation of Jaganath. The iconography of Jagannāth is in itself a unique field of enquiry, for, unlike other Hindu deities, Jaganath and his siblings are neither anthropomorphic nor zoomorphic. He is identified by his large round eyes, his black face and the absence of fully formed limbs, which have contributed to a great many popular lore. The wooden body, again a notable exception from other deities who are carved out of stone, also points to the tribal origins of the deity.

But what remains perhaps the most popular aspect of the Jaganath cult is the annual chariot festival, the rath yatra. The English term ‘juggernaut’ is not so much derived from any of the features of the god himself but from the gigantic chariot whose wheels are supposed to have crushed many who offer their lives in order to attain salvation. While the deaths might have occurred mostly due to accidents, colonial imagination and inadequate documentation might have steamrolled various facets of the overwhelmingly grand occasion into one horrifying image. For the people of Odisha, however, no other religious occasion matches the grandeur of the chariot festival.

References

Dube, Ishita B., Divine Affairs: Religion, Pilgrimage, and the State in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 2001.

Eschmann, Anncharlott, Herman Kulke and Gaya Charan Tripathi , The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa. New Delhi: Manohar, 1978.

JAGRAN/KIRTAN/BHAJAN (JĀGARAN∙/KĪRTAN/BHAJAN)

Jaskiran K. Mathur

Though very closely related, these three terms are not identical. Jagraṇ, jagraata, jaag or ratjagga quite literally mean ‘vigil or an all-nighter’. It usually refers to an event where the rendering of devotional songs (the bhajan or kīrtan), that narrate the glory of god or specific deities, is carried out as a community exercise. Jagraṇ could as easily refer to any other celebratory group activity requiring the participants to stay awake all night – be it a political event, a sport or a night of bacchanalian revels.

In the most popular usage of the term, jagraṇ more often than not includes bhajans and kirtans sung in praise of a revered deity on an auspicious day (parv) or festival (tyohaar) designated by the Hindu lunar calendar. A jagraṇ may also be organized to mark a familial celebratory thanksgiving. The collective nature of the activity is fundamental to this phenomenon, wherein the group subsumes the individual, bestowing instead a shared impetus, fervour and gratification. In this community-bolstering exercise, someone often takes the leadership role owing to either their sacramental status, their musical ability or their organizational aptitude. Such a gathering provides room for both anonymity and spontaneity. While the sense of community and belonging assures inclusiveness, the comforting potential of ritual observance serves to fuel and reaffirm faith. A similar purpose and objective could well be attributed to any jagraṇ that may be categorized as secular.

The words bhajan and kīrtan are often used interchangeably, share subject matter, form of expression and context as both belong to the genre of devotional performance art. While bhajan is less formal, kīrtan is more structured. But both involve the presence and participation of a congregation as well as spiritual or religious renditions. Bhajan quite literally means ‘to share’. As the aim is to bring home the message, popular film song tunes too have been used in bhajans to draw and hold the attention of the gathering. Kīrtan may be translated as a musical form of narration or shared recitation. Shabd kīrtan (recitation of the word of the guru; gurbani) has evolved as the very form of communal worship in Sikhism, for instance. Kīrtan has its roots in the Vedic tradition and is practised with regional and denominational variations across the subcontinent. Often, ragas are prescribed and various musical instruments employed – oration, drama, dance, moral narration, allegory, humour, poetic prowess are all very much a part of this practice as is audience participation (sankirtan).

The bhajan is intrinsically associated with the bhakti movement, which was a medieval devotional phenomenon and had significant syncretic potential and grass-roots representation. Inspired by a multitude of saint-poets, the emergence of bhakti can be traced to eighth-century Tamil Nadu and Kerala. By the fifteenth century, it had embraced the eastern and northern regions of the subcontinent as well. While it may be debatable if the movement was truly a rebellion against orthodoxy, there is no doubt that the status quo was being questioned and an inevitable recontextualizing emerged within the parameters of the Hindu tradition. It is thus no surprise that this successful motivational format played a significant role in community organization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial society when protesters and freedom activists used early morning processions (prabhat pheri) to voice inspiring political messages combined with bhajans. In fact, this influence is also visible in the expressions of protest adopted by Indian indentured workers in lands as far away as Guyana, Trinidad and Fiji.

References

Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Kaivalya, Alanna. Sacred Sound: Discovering the Myth and Meaning of Mantra and Kirtan. Verlag: New World, 2014.

JHAROO/TEEL JHAROO/EERKALI CHOOL (JHĀD∙Ū//TEEL JHĀD∙Ū/EERKALI CHOOL)

Susan Visvanathan

Most children in India grow up with the sound of the eerkali chool (Malayalam) or teel jharoo (Hindi), which their mothers use to sweep the yard or clean watery spaces, where dried-grass brooms will not work. Separate brooms are used for each workspace. As the teel jharoo is made from the spine of the coconut leaf, if left in water, or not maintained, they tend to decompose, and there is nothing more horrible than holding a wet teel jharoo to clean. It is made of a hundred or so thin strands, each of which once supported each laminae or segmental leaf, and the work of separating it from the leaf to make the jhadoo takes time.

Since coconut trees are an important source of revenue across households in Kerala, it would be instructive to look at how this process is done in that state. All over Kerala, workers employed in a house will set to de-spining the coconut leaves, which involves tearing the rib-like reed from its surrounding leaf. The quantum of such fibres used for personal use is thrice what is available in the market, as the utilitarian aspect of these brooms is valued in every home. Since the work is tedious, the actual space of involvement is that of the domestic servant sitting down after lunch and working to produce a broom as a leisure-time activity. Children surround her, and she works systematically through the afternoon, till it is time to make those coconut delicacies which the children love, such as korikatta (steamed rice balls, with a filling of jaggery and coconut inside).

The making of coconut brooms is often associated with Ezhava families, who are well versed in the collection of toddy (palm wine) as well as the enumeration of the coconut harvested from trees. Leisure thus is associated with gainful work, and the presentation of perfection is something which is defined as ‘acceptable’ by the master/mistress of the household or the merchant. Teel jharoos and eerkali chools are assessed by their weight and the strength of their fibres.

The eerkali chool or teel jharoo, in some way, with its simplicity and austerity, and its sense of compounded unity as a bundle of sticks, integrated together, used to clean effectively the dirty spaces of the house is a welcome symbol in contemporary politics (the Aam Aadmi Party has in fact adopted the jhadoo as its symbol). Not surprisingly, children were disciplined by using a single ‘stick’ of the eerkali chool. The sting of the fibre was not hard enough for the parent to feel that she or he was being cruel, and like the disciplinary pinch (picchu) was a customary way of reprimanding children.

Every morning in Kerala, the sound of the chool can be heard. A swept yard or staircase, the clean bathroom and the clean kitchen are essential to a sense of mental equilibrium. The symbolic association with blue skies, fresh air, the smell of coffee, the wisp of smoke from the wood fire on which rice is already boiling, the call of the fisher as she/he makes the rounds and the brushing sound of the eerkali chool, all these are the associated imagery which arise in the mind of a Malayali far from naad (country), as she or he sets about doing the daily chores, before rushing to catch the bus or train to work in an office.

References

Tripathy, Jyotirmaya. ‘The Broom, the Muffler and the Wagon R: Aam Aadmi Party and the Politics of De-Elitisation’. International Quarterly for Asian Studies 48 (2017).

Wyatt, Andrew. ‘Arvind Kejriwal’s Leadership of the Aam Aadmi Party’. Contemporary South Asia 23, no. 2 (2015): 167–180.

JOOTHA (JŪT∙HĀ)

Rama Kant Agnihotri

The Hindi adjective jootha, in the sense of ‘defiled’ or ‘polluted’ food, is used in rather specific contexts, such as in vahkisiikaa jootha (khaanaa) nahiin khaataa (‘He does not eat the food leftover/touched by anybody else’, i.e. ‘already polluted/defiled by being eaten by somebody else’). It could have come from the Sanskrit jushth or the Pali word jutth. In this sense, it is integral to the Indian binary of the pure/polluted that comprehensively cuts across social, religious and cultural life even though a simple binary where the ‘polluted’ is forbidden and the ‘pure’ alone is recommended may not do justice to the complexities it encompasses. The related feminine noun juuthan literally means ‘leftover’. These leftovers were meant for animals, by definition outside the human sphere, but they were often served to the Dalits, people outside the hierarchical caste system and at the lowest level of society, the ‘untouchables’. The horrifying implication here is clear. The abject poverty and social degradation that the Dalits have suffered in India is encapsulated in the autobiographical narrative Joothan by OmprakashValmiki (1997).

There may be some feudal contexts of yore in which expressions such as juuthan giraanaa may have been used. For example, aajaa phamaareyahaan juuthan giraaneaaiye (‘Please visit us for a meal’), suggesting that the leftovers will come handy for the cooks (who may have been women) and the lowly, the expression being honourific for the invited (maximizing the praise for the other) and displaying humility on the part of the person inviting and his family (minimizing self-praise). This usage is certainly dated. On the contrary, some members of a family or friends may take pride in saying ham sab ekhiiplet men khaatehain (‘We enjoy eating together in the same plate’; i.e. ‘We don’t mind eating each other’s jootha’).

Though the pure/polluted binary is possibly universal, it seems to take very specific forms across different cultures (as Mary Douglas has noted on the Jewish notion of kosher food, for example). In India, the concept jootha derives from and is inextricably linked to the overarching and hierarchical caste system. However, its linguistic expression varies across the country. The Telugu equivalent of the word is engali, while Malayalam uses the word echil; thus, there is a strong possibility that this word entered languages like Bengali, where it is known as entho, via Dravidian than Indo-Āryan routes. This is a power word that is used in many Indian languages as an adjective as well as a noun. Its strength as cultural practice remains strong and continues to be uniquely – while not admirably – part of Indian social structure in the twenty-first century.

References

Valmiki, Omprakash. Joothan. New Delhi: Radhakrishan Prakashan, 1997. Translated into English by Arun Prabha Mukherjee as Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Verma, Ramachandra. Shabd-sadhna. Benaras: Sahityaratnamala Karyalaya, 1990.

KABBADI, GILI DANDA, JALLIKATTA (KABAD∙D∙Ī, GILLĪ D∙AN∙D∙Ā, JALLĪKAT∙T∙Ū)

Souvik Naha

Kabbadi

The term ‘kabbadi’ probably comes from the Tamil root words kā’ī (hand) and pidi (catch). The sport is played between two teams of seven players each. The players take turns raiding the other team’s refuge and the team with the maximum successful raids over two twenty-minute halves wins. The raider tries to touch as many opponents as possible, holding one’s breath, before trying to return to one’s zone safely, while the opponents try to pin her or him down to diffuse the challenge. The sport is highly popular in South Asia, especially in rural areas, as no equipment is involved. Its rules were formalized after the All India Kabbadi Foundation was established in 1950. The senior national championship started in 1952. A new organization, the Amateur Kabbadi Federation of India, set up in 1972 is now governing the sport in the country. The first Asian Kabbadi Championship was held in 1980. International visibility of Kabbadi increased with its inclusion in the First South Asian Games (SAF) in 1984 and in the Asian Games in 1990 and the beginning of the Kabbadi World Cup in 2004. India usually triumphs in every tournament it participates in, making kabbadi the most decorated sport in the country. Kabbadi has been featured in many films and numerous works of fiction as a plot point.

The inception of Pro Kabbadi League in 2014 has revolutionized the sport today. Apart from organizing the game indoors, in an attractively built environment, the organizers modified the standard rules to encourage more aggressive play. Every season has proven to be highly popular, with increase in television audience across India, revealing that with proper overhaul, an indigenous sport such as kabbadi can favourably compete with the likes of cricket and football for viewership.

Gilli danda

The name of this sport comes from the practice of participants hitting a short stick (gillī) with a long stick (ḍaṇḍa), both made of wood. This game is referred to as Tipcat in English and is known by many other names across India and the world, most notably as Danguli in Bengal, Kuttiyumkolum in Kerala, Kittipul in Tamil Nadu, Billamgodu in Andra Pradesh, Dandibiyo in Nepal, Pathellele in Indonesia, Konko in Cambodia and Lappaduggi in Afghanistan. It is played between individuals or two teams with an equal number of players and no upper limit. The players first dig a small hole on the ground on which they place the gillī. A player inserts the ḍaṇḍa underneath the gillī to first lift the latter up in the air, and then strike it, before it touches the ground as far as possible. She or he gets three attempts to hit the gillī, failing which she or he is declared out. Opponents can get her or him out by either catching the gillī while it is airborne after the strike or, if it had already fallen to the turf, by collecting it and directly hitting the ḍaṇḍa, which should be placed above the hole after the hit. There is no universal scoring system, even though gillī ḍanḍā is not entirely an amateur or recreational sport any more. The Indian Gilli Danda Federation, established in 2016, is currently working towards standardizing the rules of the game.

Jallīkat∙t∙ū

A collection of Tamil Sangam poetry called Kalithogai, written between 400 BCE and 300 CE, mentions a sport called ‘eruthazhuval’ (‘embracing the bull’), in which a group of men try to tame a bull. This sport is believed to have evolved into what is today known as jallikatta. Usually conducted on the second and third days of the Pongal festival, this sport involves men holding on to a bull for a certain period of time while the animal tries to break free. Persons able to maintain their grip on the bull for the longest time are declared winners. In a way successful bull-taming has been a marker of one’s masculinity, power and self-sufficiency. The bulls which prove most difficult to tame are identified as the strongest and used for breeding strong calves, while the weaker ones are used for agriculture and transport. Tamil culture usually envisages the sport as a symbol of human–animal connection, in which the animal becomes part of the family and is treated with care.

The change in the way this ancient sport is conducted has sparked protests from various animal rights organizations, particularly since the 2000s. They have been campaigning against the cruel manipulation of bulls used in the sport. If Eruthazhuvuthal was a one-to-one combat between the bull and the man, jallikatta is a spectacle in which many people try to grab a single raging bull, which is often made to drink alcohol or provoked with injuries to be more aggressive. Other than unethical treatment of the animal, the ritual of masculinity, casteism and gambling around the sport has also been called into question. The Supreme Court of India accepted this opposition and banned jallikatta in 2014, which led to massive protests against supposedly exaggerated accounts of violence and perceived affront to Tamil culture in the state of Tamil Nadu. The agitation forced the Government of India to reverse the ban in 2016.

References

Alter, Joseph S. ‘Kabaddi, A National Sport of India: The Internationalism of Nationalism and the Foreignness of Indianness’. In Games, Sports and Cultures, edited by Noel Dyck , 81–116. Oxford: Berg, 2000.

Singh, Java. ‘Jallikattu: Post-Humanistic Coefficients and Coloniality in South Asia’s Ergic Sport’. South Asian Review 38, no. 1 (2017): 29–48.

KAI (KĀĪ)

Vanamala Viswanatha

With a four-page entry in F. Kittel’s comprehensive Kannada–English Dictionary, kai is a Kannada word which refers to the human hand. Every Kannada child masters this word first when s/he learns at home about the parts of the body and also later in school when the teacher, ready with a cane, thunders, kai chaachu! (‘Stretch your hand!’). This word is also commonly used in other South Indian languages such as Tamil and Malyalam.

The word kai is as versatile as the organ itself. In conjunction with a verb, it changes its meaning and, before you know, it can mean the opposite. Kai kodu literally means ‘to give hand’, but it can also mean ‘to deceive, to let down’. But kodu kai, used as one word kodugai, refers to ‘a generous person’. Kai bidu literally means ‘to leave the hand’, meaning ‘to give up, to drop’. Kai maadu literally means ‘to make hand’, meaning ‘to attack’. Kai haaku means ‘to venture into’, kai hidi means ‘to marry’, while kai chellu means ‘to drop helplessly’. Kai kaayuvudu means ‘to depend’, and kai nadeyuvudu refers to a time ‘when the going is good’. Kai suttukolluvudu literally means ‘to burn one’s hand’, refers to suffering. Kai beesu refers to ‘walking without a burden’. Kai torisu means ‘to consult an astrologer’. While kaigetegeduko means ‘to undertake’; kaigebaru means ‘to reap’, that is, as a grown-up son who is useful; kaigoodu means ‘to accomplish’; and kaivasha means ‘to conquer, to hold control’. Kai mara refers to the manual signal on a track. Kai magga refers to handloom and kaikola refers to the handcuffs. kaigada means ‘a temporary loan’; kaigatti is a ‘small knife’; kaithuththu is a ‘morsel’ and kaichalaka is ‘exemplary skill’. While kaifiyaththu is ‘signature’, kaibaraha refers to handwriting, and kaiyyaare means ‘with his/her own hands’. Angai and mungai refer to the palm and back of the palm, respectively. Kaikoosu refers to an ‘infant’, Kaijodisu literally means ‘to surrender’, and kaitege means ‘to withdraw’. While kaimeeri can mean ‘to get out of one’s power’, kaisere means to ‘arrest, to be in captivity’. Kaikelage is used to refer to ‘under an authority’ and kaikodali is a small axe.

Ever since ‘the hand’ became a symbol of the Congress Party, kai has been used in a telling manner to indicate the candidate’s status – kaihididaru is to ‘join the party’; kaibittaru is ‘to get ousted from the party’ and kaikottaru is to ‘defect from the party’.

Reference

Kittel, Ferdinand. A Kannada-English Dictionary, vol. 1. Basel mission book and tract depository, 1894.

KAYAKA (KAYAKA)

N. Manu Chakravarthy

The concept of kayaka is central for the Lingayat movement that flourished in Karnataka, about the twelfth century CE. This was one of the most crucial phases of the sociocultural and intellectual life of Karnataka and Kannada language. There are innumerable narratives on the period, coloured by diverse ideological positions. However, a concept that is integral to the ethos of that period and which continues to influence and shape Kannada consciousness, is ‘kayaka’. More specifically, ‘kayaka’ refers to ‘work’, to ‘physical labour’, but the concept profound philosophical and political implications and is, therefore, quite central to contemporary cultural politics.

At the philosophical level, kayaka suggests the strong shift from the privileged positions of metaphysical speculation, intellectual reflection and epistemological practice to the great meaning and significance of ‘labour’, signifying the value and importance of all working classes in a social context. The privileging of knowledge, which marginalized the enormous contributions of the laboring communities, was severely interrogated by the Vachana poets of the Lingayat movement leading many thinkers to regard it as a period that foregrounded notions of equality and justice. Hence, the concept kayaka occupies a crucial position in contemporary discussions of democratic principles of an egalitarian society.

In addition, the concept has led to the contemporary expression kayakave kailasa, negating the idea of gaining redemption/salvation and thereby rejecting the very belief in the reality of a heaven that lies beyond this temporal world. The phrase ‘kayakave kailasa’, suggests that labour/work itself is kailasa (Lord Shiva’s abode), clearly underlining the belief that dedicated work itself is true spiritual transcendence. Thus, ideas of rebirth and salvation beyond the spatial–temporal, and notions of spiritual transcendence, are erased in favour of the essential value of earthly labour. For these reasons, kayaka is part of the vocabulary of contemporary thinkers and activists who emphatically resist various philosophical and political hierarchies.

References

Īshwaran, Karigoudar. Religion & Society among the Lingayats of South India, vol. 19, Vikas Pub, 1983.

Waghmare, Nalini. ‘Basaveshwara’s Concept of Kayaka and Dasoha Relevance to Modern Times’, Faculty Publication, Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth, Pune, 2013.

KHADI (KHĀDĪ)

Tridip Suhrud

Khādī refers to any cloth made from two processes of spinning and weaving done by hand. Khādī was not an invention by Gandhi. Spinning and weaving are as old as human civilization. But, in the modern Indian imagination, khādī has come to be etched as an idea, a process and a possibility deeply and inviolably connected with Gandhi. It does signal to his capacity to understand and grasp universal human impulse and innovation and bring it into the realms of contemporary political economy and political action.

The production of khādī involves two processes, the preparation of yarn by spinning and the act of weaving on a handloom. Traditionally, in large parts of India there is gender-based division of these two activities. Women spin and men weave. Gandhi chose the activity associated with women’s labour and made it his own. So deep was his identification with the object, the process, the product and its symbolism that the spinning wheel became his lifelong companion, often its repetitive movements obliterating his need for namasmaran (taking the name of God).

For Gandhi, the charkha and the loom and the cloth that it produced came to signify the possibilities of a civilization where machines were not the measure of men, where human worth was not located outside the human person. Gandhi was captivated and moved not only by the civilizational possibilities of khādī but also its redemptive potential – its potential to free India from poverty, hunger, debt, lack of productive work, nakedness, bondage and the need and necessity to deny others the dignity of freedom. In that sense, khādī was the true ‘livery of freedom’, as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of it.

If the poet Rabindranath Tagore saw the charkha with its repetitive movement and the coarse yarn it produced as unaesthetic and hence an anaesthetic that would hold masses of India in perpetual bondage, Gandhi saw it as the only true dharma (duty) available to him. The creativity of the charkha was enough for him.

The grotesque charkhas that now abound the urban landscape of contemporary India are a perfect symbol of the fate of khādī and Gandhi in the India of today. Once a symbol of deep urge for freedom, it has now come to symbolize poverty – poverty of the spinner and the weaver, poverty of our imagination and the cessation of the Indian state from the lives of its poor.

And yet, like all potentially liberating acts and artefacts, khādī survives. It survives because of its universality, its deep civilizational roots in human subjectivity, in our capacity to imbue the simplest of artefacts and processes with our capacity to imagine and strive for freedom. And, in that sense, khādī remains a ‘livery of our freedom’.

References

Jain, Jyotindra and Jasleen Dhamija , eds. Handwoven Fabrics of India, Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd, 1989.

Tarlo, Emma, ‘The Problem of What to Wear: The Politics of Khadi in Late Colonial India’. South Asia Research 11, no. 2 (1991): 134–157.

LAKSHMAN REKHA (LAKṢMAN∙ RĒKHĀ)

Rukmini Bhaya Nair

The English phrase ‘to draw a line’ has echoes in many cultures. For much of human history, lines have been drawn to demarcate boundaries on maps, in battle and in law. They have also been implicated in large philosophical enquiries of the sort: can a clear line, a boundary, ever be drawn between fact and fiction, between subjective experience and objective reality, between self and other?

On the Indian subcontinent, the metaphor that perhaps most graphically captures these challenging features of boundaries is the ‘Lakshman Rekha’, now an intrinsic part of our everyday moral vocabulary. The Lakshman Rekha is a line drawn by the prince Lakshman to protect his sister-in-law, Sita. Sita’s husband, Rama, has gone in search of a golden deer that she has spotted in the forest and that she longs for. However, Sita is worried because Rama has been away for long hunting for this deer. She therefore sends Lakshman off in search of her husband. Once she is left alone, however, the enemy king Ravana comes to her in the guise of a wandering mendicant. When she unsuspecting crosses the line (rēkhā) in order to give Ravana his alms, she is carried off and this become a key incident that provokes the great war between Rama and Ravana in the epic Rāmāyaṇa.

In this myth, characters seem to be summoned up from the mists of antiquity with all their failings intact. Sita is shown yielding to temptation, enchanted by a possibly illusory golden deer. Further, she deliberately crosses the line drawn by Lakshmana, again putting herself in harm’s way by an act of volition. Unlike Helen of the Odyssey, abducted for her beauty, Sita is very much a self-possessed agent here. When she steps across the boundary line, she does so out of empathy for a poor man seeking alms. Acts of kindness, of desire and of delusion thus combine to present us with a series of conundrums about human nature and human motivations in the Lakṣamaṇ Rēkhā story. Sita’s actions in this tale seem to call up a moral conflict between two sorts of codes – one based on being obedient and staying within the line drawn by Lakshmana, the other based on the altruistic premise of giving alms to a poor stranger. She may have been duped in this myth but she has nevertheless succeeded in redrawing a moral boundary at the close of the story. In this sense, every Lakshman Rekha is arguably a ‘Sita Rēkhā’ as well, making Sita the sort of ‘boundary-crosser’ that anthropologists such as Mary Douglas (1966) suggest signify trouble in many cultures. Deep fears of loss of ‘purity’ are aroused when a cultural ‘rēkhā’ is crossed.

More generally, the point the story makes is that concepts of the good life and good society (e.g. moderation, modesty, duty and purity) are stereotypically exemplified by a person’s ability – often a woman’s ability – to remain within socially specified limits, not without considerable cost to oneself. However, resistance to these constricting stereotypes appears also to be built into the Lakshman Rekha myth. Such myths often enable a subtle but ceaseless critique of those several boundary lines of caste, creed, gender, economic status, language and education that a hierarchical and highly stratified culture such as the Indian is given to drawing.

In India, where there is a high tolerance on the ground of rules being changed and lines being redrawn at a moment’s notice, ambiguous stories like that of the Lakshman Rekha constitute a cognitive recourse wherein we can return to the Rāmāyaṇa to ask counterfactual questions such as the following: had Sita not stepped beyond the boundary line that day, would no great war have taken place? But if so, how would good be shown to performatively triumph over evil? A reconsideration of the concept of the Lakshman Rekha could in this sense allow an examination of the psychological and social consequences of ‘border disputes’ across a number of cultures.

Umberto Eco (1992) has argued, for example, that the boundary line was a foundational concept in Western culture. Lines served to separate the city of Rome from nomadic barbarian invasions. Bridges were drawn up so that moats into the city could not be crossed. Linearity represented not just ‘civitas’ but logical, rational thought. Once a line was drawn, time and space were considered irreversible. Even God could not change the linear laws that he had set in motion.

Does the rēkhā or line have similar implications for us in India? Prima facie, it appears that there is little obsession in India with the linearity that Eco suggests is a defining feature of Western thought. An alternative approach to ‘rational thought’ seems to consist in the knowledge that once a line is drawn there’s always the logical possibility not only that it will be crossed but also that it will be redrawn. In the narrative space of India, ambiguity and nuance often replace the strict divide that allegedly separates ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ in the Western paradigm. In such a culture, the counterfactual possibility is not banished. Time can be turned back; bridges (between Lanka and Bharat, for example). Bridges (setu) are not ‘sacrilegious’ as Eco avers that they were in the Roman world but are ‘sacred’ even – or especially! – when built by a monkey brigade. The ‘solution’ to the divisive paradox of the line is to recross it, thus both proving its existence and yet denying its supreme authority.

The Indian narrative of the Lakshman Rekha reminds us that cultural materials, unlike physical matter, are typically untidy. Space-time is perhaps mathematically describable as a harmonious, curving grid exquisitely fashioned by an Eco-logical God. Cultural vitality, however, might be understood more aptly as a set of overlapping boundaries. Multiple Lakshman Rekhas comprise our social existence, but they are typically both affective and negotiable. It may take years, even centuries, to retrieve the damage caused by the crossing of a ‘red’ line – in Kashmir or in the United States, for example – but the ‘Lakshman Rekha’ legend seems to imply, unlike the story of the founding of imperial Rome, that such redemption is not impossible.

References

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger, 1966.

Eco, Umberto and Steffan Collini. Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Nair, Rukmini Bhaya. ‘Epithymetics: The Psychology of Desire’. In Psychology Volume II, Cognitive and Affective Processes. ICSSR Research Surveys and Explorations, edited by Girishwar Misra, 204–270. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019 .

MADA, NALL (MĀD, NĀL)

Alito Siqueira and Asawari Nayak

In Konkani, the word used for the coconut tree is mada and the coconut fruit is called nall, which is derived from the Dravidian root neera (literally, water; and thereby meaning ‘fruit containing water’). The coconut tree is the state tree of Goa. Although it is also an important crop in other states of South India such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, in Goa (as perhaps in other regions too) it has a strong sociocultural significance.

Culturally, mada is regarded as one of the members of the Goan family and is often thought of as being one of the children (perhaps a son, since mada is masculine). When a coconut tree that is planted around one’s house grows to be lush and healthy, it is believed that the family too will blossom, in terms of lineage and economic status. Because of the cultural importance of this tree, a Goan would hesitate to even think of chopping a coconut tree down and would only settle to do so if there is no other alternative.

The mada and the nall are also very much present in the religious events of the locals. Traditionally, a new Goan mother is expected to start the naming ceremony of her child by watering a coconut tree on the twelfth day after the birth of the child and take blessings from it. Here, the coconut tree may be thought of as the ancestor of the family and a fertility symbol. Similarly, in Goan Catholic rituals, during ros (a pre-wedding ceremony), coconut milk is applied to the bride and the groom by the family members while singing songs that bless the couple.

The nall is also a culturally significant object. Its appearance is likened to a human head because of its shape, fibrous ‘hairy’ exterior (coir) and the three ‘eyes’. In Goan folklore, the coconut is supposed to represent God (some believe it looks like Lord Shiva since he also has three eyes) and also an ancestor of the family. Traditionally, a coconut was also used as a juristic symbol, that is, one was made to swear an oath on a coconut.

References

Kosambi, D. D. An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, second edition. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2016.

Noronha, F. ‘Why Has Goa Decided the Coconut Palm Is no Longer a Tree?’ BBC News, 28 January 2016. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35417168 (accessed December 2018).

MELA (MĒLĀ)

Chandan Gowda

mela usually refers to a large religious fair. It is a place for commerce too: various kinds of goods are bought and sold here. And it is a spectacle to behold and rejoice in. A random coming together of people, though, does not bring about a mela. Indeed, a mela happens in a designated place at a specified time. And the latter details are known to the participants not through formal announcements as much as in the nature of ingrained details of a community calendar.

The 1899 edition of the Monier-Williams Sanskrit–English dictionary defines a mela as ‘association, assembly, company, society’. A crucial feature of a mela is that the participation in it is open to all. The invocation of a collectivity of people in a mela does not admit of social distinctions. In other words, social hierarchies and the hard facts of power do not find explicit space in the imagination of a mela.

Furthermore, interactions in a mela are not tightly bound by rules. Things fall in place, as it were, on their own. There is a freeness to how people interact without the gathering risking slipping into chaos or anarchy. Also crucial: people can come in and leave as they wish.

In the meeting held at the Sevagram Ashram a few years after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, Vinobha Bhave held up the model of a mela to characterize the organization most suited for advancing the work of Gandhi in independent India. For him, a formal organizational structure was ill-suited to the task. The ensuing discussions at the meeting illuminate several other dimensions of the concept of mela.

Arguing that financial reserves were unimportant for carrying on the work of Gandhi, Vinobha pointed out, ‘The melas and gatherings of the religious people of this country have never needed funding.’

In supporting Vinobha’s proposal, Maulana Azad, singled out the special freedoms that lay in the experience of a mela: ‘A mela is an open fair, a carnival. No one attending it needs to know the others. No one has responsibility of any kind. An open fair is a throw about of people and purposes.”

The 1894 Kannada–English Dictionary compiled by Reverend Ferdinand Kittel extends the range of meaning inhering in mela: ‘meeting’, ‘union’, ‘a large concourse of people collected at stated periods for religious or commercial purposes’, ‘a fair’, ‘a band of musicians’, ‘a set of dancing girls, musicians and singers and their performances’, and ‘mirth, merriment, jest, sport, joking fun’.

A sense of fun, gaiety, blitheness and festivity are integral to the imagination and experience of a mela. This is probably a reason that mela is also used in relation to performers, musicians and entertainers. While mela as a fair or a large gathering brings up the idea of an assembly of people in the abstract, it can admit of gender distinctions when used to refer to a chorus of musicians.

A mela can also refer to the union or the conjoining of two objects or people. For instance, ‘this literary work invokes shringara rasa to portray the mela of prakriti (nature) and prema (love)’. Indeed, melaisu (to create a mela-like relation) means a bringing together of different elements in a harmonious way and, at times, a sexual union.

As a space of general social mixing melas extend opportunities for promiscuous encounters too. The anonymous nature of the mixing is perhaps reflected in the Kannada word, meladava, which literally means a man of the mela or a man who has emerged from the mela. In the Kannada dictionary compiled by the famous writer, Shivaram Karanth, meladava is defined as ‘a prostitute’s son’ and ‘an intimate associate of a prostitute’.

Additionally, mela can surface as a term of derision and sarcasm to scoff at a gathering that is crowded or has turned into a comical affair or a state of confusion. A lineage to the sense of a comic occasion is illustrated by the old Kannada words, meladaata (a male buffoon) and meladaake (a female buffoon).

Over the decades, the word mela has become hitched to modest, limited-purpose occasions. Consider the following phrases: mango mela, loan mela, saree mela, udyog mela. In all of these instances, no one is under any illusion about the depth of the mela experience. The Great Indian Mela sale announced by an online retailer recently promised the mela experience in digital space, among a virtual community of consumers.

References

Boralingaiah, H. C., ed. Karnatakada Janapada Kalegala Kosha (A Dictionary of the Folk Arts of Karnataka). Hampi: Kannada University Press, 1996.

Knighton, W. ‘Religious Fairs in India’. The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 9 (1881): 838–48.

MISSED CALL

Satish Padmanabhan

Indians are addicts of the ‘missed call’. A highly popular and often intricate form of communication despite its non-verbal nature, a missed call in India is used to market services and even to attract people to activist and political causes and to mount recruitment drives. A missed call bypasses language barriers and costs nothing if it is not picked up. Here is an example of the complex communication that a missed call can accomplish in India. Anil Singh in Khopa village near Malla Ramgarh in the hills of Kumaon goes down to the village road and gives Santosh Dharmwal a missed call whose house lies on the hill-step below him. On cue, Santosh comes out on to his terrace. Anil asks him if the gas cylinder truck has come to Malla. Santosh calls Mahesh Da, the gas dealer. He then ‘cuts’ his call, which means the truck hasn’t come. Mahesh Da in turn gives Hemu a missed call at the Indane Gas godown in Bhowali. After three rings his call is disconnected and he gets a call back immediately. This is the SOP to say the gas truck has left Bhowali. Santosh tells Anil to go to Malla in half hour to get his cylinder.

A ‘missed call’ is a new kind of Morse code, a mime act, a nod-tilt of the hat-lowering of the ‘eye’ set piece in a gangster film, where nothing is said but everything is understood. Opinion pollsters tell you to give a missed call to, say, 9898012345, if you agree with their question or to 9898012346 if don’t. Insurance companies ask you to give a missed to call to a certain number to know more about their schemes. You can give Tata Sky a missed call and they will call you back with new offerings. Girlfriends give boyfriends a missed call to ask them to come out of their hostels. Missed calls can be loaded messages in estranged relationships.

References

Donner, Jonathan. ‘The Rules of Beeping: Exchanging Messages Via Intentional “Missed Calls” on Mobile Phones’. Journal of Computer-mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007): 1–22.

Sivapragasam, Nirmali. ‘Hit Me with a Missed Call: The Use of Missed Calls at the Bottom of the Pyramid’, 3rd Communication Policy Research South Conference (CPRsouth3) Beijing, China, 2008.

PRAKRITI/SANSKRITI (PRAKR̥TI/SANSKR̥ITI)

Ranjeeta Dutta

Prakriti means original or primary, that which can develop into sanskriti (culture). It also means ‘nature’, ‘matter’ and ‘temperament’. Like sanskriti, the word prakriti also appears in the names of several institutions and retreats because of its association with nature. In Ayurveda, it also means the constitution of the body, which is made up of three components: vatta (air), pitta (fire) and kapha (body resistance). There are several food programmes and articles that state ‘Know your prakriti’ and then enlighten the audience or reader about the vatta, pitta and kapha.

According to Monier-Williams, in Hindu philosophy, prakriti is a significant concept, meaning ‘making or placing before or at first, the original or natural form or condition of anything, original or primary substance’. It is the primordial source for the birth of the universe and represents the phenomenal universe. Samkhya philosophy has it that the universe consists of two distinct realities, purusha (soul) and prakriti (matter). Neither of them need god as an original cause – nor can they be identified with god. According to the yōga school, prakriti was an effect of the will of god. Samkhya metaphysics endows prakriti with three gunas (qualities): rajas (creation), sattva (preservation) and tattva (destruction). The equilibrium between these three gunas is the basis of material reality. Prakriti also refers to the feminine aspects of the universe and is symbolically represented as a woman. In the Jain tradition, prakriti is related to the theory of karma.

Sanskriti is derived from the word sanskrit/samksruta. The etymological derivation of this word is sam+krita/kriti, where ‘sam’ is the prefix meaning ‘very good’ or ‘perfect’, kru is the root verb, meaning ‘to do’, kruta is the past participle form meaning ‘done’ and kriti is the noun meaning ‘activity’ or ‘creation’. Thus, sanskriti means a very well/perfectly done creation/action. ‘Kru’ is also the root for words, prakriti and vikriti, which means ‘degeneration’, ‘perversion’ and ‘distortion’. When prakrit/prakriti or something that is raw is developed and well formed, then it becomes sanskriti; when distorted or degenerated, it becomes vikriti. Worth nothing too is the fact that sanskrit/samskruta, meaning a perfectly made, completely refined, very well-polished language.

The word sanskriti, in English usage, is usually translated as ‘culture’, implying development and sophistication. Like the words ‘culture’ and ‘cultured’ in English, the word ‘sanskriti’ is identified with refinement, honour and aesthetic good taste. Thus, sanskriti also includes activities/engagements with the arts, architecture, dance, music crafts, literature, cuisines, languages, philosophy and ideas, all considered to be important for the development of a society, its outlook and the expansion of people’s minds.

The present state of sanskriti in any society is a result of its long-standing historical evolution, development and legacy. Often, sanskriti is used in conjunction with the word sabhyata, as sanskriti aur sabhyata, approximately translated as ‘culture and civilization’. Sanskriti and sabhayata are not, however, synonyms. The spirit of enquiry, intellectual curiosity, inventions and discoveries for the welfare of mankind and posterity is considered as sanskriti, while lifestyle, food habits, behaviour and so on are a part of sabhyata. While sanskriti generates knowledge and an intellectual capacity that creates inquisitiveness and enables mankind to question, sabhyata is related to the material conditions and improvement in those conditions. Therefore, eating good food, wearing good clothes and possessing wealth and property is sabhyata, and engaging with the natural environment around us, seeking knowledge and making innovations in the arts, science and philosophy that create intellectual development, and are not material, is sanskriti. Sabhyata informs various aspects of sanskriti, and sanskriti forms the bedrock of knowledge, on the basis of which society can think and act and improve its conditions, leading to progress. Knowledge and the research generated, as a consequence, and their use for the welfare of people are at the core of sanskriti, and making proper/beneficial use of that knowledge system is understood as sabhyata. Knowledge and inventions that harm humankind and generate negativity are described as asanskriti, and misuse of the arts, science, philosophy and ideas are considered as asabhyata. The social environment and physical conditions influence sanskriti and its further growth. The dissemination and diffusion of sanskriti is understood to occur through communities, group of people and the society. Therefore, it is not the individual but the collective that plays an important role in carrying forth the ideas from one generation to another. Although capacious, sanskriti is not a homogeneous omnibus category, not is it static with elements being added to it from time to time. Thus, arts, philosophy, language, architecture, music and dance, all change and acquire different shapes with time and comprise different components representing diverse ideas and attitudes.

The histories of India, the changes from one stage of social and economic interaction to another are all identified with Indian sanskriti. The intellectual outputs of Bodhayana, Bhaskaracharya and Aryabhatta, in mathematics and astronomy, with the pioneering invention of zero, the contributions of Kanad and Varahmira in physics, Nagarjuna in chemistry, Sushruta and Charaka in medicine, Patanjali in yōga and several others are part of a shared sanskriti. Literature, folklore, crafts, visual and performing arts, festivals, manuscripts, antiquities, museums – the entire heritage of the subcontinent counts as Indian sanskriti. In addition, the concept of the Bharatiya sanskriti is used in political and cultural discourses and ideals to emphasize the various ideas of a nation.

‘Bharatiya sanskriti’ translates as ‘Indian culture’. The Ministry of Culture today is, for example, known as Sanskriti Mantralaya. This ministry regularly organizes the Rashtriya Sanskriti Mahaotsava (National Cultural Festival) and has a mobile app called Sanskriti that provides information about events in India related to dance, music, arts, films, theatre and exhibition. The website of the ministry also has a Sanskriti channel (indiaculture.nic.in).

References

Dube, S. C. Manav aur Sanskriti. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2016.

Monier-Williams, Monier. Monier William’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary, second edition, 654. London: Oxford University Press, 1899.

RAMZAN (RAMZĀN)

Hilal Ahmed

Ramzan (Ramadan in Arabic) is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar (Hijri). This month is considered to be the most sacred month of the year by Muslims all over the world for two primary reasons. First, it is the month of fasting. It is obligatory (farz) for adult Muslims to observe fast during the month of Ramzan (except those who are suffering from an illness, those who are travelling, those cannot fast due to old age and women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or menstruating). The saum (or what is called roza in the subcontinent) is one of the five pillars of Islamic religiosity. The other four pillars of Islam are the following: shahada, the faith that there is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his Prophet; the five-time salat, also known as namaz in the Indian subcontinent; hajj, the annual pilgrimage for those who can afford it; and, zakat, the obligation on affluent Muslims to donate one-fortieth of their wealth for the poor and the needy. Observing roza from dawn to sunset is not entirely about refraining from food, drink, smoking and sexual intercourse. The rozedar (the person who observes the fast) is expected to not get involved in any sinful behaviour and observe her or his roza as an instrument to purify her or his spiritual engagement with Allah. In this sense, the physical act of fasting is a means to achieve moral–spiritual ends. Second, Ramzan is also marked as a sacred month because of its intrinsic relationship with the Quran. It is believed that the verses of the Quran were first revealed to Prophet Mohammad in the month of Ramzan. The Quran itself underlines the significance of Ramzan in the following verse in Sura Al Baqra: 2: 185: ‘The month of Ramadhan [is that] in which was revealed the Qur’an, a guidance for the people and clear proofs of guidance and criterion. So, whoever sights [the new moon of] the month, let him fast it; and whoever is ill or on a journey – then an equal number of other days. Allah intends for you ease and does not intend for you hardship and [wants] for you to complete the period and to glorify Allah for that [to] which He has guided you; and perhaps you will be grateful.’

An additional congregational prayer called taraweeh is also performed in mosques during Ramzan to recite the Quran collectively. These taraweeh prayers are led by hafiz (those who memorize the Quran). Although there is a disagreement between Shia and Sunni Muslims on the religious importance of taraweeh, there is a consensus among all sects of Islam that the Quran must be read and recited extensively in the month of Ramzan. Ramzan involves a lot of cultural festivity. Special food and drinks are prepared for sehri (pre-fast meal) and iftar (collective breaking of the fast). Ramzan ends with sighting of new moon and the very next day is celebrated as Eid-ul-Fitr.

References

O’Brien, Peter. ‘Secularism’. In The Muslim Question in Europe: Political Controversies and Public Philosophies, 144–98. Philadelphia, Rome and Tokyo: Temple University Press, 2016.

Robinson, Neal. Islam: A Concise Introduction. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1999.

SHAMSHAN (S´AMŚĀNA)

Ipshita Chanda

In Sanskrit, shma means ‘corpse’ and shyan means ‘bed’. The shamshan (colloquially, mashan) refers to the ‘cremation grounds’, where according to Hindu practice, corpses are confined to flames. The cremation grounds are presided over by the Dom community, a Dalit community from Bengal, who are traditionally assigned the task of cremation. According to the Bhagwat Purana (Skandha 4, Adhyay 4), Siva presides over the cremation grounds and it is occupied by his followers who are adept in the tantric art. The cremation ground is generally located on the banks of a river, as flowing water is needed to immerse the ashes to symbolically aid the soul with crossing the mythical Baitarani River on its way to the other world. The corpse is placed on the pyre with the feet facing south. After the principal mourner lights the pyre by placing the brand in the mouth of the corpse, the body becomes an offering to the gods. This is the place of kayanta, where the body ends.

One among the numerous cremation grounds of legend is the Manikarnika ghat on the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi, the only city that Siva is supposed to have not destroyed in his grief following the death of his wife Satī. According to legend, Satī is invited to a celebration in her natal home, where she is disturbed by the arrogance and insults her father Daksha heaps upon her cremation ground-dwelling husband. In protest, she immolates herself. Siva takes the blazing body to the Himalayas, where he lives; Vishnu sends his weapon, the sudrashan chakra, to cut Satī’s body into pieces and scatter the pieces across the country. Legend holds that places were a part of her body fell have now become places of worship of the female energy and are known as Shakti Peeth. At Manikarnika ghat, Satī’s ear jewel is believed to have fallen. The smashaan at Manikarnika ghat is ruled by Mahakaal, also known as Yama, the god of death. It is believed that those cremated here achieve mōkṣa (salvation) most easily. This is why Varanasi is also known as kasha or mokshadayini (she who offers salvation to the soul).

Besides, as the liminal world between the living and dead, the shamshan also hosts several Shiva-worshipping cults which use the death rituals and corpses as part of their devotional and disciplinary practice. At the cremation grounds in Varanasi, the cults include the Aghori tantric worshippers of Siva as Mahakaal. These worshippers believe in infringing on the taboos within Hinduism such that their path to salvation is hastened. Other cremation ground-dwelling devotees of Siva include the vetala (spirit messengers of Siva), whom worshippers have to appease in order to become vidyadhar (masters of the secret arts). The shamshan is also known as the pitr-bhasmakanan (the garden of ashes of the ancestors) and ruled by Shiva-worshipping kapalik (skull men), who use human skulls for their rituals.

In Islam, the graveyard is where the dead are buried. Here, the death rituals comprise the ritual bath (ghusl) performed by the relatives of the deceased, who belong to the same gender. Then the body is covered in a white shroud (kafan) and brought in a final procession (janaaza), after the reading of the salaat (prayer) for the occasion. While the funeral prayers are being performed, loud recitation and loud mourning or sitting are frowned upon; hence, the solemnity of the ceremony is maintained. The graveyard, therefore, is a place of prayer and contemplation. Graves are tended to and offerings are made by some sects and frowned upon by others.

References

Ballard, Roger. ‘The Logic of Cremation in Indic Contexts: An Anthropological Analysis’, 2008. Retrieved from: http://crossasia-repository.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/466/1/1_Logic_of_Cremation.pdf (accessed 6 December 2019).

Gupta, Ravi and Kenneth Valpey , eds. The Bhagavata Purana: Sacred Text and Living Tradition. Columbia University Press, 2013.

SOGADU (SOGĀR∙Ū)

N. Manu Chakravarthy

The Kannada word sogadu means the quintessential quality, flavour, temper of whatever is linked with it. Sogadu is used to foreground the inherent nature of a land, a language (to mean the richness of its idiom) and even extends to include agricultural produce (food grains, fruits and vegetables). It draws attention to the uniqueness and vitality of communities and individuals.

Sogadu could also be used to strongly indicate the heterogeneous nature of all elements – animate and inanimate – and, because of the resonances of diversity and uniqueness it carries, the word helps imply resistance to easy classifications and categorizations that come from homogenizing attitudes. However, even as it points to the uniqueness of all temporal elements, sogadu works horizontally to avoid any kind of privileging of any single entity. It is inclusive and is not exclusionary in any sense.

Contemporary cultural discourses in Kannada deploy the word sogadu to open up larger questions that resist notions of ‘purity’ of caste, religion, linguistic expressions, food habits, music, dance and other forms of artistic expression. ‘Sogadu’ could be regarded as a concept that confronts dominant stereotypes as regards the sociocultural contexts of divergent communities.

SUSEGAD (SUSSEGĀD)

Alito Siqueira and Asawari Nayak

The Rajhauns New Generation Konkani-English Illustrated Dictionary defines the Konkani adjective susegad as a word used to describe a person (a situation or place) that is calm, content or ‘at peace’. The word is from the Portuguese sossego. Other derivatives include the noun susheg, which means ‘rest’, ‘calm’ and ‘peace’; the verb susheg ghevap, meaning ‘to take rest’.

Susegad is often used as an epithet for Goa and Goans within the Indian context. The tourism industry also promotes this representation and presents it as one of Goa’s chief selling qualities. In doing so, it appeals to visitors/tourists who want to escape the clamour of their busy lives. As a state of being, Susegado is often used as the antonym of a noisy, industrial, urban, harried life. Susegad is also used as a sobriquet for the Goan way of life within the global (predominantly Western) discourse of tourism. In his article ‘You can do anything in Goa, India’, Bandyopadhayay elaborates on this by quoting an excerpt from the Marika McAdam’s work on Goa called Lonely Planet: ‘Spend any time trying to figure Goa out, and you will get no closer to a tangible answer. Instead, surrender to the spirit of susegad – of relaxing and enjoying life while you can – by accepting that Goa is not so much a state of Indian but a state of mind … a state of simply “being”’. Bandyopadhyay further argues by saying that, often, such touristic representations are largely orientalist, reflecting a colonial fantasy of India (or Goa) being a ‘timeless’ ‘west’s pleasure periphery’ and are ways in which outsiders can ‘take control’ over spaces wherein the natives continue to perform their roles to meet the pleasure needs of the tourists.

While susegad can be seen as a word used to describe the high aesthetic sense of Goans, it can also sometimes be seen as a ‘weakness’ that others (perhaps implying at non-Goans) may abuse or take advantage of. In the negative sense, the word may also be used to refer to the stereotype of ‘lazy Goans’. One can find this stereotype evoked also by Goans themselves, when the government or the media wants to take attention away from actual structural issues (such as unemployment or the caste system), by claiming that these problems are manifestations of Goan ‘sussegadness’.

This word has now entered other sister languages such as Marathi and Hindi. Although it may not find its place in the standard lexicons of these languages, it is used in popular media such as films and print media.

References

Bandyopadhyay, R. ‘You Can Do Anything in Goa, India: A Visual Ethnography of Tourism as Neo-colonialism’, Tourism and Visual Culture 2 (2010): 200–207.

‘Vidharbaat Matadaan Sussegaad’, Maharashtra Times, 10 April 2014. Available at: http://m.maharashtratimes.com/maharashtra/nagpur-vidarbha-news/voting-in-vidarbha/articleshow/33544927.cms (accessed December 2018).

STAMP PAPER

Ramanjit Kaur Johal

Stamp paper gets its name and value from bearing the ‘stamp’. Black’s Law Dictionary defines ‘stamp’ as ‘an impression made by public authority, in pursuance of law, upon paper or parchment, upon which certain legal proceedings, conveyances, or contracts are required to be written, and for which a tax or duty is exacted. A small label or strip of paper, bearing a particular device, printed and sold by the government, and required to be attached to mail-matter, and to some other articles subject to duty or excise.’ The origin of stamp duties lies in the Stamp Act of 1694 signed in England during the reign of King William and Queen Mary.

As Britain extended its empire to India, the coverage of stamp duty also increased. The purpose of this instrument was to raise revenue for the East India Company. The British first introduced stamp duty in India in 1797. Initially, it was limited to Bengal, Bihar, Banaras and Orissa (now Odisha), replacing a tax that was collected from Indian merchants and traders for maintaining the police. The government was run mainly from land revenue as there was no income tax, excise or custom duty. Court fee and revenue stamps were designed by the British to collect taxes from residents of some of the princely states as early as 1797. The designs included the name of the state as well as the type and amount of tax imposed. Early examples of stamp paper from British India and the princely states were colourless, much like a notary’s seal, but were subsequently replaced by typeset or engraved stamps. Later, colour was added, and printings for some of the more affluent states were imported from the West. These collectors’ items are found in museums, personal collections and in the market for their artifact value.

Stamp duty was first formalized by Act XXXV of 1860, soon after the administration of India was transferred from the East India Company to the British Crown. After several amendments, the present law, called the Indian Stamp Act, emerged in 1899. The Indian Stamp Rules were framed in 1925. The Act covers stamp duty in various forms, including on transfer of land, insurance policies, promissory notes and power of attorney. It also covers revenue stamps on receipts. The Act has been amended fifty-one times since 1899 (most recently in 2004), repealing and imposing stamp duties and granting exemptions. The Act has also been amended by various states and the rates of duty differ from state to state.

Under the Bombay Stamp Act of 1958, sixty-two categories of documents need to be legitimized by stamping them. For instance, stamp paper of 10 rupees is used for an affidavit/declaration/undertaking; stamp paper of 20 rupees for Special Power of Attorney; stamp paper of 50 rupees for General Power of Attorney/Agreement; stamp paper of 100 rupees for Indemnity Bond and Guarantee Bond.

There are of two kinds of stamp papers: judicial stamp paper, used for legal and court (kacheri) work for payment of court fees, and non-judicial stamp paper, used for registration/execution of documents, insurance policies and so on. Stamp duty paid for non-judicial stamp paper is paid under the Indian Stamp Act of 1899. The different denominations of non-judicial stamp papers include those of Indian Rupees 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, 25,000. Stamp papers and stamps are distributed to nodal districts and reach the public through sub-treasuries and stamp vendors.

In India, some types of contracts need to be stamped to make them legally valid. For example, if an individual sells property as per a written contract which is not on stamp paper, or for which stamp duty is not paid, then such a document would not be legally binding. Sales deeds have to be executed on stamp paper and any deficiency invites penalty, which may be of the value of the insufficient stamp and fine or up to a certain multiple of the insufficient stamp duty. In India, the collector has the power to punish, impose fine and rule for forfeiture of the property. The payment of duty towards stamp enables the government to keep records of the documents for which stamp duty or stamp revenue was paid. Hence, ultimately, genuine documents would be preserved by government functionaries.

Revenue stamps and stamp paper are treated with awe and respect in India. Stamp paper has found its place in the vernacular as an embodiment of the gravity and promise of the documents that it is used for, thus when convincing another of the seriousness of their intent the poser often is, ‘Would you have this committed on stamp paper?’ It is interesting that stamp paper is perceived to establish the authenticity of a document. However, it does not in itself certify the genuineness or falsity of a document; it is the concerned authority that authenticates a document executed on a paper of a certain stamp value. The need to make this obligatory payment or else pay the penalty, in the case of inadequate postal stamp value, actually ensures the delivery of such ‘bearing’ (barang) letters where the penalty is collected from the recipient. This convoluted effect of surety of delivery has been captured eloquently in folk songs, such as in the Punjabi folk song which goes Jaan taan sajjanaap millin, nahi chitthive barang pavin, which loosely translates to ‘my beloved, meet me in person or then mail me a “bearing” letter’. In 2002, India was rocked by the infamous Telgi Scam, which was a counterfeit stamp paper scam that was spread across seventy-two towns and eighteen states over a period of ten years. This scam dealt the Indian economy a shattering blow of a loss of about 32,000 crore rupees.

With the slogans of smart and citizen-centric governance, stamp paper usage is increasingly being done away with. Apart from withdrawing affidavit requirements for many non-judicial procedures, stamp papers are being replaced with more secure ways of paying stamp duty, such as e-challans and e-Secured Bank-cum-Treasury Receipts (eSBTR). E-stamping has made the procedure of stamping easier. The Stock Holding Corporation of India Limited (SHCIL) is the central record-keeping agency that has facilitated e-stamping in a number of states and union territories. It is a computer-based application and a secure way of paying non-judicial stamp duty to the government. It is the speediest and most convenient mode of stamping and also helps check counterfeiting. In fact, in states like Delhi all stamp duties are being compulsorily paid through e-stamping since 2016.

References

Aggarwal, S. ‘Modes of Stamping in India’, blog post on lawfarm, 29 July 2016. Available at: https://www.lawfarm.in/blogs/modes-of-stamping-in-india- (accessed 7 February 2018).

Misra, B. B. The Administrative History of India 1834–1947: General Administration. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Sims, B. J., J. B. Hodgson and A. K. Tavare, eds. Sergeant on Stamp Duties. London: Butterworth & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1963, 4th edition.

STREET CHILDREN

Harsh Mander (with Satya Pillai and Deepti Shrivastava)

According to the Inter-NGO Programme cited in Strategies to Combat Homelessness by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), a street child is ‘any girl or boy … for whom the street (in the widest sense of the word, including unoccupied dwellings, parks, parking lots, spaces under bridges, shop corridors, wastelands, etc.) has become his or her habitual abode and/or source of livelihood; and who is inadequately protected, supervised, or directed by responsible adults’. In general, street children suffer from many denials and vulnerabilities. These include deprivation of responsible adult protection; coercion to work to eat each day; work in unhealthy occupations on streets like rag-picking, begging and sex work; abysmally poor sanitary conditions; inadequate nutrition from begging, foraging and food stalls; a range of psychosocial stresses; physical abuse and sexual exploitation; and exposure to hard drug abuse. From our years of engagement with street children, we identify them as children who have abandoned their families, children whose families have abandoned them and children who have ties with their families.

Although India, the second most populous and fastest-growing economy, is home to the world’s largest population of street children, we still do not have any agreed definitive and accurate official figure of the number of children for whom city streets are home. They escape official attention and are not counted in censuses and surveys, as these are designed and conducted around counting housed people.

Children on Indian streets are brave but profoundly vulnerable survivors. They have run away from incest, violent and substance-abusing guardians, starvation, cruel step-parents and even horrendous massacres. They have been forced to live by their wits on the street, find food, work or beg to get money, fight for whatever they need, fend off older bullies and all the time carry a well of emptiness in themselves because the significant adults in their lives have failed them. These street children are free spirits. They do not take kindly to being locked inside a gate, being supervised closely and being corrected constantly. They therefore need comprehensive long-term residential care for the entire duration of their childhood and youth but in ways that are voluntary and non-custodial. Children from the street have proven to be able to learn and accept discipline when guidance is not accompanied by condemnation or rejection. They seem to have created a space around themselves, which served the purpose of self-protection when they were living on the street. They do not easily allow others to come into this shell. These children often carry the scars of earlier negative experiences of which they do not speak until they trust the people around them. They sometimes show a strange combination of the maturity of adults coupled with the joy, vulnerability and innocence of a child.

References

Mander, Harsh. Living Rough, Surviving the City Streets: A Study of Homeless Populations in Delhi, Chennai, Patna and Madurai. New Delhi: Planning Commission of India, 2009.

Shukla, P. C. Street Children and the Asphalt Life: Street Children and the Future Direction. Delhi: Isha Books, 2005.

STREET VENDORS

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay

Street vendors occupying public spaces such as pavements, parks and thoroughfares, and thereby appearing to deny access to their ‘rightful’ users has been, over the years, a highly contentious issue in major cities across the globe. In India, the question of the street vendors has received enthusiastic public attention with the passage of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act 2014 (hereafter, SVA). In 2004, the first draft of the Act in the form of a national policy was made public for wider consultation. The SVA arrived at an eclectic definition of street vendor for the entire country: ‘“street vendor” means a person engaged in vending of articles, goods, wares, food items or merchandise of everyday use or offering services to the general public, in a street, lane, sidewalk, footpath, pavement, public park or any other public place or private area, from a temporary built up structure or by moving from place to place and includes hawker, peddler, squatter and all other synonymous terms which may be local or region specific; and the words “street vending” with their grammatical variations and cognate expressions, shall be construed accordingly.’ Clearly, this definition attempts to bring together a vast array of trade practices and their regional dimensions within a coherent and recognizable structure of street vending. We may call this the moment of nationalization of the street vendor.

The term street vendor was not common in popular parlance in India until the 1970s. In the colonial archives of Calcutta, for instance, the term ‘hawker’ appears along with other similar terms, such as pavement seller, footpath seller and pheriwala (peddler) at least since the late nineteenth century. Whereas in everyday language of conversation, hawker emerged only after Partition, when the Government of West Bengal initiated economic rehabilitation projects for refugees by building a number of ‘refugee hawker corners’ in the city. The changing political circumstances after Independence also enabled various commodity sellers on the sidewalks to come together under trade unions. The trade unions also needed a generic name that could somehow manage to describe their subjects. This is the context for the emergence of the hawker as a population category. The term street vendor/street vending started becoming familiar to the street traders as the trade unions began to embrace the lexicon of informal economy to articulate their objectives and orientations.

Street vendors are the key players in rural–urban commodity circulation. They constitute one of the largest service sectors that keeps cities affordable to a large cross-section of the population. In early 1990s, All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health conducted a survey on the street food sector of Calcutta led by I. Chakravarty and C. Canet. The survey was carried out on 911 consumers from various important commercial areas and transit points, of whom a staggering 80 per cent were men and the rest women. The survey revealed that in some of the prominent business districts of Central Calcutta, about 75 per cent officegoers obtained at least part of their midday meal from street vendors. The survey also considered the nutritional value of some of the most consumed food items and found that the street food ‘may be the least expensive means of obtaining a nutritionally balanced meal outside home, provided the consumer is informed and able to choose the proper combination of food’.

In Indian cities, street vendors represent one of the largest, more organized and more militant sectors in the informal economy. Often, they negotiate eviction operations by virtue of complex patronage networks involving local state functionaries belonging to the ruling and opposition political parties. These relationships can hardly be reduced to electoral calculations, as street vendors do not form a clustered urban vote bank like slum dwellers and squatter groups. Rather, through everyday negotiations with pedestrians, shopkeepers, property owners, the state and themselves, the street vendors create, reconfigure and ‘re-function’ materialities of infrastructures. In doing so, Mitchell notes, they periodically sidestep the bourgeois law of property, appropriate infrastructures and make infrastructures the focus of a collective existence. Often, they demand concessions from the government as a matter of right to livelihood in the city. They place such claims not as a matter of rule but as acceptable exceptions to the rule of property. At the time of competitive electoral mobilization in cities, according to Partha Chatterjee, such claims define the terms on which these groups are considered parties to the governmental negotiations.

References

Bandyopadhyay, R. ‘Institutionalising Informality: The Hawkers’ Question in Post-Colonial Calcutta’. Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 2 (2016): 675–717.

Mitchell, T. ‘Introduction: Life of Infrastructure’. Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 437–439.

TEMPLE ENTRY

Dipti Kulkarni

Certain places of worship in India have followed discriminatory practices and have prohibited women and people belonging to the ‘lower castes’ from entering its premises to worship. Such practices of social exclusion have a long history and continue to this date, despite being unconstitutional. The basis of such segregation and exclusion runs deep. Persons belonging to the ‘lower castes’ and women are prohibited entry because they are considered impure. Notions of purity and impurity may be difficult to fathom for an outsider but are an intrinsic part of the practice of Hinduism.

Persons born outside the four broad varnas (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra) may not only be prohibited from entering temples but are also denied access to public wells, roads and so on.

Efforts by the oppressed to gain access, in modern India, can be dated to the Vaikom Satyagraha in the 1920s. Temple entry agitations such as these were marked by the usage of Gandhian means of satyagraha (civil disobedience). Dr B. R. Ambedkar, a legal luminary, visionary and scholar, led many such protests for access to public utilities in the state of Maharashtra.

The question that often gets asked then is why do these women and Dalit groups feel the need to seek entry and worship these Gods anyway. To paraphrase the thoughts of Ambedkar on the matter: Entry into temples is not an end in itself. The oppressed must focus their energies on things like education and getting jobs, but it is still only one step towards gaining equal status in society. The final objective being the abolishment of gender prejudices and caste altogether.

References

Jeffrey, R. ‘Temple-Entry Movement in Travancore, 1860–1940’. Social Scientist 4, no. 8 (1976): 3–27.

Kulkarni, Dipti. ‘No Social Change Sans Dialogue: Case of Shani Shingnapur’. Economic and Political Weekly 51, no. 34 (2016): 34–35.

TRIBAL CUSTOMARY LAW

Melvil Pereira

Tribal customary law is defined as the body of traditional practices observed and procedures followed in an indigenous or tribal community. However, it is a contested term in the academia. Some scholars refuse to recognize it as law, treating it merely as one of the sources of law, because it lacks clarity, certainty, legitimacy and sanctions. Other scholars assert that it is indeed a system of laws consisting of all the customs and practices found in a particular community. These scholars hold that customary law, like statutory law, enjoys social sanction and promotes law and order in society.

Given these divergent views, it is useful to begin by distinguishing between ‘custom’ and ‘customary law’. A custom is a usage or traditional way of doing things passed down the generations. A custom attains the status of law when it is recognized as useful or even necessary for maintaining harmony in society and its violation leads to penal action. Thus, customary law is part of social heritage and differs from statutory law, which is enacted by a sovereign or legislature. Tribal communities all over the world are falling back on their customary law in order to preserve their culture and identity.

There is no doubt that nowhere else are tribals more protected than in India. There is also no doubt that tribals have nowhere a greater say in managing their own affairs than in Northeast India. This is because of the special provisions in favour of tribal communities by virtue of Article 371 and the Sixth Schedule enshrined in the Constitution of India. For instance, Article 371A and 371G protect Naga and Mizo Customary Law, respectively, as they state that no Act of Parliament in respect of Naga or Mizo Customary Law and Procedure shall apply to the states of Nagaland and Mizoram unless their respective legislative assemblies so decide through a resolution.

Many of those who favour the continuation of customary law also recognize its limitations. Customary law is essentially patriarchal, resulting in the denial of rights to women in inheritance of property, maintenance and governance. It also systematically excludes women from decision-making forums.

References

Pereira, M., B. Dutta and B. Kakati , eds. Legal Pluralism and Indian Democracy: Tribal Conflict Resolution Systems in Northeast India. New Delhi: Routledge, 2018.

Singh, K. S. Tribal Ethnography, Customary Law and Change. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1993.

ZANANA (ZANĀNĀ)

Nazima Parveen

Zanana is a Persian word that is used by both Urdu and Hindi speakers in India. It originated from the Persian root zan, which means ‘woman’. In its literal sense, zanana means ‘of the women’ or ‘pertaining to women’, that is, referring to a space in a house belonging specifically to women or a ‘gathering of women’. The word zanankhana is an extended expression which specifically describes the space where female members of the family can take rest, chat, play, dance and entertain friends in private. Zanana is the antonym of mardana, which refers to a masculine space, that is, the outer apartments used for welcoming male guests and men.

In another sense, the word zanana is also used to describe the feminine tendencies of eunuchs, that is, men who have been castrated and hijras (who are identified at birth as male but who self-identify later as female or as neither male nor female).

Zanana space was intrinsically linked to the practice of purdah, as women were not supposed to enter the outside domain of men. This imposed restriction, nevertheless, has its own sociological implications. As feminine zones, zanana spaces produced a whole variety of womanly rituals, games, music and rich linguistic traditions, which are completely alien to menfolk. Begmati Zubaan, the language of the women of the aristocratic class of shahjahanabad, a coded language for secret conversation was a specially intersting development that is said to have taken place during the Mughal period.

The Hindi–Urdu controversy, after the Independence, gradually replaced zanana by the Sanskritized Hindi term mahila and the English word ‘ladies’. However, as an expression, zanana still remains a tongue-twisting favourite of Urdu lovers.

References

Lal, Ruby. Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World South Asian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Minault, Gail. ‘Begamati Zuban: Women’s Language and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Delhi’, India International Centre Quarterly 11, no. 2 (June 1984): 155–170. Available at: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urdu/umraojan/txt_minault_begamatizaban.pdf (accessed December 2018).