If the Introduction to this book was the elegant setting out of the philosophical reasoning that underlay our enterprise, this epilogue outlines the political reasoning behind it. If the former is persuasive and scholarly, this is polemical and blunt. We see our book as belonging firmly to the literature on the politics of knowledge as it seeks to partner the many attempts to flatten the knowledge asymmetries between the North and the South. It has subversive intent. It seeks to disturb the regular vocabulary of social sciences and humanities and to disrupt the flow of communication between the North and the South. It seeks to upset the complacency of scholars who think their language adequate to the task of representing their world of inquiry. It seeks to suggest that their language is deficient and that new words and concepts are required.
In our book, we hope to both enlighten and liberate – to enlighten scholars who want to know India and through such enlightenment discover that they need not be constrained by a settled academic language that is, in fact, limited and not up to the task. We hope to suggest to such scholars that there is a rich linguistic reservoir out there, the baolis of India, from which they can draw. This book is also an act of liberation because it will allow scholars from outside the metropolis to participate in discussions on India using vocabulary that they consider more authentic and to assure them not to feel constrained by their unfamiliarity with jargon fashioned in the academic corridors of the North. The language of representation has to be asli not nakli.
While we recognize that the word ‘authentic’ is a taboo word in fashionable circles, these days we are, by using it here, inviting a discussion on the need to align the thinking and feeling of the scholar in her attempt to construct and represent. Sometimes words from the high table seem inauthentic, such as landed gentry, when zamindar would do. To an organic scholar, a word must feel authentic for it belongs to the common sense of the world in which she lives and operates. This looming battle that we are hinting at, to represent the world with words and concepts from outside the metropolis, belongs to our struggle in the politics of knowledge. The epistemology of the South must share equal space in the seminar room with the epistemology of the North.
While many of the responses to this pervasive and persistent knowledge asymmetry between the North and the South – by which we mean a political location not a geographical one – have looked at the processes of production of the knowledge that is largely used by global knowledge communities, such as policymakers and consultants, universities and multilateral agencies; or to the structures of dissemination by which words and concepts arrive, such as at media corporations and publishing houses; or to the communication instruments by which they get nativized, such as YouTube and Facebook; or even to the processes of valorization of some words and the downgrading of others, such as modus vivendi and not jugaad, this book looks at the conceptual landscape within which we operate. It looks at language. It recognizes the plural language landscape in which we in India communicate and which, we are arguing here, must be the landscape from which we draw our concepts.
While mapping asymmetries in production, dissemination and valorization of knowledge needs to be done to expose the biases at the heart of a world dominated by the knowledge systems left behind by the colonizer, what K. C. Bhattacharya described as producing a ‘shadow mind’ in place of a ‘real mind’, this volume, by looking at language, opens a new front in this battle for the decolonization of the mind. It seeks to diminish the asymmetry between the colonizer’s language and the bhasas, between the conceptual universe represented by the colonizer’s language and that of the bhasas. It is a small beginning in the effort not just to seat Sanskrit besides Latin but also Bhojpuri alongside French at the festival of ideas on India. In this task it has a larger ambition. The book seeks to give the world a wider menu of concepts from which to draw as together we, attempt to understand the complexity and paradoxes of the human condition. The book will thereby make policy choices more informed. It is, hence, also a celebration.
We have been able to get here only because of the huge collaborative effort that was involved. With their eyes and with their words friends said to us ‘aage badho, hum tumare saath hai’, meaning ‘go ahead we are with you’. With gratitude, we have in the Introduction acknowledged the contributions of our many collaborators. At the risk of being repetitive, let me add to what has already been said. With approximately 259 entries, ranging from 300 to 1,200 words, and with nearly 200 contributors from across the disciplinary and geographic landscape of India, we have produced a book that offers more than a peek into the cultural and intellectual topography of India. Over the several years of its making, the book grew in its promise as we hounded some contributors, badgered others at seminars, chased still others behind bookshelves at book shops where we met by chance, and managed to persuade and enthuse them about our project. Most joined us, some didn’t because of other commitments, but in the process we have made what began as an intangible idea into a printed reality. We are truly grateful to those who have come on board.
The book that we offer is intended to be interesting and playful, provocative and intriguing. Readers will smile at some of the entries and occasionally wonder why obvious words are missing. We know that at the moment of its publication there will be a veritable storm of protest. Scholars will question the title of the book and argue that India should not be in it since a lot of India is missing. ‘Why is so and so word excluded?’ ‘Why is this region under-represented and that over-represented?’ ‘How do you justify including such and such a word, as a keyword?’ ‘Surely you could have done better?’ While the first three responses are understandable, even justifiable, we must take issue with the fourth since cajoling two hundred plus scholars to contribute an entry was difficult and since every conversation we had across the many meetings both of us attended, produced suggestions, possible entries and the search for willing authors. We were consumed with the project. We saw it evolve as some leads turned out to be duds and others proved to be very fertile. There were frustrations and disappointments. And there was also joy as the confirmations started coming in.
It was a challenging task to match the structure of the book with the received entry, to attempt a balance so that one section would not dominate another, to ensure that the collection would not be ponderous but playful and innovative in what it revealed of the dynamic cultural and linguistic landscape of India. We are pleased with the outcome. We think we’ve done very well thank you. This book is the first step in our hope that others will join us in plugging the gaps. Producing it was like filling a hole on the beach with water from the ocean. The tide is coming in. And there is still water in the hole.
That it would be a challenging task was to be expected. After Papua New Guinea, India is the most diverse language landscape in the world. Now only do we have many languages, some only oral and some both oral and written, we also have some languages with many scripts. To prepare a short list of words, and to find contributors for them, was near impossible since we did not know enough language speakers from all the languages who could contribute and who were willing. Yet we got 259 words. Early in the project we took a decision that our volume was not aiming to be comprehensive. It could not be. At the best of times, it would be a Hanumanian task and perhaps even Hanuman would not be able to complete it. So we abandoned the aspiration of being comprehensive and also gave up on the goal of being representative. Even if we restricted ourselves to only the twenty-two languages in the Eight Schedule of the Constitution, and excluded the many languages documented in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India or Ganesh Devy’s People’s Linguistic Survey of India, and further, found words that opened the proverbial window to give us a view of the inside of India, the book would still be deficient. Comprehensiveness and representativeness were unattainable goals. All we have been able to do is to illustrate what is available and what is possible. We expect this book to seed a curiosity and whet an appetite.
In this epilogue, let us describe the strategies we adopted to make the book a contribution to the larger battle in the politics of knowledge. Four approaches were tried simultaneously in our effort to select and reject, include and exclude. These are to infiltrate, elevate, appropriate and populate. Let us now detail the thinking behind each of these strategies.
The first is to ‘infiltrate’ the conceptual vocabulary that scholars and students use when speaking about India. The desire to infiltrate comes from our feeling that internally scholars hesitate to use concepts from the bhasas, and from the high languages of India, because it is considered inappropriate and perhaps indicative of a deficient education. Aime Cesaire saw this as the colonial process of inferiorization, a feeling, produced by colonization, that the culture of the local is inferior to the culture of the colonizer. This includes language. In the humanities and social sciences community when we want to represent India, we must speak English not Vinglish. So it is freedom instead of swaraj (svarāja), or non-violence instead of ahimsa (ahinsā), or honour instead of izzat, or even tribal instead of Adivasi. This hesitation is because we still have to attain the ‘swaraj in ideas’ that K. C. Bhattacharya talked about. We still feel diffident to use a vocabulary that is not the vocabulary of the metropolis. Salman Rushdie in his Midnight Children did not suffer from such diffidence. But other children born after midnight do.
Social sciences’ work in, and about, India is done in English. This must naturally be so since English is the language of academic communication across the world. Fair enough. And therefore the challenge before us is to colonize this English. We have to make it more Hinglish or Bonglish. Further, if internally there is a hesitation to use words from the bhasas, then externally, to compound the problem, we experience a disapproval of words that the international community of scholars does not understand. If we have to represent India, we have to do so in their language not ours. So we are all expected to speak of India’s zeitgeist not asmitā or political protest not dharnā. This is just not level.
The way to expand the field of available concepts is, therefore, to infiltrate the vocabulary of the humanities and social sciences in India with words and concepts from the larger linguistic terrain of India. The objective is to bring into this vocabulary words and concepts that have already achieved philosophical depth within the Indian philosophical traditions and then to offer them to the world not just because they are more representative of the Indian social, political and cultural landscape but also because they carry with them meanings that help us understand better the Indian civilizational universe and thereby, in doing so, contribute to our understanding of the diversity of the human condition. Concepts such as dharma and lila or harām and halāl are rich in meaning, have been extensively debated within their respective weltanschauung where fine distinctions have been made and have, over the years, produced a vast literature on their multiple usages. Such words are available. When one goes through the list of words in our book, one will get a sense of the infiltration we have attempted of the existing vocabulary of social sciences and humanities in India. The goal was not only to disturb the complacency of the scholar but also to deepen the resource base of concepts on India.
The second strategy that was used was to ‘elevate’. Many things needed elevation –words into concepts, colloquial expressions into respectable phrases, acronyms into words and terms into ideas. Take foto or herō or UPSC or cyberbhakt or bhailo for example. They constitute small windows into the contemporary cultural world of India. These are both descriptive terms and conceptual categories for they allow us to name an action or a practice and also to place it within a distinct semantic context. During this exercise of finding words that represent contemporary India, we found words that bring alive contemporary India. ‘Herō’, for example, when deconstructed tells us a great deal about Indian modernity. ‘Cyberbhakt’ is a good window on how politics in India relates to the digital world. ‘UPSC’ is an acronym, which has become a word, that describes aspiration, achievement and social power. ‘Foto’ when opened up tells us much about the new mass culture, about emancipation and about the democratization of technology. ‘Bhailo’ refers to relationships of competition and hostility as ‘the other’ is constituted by communities across India. The bhailo is the other of the self in Goa. To elevate, therefore, is to give respect to words and terms that have hitherto been ignored and that have, so to speak, not appeared on the conceptual radar of the social sciences and humanities. To elevate a word into a concept is an act of resistance to the hegemony of the metropolis, to Northern epistemology. While English or French may be the base language of the humanities and social sciences, these base languages must borrow more widely, and more readily, from the languages of the other societies that they strive to interpret.
To elevate is to equalize concepts from the periphery with those of the metropolis. It shifts the burden of diffidence from the periphery onto the legatees of the hegemon. Elevating a word, which is much used in communication in the public sphere in India, whatever the location of such a word might be, such as thalaiva or aḍḍā or just matalabī, into a concept equalizes it with other concepts from the North such as Sir or gossip or dissimulation. Such equalization is necessary to flatten the asymmetry. It is also fun. Our favourite is a word such as baat-chiit. It is a word that spans a range of meanings from conversation, to discussion, to negotiation, to dialogue, to achieving understanding between persons, families and even nations. Why have we in India kept it beyond the periphery? We do democratic dialogues, not democratic baat-chiit. We have family arbitration not family baat-chiit. Another term that must be elevated is the description of the welfare state in India as mai-baap sarkar. It refers to government that is both mother and father, in its literal translation, and thereby to government that will provide livelihood security, when seen from the left, and rob one of initiative, when seen from the right. It is a term that signifies not just the reach and care of the state but also the dependence of the vulnerable citizens on it. To talk about India’s economic policies of welfare, without using the term mai-baap sarkar, is to limit the discussion to the Lodhi Estate community and to not extend it to the many policy discussions and academic sites that flood the Indian plains. For their own good, the Bretton Woods institutions better learn this language of mai-baap sarkar. It will ease their communication with the wider Indian world. Elevation as strategy comes from the belief that India cannot remain a non-contributor of concepts to the global policy discourse. We must try and make words into concepts, that is, inhabit them with meanings that come from diverse usages, and sometimes try and make concepts into theories such as bhoodan and sarvodaya. But we are not there yet.
The third strategy that has been deployed simultaneously with the earlier two is to ‘appropriate’. Here we reverse the direction of flow, not from the bhasas to English but from English to the bhasas. As an illustration, let us take two English words that can be found in most Indian languages, ‘tension’ and ‘adjust’. If one were travelling in a crowded metro train or a city bus, one will soon see that the last passenger to board, looking for a place to rest her weary body, will move towards a crowded seat and ask its occupants to ‘adjust’. In translation, this means make a little place for me please. In most cases, passengers willingly comply. There is a shuffling of bums, and from nowhere, like a P. C. Sorcar trick, a tiny space appears just enough to seat a little bum and a weary soul. No rules of only two per seat work here. Sharing of common resources is the norm. A concession is made by the others occupying the seat who, by a small adjustment in a finite space, create an opening in which the recipient of that concession soon sits as if by right. We may be over-reading the small event that happens across buses in India but this is mainly to explain how the word ‘adjust’ travels across linguistic space in an Indian bus. Interestingly, adjust is not a word used in the London Underground to accommodate the last person to board. It must. ‘Tension’ enjoys similar acceptance in many of the other Indian languages. Here an English word carries many of its meanings into the bhasas and lives on in a range of situations. Recently, I was in a hospital ward where many of the staff came from the different linguistic states of India and where a kind of English-Vinglish was on full display. ‘Tension’ was the common word used by the nurses when bantering about their work. ‘Last night I had toooo much tension no, because the ward was full.’ ‘Sir don’t worry about the drip running out of fluid, don’t take tension.’ And so on, an English word making perfect sense in many Indian languages. Ask a taxi driver in Delhi whether you will reach your meeting on time and he will probable reply, ‘sir tension mathh lo’ (‘Don’t be worried you will reach on time’). One appropriates not just words but also acronyms. VIP in India, while it does mean very important person, has spawned a whole semiotic universe of Indian political culture. Seats are reserved for VIPs. Airport lounges can only be used by VIPs. There is a separate queue at many temples for VIPs. Aspiring for the status of a VIP is important for those who want to announce their importance to the community and to the society in which they live. VIPs walk differently, eat separately, dress distinctly. And since the class of VIPs has grown in size because of democracy – an indicator of the ease of political mobility that is available to all citizens in Indian democracy, an indicator which is not unlike the ease of doing business recommended by the World Bank – a special category of persons has emerged called VVIPs. If VIPs have a section of seats reserved for them at the Republic day parade in Delhi, VVIPs get the first row in this section. To discuss Indian polity and society by ignoring this class of persons is to miss a great deal about Indian democracy. Our book has included words such as adjust, tension and VIP. As we have stated before, this is just a beginning. Our list of words can only be illustrative not exhaustive. It can only provoke others to add to the list. We welcome additions to the lexicon of words that have been appropriated from English by the many Indian languages and that have acquired considerable use in the public sphere. For example ‘herō’ or ‘missed call’ tells us a great deal about the dynamic linguistic landscape of India and about how it is influenced by both Bollywood and technology. We wanted to have ‘420’ in our lexicon, the section in the Indian Penal code that deals with crooks, but were unable to get a contributor. This discussion of appropriation of English words is like a ‘selfie’ of contemporary India.
While infiltrate, elevate and appropriate are useful strategies that have been adopted in our struggle within the politics of knowledge, the fourth, ‘populate’, gives this struggle the numbers we need. If one goes through the list of 259 keywords in 7 categories, one sees many words that have been included and that had hitherto been excluded. The exercise of populating comes from our goal to flatten the asymmetries in the flow of concepts across the world and not to create an alternative vocabulary. We recognize, and accept, that English and French are the dominant languages of social science and humanities production so far and so our goal is more modest, to add to the vocabulary words from other Indian languages, words that are closer to the ground, that better represent the world being described. Often words that come from outside the cultural universe of India, such as ‘kulak’, describe less than what an Indian equivalent word such a ‘zamindar’ would do, or ‘sarkār’, in the colloquial instead of ‘governor’, ‘fatwa’ instead of ‘edict’ or ‘rajdharma’ instead of ‘norms of governance’. While many in the list of 259 words and concepts are from the conventional vocabulary of the humanities and social sciences, especially words on the Indian economy, their elaboration has an Indian touch. For example the sport cricket is the same game in the ex-British colonial world but in India, as in the South Asian subcontinent, it has the additional status of a religion. To populate is to add to the set of words. Our 258 words have done just that.
When these words, and others, enter the lexicon of keywords for India, then we will have diminished the power of the epistemology of the North. Angry critics from the North will describe our exercise as an attempt to create an alternative vocabulary that is bound to fail. This is caricature. We seek to add diversity not to substitute, to offer conceptual options not to compel the social reality to fit a social science concept that has been fashioned elsewhere. As was stated in the beginning of this epilogue, the philosophical underpinnings of this project were outlined in the Introduction. Here we have merely attempted to make a political statement.
Peter Ronald deSouza