KEYWORDS FOR MODERN INDIA
Craig Jeffrey and John Harriss
Oxford University Press
200 pages; Rs 495
If the French painter Paul Cezanne understood that to see is to question, not to believe, as BBC News arts editor Will Gompertz has put it, then perhaps Raymond Williams understood that to speak is to confound, not to explain. That might not have been a new idea to philosophers when Williams' Keywords, a cultural contemplation on some of the more popular words that the British were using then, appeared in 1976, but it opened a new way of seeing for those studying how language shaped culture. In fact, Williams went a step ahead of the philosophers by deciding that "the emphasis of my own analyses is deliberately social and historical". And though the Cambridge Marxist took the venerable Oxford English Dictionary as his point of departure, he also realised that "especially for words which involve ideas and values, [looking up a dictionary] is not only an impossible but an irrelevant procedure". In Keywords for Modern India Craig Jeffrey and John Harriss bring to our contemporary use of English, which also includes a smattering of desi vocabulary, that "social and historical" approach.
Oxford University's Mr Jeffrey is also part of a larger ongoing academic project that is trying to understand "Indian English … in everyday social and political contexts". Even as the project is a nod to Hobson-Jobson - the late 18th century English glossary meant to assist the bemused white man on the subcontinent - it tries to upend the glossary by trying to understand the "idiosyncratic ways" in which English words are used in India. In that effort, Keywords for Modern India is admirable, especially given that the authors did not have anything like "the extraordinary advantage of the great Oxford Dictionary" that Williams had.
While the choice of words partly reflects the authors' own preferences following their research in Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, to keep the list objective they have chosen words that do not lend themselves to easy definition, will last the test of time and "offer a window on recent and contemporary social, economic, and political change in India".
Here, however, two problems arise.
First, the post-1991 period of on-and-off economic reforms becomes conflated with "modern India". Surely, the authors are not suggesting that but for P V Narasimha Rao's decision to abolish industrial controls in most sectors modernity would never have arrived on the subcontinent. What they probably mean is "Keywords for Contemporary India". But that would narrow their criterion of choosing words that are not mere trends.
Besides, most words in the book are traced back to their original, older usages both in native and Indian English. Periodisation is always a slippery slope and the authors could have just left the title at "Keywords". Secondly, the authors' discussion of how they made their choices highlights that this list is as much coloured by the white man's bemusement as Hobson-Jobson: "We are mainly interested in words that resonate both in international academic circles and within India."
For instance, microfinance has only recently entered public discussions due to popular outrage over ways through which companies tried to collect their loans. But that's mostly in the press, academia or the non-governmental organisations. This idea of "small-scale financial services provided to the poor" comes up in general discussion more through either self-help groups or the Grameen Bank - both words that came into use much earlier. Yet the framing of the discussion is through "microfinance" rather than the other two words.
Another missing word is "food", which remains a contentious developmental issue despite overflowing Food Corporation of India godowns. The rhetoric - political and cinematic - of "roti" remains important still through "inflation" and "hunger" and yet none of these entries passed muster.
A similar text published in 2007 in the United States, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, not only avoids such problems by narrowing its scope to a field of scholarship but also checks its own biases by letting people comment on their definitions online (keywords.fordhamitac.org).
Written in the style of an Indian high-school goer, Keywords for Modern India leaves it to the reader to judge her own meaning. The authors make evident their own beliefs but give ample space to all viewpoints - from the rabid Marxist to the impassioned nationalist ones. As a result, the book has a vast potential readership, and not just as a textbook. Take the discussion on "criminal" that begins with its usage since the Raj rather than with a complete history of the word. It teases out the legal and moral meanings, progresses to the academic argument whether "crime" in a country unaccustomed to the impersonal state's rule of law could be democratic in some sense but ends with a cautious note that "the commonplace notion of a criminal ... does not fit with the contemporary Indian scene" given that people are "frequently part of dense [social] networks [including] professional criminals".
Overall, Messrs Jeffrey and Harriss do not spend more than at most about two pages on any entry. Though it gives the book consistency, this uniformity feels like a constraint, especially when you seem to expect the discussion branching into various directions but instead are confronted with a hurried summing up.
