Overview

What terms are currently up for debate in Indian society? How have their meanings changed over time? This book highlights key words for modern India in everyday usage as well as in scholarly contexts. Encompassing over 250 key words across a wide range of topics, including aesthetics and ceremony, gender, technology and economics, past memories and future imaginaries, these entries introduce some of the basic concepts that inform the 'cultural unconscious' of the Indian subcontinent in order to translate them into critical tools for literary, political, cultural and cognitive studies. Inspired by Raymond Williams' pioneering exploration of English culture and society through the study of keywords, Keywords for India brings together more than 200 leading sub-continental scholars to form a polyphonic collective. Their sustained engagement with an incredibly diverse set of words enables a fearless interrogation of the panoply, the multitude, the shape-shifter that is 'India'. Through its close investigation and unpacking of words, this book investigates the various intellectual possibilities on offer within the Indian subcontinent at the beginning of a fraught new millennium desperately in need of fresh vocabularies. In this sense, Keywords for India presents the world with many emancipatory memes from India.

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9781350039247

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Reviews

Trying to capture the soul of a country in key words, particularly if that country is as immense and ancient as India, is a daring task. The extraordinary fact is that the authors of Keywords for India accomplish it brilliantly. This is an exciting tour guided by the most knowledgeable guides into a fascinating country in which the monuments and landscapes are words. A truly unique book. * Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra, Portugal and Distinguished Legal Scholar, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA * At last, a book that examines keywords in everyday use in contemporary India in all their complexity and depth. This is not only a magnificent linguistic atlas. It provides an enormously rich constellation of essays exploring the new imaginative connotations, febrile controversies and critical self-reflections with which India takes part in the global communications revolution of the 21st century. A landmark study, extraordinarily useful for a wide range of disciplines as well as to the general reading public. * Caroline Humphrey, Emeritus Sigrid Rausing Professor of Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK * I am in awe of Keywords for India. Its brilliant editors, Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza, and its over 200 contributors are indispensable guides to one of the world's most historic and crucial cultures. This book is a gift from that culture. * Catharine R. Stimpson, University Professor and Dean Emerita, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, New York University, USA *

Author Information

Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. Peter Ronald deSouza is Professor at the Centre for the Study of the Developing Societies, India.

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