Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century

- Blurb -

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 and technology, economics and politics, 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, this work differs from it in at least one crucial aspect. It is not single authored. In it, for the first time, more than 200 leading sub-continental scholars form a polyphonic collective, whose 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 explores 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 also presents the world with emancipatory keywords from India.