![]() Ideas And Praxis: A Creative DialogueAmiya P. Sen KEY CONCEPTS IN MODERN INDIAN STUDIES Edited by Gita Dharampal-Frick , Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach, Rachel Dwyer, Jahnavi Phalkey Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2015, pp. 277 Bibliography Notes on Editors, Rs. 1195.00 VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 10 October 2015 The present volume calls to mind A Dictionary of Modern Indian
History: 1707–1947 by Parshotam Mehra, also published
by the Oxford University Press in 1985 (revised edition
in 1987), a book that some of us would have profitably
consulted as students. But such association between the two works
is purely spontaneous and the resemblance only superficial. The work
under review has many more features to commend itself to the interested
reader. For one, it carries updated information and new findings
that have come our way in the last three decades or so. Again,
quite purposively, it includes the postcolonial, albeit only selectively.
But above all, the approach adopted in this work is far more interesting
and enterprising. In terms of its organization and content, it
goes beyond a dictionary and stops short of an encyclopedia which,
I suppose, it never aspired to be. A good number
of essays included in this volume are acutely
analytical and intensive: they highlight crucial
heuristic transformations and subtle conceptual
changes within a wide repertoire of terminologies.
The discerning reader will also be able
to glean in them the creative dialogue between
ideas and praxis. One may thereby gain greater
understanding of how concepts may bring
about subtle but significant changes in social
practice and conversely, of the process by which
social practice internally fashions conceptual
nuances.
An added feature of this book is the willingness
to substitute (though again selectively)
Anglophone terms and concepts with those
rooted in indigenous knowledge-systems.
Hence we have Khandaan (for family), Itihasa
(for history) or Hijra (for trans-gender). This
strategy has proved to be both useful and innovative.
But even more generally speaking, the
choice of terms and concepts are in some cases
quite unique. It was both courageous and insightful to include
‘Goonda’, ‘Biradari’, ‘Bollywood’, ‘NRI’ or ‘Seven Sisters’; perhaps
the only criticism that one may justly make in this case is that some
of these terms are current only in North India.
Between them, these essays cover an extensive thematic ground.
Numbering over a 100, they are drawn from fields as wide-ranging
as geography, science, politics, philosophy, religion, environment,
culture and society. The quality of the essays included are on the
whole consistently good though as the editors rightly observe, a degree
of unevenness was bound to result from both the nature of the
given discipline itself and the approach/methodology used by the
author in question (Introduction, p. xi). In ... Table of Contents >> |