Recent revisions to high school textbooks in India, including edits to sections on Mughal history and the 2002 Gujarat riots, have caused a furor in the country.
Thoughtful histories do not simply glorify or denigrate rulers, they explain the intersection between the earth and human activity, between the forces of nature and technology. They help us understand the world
outlookindia.com 2021-03-12T16:08:24+05:30
Nair and deSouza’s
Keywords is a book whose time has come, to employ a cliché-metaphor in keeping with the book’s foundational emphasis on language in practice. A ‘keyword’, says the introduction, is an “encapsulated and enduring thought, part of an architecture of concepts that cultures tend stubbornly to uphold”. Arguing that new keywords are added even as older ones remain embedded in communication, this ‘conceptual lexicon’ brings together the local and the cosmopolitan in an innovative effort at polyphony and the plural histories of ideas.
Organised under seven categories classical heritages, contemporary aesthetic modes, economic mantras, intimacies, emancipatory imaginaries, language and self-reflection and politics and the political Keywords is an encyclopaedia of concepts, ideas, idioms and lexias that constitute our current languages of the sayable and the unsayable. The volume is at once a dic