| Sumario: | As royal seal, poetic signature, textile print, numismatic image, or sectarian forehead marking, the chhāp in Hindi and Urdu bears witness to a physical act of impressing or marking by which an object is stamped with significance. Yet the chhāp is also the copy, duplicate, or imitation. This essay draws out implications of the untranslatable concept chhāp for anticaste thought and for theories of signification by way of its usage in early modern devotional or bhakti poetry, a composition of the medieval Delhi poet Amir Khusrau, and the reflections of a police official on caste epithets in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Together, the poets and the cop reveal chhāp to be a crucial element in the implicit semiotic theory of the north Indian vernacular, an alternative to the anglophone index that is better attuned to relations of force and vulnerability to counterfeit.
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