Chhāp: Authority, Indexicality and Caste in Vernacular Theory.

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 d...

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Publicado en:Philological Encounters Vol. 10; no. 4; pp. 318 - 339
Autor principal: Lee, Joel
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Brill Academic Publishers 2025
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Chhāp: Authority, Indexicality and Caste in Vernacular Theory.
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        au: Lee, Joel
        affil: Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Williams College, 8609, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA
      su:
        Caste
        Semiotics
        Colloquial language
        Emblems
        Poetry (Literary form)
        Symbolism
        Indexicals (Semantics)
        Power (Social sciences)
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        subj:
          Caste
          Semiotics
          Colloquial language
          Emblems
          Poetry (Literary form)
          Symbolism
          Indexicals (Semantics)
          Power (Social sciences)
      keyword:
        Amir Khusrau
        bhakti
        caste
        Hindi
        indexicality
        semiotics
        Sufism
        Urdu
      ab: 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.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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