The reason why this section has been included towards the end of this book rather than in the beginning finds its logical explanation in the separate existence of both Kanthapura and Comrade Kirillov from the rest of Rao's novels. Prior to the meeting with his guru Sri Atmananda in 1943, Raja Rao had already published several short stories in Bombay, Paris, New York and London, together with his first novel Kanthapura. His subsequent novel Comrade Kirillov however, was not published as the writer's second work as it should have been. It went to press much later in 1965, the same year of the publication of The Cat and Shakespeare in New York. It was published in French translation “by sheer accident,” (Niranjan, ‘An Interview with Raja Rao’: 22) while its original English version appeared in New Delhi only eleven years afterwards, in 1976.

Interestingly, Rao has always been keen to point out that “Comrade Kirillov was an earlier thing” (Niranjan, ‘An Interview with Raja Rao’: 22). Hence as M.K. Naik remarked first (1972: 142) it can be assumed that the novel was indeed written earlier than 1965.

Introduction

Mising is listed in the Indian constitutional order of Scheduled Tribes, 1950, as Miri. When and how the name Miri came to represent the Misings remains a matter of conjecture. In fact, “never a tribe known as Miri existed before”, claims Dr N. C. Pegu. In the words of Prasad (1991: 4), the word Miri is derived from ami ‘man’ + iri ‘virtue’ = miri ‘virtuous man’. Today, the Mising speakers consider the name Miri to be derogatory and in fact refer to themselves as Mising. Hence, they are now known by this name for all purposes. Sun, in his (1993) study of Tani languages, states that the term Abor-Miri-Dafla, composed of names of the three major tribal groups speaking these languages, must be discarded, since the outdated exonyms it is based on are now resented by native speakers. These terms are no longer accepted or widely used in North East India, having been replaced by the names Adi, Mising, and Nyishi, respectively.

The Mising people are believed to have once been hill dwellers, and to have lived in the hilly tracts of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh. The precise date and circumstances of entry of the Misings to the Brahmaputra Valley is not known. There are many controversies regarding the time of their settlement In Assam as well as in the adjoining plains of Arunachal Pradesh. N. C. Pegu and Dimbeswar Doley have estimated the Mising migration to have taken place around the time of the Ahom invasion in the early 13 century AD (Doley 2008: 48), although this has not yet been independently confirmed.

Introduction

The genetic relationships among the Tibeto-Burman languages of eastern India and western Burma have always been problematic. While several linguists, including myself, have made stabs at sorting the problem out at higher levels, we can expect that serious progress will start with establishing lower-level groupings, on the order of Burling's (1983) hypothesis of a special relationship among Bodo-Garo, the Konyak Naga languages, and Jinghpaw. This paper discusses data which offer significant support to Burling's “Sal” hypothesis – I will present here what I think is strong comparative evidence for a quite close relationship between Jinghpaw and Nocte, which nails down one side of the triangular Sal grouping.

The Jinghpaw Tense-Aspect-Agreement Complex

Jinghpaw has a very peculiar verbal system, as yet far from thoroughly understood. Along with a large set of grammaticalized verbs (Matisoff 1974; DeLancey, Diehl, et al. 1978), there is a system of morphologically complex final elements, of one or two syllables, which Dai and Diehl (2003) label “Sentence Final Words”, or SFW's. Dai and Diehl's SFW category actually consists of two distinct categories of SFW, which I will label prefinal and final. We will see that the prefinal SFW construction corresponds directly to an almost identical SFW construction in Nocte.

A sentence in Jinghpaw typically ends with some kind of mood particle. In a declarative sentence the default is the final particle ai, which otherwise functions as a nominalizer.

Introduction

Copular constructions have since long drawn the attention of scholars engaged in explorative studies of a particular language or across languages because of the intriguing features that set copular constructions apart from other types of constructions in language(s). The term “copula” (COP), as a constituent of a copular construction, has been used in typological studies to refer to any morpheme (affix, particle or verb) that links or “couples” a subject with a copula complement in a “family” of constructions, collectively often referred to as “predicate nominal constructions” (Payne 1997: 111–14). In contrast to the dimension of verb complementation distinguished in terms of the number of objects present, a copular construction, characterized by a copula, contains an obligatory copula complement (CC)/predicative complement (PC), predicated of the copula subject (CS) (Dixon 2004; Huddleston & Pullum 2002). Cross-linguistically, “the most basic copular construction” is used to encode the meanings of classification (inclusion/group membership) or identification (specification/equation of two participants “normally encoded as noun phrases,” others being “less basic” (Curnow 2000: 2). Typological studies show that besides that of inclusion and equation, copular sentences are used to express other assertions like that of location, attribution, possession or existence of a referent (Payne 1997; Declerck 1988; Pustet 2003). The distinctively different categories of overt copulas that have been attested across languages are mostly verbal, pronominal and particle (Stassen 1997: 85, cited in Pustet 2003: 45; Payne 1997: 118–119).

Introduction

This paper presents a description of the derivational morphology and the process of compounding in Pnar, an Austro-Asiatic language of the Mon- Khmer branch spoken in the Jaintia hills of Meghalaya. Derivational processes in Pnar are prefixing in nature and result with the formation of new words along with a change in lexical category. The notable derivational prefixes are noŋ-, i- and jiŋ-.

An attempt has been made in §2 of this paper to provide a brief linguistic description of Pnar. §3 discusses the nature of the derivational prefixes used in this language to derive new words. The next section of this paper is devoted to the causatives in Pnar which are morphologically realized. In §5, I discuss the poly-functional nature of the prefix wa- in Pnar as it is assigned the role of adjectivalizer, complementizer and conjunction although this prefix as a derivational morpheme is attached exclusively with adjectives. The next section analyses reduplication in Pnar as a derivational process. This language exhibits the instances of complete word reduplication which can be interpreted under the purview of derivational morphology. The process of compounding plays a vital role in the word formation process in Pnar which is discussed in detail with adequate examples in §7 of this paper.

As far as the methodology of this paper is concerned, it is based on primary data collected from three consultants. All the consultants are from Jowai, the region in Jaintia hills where Pnar is mainly spoken.

Among the renowned Indian writers of his generation, Raja Rao is the only one who lived through the first six years of the twenty-first century, besides being the one who travelled the most widely. Indeed, the extensive cultural and philosophical cognizance informing his writing is the inevitable result of a trans-cultural lifetime experience.

Interestingly, it was by taking advantage of an unexpected opportunity during his teenage life at the end of the 1920s that the South Indian Brahmin embarked on quite an unusual journey for an Indian writer in English of his generation. Such an incident allowed him to live for extended stretches of time in several parts of Europe, first in France, then in England, and ultimately in Austin, (Texas, USA). In my view, Rao's first-hand experience and assimilation of the cultures of France, England and America are not only detectable in all of his works but contribute to the enrichment and stimulation of the intellectual experience of the literary scholar who scrutinises his writing.

Born on 8 November 1908, in Mysore, Raja Rao lost his mother at the early age of four. The resultant psychological trauma of loss will be constantly re-elaborated in his writings, especially in The Serpent and the Rope (1960) where the mother-figure stands pre-eminently.

Following Kakar's psycho-analytic view of reality, the Hindu world (in its yogic representation) appears to be a romantic world—contrary to the western ironic acceptance of life and its painfulness, it substitutes the romantic idea of quest. In Raja Rao's novels, the recurring reference to and practice of sadhana (Skt. ‘means to salvation’) appear to connect his characters with the quest tradition of ancient Hindu scriptures like the Upanishads. In The Inner World, Kakar suggests a comparison between a yogic vision of life and a western psychoanalytic approach by distinguishing between an ironic acceptance of psychoanalysis and a romantic quest, which characterises the sadhaka:

Introduction

Purum is a language belonging to the Kuki-Chin group of the Tibeto- Burman family (Grierson 2005 [1904]). Benedict includes the language under Kuki-Naga (Kukish) (Benedict 1972). The word Pu rum means ‘hide from tiger’ (Shakespear 1912: 150). Purum is recognized as one of the 33 languages spoken in Manipur by the State Government of Manipur, and the language is considered to be highly endangered. According to the Census of India (2001), the number of Purum speakers is 503. The teaching of the language has not yet been introduced even at the primary level of school education. There are two Purum villages, situated in the Senapati district of Manipur. The names of these villages are Purum Khullen and Purum Likli; the former is about 18 kms and the latter 27 kms north of Imphal (the capital of Manipur). Most Purum speakers are able to speak Manipuri due to the fact that they are in contact with Manipuri speakers through education, administration, business transactions, and so on.

There has been confusion as to whether two groups, the Purum and the Chote, are the same, as we can see from the title of the proceedings of a symposium held in 1985, “Proceedings of the Symposium on Purum (Chote) Revisited”. In those proceedings, Hiyang et al. point out that the name Chote, which has later come to be spelled Chothe, seems to be confused with Purum because the Chothe people settled in some places called Purum (Hiyang et al. 1985: 25–26).

Since the beginning of his writing career and onwards, Rao's contribution to the scenery of Indian fiction in English has suffered from inconstant and mixed appraisal. Despite receiving some prestigious literary awards and numerous literary reviews of his novels in France, America, India, and England, he has only intermittently been welcomed by critics across the world, as for instance C.D. Narasimhaiah and Paul Sharrad. Furthermore, only a few monographs have been dedicated to his work so far, the number of which reduces to about a dozen. This chapter examines the major critical responses to Rao's work, especially with regard to the quest for identity while suggesting a way for future critical investigations.

Paradoxically, one of the main limitations of critical orthodoxy on Raja Rao has been the continuous attempt at discrediting the writer's constructions of ‘Indianness’ in his fiction. A conspicuous number of critics have pointed the finger at Rao's deliberate exile in foreign countries, attributing his spatio-temporal isolation to a presumed proportionate aloofness from ‘genuine’ Indian culture. Some others have instead placed emphasis on a nostalgic response often informing the works of expatriate authors. This second stance is, for obvious reasons, the nearest to my perspective although I will also expose its limitations.

The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1998) and The Meaning of India (1996) constitute Rao's most theoretical inquiry on the subject of the guru. Chronologically following Rao's The Chessmaster and His Moves by a decade,1 both works also explore the main tenets of Advaita Vedanta philosophy which have permeated the author's work throughout the years.

Rao's attention to Gandhi, whom he saw as a national and spiritual leader for India (and for the world), has been long-lasting. Apart from his earliest discussion of Gandhi's ideology in Kanthapura, some of the ideas he explores in The Great Indian Way were also anticipated in the form of an essay he had published for the UNESCO Courier publication in 1969. The article presented in a nutshell an account of Gandhi's life and thought against the backdrop of Indian mythology, and was accompanied by a detailed biography by the distinguished Sorbonne Indologist Olivier Lacombe.

Introduction

This paper is a comparative approach to functions of nominalization in Karbi (formerly called Mikir/Arleng), a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language from Assam in central North East India (NEI). Nominalization and its various functions is a topic of considerable current interest in TB studies, and one with both typological and historical implications. There may be several nominalization constructions with deep roots in TB, including nominalization with the kV- prefix, as found in Karbi, and nominalization with the post-verbal particle -pa, which is widely attested in the family. There is still disagreement as to where Karbi fits into the family. It is often classified as particularly close to Meithei (DeLancey 1987: 800), but other scholars prefer to place it in a branch by itself (Burling 2003: 187). Both approaches acknowledge resemblances between Karbi and the different groups of “Naga” and Kuki languages, even though those are spoken in far eastern NEI. The status of these resemblances for the genetic classification has yet to be determined. While this paper is primarily descriptive rather than comparative, I have included data from two other TB languages of NEI: Angami Naga (Tenyidie), where we see the same velar prefix as in Karbi, and Meithei (Manipuri), putatively closely related to Karbi, but using the -pa nominalization construction instead of the velar prefix.

The outline of this paper is as follows: §2 is devoted to derivational nominalization, including the derivation of nouns that denote activities, states, or events, and the derivation of agent nouns.

International Labour Organization (ILO) and Debt Bondage

In the literature dealing with unfree labour practices, debt bondage has been regarded as one of the forms of forced labour, the others being slavery and serfdom. The ‘UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, 1956’ defined debt bondage as a ‘status or condition arising from a pledge by a debtor of his personal services or of those of a person under his control as security for a debt, if the value of those services as reasonably assessed is not applied towards the liquidation of the debt or the length and nature of those services are not respectively limited and defined’. In the context of the above definition, it has been argued by G.E.M. de Ste. Croix that though the debtor is not a slave, his services and his labour are at the disposal of his creditor. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix has been of the view that debt bondage though technically made illegal still persists in some countries.

The problem of debt bondage has been in the news due to its coverage in international news magazines and the ILO reports. Newsweek in its 4th May 1992 issue carried a special report on the bonded labour system. The Newsweek investigation suggests that cases of involuntary servitude run well into millions. It also emphasized on debt bondage being the most common cause for families to work for generations.