The Question of Silence: A Para-biography

The silence the eminent scholar and cultural activist G.N. Devy refers to in The Question of Silence is a malaise of modernity. One among its many dimensions is the alienation spawned paradoxically in a global conjuncture of hyper-connectivity. Devy’s ‘silence’ also refers to cultural loss, of languages extinguished, and of the disinheritance of the human race as a part of its collective past vanishes into oblivion. Language is the means through which the human species names the world and creates a sense of space and time. Human community in turn is a construct of linguistic patterns and shared meanings. Languages, and indeed particular words, are a distillate of years of collective human experience. Devy found while surveying the languages of the Himalayas, that there are no fewer than 162 words for ‘snow’, each referring to a particular aspect of the natural phenomenon. That spirit of equality and not least, cultural generosity, may be difficult to retrieve, but Devy’s book gives hope. For those who may lack access to the larger body of his work, this volume provides a conspectus of sorts, in language that is easy and deeply intimate.