TWO HINDIS AND PHILOLOGY

There is a remarkable exchange that took place on NDTV on the days following the results of
the assembly elections on Delhi for 2015 that shifts from metaphor to reclaiming through
etymology. Metaphors were rife in the self - representation and characterization of the
opposing candidate and party. On the day the AAP party won an overwhelming majority print
and televisual media embarked on another series of excitable metaphors that, for instance,
compared the AAP to a tsunami that had turned back the Modi wave. Tsunamis and tidal
waves, David and Goliath, MufflerMan versus Style Icon - each set of metaphors was designed
to capture the meaning of the contestation between Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi by
articulating the perceptual style of the Delhi voter, in effect how voters perceived the two
leaders and the contrasts between them. Metaphors are unstable linguistic devices, and the
problem before media analysts was not only to describe the concrete specificity of what had
been achieved through electoral process but more importantly, what could be said to be the
implications and long term consequences of this electoral upset. Metaphor emerges in writing
and speech at the very point when the facticity of numbers and statistics appears to give us
some glimpse of the historical reality but is unable in the final instance to imprison voters
thought processes and decision in a set of facts. However metaphor always retains the capacity
for opening up new layers of human histories enclosed in the traffic between English and Hindi
through recourse to etymology. Indeed this shift from metaphor to etymology occurred in the
primetime program conducted by Ravish Kumar where the AAP leader and academic Yogendra
Yadav deliberately toned down the hyperbole around the electoral victory by likening Indias
Prime Minister Narenbra Modi to the English word juggernaut.