Semiotic Travels: An Interview with Harjeet Singh Gill

Harjeet  Singh Gill; Nishaant Choksi; Arka Chattopadhyay

doi:10.35684/JLCI.2022.9107

Authors

Harjeet Singh Gill
Nishaant Choksi IIT Gandhinagar
Arka Chattopadhyay IIT Gandhinagar

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35684/JLCI.2022.9107

Keywords:

Abelard, Buddhism, creativity, conceptual structures, France, India

Abstract

Gill's use of Abelard to critique dominant trends in European semiotics finds its parallels in his extensive work on Buddhist philosophers Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, who posed an alternative notion of the sign to that developed by the more celebrated earlier grammarians from the Sanskrit tradition, Pāṇini and Bhrtihari. He places these heterodox Indian and French traditions of semiotics in creative dialogue to cultivate a semiotic theory that is at once universal in its applicability while also allowing for multiple, non-dominant forms of thought and creativity to emerge. Consequently, his ideas provide a new way for semiotics that would be particularly relevant for scholars working in postcolonial Asia.

This interview is an abridged and edited excerpt taken from an interview conducted with Gill by Nishaant Choksi and Arka Chattopadhyay at a virtual seminar held at IIT-Gandhinagar on 31 March 2021. The entire recorded interview can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb6fG3_hvqg. A special thanks to Shruti Nair for her assistance in transcription.

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Author Biographies

Harjeet Singh Gill

Harjeet Singh Gill is one of the doyens in the field of semiotics in the Indian subcontinent. Hailing from Punjab, a region that straddles the border between modern-day India and Pakistan, Gill spent his formative years (1963-1968) studying linguistics and semiotics at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris under the tutelage of the well-known French linguist Andre Martinet. During that period, Gill interacted with some of the great modern-day thinkers of the time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Claude Levi-Strauss. Gill returned to Punjab in 1968 as a Professor of Linguistics at Patiala University and started the department of Anthropological Linguistics there, one of the first of its kind in South Asia. In 1984 he moved to New Delhi to take up the post of Professor of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. From 2000-2003 he was also a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Gill continued his close engagement with the French academy, taking up visiting professor roles at the Maison de L’Homme and the College de France.

He has several books to his name, some of the most famous of which are Structures of Narrative in East and West (1989), Abelardian Semiotics (1989), The Semiotics of Conceptual Structures (1996), and Signification in Buddhist and French Traditions (2001). His influential edited collections include Ideas, Words and Things: French Writings in Semiologie (1992, co-edited with Bernard Pottier) and Signification in Language and Culture (2002). He also has published linguistic writings, including a reference grammar, on Punjabi, has written on the Sikh gurus, and has translated Sufi Punjabi poetry into English.

Nishaant Choksi, IIT Gandhinagar

Nishaant Choksi is working as an Assistant Professor in the discipline of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT-Gandhinagar. His main field of research is in linguistic anthropology, and conducts research among Adivasi communities in eastern and western India. His most recent book is entitled Graphic Politics in eastern India: Script and the quest for autonomy published by Bloomsbury in 2021.

Arka Chattopadhyay, IIT Gandhinagar

Arka Chattopadhyay is assistant professor, Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He has been published in books like Deleuze and Beckett, Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film, Gerald Murnane: Another World in this One etc., and journals such as Textual Practice, Interventions, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Critique, Sound Studies and The Harold Pinter Review. He has co-edited Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (2013) and guest-edited the SBT/A issue Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind. (2017). Arka is the founding editor of Sanglap and a contributing editor to Harold Pinter Review. He is the author of Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real (Bloomsbury Academic UK, 2019). He has co-edited a volume on Nabarun Bhattacharya (Bloomsbury India, 2020) and is working on a monograph on Posthumanism (Orient Blackswan) and two edited volumes on Affective Ecologies and Badiou and Modernism (Orient Blackswan and Bloomsbury). He has recently been awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship 2022-2023 at the University of Edinburgh.