 So, let us see now in this session what we have done so far. In the last few lectures, we looked at words and we have been emphasizing the need to pay attention to words and we really have to rework our relationship with words and languages and we are aware of the complexities of the task. So, we have dipped into the present Indian context, its demands by on the one hand placing the subaltern perspective and on the other hand also looking at globalization processes and the connections these have thrown up with a very fast changing world around us. We have also looked at multilingual plurality of India and also the multilingual plurality that exists within us. We have tried to understand the locus and the nature of English as an Indian language. This we maintained is a problematic area for reasons that we have already articulated and therefore although English is an Indian language, but the relationship with English language will really be somewhat paradoxical because after all languages keep changing with times and therefore we can rework our relationship in substantive ways. Some of the examples of Indian language scripts and words these were presented before you in terms of the word creative and creativity. This activity led to a presentation by Rinal who talked about the natural environment and the way languages coexist and also her own take on some of the issues related to the words creativity and creative. So as Maam said about the multilingual nature in India and the various languages spoken in the country, I would like to say that since my childhood itself I have been born in a very multilingual environment. So at home I spoke Gujarati and Kachhi and then I went to school and we generally spoke in English and Hindi and then in high school Marathi was added to it. And then for my higher studies when I went for engineering in my hostel I had students speaking various languages there was Bengali, Oriya, many southern languages mainly Telugu. So there was always a wide exposure of various languages surrounding me. It was taken for granted I mean I had never so consciously realized about the various languages that were spoken around. Eventually I started learning Oriya not because there was a language barrier in conversing with them but because learning a new language was fun. Presently certain linguistic spheres have evolved in my day to day life. At home I converse in Gujarati on the campus and amongst friends I speak in Hindi and while writing or talking about academic topics I switch to English. In case of informal writing like when I write my diary I usually write in English and switch to Hindi when I cannot find the right words to express my thoughts in English and thus I switch between the two languages back and forth. However I use the roman script all the time even while writing Hindi words. Similarly when I chat on the internet I type Hindi words in the roman script while talking to most of my friends and it has become so common that it does not take any effort to spell out the Hindi words. So this is what we did so far. From that perspective we felt that it is time for us to look at creativity and the relationship of creativity to words, to language, languages in terms of some very important western view points that have animated this discussion over the last few decades. He started off by actually quoting Raymond Williams from his famous study titled The Long Revolution where he had pointed out that this is a word in the English language with only positive connotations. And once again it is useful to point out that although we are dipping into this very significant study and the ideas of a very important thinker but our idea is to use it so as to develop generative exercises. Because you have already dipped into some of these personal issues, personal explorations, your own environment, the Indian reality at many levels. Although this is a starting point but you know you can begin to build on those experiential aspects. I think it is time to dip into a more systematic way of looking at some of the issues. What we have done is to look at the word culture and the word creative for our exercise today. That exercise of critical assessment and also exposure to this way of looking at analysis of the word culture and the word creative within culture. So now let us see what Raymond Williams in his famous study Keywords of Vocabulary of Culture and Society has to say about his own work and the approach that he has undertaken here. This analysis operates within the framework of a shared body of words and meanings of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society. So which are the institutions we group as society? What are the actions and activities we group as a culture and also then the notion of society. What is society? What is this institution called society? How come he chose keywords? So the explanation that he provides that he says well the words selected are they are keywords in two connected senses. They are significant binding words. I think the emphasis is on binding words. They are significant binding words in certain activities. So they connect certain activities to some other activities or institutions. So they are binding words that is words that sort of actually resonate. They sort of move in the direction of many other activities. In other words while singling out these key words he is actually interested in looking at their vital connection with whole lot of other activities because after all words also represent activities. Words also represent thought processes that goes without saying but look at the word binding because when we begin to look at this critical perspective I think these ways of putting these ideas together they are very very useful and they will also provoke a lot of discussion and thought although since I do not get to see you and I do not get to interact with you in a regular natural setting that joy will be lost but we can find some other ways of compensating for it but certainly I think this word is what I would like you to concentrate on. So they have both the sense of binding activities but they also have an abstract aspect where certain forms of thought are indicated by their use. So this concrete and abstract I think this is what he is trying to bring out in his approach in terms of key words culture and creative are not the only key words he has chosen. He has chosen 131 key words if my counting is correct in this edition that I am using he has used 131 words and for each word he has also given connecting words which he has placed within this study. So there are about 131 key words but I think we also need to understand something about why he chose these words and why he chose this approach of clubbing culture and society together. To show you some of the resonances that we feel exist with the earlier part of our discussion he says to show he chose this study to show that important social and historical processes occur within language in ways which indicate how integral the problems of meanings and of relationships really are. Now this is a thought that I think would require certain amount of reflection on our part and therefore I like you to stay with it and when you follow up this lecture with the reading of the introduction maybe it will get clarified and we will also try and see in what ways we can reemphasize and clarify this approach and this idea in the next module or in the next few lectures of the first module in which we are trying to understand the general aspects of creative processes and how to trigger it how to identify our own unique talent within whatever exercises we have undertaken. So therefore I think it is best to come back to it I would say time and again. The other resonance that was very palpable is related to new kinds of relationships but also new ways of seeing existing relationships appear in language in a variety of ways. In the invention of new terms, in the adaptation, alteration of older terms, in extension or transfer. Let us see what else this holds for us. I think the important aspect of this study is related to the fact that historically the same words also undergo a lot of change and actually in some ways this is what he labeled as historical semantics but I think it also helps us locate the changing scenario historically for ourselves. The historical context of Raymond Williams himself is steeped in 1945 post-war Britain. When he came back from the war, he found that people around him used words in a way that he did not understand. The sense of meanings associated with many, many words changed and he was quite surprised by that. He was I think quite disoriented by that. So he decided to study this phenomenon a little more carefully and he found that people around him used the word culture more than any other world and I will read the statement that he made. I found myself preoccupied by a single word culture which it seems I was hearing very much more often than he had ever heard before. So then this historical context I think we should keep in mind. We have talked about the significance of maintaining a sense of historical context in every bit of our reading material because it helps us establish our own critical relationship with a text and he says the emphasis of the study is not only on historical origins and developments but also on the present, present meanings, implications and relationships as history and I would say as history in making which is what you are doing, which is what we do when we try to extend meaning, when we try to create meaning. We do not just stay with given meanings in our life, we try to give and find new meanings. So in that sense it is a very, very important approach where you look back at history and in terms of words you look at the historical origin. You also look at how those have undergone changes and in his kind of analysis you pin that in terms of the social context and that may mean economic, political situations, the attitudes towards certain institutions, maybe the need for those institutions, the economic efficacy of those institutions, we will have to see what that leads to. So what he has done in terms of the methodology, that is really very, very interesting, fascinating in fact, this was such a discovery I have actually I was familiar with many other studies but I had never dipped into it. So it has been a pleasure to dip into this study and find a very, very useful methodology. What he has done is to identify these keywords and then for each keyword he has clusters and we will share those clusters with you. So now in these clusters he has a particular set of interrelated words and references with meanings that emphasize interconnections across domains. So now I am sort of moving towards the word culture, the way he has identified the word culture, the way he has defined the word culture. I hope you will enjoy this activity. This is somewhat different from the usual vocabulary development work. If you have initiated that process already you can share your thoughts and your concerns and your viewpoints with us. So the word culture now, in terms of the word or the term culture the statement that he makes is very interesting. He says well it is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. That is really quite a statement, most complicated words in the English language. Then he goes on to say this is so mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought. Part of our aim in this first module is also to try and emphasize certain degree of independence of thought. So even when we dip into new thoughts we want you to first look at your own responses and then look at the more systematic analysis that is offered. So even if you interpret this in a simple surface way at this point in time that would be fine. We would explain these ideas later on definitely that is a commitment I am ready to make right away. So the term intellectual disciplines, what are these intellectual disciplines that he has in mind, what are these several distinct and incompatible systems of thought that he has in mind. Right now we are looking at the clusters and we are looking at the term culture in terms of its complexity. Culture is the first cluster where the word culture and its meanings are given. He points out that the word culture was used in earlier periods to cultivate, inhabit, protect, honor, worship, the other was tending and tending in terms of both natural growth that is crops, animals, but also spiritual mental growth. That kind of sounded really very interesting. I got quite excited by that, but let us first look at the related set of ideas here is related to use in works and practices of sciences, arts and intelligence. I somehow feel that there is a key here for us and we should open a new door or a door that was not opened for some time by using this key, but let us also see the other connotations here. So again cultivate, inhabit, protect and then spiritual mental growth of a human being, but also a particular way of life and is this particular way of life which actually has led to the growth of disciplines like anthropology that look at this variety diversity. As you know we are talking to you, but simultaneously I am also teaching this course in a regular natural IIT setting and the reason we have not been able to bring everybody here on board is primarily related to issues of logistics, the time frame in which the students work, the timetables are different and also in terms of clarity the video course does requires greater degree of clarity. But if we try this activity in class and it works out we will come back with some of our findings and share those with you. So in terms of tending my sense was that maybe you know we can go back to this earlier term because I think it may be sufficient for us to look at the word culture and how it has retained that earlier sense of tending, but also this tending of natural growth. In the earlier sense it was crops and animals and what if we transform ourselves a little bit or transfer our setting in our imagination a little bit and create a pastoral setting you may stay with your own experience of the big city or any other location where you exist and live your lives. But maybe you can examine what you feel about tending crops tending animals do you continue to have a relationship with the natural environment. So this may actually be quite an interesting exercise in trying to see what our relationship to our natural environment is and if we can build this as another theme in addition to the natural linguistic environment I think that would be a very interesting step because this will immediately lead us to other interrelated idea here of sciences and arts. So now let us look at his definition of creative the word creative and it is really not a definition but he is trying to work out the meaning associated with the word. So it points out that creative in modern English has a general sense of original and innovating and an associated special sense of productive. It is also used to distinguish certain kinds of work as in creative writing the creative arts. So in terms of the word creative we have fiction, we have image and we have art now I felt that it will be useful for us to look at the subdivisions in greater detail in terms of the links provided for these. So we start with the word creative we look at the links for fiction that have been provided we look at the links that have been provided for image we look at the links provided for art. So then for the word fiction quite surprisingly he has given two other words myth and romantic the cluster for image is again quite surprising there are only two interrelationships that he has mentioned one is realism and the other is idealism. These interrelationships to me on surface are not really very clear as to why realism and idealism realism still makes sense the whole tradition of my masses which we do not dip into right now. This word I want to pay greater attention to the word art. So with reference to the word creative as you remember this was one of the clusters one of the words in the cluster of three that he had given. So when you dip into it you come back to that sense of culture and sense of tending and sense of tending in terms of intellectual practice in terms of arts in terms of sciences and in you know in the realm of what he described as intelligence. Since we have the copyright permission from Raymond Williams estate let me read this longer quotation very clearly. The original general meaning of art to refer to any kind of skill is still active in English but a more specialized meaning has become common and in the arts and to a large extent in artist has become predominant. Art has been used in English from 13th century it was widely applied without predominant specialization until 17th century in matters as various as mathematics, medicine and angling. In the medieval university curriculum the arts the seven arts and later the liberal arts were grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. An artist from 16th century was first used in this context though with almost contemporary developments to describe any skilled person as which it is in effect identical with artisan until 17th century as a practitioner of one of the arts in another grouping those presided over by the seven muses history, poetry, comedy, tragedy, music, dancing, astronomy. Then from 17th century there was an increasingly common specialized application to a group of skills not hitherto formally represented painting, drawing, engraving and sculpture. The now dominant use of art and artist to refer to these skills was not fully established until 19th century but it was within this grouping that in 18th century and with special reference to the exclusion of engravers from the new royal academy a now general distinction between artist and artisan the latter being specialized to skilled manual worker without intellectual or imaginative or creator purposes was strengthened and popularized. This development of artisan and in the mid 19th century definition of scientist allowed the specialization of artist and the distinction now not now of the liberal but of the fine arts. It is absolutely delightful to remember a time when the separations were not so sharp and what we would like to do is to really see if this is a theme that we can develop further in terms of interfaces between these disciplines. For that of course there is time and we also need to generate more activities but we will definitely look forward to your participation in trying to take this connection sense of connections further. So, to come back to the total scene so to say about regarding the clusters this is how it looks and I am not going to try and read it I will let you look at it. Let us now turn to ourselves so we looked at this fascinating array of ideas based on deep critical analysis of culture and society but how do we look at these words? My simple question to many of my students was related to the word culture and creative and the frequency of use so I asked them which word do you use more frequently culture or creative. I was also aware of the fact that often in our own languages we use some of these words we have started using a lot of English words in our own languages also. So therefore the other question that perhaps I like to pose is related to the absorption of these words in your own mother tongue has the word culture been absorbed has the word creative been absorbed and the best way for you to get a flavor of the classroom situation is to have some representation from the class into this video course and therefore I would now request Neha Chaudhary whom I have already introduced to you in the earlier part of this module as someone who has been intimately associated with the preparation of the PowerPoint presentation and also discussion about the content of the course I would request her to share the flavor of the classroom participation and some of our own intentions in undertaking this activity in the class. So now Neha would make her own presentation and she will also give her own map because we also requested everybody in the class to prepare their own map of creativity in terms of what kind of associations the term evokes I mean I just wanted them to let go which is what we would like you to do however structured may we may seem but really unless there is this letting go of your imagination there is just no fun in doing this course. So now let us have Neha over. Hi so there is sort of inevitably you know a difference between how we did the activity in class and how I will sort of present it to you here because when we did this activity in the class we did it before we read anything about Raymond Williams. So we had a very instinctive response towards the kind of connotations the word creative generated and the kind of activities we thought about when we thought about the word creative. These activities are extremely open-ended and they are deliberately open-ended because when we began when Professor Talwar and I began to discuss about how we will generate activities for the class to explore their sense of self and explore their creative potential. We sort of realized that it's you know it's a very difficult in a structured educational environment to have people find their own different paths. So therefore we kept various sort of activities like the childhood activity and this map activity as a deliberately open-ended one because we want it as an exploration on your part. So now I will sort of move on to what different people said in their different maps about what they thought about what creativity means to them. So most of them in this age of the fast paced world most of them thought that creativity is something of a flash. It sort of comes to you as a lightning idea, a light bulb blows in your head and it's all about finding new ideas that come to you know at the tips of your fingers somehow. Another very interesting take that we had from another person in the class he said that creativity meant to him a way of being efficient in the way you do things in your field. So in your profession or in your work how efficient you are and the way you are able to manage your tasks that is what creativity meant to him. Then there were people in the class who thought that creative time the time in which you do creative activities actually equals your leisure time. It does not equal the time where you work you know or where you pursue your profession so it's it's sort of a divide between creative time and work time. And then I will just present to you a map that I made and I associate creativity with learning with bonding with fiction, technology, art, happiness, travel and cooking. Thank you so much Neha. I mean it's actually absolutely delightful to really have the students and other participants from the classroom situation to come here and share their views and ideas with others. We will keep doing this all the time and since we have very little time left for this segment let me just wrap up by talking about two books that we are going to dip into for generative activities because so far we have not been able to share the generative activities pertaining to Raymond Williams in specific ways. We will do that and for that we would recommend the you know introduction to or the use of the writer's workbook and also Paul Dawson who has talked about creative writing and the new humanities. These are very recent books and I think they contain practices from different parts of the world. So you can get started with these books, get hold of them and we will develop our own independent activities using some of the ideas that these books provide. Thank you very much. I look forward to talking to you again next time. Thank you.