Notes on Transliteration

Abstract

Extract In contrast to standard academic transliteration of Indian-language terms, and in order to make this book as accessible as possible, I have elected not to use diacritics. My assumption is that those who do not know Indian languages will not know the conventions of the diacritics and that those who do know Indian languages will not need diacritics to correctly pronounce words. The diacritics are, however, included in the Glossary. In the absence of diacritics, I render transliterations as close as possible to what will result in correct English pronunciation. Thus, I render both ś and ṣ as “sh,” so, shakti (spiritual power) rather than śakti. Further, I have indicated aspirated consonants with an “h,” such as chaturthi (fourth day)—as found in Ganesha Chaturthi—rather than rendering the word according to the standard academic transliteration of caturthi. The majority of the conversations that animate this book were conducted in Hindi, but I draw on and deploy some concepts from classical Sanskrit texts. Thus, throughout this book, I use the Sanskrit transliteration for proper names of deities (i.e., Shiva instead of Shiv, Ganesha instead of Ganesh) as well as for dharma, rather than the Hindi dharm, because I specifically relate my use of the term to Sanskrit texts. Likewise, terms I only use in reference to classical texts, such as varna or ashrama, are in Sanskrit form. In most other cases, I have followed Hindi conventions for language and transliteration, particularly by leaving off the final “-a” for nouns (such as prasad instead of prasada, vrat instead of vrata) because these are closer to the vernacular pronunciations used by the women with whom I work.