ABSTRACT
Some thirty inches from my nose The frontier of my Person goes, And all the untill’d air between Is private pagus or demesne. Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes I beckon you to fraternize, Beware of rudely crossing it: I have no gun but I can spit. W.H. Auden The terms ‘individual’ and ‘person’ evoke and express a great variety of ideas, and it is not possible at the outset to assign a single, unvarying meaning to either of them. Some might find it safer to take only one of the two concepts - and each is broad enough - but my first objective is to draw attention to the confusion of tongues that marks the discussion. I will make my own observations about the changing position of the individual in contemporary Indian society, but they will come later. For the present, one might add to ‘individual’ and ‘person’ the concept of ‘self for that also has figured prominently in sociological discussion of a certain kind, particularly in the United States:1 the same concept, though in a different form, has been a perennial, not to say an obsessive, concern in certain traditional systems of Hindu philosophy.2
