ABSTRACT
There is a striking refrain in Arziyan, a Sufi-inspired qawwali from the critically acclaimed soundtrack of Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s 2009 Hindi-language film Delhi 6 that says: “dararein dararein hain maathey pe Maula/marammat muqaddar ki kar do Maula”; beautifully shot in the backdrop of the majestic Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, the refrain is an alliterative entreaty to the Divine Master to “repair” one’s destiny—literally, the furrows on one’s forehead, the place where it is believed one’s fate is inscribed—conveyed by the use of the Hindi-Urdu word “marammat,” which comes by way of Persian and Arabic. But this unusual evocation of repair is not merely metaphorical. Street-side stores that would do a marammat of anything from a damaged clock to a broken bicycle and, of course now, the proverbial mobile phone, abound in the towns and cities of the subcontinent. Cognate words for the Latin root “reparare” do exist in South Asian languages and attest to the widespread nature of the practice in the sense of mending and restoring: take the word “rafu/rafoo/rifu” for darning, for instance; but, if we want to engage with an idea and a practice on a truly “equal” comparative scale without repeating, yet again, the gesture of Euro-US-centrism, and since we are yet to “model a method of doing things philosophically with words in any language,” we at least need to start from here: repair is not only not just English; it is also much more than Latin.
