Between the Lines: Footnotes, Glossaries, Parentheses

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes on the politics of what sits beside the sentence in South Asian Writing.

In South Asian literature, meaning often arrives sideways. It leans in from the edge of the page, clears its throat in a footnote, lingers inside a bracket, or waits patiently at the back of the book in a glossary that few readers admit to reading in full. These are not decorative excesses. They are not scholarly flourishes. They are structural. They hold what the main sentence cannot bear on its own.

To read closely across the region’s writing is to realise that the centre has never been enough. Too much history presses against it. Too many languages breathe beneath it. Too many lives have been trained, by force or habit, to speak in half-tones and asides. What appears as extra is often the real narrative labour, the work of holding contradiction, refusing erasure, and surviving translation.

The footnote interrupts the illusion of smooth reading. The glossary delays comprehension. The parenthesis hesitates, doubles back, and revises itself mid-thought. Together, they produce a literature that does not glide. It pauses. It corrects. It remembers what has been strategically forgotten.

This is not accidental. In societies shaped by caste hierarchies, colonial grammars, and rigid ideas of who may speak plainly and who must explain themselves, the margin becomes a charged site. The page replicates the world: some voices take up the centre effortlessly; others must arrive annotated, justified, escorted.

Who Gets Explained, Who Doesn’t

English, in South Asia, arrives with a long shadow. It promises circulation and reach, but demands legibility on its own terms. Glossaries emerge here not merely as aids but as negotiations. Every italicised word carries a question: for whom is this text being made readable? At what cost?

A glossary can act as a bridge, but it can also become a checkpoint. The reader pauses, flips pages, and learns a word, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with irritation. That irritation is not incidental. It mirrors a deeper unease: the expectation that certain lives must always arrive pre-explained.

Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land resists this pressure with quiet insistence. Arabic, Bengali, and historical terms are not always flattened into immediate clarity. Instead, the text trusts the reader to dwell in uncertainty, to accept that full comprehension is not owed instantly. Later, in the Ibis Trilogy, the glossary becomes expansive, almost novelistic in itself. The housing sailors’ argot, Bhojpuri-inflected speech, and the colonial trade language. These glossaries translate and archive. They insist that language, like labour, leaves residue.

Elsewhere, refusal becomes its own ethic. Many contemporary South Asian writers choose not to gloss at all. Words from Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bangla, or caste-specific vocabularies appear unaccompanied, unitalicized, and uninterested in apology. Meaning emerges through rhythm, repetition, and context through living with the word rather than mastering it. This is not obscurity. It is an assertion that some knowledge is not meant to be efficiently consumed.

What remains untranslated does important work. It marks intimacy. It withholds. It reminds the reader that access is not a universal right but a relationship built over time.

Footnotes as Counter-Narrative

If glossaries negotiate with power, footnotes often argue with it.

In academic writing, the footnote is subordinate. It is supporting evidence, a nod to prior work. In literary texts shaped by political fracture, it becomes something else entirely: a murmuring second voice, a buried correction, a record that refuses to disappear quietly.

Footnotes allow a text to tell two stories at once. One moves forward, linear and legible. The other accumulates beneath it, interrupting, complicating, and sometimes contradicting what has just been said. This structure echoes lived reality in deeply familiar ways. Official histories proceed cleanly with lived histories and accumulate debris.

In South Asian contexts, where caste violence, displacement, and state neglect are often sanitised in public narrative, the footnote becomes a site of ethical insistence. It is where dates multiply, names return, forgotten incidents surface. The reader is forced to look down, away from narrative comfort, toward what was not meant to hold attention for long.

This technique appears most powerfully in non-fiction and hybrid forms, but its spirit travels widely. Dalit autobiographical writing in translation, for instance, often carries explanatory scaffolding that does more than clarify context. It exposes the violence of having to explain one’s pain at all. The footnote here is not neutral; it bears the weight of an unequal conversation.

Even in fiction, footnote-like interruptions perform similar work. They fracture immersion deliberately, reminding the reader that absorption can be a form of forgetting. That ease is political. That fluency has a cost. To read these texts attentively is to accept interruption as part of the experience. The book does not want to be seamless. It wants to remain slightly unresolved, slightly abrasive, like a truth that refuses to be filed away.

Parentheses as Self-Interruption: Arundhati Roy

In Arundhati Roy’s work, the sentence rarely travels alone. It drags memory behind it, tucks qualifiers into its folds, and hesitates mid-breath. Parentheses recur not as stylistic ornaments but as ethical pauses and spaces where the voice doubles back on itself, uncertain whether what is being said can be said cleanly at all.

In The God of Small Things, parentheses hold what the main clause cannot carry without breaking: reminders of caste, childhood fear, bodily knowledge learned too early. They often function like whispers and secondary truths that undermine the authority of the primary sentence. What looks grammatically minor is emotionally central. The bracketed phrase carries the bruise.

This is especially visible in Roy’s treatment of Ammu and Velutha. Love itself is narrated through interruption. Each movement toward intimacy is checked by a return with history intruding, law inserting itself, and memory refusing linearity. The parentheses enact a kind of internal policing, mirroring how transgressive lives are trained to narrate themselves: cautiously, with constant self-correction.

Later, in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy expands this method across the architecture of the book itself. Lists, asides, documents, slogans, poems, footnote-like insertions, everything presses against narrative continuity. The novel refuses to let one voice dominate. Khaufpur, the graveyard settlement at its heart, is built from narrative scraps. Nothing is allowed to resolve into a single authoritative account.

Here, the extra becomes a political stance. The book insists that India itself cannot be understood through a single, well-paced storyline. It must arrive cluttered, unruly, footnoted by grief.

The Encyclopaedic Impulse: Amitav Ghosh

If Roy’s interruptions feel visceral, Amitav Ghosh’s feel archival. His glossaries, notes, and historical digressions perform a different kind of resistance: they slow the reader down not through shock, but through accumulation.

In Sea of Poppies and its companion volumes, the glossary becomes an extension of the novel’s moral imagination. Lascar slang, Bhojpuri-inflected speech, botanical terms, and colonial trade language. All coexist without hierarchy. The glossary preserves. It insists that these words mattered, that they structured labour, migration, hunger, and survival.

What is striking is how these extra sections resist narrative efficiency. They ask the reader to labour alongside the text. Meaning must be assembled. This mirrors the historical processes Ghosh writes about indenture, forced movement, and economic extraction, where lives were similarly broken into parts, catalogued, and relocated.

In In an Antique Land, the footnote operates almost as a parallel consciousness. Medieval trade records, Arabic fragments, and ethnographic observation sit beside the narrator’s contemporary encounters, refusing to be absorbed into a single explanatory frame. History is a restless presence that keeps interrupting the present. Ghosh’s use of the margin resists the colonial habit of flattening complexity. Instead of translating everything into narrative flow, he leaves evidence visible, raw, occasionally awkward. The book teaches the reader how to read slowly again.

Dalit Writing and the Violence of Explanation

Perhaps nowhere is the politics of the margin more evident than in Dalit literature, especially in translation. Here, footnotes and glossaries expose the unequal conditions under which stories travel.

Caste-specific terms, social practices, and forms of everyday humiliation often arrive with explanatory apparatus attached. The note tells the reader what the word means, but it also silently records an imbalance: whose life requires annotation, whose does not.

In autobiographical texts like Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan or Bama’s Karukku, the narrative itself frequently pauses to explain what a dominant society has refused to learn. These explanations carry exhaustion within them. The text knows it is being asked to educate even as it testifies.

At the same time, there is resistance here. Explanation is not always compliance. Sometimes it is an indictment. The footnote becomes a ledger of harm, a record that refuses denial. It insists on specificity, on naming practices, slurs, and exclusions that general moral language would soften.

Increasingly, contemporary Dalit writers choose strategic opacity instead. Certain terms are left untranslated. Certain experiences are narrated without accommodation. This is not hostility toward the reader; it is boundary-setting. The text refuses to perform endless labour for an audience that has historically looked away. The margin here becomes a site of negotiation: how much to explain, how much to withhold, how much violence can be carried without being re-enacted through narration itself.

Urdu-Inflected English and the Refusal of Clean Grammar

Urdu-inflected English in South Asian writing often arrives carrying its own internal footnotes. Words like mehfil, ghazal, adab, sharm, zaabt do not translate neatly. They arrive with cultural weight intact, vibrating against the sentence that houses them.

In writers shaped by Urdu literary traditions, the parenthesis often mimics the structure of the ghazal itself, returning, circling, and refusing closure. Meaning is layered rather than linear. Emotion arrives obliquely, through metaphor, repetition, silence. This linguistic texture resists the dominance of a single grammatical authority. English is bent, softened, made porous. The sentence learns to host another history within itself. What appears stylistically extra is actually the record of survival of carrying a language across partitions, migrations, and erasures.

To read such writing attentively is to accept that not everything will settle. Some meanings will hover, unresolved. Some words will refuse to be absorbed. And that refusal, too, is political.

What Refuses to Stay Inside the Text

What these footnotes, glossaries, parentheses, and sidenotes finally reveal is not excess but unease. They appear when the sentence knows it is insufficient, when a narrative senses that something vital will be lost if it proceeds cleanly. The margin becomes a place where the text confesses its limits.

In South Asian literature, this confession is rarely aesthetic alone. It emerges from histories that were archived improperly, from lives that were documented only when useful to power, from languages that survived by slipping into one another. To write here is often to write with an awareness of damage already done to memory, speech, and lineage. The extra enters because the central line cannot bear the weight by itself.

Footnotes slow the imperial habit of consumption. Glossaries interrupt the fantasy of universal fluency. Parentheses fracture the authority of the declarative voice. Together, they train the reader into a different posture, one of hesitation and humility. Meaning is no longer something to extract quickly and carry away; it must be sat with, worked through, sometimes left unfinished.

There is also an ethics at play. To annotate is to admit that language travels unevenly. To leave words untranslated is to refuse the idea that every reader is entitled to everything. To interrupt one’s own narrative is to acknowledge that certainty itself can be violent. These choices reframe authorship not as mastery, but as custodianship of stories, wounds, and inherited silences.

Perhaps this is why these devices linger in the mind long after the plot dissolves. The reader remembers not just what was said, but where the text faltered, where it paused to explain or chose not to. The white space around the sentence begins to speak. The book trains the reader to notice what usually disappears.

In a region where history has so often been written elsewhere, the reclaiming of the margin becomes an act of quiet insistence. The story is not over, the book seems to say. It simply does not end where you expect it to.

And so the reader closes the book carrying something unresolved: a word not fully understood, a note that felt heavier than the main text, a sense that meaning has been displaced rather than delivered. The narrative ends, but the thinking does not. It moves outward, into the pauses between languages, into the long footnote of living itself, where what matters most has always existed slightly to the side, waiting to be read.

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