Jeevan: a life word and an academic author credit

Life and contextual senses

Nabha’s Mahan Kosh records Jeevan as life, but its numbered entry also includes water and livelihood. These are separate contextual senses in a historical reference work, rather than three definitions that every personal name must carry together. Keeping them separate matters when reading a literary line as well as when interpreting a modern author credit.[1]

The same scanned page contains a neighbouring compound entry for a life narrative, glossed in English as biography. This gives a specific example of the life word’s participation in a longer expression. It does not turn the given name into the title of a literary genre.[1]

The checked Gurmukhi form here belongs to the dictionary. These lexical records do not tell us whether the academic author below had any particular sense in mind, or establish his family’s naming history.[1]

Jeevan Singh Deol in a public catalogue

Cambridge’s Apollo metadata credits Deol, Jeevan Singh as author of Sikh discourses of community and sovereignty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It identifies a doctoral thesis in the Faculty of History and gives 8 May 2001 in its issued-date field. The surname-first order is a catalogue convention visible in this record; Jeevan is retained within the fuller author name. The publicly accessible material is metadata, not the thesis’s historical argument.[2]

A dated institutional form with an initial

SOAS’s January 2008 South Asia Newsletter lists Dr Jeevan S Deol among its centre members. It identifies a lecturer in Urdu and South Asian Studies in the Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia. The printed initial and professional title show another institutional way of presenting a public academic name. This is evidence for the name and appointment in that issue; it neither updates the appointment to the present nor explains the family’s selection of Jeevan.[3]