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Caesura

Written by

Arun Nagore Jayaraman Shyam

An Epithet Called Freedom: Maharddhika, Merdeka, and the Unmaking of a Word for the Divine

Maharddhika was an epithet for the divine, invoked on a stone that cursed anyone who broke faith with a kingdom. It took centuries, and a long detour through tax exemptions and colonial paperwork, for the word to start meaning freedom instead.

12 min
Black-and-white self-portrait of the author seated before a fireplace, framed by two high-backed armchairs.
Between one thing and another. Self-portrait.

About

Caesura takes its name from the Latin caesūra, a cutting; in poetry, it names a pause within a line of verse. I interpret it as a way of thinking about change without treating it as disappearance, a little like the Japanese kire-tsuzuki, cut-continuity: a second anatomy that carries what came before instead of replacing it. This project is inspired by how lives, ideas, places, and relationships go on becoming themselves in that unsettled middle, and by the possibility that growth does its most interesting work there.

I'm Arun Nagore Jayaraman Shyam, an ALM candidate in International Relations at Harvard. I founded Caesura as a personal project for independent inquiry into politics, culture, and history, with a particular interest in what artificial intelligence may mean for all three.