This year, Durga Puja was grand with Covid-19 receding and the crowds surging and van Gogh nights swirling against Calcutta skies all day and the Unesco tag adding to the shine generally. All this was magnificent, stupendous, exquisite, larger-than-life, epic, even epoch-making, perhaps, in some way, but can a Durga Puja under any circumstances be described as seminal?

That is what an acquaintance did and I put my foot down. Metaphorically, of course, which meant that, in effect, I shut up and retreated from the conversation. If I had tried to explain myself I would be called pedantic, patronising and pointless, and would also be required to discuss the human anatomy in some detail, which I may not have felt comfortable doing with a man I barely knew. Sex, sexuality and gender, not to mention class, control every bit of our language and erupt all the time around us, but you may not know how to talk about them in the middle of a joyous Puja gathering.

But that is the point I would have wanted to make. About three decades ago, in a college classroom, a teacher had told us grimly, though with a twinkle in her eye, that we should use the adjective, ‘seminal’, with discretion, especially in the context of gender. We should remember that the word is derived from semen, which is produced only by those who are biologically male.

Use cautiously

That seminal has come to mean a powerful pioneering work, work that inspires later developments, or an original, important achievement, is proof of the potency attributed to the male reproductive fluid. Which is all very good, but why is it that the word is used so commonly? Is all pioneering work drenched in this particular liquid? Gross, even taken metaphorically, but this is what the word means. And what about the corresponding female reproductive fluids? Do we even have a name for them? Perhaps there is no equivalent for the male fluid in the female body, but what about the female body parts and organs that nurture life for months? Is there any distinguished adjective attached to them that can be applied to a pathbreaking work? Uterine? Ovarian? Can you call a major Marxist text fallopian?

This was a very important rhetorical question. Umbilical is in currency, but does not quite serve the same purpose as seminal. Biology determines, language tricks. Phallogocentrism is so deep that it is invisible, like the glass ceiling, like housework, like the root word of seminal. It cannot be cancelled. You would have to cancel language itself.

So here is a list of sentences in which the use of the word seminal is fine.

1. Buy The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud’s seminal work, Rs 227 (9% off). (This is a perfect example.)

2. For seminal work, by definition, goes where few have gone before. (Enigmatic and hyperbolic, but acceptable.)

3. Picasso’s eye-catching depiction of five prostitutes in a brothel, a seminal work in the development of Cubism, revolutionised the art world. Or, Picasso’s seminal, rapturous portrait of his nude mistress-muse is expected to fetch as much as $21 million. Picasso was infatuated with MarieThérèse Walter when their gaze met near the Galeries Lafayette in 1927. Five years later, he depicted her ample naked body in repose, one hand cradling her head, the other framing her pert, round breast.

4. Manusmriti is one of three seminal Hindu texts, the other two being Arthashastra and Kamasutra.

5. The Central Vista is a seminal project rolled out by the Centre. (This is the clincher, defining our future.) The world looks set to remain very, very seminal. I just wish our mothers were kept away from this.