From Language to Script: Graphic practice and the politics of authority in Santali-language print media, eastern India

Abstract

This article discusses the way in which assemblages of technologies, political institutions, and practices of exchange have rendered both language and script a site for an ongoing politics of authority among Santals, an Austro-Asiatic speaking Adivasi (Scheduled Tribe) community spread throughout eastern India. It focuses particularly on the production of Santali-language print artefacts, which, like its dominant language counterparts, such as Bengali, has its roots in colonial-era Christian missions. However, unlike dominant languages, Santali-language media has been characterized by the use of multiple graphic registers, including a missionary-derived Roman script, Indic scripts such as Devanagari and Eastern Brahmi, and an independently derived script, Ol-Chiki. The article links the history of Santali print and graphic practice with assertions of autonomy in colonial and early post-colonial India. It then ethnographically documents how graphic practices, in particular the use of multiple scripts, and print technologies mediate a contemporary politics of authority along vectors such as class and generation within communities that speak and read Santali in the eastern state of West Bengal, India.

Territorial identity and boundary negotiations among Santhals

“…The position is usually hereditary but not despotic, and power is not absolutely concentrated with the Manjhi, whose decisions are approved subject to general assemblies. Manjhi Pargana is an anachronism dating back to the Mughal period or even earlier, when ‘Pargana’ denoted a ‘geographically delineated group of villages’ (Choksi, 2017: 35, Murmu and Kanhar, 2014). The Manjhi Pargana system is essentially a self-governing tribal court that functions in perfect autonomy.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2017: It Could Be Otherwise

“…Scholars exploring such semiotic underpinnings of broader social imaginaries often invoke Anderson's Imagined Communities () (such as Bishara ; Choksi ; Eldredge ; Graan ; Nakassis ; Sharma and Phyak ; Westinen ; Zimman ). Some of these works explicitly outline how the processes they studied contrasted with the historically, politically, and technologically contingent modes described by Anderson.…”

“…Some of these works explicitly outline how the processes they studied contrasted with the historically, politically, and technologically contingent modes described by Anderson. For example, Choksi (, 1519) analyzes the significance of script choice in the production, circulation, and uptake of text objects among Santals, an “Adivasi (Scheduled Tribe) community spread throughout eastern India.” He argues that script choice, rather than language choice, is a more central means by which textual objects ground imaginations of a Santal community; a “monographic” rather than monolingual ideology may be emerging (1559). Choksi also notes that, rather than “print capitalism,” the processes he studies are better described as “print communalism” (1525).…”