Scripting Autonomy: Script, Code, and Performance among Santali Speakers in Eastern India.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of script in the politicization of literacy among the Santals, an indigenous Austro-Asiatic language community in eastern India. Santals are spread throughout numerous states in eastern India and are subject to those states’ official linguistic-graphic regimes, always in the dominant Indo-European vernacular. Most Santals are therefore multilingual in Santali, the different Indo-European vernaculars (Hindi, Oriya, Bangla, Assamese, Nepali, etc.), and other local varieties. Santali is also written in multiple scripts, including the dominant Brahmi scripts associated with Indo-European, a Romanized alphabet created by missionaries, and Ol-Chiki, a visually distinct script developed this century for Santali writing. The multilingual, multiscriptal situation reveals a complex discourse in which ‘literacy’ cannot be associated with a single script or code. Rather, it emerges as a constellation of disparate graphic and linguistic repertoires that variably align as part of larger social and political networks. It is through the linkages constructed between social and political ideologies, material and graphic form, linguistic repertoires, and performance practices that particular graphic-linguistic constellations become icons of sociopolitical difference and are mobilized in political assertions of autonomy. This dissertation charts the range of social and political networks among Santali speakers and analyzes their co-constitutive relationship with constellations of graphic, referential, and performative features of language use. In emphasizing the ways Santali speakers and writers variably deploy these constellations in public spaces, schools, and media; the analysis challenges fixed, identity-based theorizations of indigenous social movements, while at the same time showing how fluid script-code alignments allow Santals to contest their social subordination and vie for control over resources in a social landscape marked by caste domination and exclusion. Reconceiving questions of writing and literacy in light of the nexus between script, performance, and politics, the dissertation addresses several issues within anthropology, linguistics, and social and cultural theory more broadly, such as the question of ‘genre’ and its relation with literacy and graphic practice, the concept of ‘public’ as constituted by graphic circulation, the spatial and temporal dimensions of language, and the role of literacy projects in political mobilizations in indigenous and postcolonial contexts.