The South Asian Studies Program, an International Programs affinity group, the UI Department of Anthropology, and Grinnell College invite you to "Graphic Politics in Eastern India: Script and the Quest for Autonomy," a talk by Nishaant Choksi, on Thursday, April 13, from 10 - 11:15 a.m. (CDT), via Zoom.
Attendees must pre-register to attend.
Linguistic anthropologist Nishaant Choksi, an assistant professor in the Humanities and Social Science Department at the Indian Institute of Technology-Gandhinagar, will discuss his recently published monograph entitled Graphic Politics in Eastern India: Script and the Quest for Autonomy (2021, Bloomsbury). The book provides an account of the importance of script in regional movements for autonomy in South Asia through an ethnographic investigation of the use of writing among the indigenous (Adivasi) Santal-speaking community in eastern India. Based on extensive fieldwork in the villages of southwestern West Bengal, it explores the use of multiple scripts to write Santali, the creation of a new independent script for Santali known as Ol-Chiki, and the ways in which the deployment of scripts in everyday spaces like village markets, schools, and in the local press, mediate longstanding Adivasi demands for cultural and political autonomy.