Chair: Karuna Mantena, Yale University

Discussant: Karuna Mantena, Yale University

It is a central concern of postcolonial studies to explore and explain the transformative impact of the colonial state on past and present society and culture. In this vein, scholars of South Asia have recently begun to examine how languages and literary traditions were transformed by state practices and by the ideology of "modernization" widespread both in the late colonial and postcolonial eras. This inter-disciplinary panel investigates this transformation in three different South Asian linguistic communities. In her paper on the production of Marathi textbooks in the mid-nineteenth century, Clare Talwalker will consider the relationship between this significant example of a state-directed linguistic project and the emergent socio-economic realities of colonial India. Also working with materials from colonial India, Kavita Datla’s paper explores the Urdu literary agendas formulated during the ambitious attempt by the princely state, Hyderabad, to create India’s first vernacular University. Suhail Islam extends this discussion into the postcolonial period by attending in his paper to the political-ideological dimension of state language policy and planning for Bengali in Bangladesh. These papers will contribute to understanding the respective histories of these three South Asian vernaculars.  Taken together, they also hope to address an important question in the field of South Asian studies: How might we understand the ‘modernization’ of South Asian languages, both at the level of the state and as appropriated by individuals and groups? The goal here is to tell the story of Indian vernaculars in the modern period while keeping a critical eye on the forms, practices and power of the state.

Clare Talwalker, University of California, Berkeley

In the critical theory tradition, scholars ask how cultural objects might be understood in relation to their socio-economic milieu. In this spirit, this paper proposes to examine cultural objects produced during the mid nineteenth century British colonial period, placing them against the backdrop of the western Indian capitalism of that era. I focus on the first series of primary textbooks written in Marathi between 1857-1861; the series was a collaborative project undertaken by British education officials along with English-educated Marathi Brahmins in western India.  While these state-produced modern Marathi textbooks were used in a small number of schools established by the colonial state, they later became the template for successive private textbook writing ventures by prominent Marathi-speaking figures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Drawing on cultural critic Fredric Jameson’s reading of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (who views myth as symbolic resolution of social contradiction), I read these textbooks as symbolically resolving contradictions and conflicts imminent in the socio-economic transformations of the colonial period. I explore how these state-produced cultural objects accomplish such resolution and why this phenomenon is significant and interesting. I argue that the form and content of this first series can be usefully interpreted to show how they reflect the emergence of the capitalist money form in colonial India.

Kavita Datla, University of California, Berkeley

Educational institutions in colonial Indian were key sites in the formulation of literary and linguistic agendas. This paper takes as its subject the Translation and Compilations Bureau established by the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1917 to prepare textbooks for Osmania University. Osmania University, India’s first vernacular University, and Hyderabad’s most ambitious educational undertaking, sought to instruct college and university students in everything from history, economics, law, to physics, chemistry and medicine in a modern Indian language, namely Urdu. Its first project, then, was to create textbooks for its classrooms by drawing upon the linguistic and scientific expertise of men located throughout the Indian subcontinent. This paper will argue that the endeavor to create textbooks for Osmania University, the translation of the modern arts and sciences, was fundamentally a response to models of education developed by the colonial state. And more than anything else it involved a thorough examination and attempt to transform the Urdu language itself. The discussions and debates that surrounded this translation work mobilized various understandings of the nature of the Urdu language, its literary past, and its linguistic capacities. These discussions were directed towards the creation a very specific kind of language, a language that was decidedly modern, an Urdu that could be used for everything, that could be used as much for science as a language of poetry or administration.

Suhail Islam, Nazareth College

In my short paper, I will try to provide a rough outline of the political-ideological dimension of developments in the field of language policy and language planning in Bangladesh. This emphasis on rather abstract, underlying ideas in the field of language policy and planning is based on my conviction that the story of Bengali is largely a political-ideological story and that this dimension is too often overlooked in analyses of language planning. The fact that these ideas are often already pre-inscribed in the political ideologies of interested groups in society (including the government, but also other groups such as intellectuals, scientists, artists...), and that their scholarly phrasing is often more a post-factum rationalization than an autonomous and practice-oriented scientific argument, is not always taken into account. What I want to do in this paper is to re-politicize the arguments used by various participants in the debate on language in Bangladesh since British colonialism to independence of Pakistan in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971. The theoretical implication of this would be that we get a clearer idea of how political ideologies actively structure society, or, in Gramsci's words, how hegemony can be made visible.