https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/graphic-politics-in-eastern-india-9781350159587/

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:    Your fascinating book argues that script serves as a “critical semiotic modality through which Santali speakers assert temporal and spatial autonomy from hegemonic historical narratives, administrative territories, and dominant class and caste based social orders” (26). The concept of autonomy is very central to the book. Can you speak about how a graphic politics of autonomy is distinct from identity or state-based politics of recognition that have, perhaps, been more frequently been addressed in linguistic anthropological work? 

Nishaant Choksi: First of all, thank you so much for the interview, and giving me a chance to discuss my work with you and the CAMP audience. Yes, you are right, I have deliberately tried to avoid using the words ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’ in the book and instead tried to outline the concept of autonomy. It is not like the struggle that the proponents of Santali language and Ol-Chiki undertook was not about identity or recognition, it certainly was. However, these notions in terms of political vocabulary are relatively recent in India, and they also, as many anthropologists have discussed, come with analytical limitations. Instead, I draw on a longer discourse of autonomy among the communities I worked with which was tied to the struggle for Jharkhand, which was a long-running struggle among indigenous communities in eastern India to have a federal region with an indigenous majority that would have a specifically indigenous political and cultural character. The struggle was both spatial in that it focused on territory, and temporal, in that it sought to emancipate the Adivasi (original inhabitants) from a temporal discourse of backwardness and primitiveness. The area of West Bengal state in eastern India where I did my fieldwork was left out of the eventual Jharkhand state but the assertion for script in this area, I found, had many continuities with the struggle for Jharkhand. While interfacing with the state for resources and institutions for Santali language and script, the discourse might revolve around identity or recognition, the everyday graphic politics practiced in the rural areas where I did fieldwork revolved more around the conceptual fulcrum of autonomy.      

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:  While many scholars treat writing as a secondary reflection of speech, your book focuses specifically on the graphic politics afforded by the invention and circulation of the Ol-Chiki script. What does your attention to script and multiscriptality reveal beyond what a study attending primarily to language and multilingualism might find?   

Too often the study of writing systems has been conflated with that of language, drawing from, as you rightly point out, the idea that writing is a secondary reflection of speech. In this book, I try to intervene by analytically separating script from language (by language I mean ‘code’ or ‘oral variety’). In doing so, I see how script carries different semiotic significations from a linguistic variety, which is important when analyzing languages written in multiple scripts. Starting from this vantage point also allows us to see under what conditions a script becomes ideologically tied to code, and what the significance of the script is for readers and speakers of a language beyond the fact that it represents a particular language. For instance, the Eastern Brahmi script is ideologically tied to the Bengali language in West Bengal, although it is also used to write Santali, which places Santali written in the Eastern Brahmi script in an inferior position to Bengali. This is one of the arguments used for the argument that an independent script such as Ol-Chiki is needed for the Santali language. Yet, Eastern Brahmi is also the most accessible script for Santali speakers and readers, and therefore it is highly visible in the linguistic landscape and in certain types of Santali-language media, where it carries different significations, such as that of local territorial affiliations and literary culture for Santali-speaking communities residing in West Bengal. Understanding the layered and complex signification of script and its multiple relationships with a particular linguistic code was not possible within prevailing analytical frameworks that focused on multilingualism alone. 

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:  In Chapter 2, you describe a moment in which, noticing a diagram chalked at the entrance of a Santali household, you were told that the marks were writing (ol) but not symbol (chiki). This moment is suggestive of Santali semiotic ideologies about the potential properties, functions, and social indexicalities of writing that differ significantly from understandings of the nature and purposes of writing held by missionaries, state administrators, and other institutional figures Santali speakers encounter. Can you speak a bit about how variously positioned Santali writers understood and deployed Ol-Chiki? 

Yes, as I argued in Chapter 2, the originator of Ol-Chiki script, Pandit Raghunath Murmu, had incorporated ritual elements into the graphic construction and rationale for the script that drew a much older practice of writing/drawing or what in Santali is called ol.  The same went for other Santali intellectuals and writers who created their own distinct scripts, for instance the famous Santali poet Sadhu Ramchand Murmu also based his script, Monj Dander Ank, on ritual writing and “divine sound” (ishrong). These scripts were both modern in that they represented spoken language, but also departed from the notion that writing was an arbitrary representation of speech that informs modern regimes of literacy. Scriptmaking, I suggest, emerged in the Santali-speaking area at a time when many of the leading intellectuals of the community were experimenting with ways of how to usher the community into modern regimes of literacy and education while also preserving community values and histories. Ol-Chiki was the most successful of these new scripts to emerge during this period but despite its success, was not immediately accepted by all. Many writers still value the Roman script, while other senior writers preferred writing in regional scripts like Eastern Brahmi so their writing could be made more accessible to the widest possible audience. However, as technology changed and the politics of autonomy became more identified with the graphic domain, most writers under 50 in my field area have more fully embraced Ol-Chiki as the most appropriate script for writing Santali literature.  

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: In Chapter 5, while focusing on the role of print media, you introduce what you call the “Jharkhand imagination,” which challenges both Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities and theories of Indian nationalism. Could you elaborate on the concept and how it intervenes in these frameworks? 

Nishaant Choksi: Anderson’s concept of imagined communities is useful in that it provides a way that we can incorporate “imagination” into our social scientific analysis, seeing how collectives can exist beyond the present status-quo, both temporally and spatially, and allows us a way to examine how media, specifically, facilitates that imagination. It is limiting in that, as many linguistic anthropologists have argued, its notion of imagination is flat and homogenous, based on a presumption of a monolingual reality. In the study of South Asia, the concept has come under criticism, famously by Partha Chatterjee, who argued that the Indian elite had a simultaneously spiritual domain of what constituted the nation, based on writings in Bengali, and material domain oriented toward the British imperial power, based on the English language. This division between English and what is viewed as the vernacular has been constant in the linguistic understanding of South Asian nationalisms and sub-nationalisms. 

Such formulations do not adequately explain the multiscriptal, multilingual milieu of eastern India where I did my fieldwork. Print media was very important for Santali-language activists and writers, but the articulations of community were highly varied depending on what genre of media, and what combinations of script and language they used. Magazines and newspapers had different aims, for example, and they used different linguistic and graphic resources to fulfill these aims. “Jharkhand” as it was imagined in the regional media, especially the multilingual and multriscriptal newspapers which I discuss in the chapter, as a space not identified with any language or script, but with the idea of a convivial and co-eval multilingualism and multiscriptality. Hence the project challenged the idea of linguistic uniformity as a basis of shared community as well as the concept of a hierarchically ordered bilingualism that informs studies of Indian nationalism. 

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:     You note in the book that digital media use has proliferated among Santali speakers since your research began in 2010. You offer an analysis of the role Ol-Chiki had begun to play on digital media during the period covered in the book, but I wonder if you can speak to any changes following this period in how digital media has been drawn into the scalar work through which Santali and other Adivasi groups create autonomous spaces that extend beyond state lines? 

Exactly, so much has changed since 2010-2011 which is when I conducted my long-term fieldwork on which this book is based. At that time hardly anyone (including myself) had a smart phone. Carrying my laptop and a USB dongle, I was one of the few people who even had an internet connection. My research assistant had never even heard of email, much less social media. In the years I have been back, mobile smart phones have revolutionized the communicative situation, and now so many people, both young and old, have access to the internet and are communicating with each other through messages and social media. Filming which used to take place with cameras and VCDs has now become extended to anyone with a phone. Choices of script, which before had to be written by hand, or if typed, given to a specialist who knew typing, can now be accessed and changed at one’s fingertips. Ol-Chiki is even available as a Google font. YouTube channels also abound with Ol-Chiki script displayed prominently in the videos. I suggest the digital transformation hasn’t reduced the importance of script, and print media is still important though it is supplemented and complemented with digital media now. Moreover, digital media provides new platforms where the script can be used to different ends. I have written a little about this in the book, and more substantially in a separate journal article and a book chapter, but there is so much more to explore on the subject. I think for the study of indigenous languages in South Asia and elsewhere, this will be the most important area of research in the coming years.   

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:  Who are you most hoping to address in this book and what do you most want readers to take away from it?  

Nishaant Choksi: Originally when I wrote the book, I had in mind primarily the research and student community in anthropology, linguistics, South Asian Studies, and indigenous studies. I wanted to place the study of script and writing front and center in the study of South Asian languages, an area still underexplored given the vast diversity of writing systems. In addition, I had hoped to contribute to the development of the study of the graphic from a linguistic anthropological standpoint, a field that has really picked up in recent years, much more than when I started my graduate studies. Thirdly, India’s Adivasi (indigenous) communities are primarily identified with oral culture and oral tradition, and this is one of the few scholarly books discussing the Adivasi communities in terms of their writing practices and encounter with literacy. For both Adivasi scholars and those working on Adivasi communities, I am happy to see that it has had some impact. 

Finally, it is nice to see sometimes when you write a book it goes beyond your intended audience. For instance, I had no idea that the graphic design community would find this book useful, but recently a font designer who has worked on developing culturally sensitive Indian language fonts read my book and interviewed me for a documentary, for which he also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand in Santali villages. I have also received an invitation to speak about the book to a design group focusing on indigenous design.  It is a positive development that our work as anthropologists can also have influence in other kinds of fields, and because of the book and the conversations I have had around it, I was also able to expand my own intellectual and creative horizons.