About TDF Session 141
More details on the session and the Zoom link available on Registration.
About the Talk
A discussion on 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 Explore 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.
About Nishaant Choksi
IIT Gandhinagar
Nishaant Choksi is Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Social Science Department at the Indian Institute of Technology-Gandhinagar in Gujarat, India. He completed his PhD in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2014. His work focuses on issues of language, script, education, migration, displacement, and issues related to indigenous Adivasi communities in India. He has published in journals such as Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language and Society, Contemporary South Asia, andModern Asian Studies among others. He has authored one monograph (Graphic Politics) and has co-edited a volume entitled Expressives in the South Asian Linguistic Area (Brill, 2021).
Image by Dibyendu Dey Choudhury
