Fayerweather Hall, Room 413
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
South Asia Institute, Center for International History, and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
A talk by Prachi Deshpande
“Words as Archives: Locating the modern South Asian ‘Vernaculars’ in History”
Linguistic modernization in the nineteenth century prompted a new interest in the pasts and the futures of South Asian regional languages. Within the framework of language families and historical grammar, etymology – tracing the origin and transformation of words – became a critical methodological tool of historical exploration. Histories of languages also became intertwined with the histories of their speakers and the regions in which they were primarily spoken. This paper examines writings on the history of the Marathi language in western India, focusing on ways in which etymology was deployed to characterize Marathi as a modern deshabhasha with a deep social and geographic history. Marathi’s relationship with other languages like Sanskrit on the one hand, and Tamil and Kannada on the other was a critical question in this context, and formed part of wider regional debates over caste and regional culture. These linkages between language, place and people, and the enmeshing of linguistic, social and cultural histories, the paper argues, have been critical to the nature of Marathi modernization, and its importance and viability as a language of mass education, media and regional politics in the later half of the twentieth century.
Prachi Deshpande is a Fellow in History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She earned her PhD at Tufts University. She has taught at University of California, Berkeley; Rutgers University; and Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Her research interests cover language and modernity; script and language; multi-linguality; cultures of historiography; memory; translation; scribal cultures, Maratha states; 19th and 20th century western India; and Marathi literature and culture. Dr. Deshpande is the author of Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960 (2007). She is currently working on a book on Marathi language practices, especially scribal writing in the cursive Modi script, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries
