The Writerly Self: Discourses of LIterate Practice in Early Modern and Colonial Western India

<strong>Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences</strong> a lecture on <strong>The Writerly Self: Discourses of LIterate Practice in Early Modern and Colonial Western India</strong> <strong>Prachi Deshpande </strong> Centre fro Studies in Social Sciecnces, Calcutta <strong>17th August 2016</strong> Abstract In this paper, I examine Marathi discourses of good writing from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. A vast scholarship on diverse cultures of literacy over different eras has highlighted reading and writing as historically situated practices, with diverse conceptions of literacy and complex interactions between manuscript and oral domains. South Asian historiography on early modern scribal practices has also addressed the expansion of state power, regional historical imaginations and literary cultures, and focused on the sociology of scribal caste groups. Writing proliferated in seventeenth-century Maharashtra, with the establishment of the independent Maratha state, and the spread of various religious movements, and generated diverse norms about ideal literate practice. I closely read a collection of accountancy manuals called mestak, alongside literate practices idealized by the poet-saint Ramdas in his treatise Dasabodha. While pointing to divergent priorities in normative literate practice across these bureaucratic and devotional contexts, I tease out common emphases of moral conduct and self-fashioning, which were critical to the making of Maratha scribal communities, and their religio-political horizons. Tracking shifts in these concepts of good writing into the nineteenth century as part of the changes brought about by print and political power, my paper explores the changing relationship between script, language and literacy from the early modern into the colonial eras. Prachi Deshpande is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She is author of Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960 (Columbia University Press, New York; Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2007). She is currently engaged in a book-length research project on Marathi language practices from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, examining the broad transitions in literacy and scribal practices from the early modern into the colonial and late colonial periods. Through a central focus on the world of the Modi script, this project engages questions of multilinguality and herarchy, cultures and ideologies of writing, and the socio-cultural and multilingual history of scribal classes in Maratha bureaucracies.