Surface Politics: scaling multiscriptality in an Indian village market

■ Nishaant ChoksiLinguisticsUniversity of [email protected]

Surface Politics: Scaling Multiscriptalityin an Indian Village Market

Linguistic anthropologists have used the concept of “scale” to describe how everyday inter-actions are linked to global flows and movements, particularly in the urban centers of Europeand North America. This article reconceptualizes the notion of “scale” by examining howresidents in a small market village in eastern India order, in both hierarchical andnonhierarchical configurations, multiple graphic repertoires in dialogic engagement with thebuilt environment. In the article, I suggest that script is an important semiotic modalitythrough which indigenous and nonindigenous residents align notions of community, lan-guage, and territory according to different evaluative metrics, often in conflicting and antago-nistic ways. These differential scalings of multiple scripts on the village’s surfaces, and thedisjunctures that exist between these scalings illuminate how dominant language hegemoniesare perpetuated and, at the same time, contested by indigenous and minority languagecommunities. [script, scale, indigeneity, linguistic landscape, literacy]

Within linguistic anthropology, the spatial and temporal metaphor of “scale”has become increasingly popular to describe how everyday interactionsamong diasporic populations and transnational migrants in globalized

urban centers in Europe or North America are linked to global flows and movementswithin hierarchical indexical orders1 (Blommaert 2010; Blommaert et al. 2005; Collinset al. 2009; Das 2008). Irvine (2013)2 points out that the use of scale in the literatureconfuses ideas of discrete, hierarchically bounded levels with an idea of measure-ment, suggesting that it might be more useful to account for how participants delin-eate different metrics and the ways in which these metrics are then combined toproduce evaluative semiotic orders. These metrics do not have to be linear in aCartesian sense of “measurement,” nor do they have to be hierarchical; their qualitiesdepend on the multiple evaluations and nested orderings present in a given interac-tion. Recent formulations (Blommaert et al. 2014; Lempert 2012) have attempted tomove beyond the macro/micro- (or local/global) dimensionalities that scale con-notes, instead arguing that “scaling” should be analyzed as a process by whichparticipants order a range of semiotic material through shifting participant align-ments along interactionally produced sociotemporal clines.

In this article, I draw on recent linguistic anthropological discussions of scale toaccount for the differential evaluative orderings of multiple scripts among both indig-enous and nonindigenous residents in the small village market (bazaar) of Jhilimili,located in the hilly forest region of eastern India. While the relation between scalarideologies, code, and community has been explored in previous work (Silverstein

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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 25, Issue 1, pp. 1–24, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2015by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12070.

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1998), I will show how script, thus far neglected in much of the discussion on scale,provides distinct semiotic affordances through which differently positioned partici-pants construct competing, and often antagonistic alignments between communities,denotational linguistic codes, and territory. I argue that the competing scalarorderings of multiscriptality on Jhilimili’s surfaces and the “disjunctures” (Appadurai1996; Meek 2010b) produced by the gaps between these orderings, provides a rigor-ous framework for analyzing the politics of contestation and reformulation of domi-nant language hegemonies by minority or indigenous language communities.

Scaling Multiscriptality

Writing systems, as many linguistic anthropological studies have shown, are oftenthe sources of political conflict, and so-called “language” politics in many casesactually centers on contestations over script and orthography. This is the case forminority languages such as Haitian, where even slight changes in orthography havebeen linked to opposing nationalist visions (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994), or Corsican,where controversies over spelling reveal a complex history of resistance and accom-modation to dominant French-language ideologies (Jaffe 1996). In addition, orthog-raphy can mediate disputes between community-based and scientific claims tolanguage, as Collins has shown in his analysis of the way beliefs about the Unifonscript’s phonetic suitability ideologically framed debates between members of theTolowa tribe of northern California as well between Tolowa and academically trainedlinguists (Collins 1998; Collins and Blot 2003).

Historically, the creation of distinct language communities has also been mediatedin large part through the iconic affordances provided by differing graphic repertories.One of the most famous examples is the case of Hindustani, a lingua franca of northIndia, which, during the late nineteenth century, divided along graphic lines intoHindi (Devanagari script) and Urdu (Persio-Arabic script). The scripts served as aniconic resource upon which two different religious-political (Hindu and Muslim,respectively) identities could be framed, leading eventually to two divergent national“languages”: Urdu for Pakistan and Hindi for India (Ahmad 2008; King 1994; Rai1984). Another example of this can be seen in the Balkan republics, in which Latin andCyrillic scripts, both used to write Serbo-Croatian, served as a resource for thecreation of the independent “languages” of Croatian and Serbian, respectively(Magner 2006). All these cases underscore the importance of considering script instudies of linguistic differentiation, corroborating Sebba’s assertion that “script andorthographic variation is used to iconize difference at a wide range of linguistic levelsand levels of social organization” (Sebba 2012; see also Angermeyer 2005; Jaffe 2000;Sebba 2009; Unseth 2008).

In addition to iconizing a range of sociolinguistic differences, writing systems haveserved as a resource for people in constructing the spaces they inhabit. This has beenone of the chief contributions of sociolinguistic “linguistic landscape studies,” whichhave extensively documented multilingual inscriptions in mostly urban environ-ments. Analysts have used this data to gauge the linguistic diversity and ideologicalfault lines of a spatially delimited community through their public use of linguisticand graphic tokens or to identify how language in public signage marks boundaries(Backhaus 2007; Coupland and Garrett 2010; Gorter 2006; Shohamy and Gorter 2008).While these studies have been important in foregrounding the study of materialrepresentations of language, they have failed, as Blommaert notes, to reveal the“complex and multiscalar order” (2013:112) of the built environment, in which the useof multiple scripts and/or languages produce different spatial and temporal configu-rations within a given landscape in concert with the ways in which participants orderand evaluate them (see also Jaworski and Thurlow 2010).

In this article, I focus on the distinct semiotic and scalar affordances script offersapart from other communicative modalities, allowing social actors to visually deploycontrastive, and often ideologically conflicting, alignments of code, community, and

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territory simultaneously. This is especially evident in situations of intense graphicpluralism or what linguist Singh (2001) has called “multiscriptality.” In these settings,writers and readers have access to multiple graphic varieties in which a mutuallyintelligible linguistic code may assume different graphic forms, or multiple linguisticcodes may assume the same graphic form. India, as Singh (2001:66–67) notes, pres-ents a particularly rich multiscriptal milieu, as the presence of multiple graphic andlinguistic repertoires has led to the proliferation of variable script-code combinationsand alignments, creating a complex and volatile political field that has posed signifi-cant problems for language planners invested in creating national or regional lan-guage standards.3

In multiscriptal settings, people scale script and code in ways that markedly differfrom the regimented and isomorphic alignments outlined in official language policyand discourse. For instance, in India, Hindi (in the Devanagari script) is consideredthe official language of the Indian union, enjoying special status and privilege overIndia’s many vernaculars. English, in the Roman script, however, has continued tooperate as a de facto national language in the bureaucracy and serves as the languageof elite communication. Yet although Hindi and English are accorded equal statuswithin the Indian constitution, locally constructed metrics complicate officially sanc-tioned ideologies of linguistic equivalency and isomporhism between a denotationalcode and a particular script. Ladousa, in his analysis of school advertisements inVaranasi, a regional center in northern India, describes how in everyday contextsHindi and English are variably aligned with Devanagari and Roman scripts.However, the multilingual genre of school advertisements differentiated theDevanagari and Roman script, such that the Roman script, regardless of code, indexed“English medium” and the Devanagari script, “Hindi medium.” Within this genre, asLadousa’s evidence suggests, participants scaled the Roman and Devanagari scriptalong a hierarchical metric of “center” and “periphery” in which English, the nationalcapital New Delhi and an abstract notion of an “international” elsewhere were allscaled as “center,” while Hindi, the regional center Banaras, and the local communitywere all scaled as “periphery” (Ladousa 2002:223–224). This scaling conflicts with the“equal” status of both languages in official discourse. In Ladousa’s study, then, we seehow in a multiscriptal milieu, the scaling of languages operates at the level of scriptdistinct from the referential content of code.

Local practices of scaling multiscriptality are especially important in situationswhere indigenous communities are promoting a politics of sovereignty andautonomy. One illuminating case comes from a small town in Nunavik, northernQuebec, Canada (Daveluy and Ferguson 2009), where traffic signs and road signs arewritten in both Roman/English and Inuktitut/syllabic. Here, as the authors suggest,the use of the Inuktitut syllabic writing system alongside English/Roman creates alocally meaningful semiotic contrast for Inuit speakers and readers within Nunavik.Though the syllabary is used only in this small part of Quebec, local Inuit speakerscan scale the Inuktitut language and syllabary as “national” or even “international”because traffic signs are emblems of state governance, and are regulated by interna-tional treaty norms (2009:86). In addition, local Inuit readers also scale the use of thesyllabic writing system as pan-Arctic because the use of Inuktitut in public space is acentral issue discussed and promoted by the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) com-prised of indigenous representatives from the entire Arctic region. Yet, even thoughthe official script of the ICC is Roman, Daveluy and Ferguson (2009:93) argue that inNunavik, it is the visual contrast between the syllabary and Roman/English thatindexes international Inuit sovereignty, a contrast that is erased in the officialInuktitut script adopted by the ICC.4

The sociolinguistic situation in Jhilimili, a village located in a hilly, forested regionof West Bengal, India, on the edge of the borders with the states of Jharkhand to thewest and Orissa to the southwest presents an especially complex situation ofmultiscriptality. While only two languages are spoken in Jhilimili, Bengali and Santali,an Austro-Asiatic variety spoken by the village’s majority indigenous (or adivasi)

Surface Politics: Scaling Multiscriptality in an Indian Village Market 3

residents, there are several graphic registers present on the surfaces of the localvillage market (or bazaar). In the bazaar, one may find combinations of Roman,Eastern Brahmi, Devanagari, and Ol-Chiki scripts. In a world of complete code-scriptisomorphism, these scripts would align with English, Bengali, Hindi, and Santali,respectively (Table 1). However, as I argue here, in Jhilimili, scripts are ordered incomplex and sometimes contradictory ways, invoking contrasting scalar configura-tions both in their organization and the ways in which they are evaluated. Theseorderings range from a vertical and hierarchically organized alignment betweenscript, code, and territory to a more horizontal ordering where single codes throughscript alternation index multiple, equally valorized scalar configurations. It is thedisjuncture between these orderings, understood most acutely by Santali speakers,which renders script such a critical component of the politics of indigenous assertionin Jhilimili bazaar.

Jhilimili Market and the Politics of Indigeneity

Jhilimili village is centered on a bazaar, a small agglomeration of shops and buildingsclustered around an intersection between two narrow one-lane highways. The bazaaris surrounded by numerous hamlets in which Santals, an indigenous or adivasigroup,5 form a majority. Living together with Santals are numerous other Hinducastes, including both upper caste Brahmins and Vaishnavs, as well as lower castepotters and Dalits, Muslims, and other adivasi castes. Most Santals speak Santali, anAustro-Asiatic language as their first language, and all castes, including Santals,speak a regional variety of Bengali.

Despite Santals forming a majority in Jhilimili bazaar at any given moment, theysee the bazaar as a diku (Santali for caste-Hindu) space. It was common for Santals toidentify themselves as atu-ren (village people or village “Santals”) as opposed tobajar-ren jati (bazaar castes) even if most people, Santal and caste-Hindu alike, live innearby village hamlets. The shops in the bazaar were primarily owned and operatedby caste-Hindus, although Santals maintained some shops on the outskirts. In addi-tion, marked Santali practices such as the consumption of beef or the buying andselling of rice beer or flower wine were de facto prohibited in the bazaar, althoughbutchers routinely sold chicken and goat, as well as bottled alcohol such as beer andrum. Thus the appropriateness of behavior within the bazaar itself was determined bycaste-Hindu mores.6

Since the 1950s, Santals in Jhilimili and other neighboring regions have been activein a movement known as “Jharkhand” [Hill-land]. This movement began around thetime of Independence, started in the various indigenous-dominated border regions inthe adjacent Indian states of Bihar, West Bengal, and Orissa. The movement aimed tocarve out an independent federal state known as Jharkhand that would have amajority indigenous population, and stated its aims in terms of cultural and politicalsovereignty in regions long dominated by a small upper-caste elite. Central to thismovement were new articulations of cultural distinction, notably in terms of languageand script. Santals began asserting the primacy of the Santali language in theiridentification as adivasi (“original inhabitants”), and started writing down their

Table 1Codes and scripts within Jhilimili

English RomanBengali (Eastern Brahmi)Hindi (Devanagari)Santali (Ol-Chiki)


language, modifying regional scripts such as Eastern Brahmi (used for Bengali),Devanagari (used for Hindi), Utkal (used for Oriya), and Roman (used for English).

In addition to the use of regional scripts, as part of the Jharkhand movement, manySantals also created their own scripts, the most famous of which was called “Ol-Chiki” (writing-symbol).7 It is said that Santali spirits revealed this script in the 1940sto Pandit Raghunath Murmu, a Santali poet and dramatist, at his home village inOrissa. He began to spread this script through the various Santali-speaking areas inthe various states, attempting to graphically unite Santals throughout the variousstates of the proposed Jharkhand region, and even extending into the neighboringstates of Nepal and Bangladesh, which also have sizable Santal populations. Conse-quently, even though reading proficiency in the script was low, the script becamepopular in areas such as Jhilimili, serving for many Santals as a reminder of a nationaland even international Santal community that stretched beyond the borders of theirvillage or the state of West Bengal. However, in Jhilimili, use of the Eastern Brahmiscript, the script in which Bengali-language literacy was taught, still remained themain form for writing Santali.

Santals, propelled by the Jharkhand movement and the spread of Ol-Chiki script,successfully lobbied both the governments of West Bengal (in 1979) and the govern-ment of India (in 2003) to list Santali as an “official” language, on par with Bengali andother administrative languages, respectively (Hansda 2004). Yet, despite this officialstatus of Santali, for many non-Santals I talked to in Jhilimili bazaar, Santali was stillnot even considered a “language”; many referred to Santal speech as t·har, or thesounds that the deaf or mute make when they are unable to articulate structuredlanguage. If they considered it language at all, they talked about Santali as a localvariety. Caste-Hindus in nearby towns and cities even described it as a local dialect ofregional Bengali (a dialect of a dialect). This attitude was reinforced by the universalabsence of Santali in all official business of national and regional governance withinJhilimili, which was uniformly conducted in Bengali. The evaluation of Santali as aninferior variety, specific to a local lower-caste community, deploys a metric thathierarchically subordinates Santali to Bengali, Hindi, and other dominant languages,and serves to perpetuate the very caste-Hindu hegemony that the Jharkhand move-ment contests.

I came across a noteworthy example of the antagonisms produced by these com-peting scalings in a local Santali play staged during the end of my fieldwork period.Earlier that year, I, a U.S.-based anthropologist who had come to Jhilimili to studySantali, had written an article at the behest of a local Santali-language magazine editorentitled (by the editor) “Discussion of Santali Language outside India” (Choksi 2010).The article was basically a literature review of some of the linguistic and anthropo-logical research that has been conducted on Santali in Europe, North America, andJapan. The article enjoyed success, not only because it was written by an America-based non-Santal researcher in Santali, but also because it cast Santali as an “interna-tional” language with international scope on an authoritatively valued social-scientificmetric.

The article was taken up in a short play written by a Jhilimili-based Santal play-wright for a drama competition which took place every June 30, the day of the famousSantal Hul, a famous insurrection led by Santals against caste-Hindu dikus and theBritish administration in 1857. While the state government officially recognized theHul, the celebration of the event was chiefly conducted by Santals, with little non-Santal participation. This was especially true for the drama competitions, which wereentirely conducted in Santali. The play begins with two young Santal students review-ing their Bengali language textbooks late at night, asking why, if Santali was an“international” language, according to my article, and had received “national” Con-stitutional status from the government of India in 2003, they were discouraged fromspeaking it in government offices or from using it for any official business withintheir own village? The two students fall asleep, and in their dream-world, meet awoman, Parsi (language) who is married to Sambidhan (Constitution) in a generic


Santal village. However the couple’s married life is periodically disrupted byPrashashon (Administration), a caste-Hindu diku who is always interfering in theirhousehold. Protecting their house is Ain (the Law), but he fails in his duties, and thediku eventually sets fire to the house. The two students and Parsi manage to escape,running into the forest and onto a hill where they see their village being destroyed.Eventually, they see a light, and numerous Santals arrive with their bows and arrows.Led by the students and by Parsi (Language), the Santals, having united, return totheir villages to fight (Hembram 2010).

In the play, the playwright presents a narrative where the multiple scalings ofSantali (and the various metrics used to scale Santali) are placed in antagonisticrelation with one another: Santali is a language with international social scientificimport as well as official “national” status according to the metric of the Indianconstitution while at the same time pragmatically erased through diku hegemony inthe very place where Santals live. All these metrics are “local” in the sense that theyarise from the specific social and political relations present in the Jhilimil bazaar.However, by juxtaposing metrics that scale Santali as dominant, the play also createsa space in which Santals are urged to contest caste-Hindu hegemony over adminis-trative control of a particular place.

While the play presents a particularly dramatic rendering of the ongoing contes-tation between Santals and caste-Hindus in Jhilimili, the competing scalar orderingsand the disjunctures between these orderings are also visible in the everyday, and canbe analyzed through the organization of scripts evident in the various media, such assignboards, posters and facades, plastered onto the surfaces of the built environmentof Jhilimili market, revealing the intimate relation between politics, scalar processesand material form.

Scaling the Nation in Jhilimili Bazaar

According to Part XVII of the Indian Constitution, “The official language of the Unionshould be Hindi in the Devanagari script,” with a provision made for the continuinguse of English “for all official purposes of the Union.”8 However, every state has theright to enact its own official language or language(s), and these languages are alsolisted as official “national” languages according to the eighth schedule of the Indianconstitution. Both Santali and Bengali are listed under this schedule, and are alsolisted as official languages of the state of West Bengal.9

Constitutional provisions have meant that most central government institutions,such as banks and post offices like the ones in Jhilimili (Surface A, B, below) officiallyfollow a “three language-three script formula” in which surfaces are layered simul-taneously with Devanagri and Roman (the “official” scripts of the Union) as well as adesignated regional language script (Aggarwal 1997; Ladousa 2005). In the case ofJhilimili bazaar and throughout the state of West Bengal, the latter is Bengali in theEastern Brahmi script. In addition, within government offices, the spoken languageused is always Bengali; I never heard any business within the post office or bankconducted in any other language. Consequently, institutions like banks or post officesare not scaled within Jhilimili as “national” through spoken Hindi or English, lan-guages that were almost never spoken anywhere in the bazaar, but through a materialthree-script/three-code constellation “emplaced” (Scollon and Scollon 2003) on thesurfaces of particular institutions.


Surface A. Jhilimili post office. Signboard written in Devanagari/Hindi; Eastern Brahmi/Bengali; Roman/English.

Surface B. “Punjab National Bank” written in Roman, Devanagari, and Eastern Brahmi.

The signboards of the government institutions pictured above display, like manysigns in Jhilimili bazaar, a degree of script-code variability. For instance, while “PostOffice” (in Surface A) is written in Hindi (d· ak ghar) and Bengali (d· ak ghor), respec-tively, in surface B, the English name “Punjab National Bank” is transcribed phoneti-cally into Roman, Devanagari, and Eastern Brahmi scripts. However, whatdistinguishes signs of central government institutions such as these from other signsin the bazaar is that they display three distinct scripts which each correlate to anofficial language and an associated scalar position (national/regional) as mandatedby Indian government policy. The layering of three different scripts onto a surfaceiconically projects a metric through which residents scale the various official lan-guages: Hindi, English, and Bengali.

Notably absent from the three-script/three-code formula is Santali. Consequently,the signboards of state institutions effectively erases Santali, despite its “official”linguistic status in both West Bengal and India. For most caste-Hindus in Jhilimili,this fact is not remarkable, as they, as will be discussed in the following sections,routinely scale Santali at a point much below any position of national or regionalpolitical territory. For them, Santali is a language of a particular caste in this particular


village and forest region in which they live. However, for Santali language activists,who are well aware of the non-Santals’ localization of their language, the lack of stateuse of Santali is a point of contention. Hence the aforementioned Jhilimili playwrightwho paraphrasing his characters in an interview, asked why, if Santali is a nationaland international language, “it is not accepted in the bazaar, schools, colleges, orgovernment offices?”

While Santals utilize state institutions such as post offices and banks in equalmeasure to non-Santals, they also participate in a separate political administrationthat does not map onto the administrative territories of the nation-state. Most Santalhamlets (atu) are organized under a five-man village council, led by a villageheadman called a majhi. The majhi is present for all events in the village, includingmarriages, births, and funerals. These headmen also mediate disputes both within thevillages, and if there are conflicts between villages (for instance, if two young peoplefrom different villages run away and get married). Whenever a situation in a particu-lar village arises, village councils call a kuhli ’ (“question-sitting”) where allvillagers consult with each other and make collective decisions.

Village councils are nested into larger administrative units called disom (country),organized by a pargana. Jhilimili was located in the Marang Tung (Big Tung) country,bordered by Singh, Man, Sikar, and Small Tung countries. Each of these disoms has aseparate pargana and pargana council. The pargana usually calls a monthly meeting ofthe headmen. Although Jhilimili market is seen as a caste-Hindu space, it is also anodal point for the surrounding villages, and thus serves as a convenient meetingpoint for headmen and council members coming from various villages. While thesecouncils are not officially recognized by the state,10 Santals usually expressed to me agreater allegiance to the “majhi-pargana system” than they did to official state insti-tutions, and the upholding of this alternative governance system forms a spatiallynchpin in the local politics of autonomy around Jhilimili. They even compared thisinstitution to national state institutions, referring for instance to the meeting of theannual meeting of the parganas to solve disputes (lo bir) as our “Supreme Court.”

Surface C. The Marang Tung Country Pargana office, Jhilimili in Ol-Chiki/Roman/EasternBrahmi scripts (from top to bottom).

During my fieldwork in 2011, the pargana council did not have its own meeting place,convening in either the offices of a local political party or in a meeting house in thebazaar. However, on my return trip the following year, I saw that not only a new


small office had opened up, but also a large sign had been erected on the road leadingup to the main bazaar (Surface C, above) with the words Marangtung Pirpargana MajhiMad·wa (Majhi-Pargana council of Marang-Tung country) in Ol-Chiki, Roman, andEastern Brahmi scripts. While I did not get a chance to discuss the new sign with thepargana, I know that the use of three scripts did not conform to the official letterheador to daily correspondence from the disom council, which exclusively used the EasternBrahmi script (either in Bengali or Santali). On first glance, the three script display inthe new sign appears to mirror the three script constellation of central governmentinstitutions, with the only exception being that the Ol-Chiki script, the script that will,according to many in Jhilimili, “unite” Santals across state boundaries, replacesDevanagari (the script associated with Hindi).

Juxtaposing the sign with the other media tokens plastered on Jhilimili’s surfacesthat I collected throughout my research period, however, I contend that the Parganaoffice presents a significantly different metric than the one on government offices.Unlike the official surfaces of the post office or the bank, the sign in Surface C does notposit an isomorphic relation between script and code, nor does it attempt to verticallyintegrate separate codes. Instead, through contrasts between multiple scripts (Ol-Chiki/Roman/Eastern Brahmi) this sign metricalizes a single linguistic code–Santali– that has been excluded from the official government metrics entirely. Thismetric ties evaluations of script to an alternative spatial, territorial, and politicalgeography, and forms a network with other Santali language texts on the surfaces ofthe bazaar. However, the metric, linked as it is to a Santal-specific political geographyoften remains opaque to non-Santals who live in the bazaar while the official three-language/three-script metric that excludes and erases Santali is transparent to manySantals. The opacity of the Santali metric contributes to both a consolidation ofhegemony by caste-Hindus over the bazaar space, but also creates scalar disjuncturesthat facilitate awareness and open spaces for active contestation on the bazaar’ssurfaces.

Scripting Santali in the Jhilimili Bazaar

The layered use of Ol-Chiki, Roman, and Eastern Brahmi in Surface C, as I haveshown above, creates a Santali-specific metric distinct from the official metricspresent on government buildings in which the national and local are not tied todifferent codes, but scaled through mutually intertwined positions of the same code(Santali) differentiated through the use of script. In this section I will outline in greaterdetail how Santals deploy various script combinations of Ol-Chiki, Roman, andEastern Brahmi to scale Santali on the surfaces of Jhilimili bazaar, examining postersfrom a wide range of sources, including advertisements for Santali cultural organi-zations to posters for dramas and films. I suggest that through alignments betweenscript and participant roles visible on the bazaar’s surfaces, Santals in Jhilimili deploymetrics that scale their language as well as their politics as simultaneously local,national, and international.

Ol-Chiki script established itself among Santali-speaking communities in partthrough the charisma of its founder, Raghunath Murmu, who strived to unite Santalsdivided across administrative regions through the medium of script. For instance, ina famous song, Murmu (n.d.) asks, “Our language ( ) is one, my brothers, ourlanguage is one, so why are we not one in our reading and writing (ol-pad·hao)?” In the1960s, Murmu set up an organization called ASECA (Adibasi Socio-EducationalAssociation) in three states, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Orissa, along with district-level committees that initiated informal schools in Ol-Chiki and distributed printedmaterial in the script. ASECA later organized a branch in the Indian capital NewDelhi (the All-India ASECA), which coordinated policy advocacy around the imple-mentation of Ol-Chiki script, and has even done outreach in Nepal. On a nationalstage, ASECA has been successful. For instance, national literary awards in Santali bythe central government’s Sahitya Akademy (Literature Academy) are only awarded to


works written in Ol-Chiki script, much to the chagrin of the majority of Santali writerswriting in the Brahmi or Roman scripts. ASECA also played a role, along with otherorganizations, in lobbying the national government to include Santali in the eighthschedule of the Indian Constitituion as an official language (Hansda 2004).

Hence, Ol-Chiki activists’ discourse is one of transcending state boundaries, andthe use of Devanagari, Eastern Brahmi, or Utkal scripts, tied to separate “regions” isseen as divisive. Thus, discourse around Ol-Chiki produces a metric which clearlysubordinates the Brahmi scripts, which index regional administrative borders divid-ing a Santali language community, to scripts such as Ol-Chiki, which iconicallyunifies this community beyond these borders (Choksi 2014). For Ol-Chiki propo-nents, the Santali Roman script, a script created by missionaries in the late nineteenthcentury, and used primarily in northern West Bengal and northern Jharkhand, andalso by Christian communities, is understood as both “foreign” (coming from theWest and therefore not indigenous) as well as “Christian” (and again therefore notindigenous). The missionary script however was rarely used in Jhilimili bazaar.

When I first started my fieldwork in Jhilimili, the use of Ol-Chiki was slowlygaining popularity among Santali residents. The high school, following a long drawn-out battle between Santali language organizations and the caste-Hindu dominatedschool council finally had begun offering Santali as a “second language” from class 9,per an almost decade-long state directive. Part of the curriculum (after another fight)was the learning of Ol-Chiki script, although students were allowed to use EasternBrahmi for the writing of exams since Santali language textbooks were only recentlyintroduced in Ol-Chiki. However, competency in Ol-Chiki among younger genera-tions slowly increased, as well as enthusiasm. According to the Santali languageteacher, in 2002, when Santali-language classes were first instituted, there were onlynine students in his class. At the time of my fieldwork in 2010–11, enrollment hadclimbed to over 100. As one caste-Hindu schoolteacher told me, he had never seen hisstudents as excited as they were now about “their script.”

Surface D. A banner of a local branch of the Bharot Jakat Santali Pathua Gaonta (All-IndiaSantali Students Council) in Ol-Chiki and Roman. Put up by a branch of the All-India

Santali Students’ Council in a village bordering Jhilimili market.


Surface E. A local advert for a Santali medium school in a nearby village. Posted on thewalls of Jhilimili bazaar by a branch of the “All-India Santali Education Council” (English

name spelled out in Roman and Ol-Chiki) with details in Eastern Brahmi/Bengali.

Within the bazaar the use of Ol-Chiki remained limited, yet the script, in com-bination with other scripts, figured crucially in how Santali was scaled. For instance,in publicity for most local branches of “All-India” Santali organizations, of whichthere were several, Ol-Chiki always appeared in signs and banners together withRoman script. The same combination was evident in flyers I saw circulating inJhilimili for an “International” Santali conference held in Nepal. Consequently, forthe Santal viewer, it was not the use of Ol-Chiki or Roman as discrete elements, northe deployment of a strictly grammatical Santali code, which scaled a particulartoken as national or international, but rather the combination of Ol-Chiki and Romanscript. This can be seen in Surface D, a banner for a local branch of an “All-India”Santali student organization in which the name is in Santali, and in Surface E, a signfor a branch of an “All-India” Santali educational organization promoting schoolingin Santali, in which the name in both scripts is in English (see below). Rather thanthe use of Santali code, it is the deployment of Ol-Chiki/Roman script that projectsSantali-language tokens on the bazaar’s surfaces as transcending locality andregion.

The widespread use of Roman in concert with Ol-Chiki stems in part from the factthat even today, Ol-Chiki proficiency among Santals remains quite low. Hence,Roman script allows for Santal readers to parse the Ol-Chiki while continuing tosubordinate the divisive connotations of regional and local non-Santal control overliteracy indexed by scripts such as Eastern Brahmi and Devanagari. Though almosteveryone with a secondary school education can read Roman in Jhilimili, it is notconsidered marked by territory or region in the same way as other scripts. English-Roman, for instance, is not the “official” script-language of any of the states of India,yet it is used in official business by all states. While the use of Roman with Ol-Chiki


serves as a way for Ol-Chiki text artifacts to be parsed in a situation of limitedproficiency, the scripts work in concert to diagram the trans-regional scale atwhich Santali institutions, commodities, and media are understood to circulate andoperate.

The Ol-Chiki/Roman constellation is evident on a range of media forms, both onthose situated on the bazaar’s surfaces as well as ones that circulate through thebazaar. For example, Santali language magazines in Ol-Chiki script, though requir-ing Ol-Chiki proficiency to read the content, display their cover pages prominentlyin the Roman/Ol-Chiki combination.11 Santali-language film posters, most of whichare produced in the nearby city of Jamshedpur in neighboring Jharkhand (SurfaceF, below), also primarily display Ol-Chiki titles with Roman transliteration, as doposters for touring Santali music bands (called orchestras), such as Surface G, aposter for a Jhilimili-based orchestra. Some of these examples were producedwithin Jhilimili, others from different cities and towns in the Santali-speakingregion, yet they all share this same script patterning, iconizing circulatory trajecto-ries that extend beyond Jhilimili village, the local region, or the state of WestBengal.

Surface F. Poster for Santali-language film Pund· Ayang (White Cobra) in Ol-Chiki with theRoman in top right corner.


Surface G. Poster for a Jhilimili-based traveling Santali music group in Ol-Chiki/Roman.

In spite of Ol-Chiki proponents’ promotion of the script as the single most appro-priate system for Santali (even though practiced through the use of stable digraphia),in Jhilimili most Santali language texts were written in the Eastern Brahmi script.These texts included Santali language magazines, newspapers, letters sent out byvillage headmen, and grassroots literary production such as drama scripts for localvillage competitions. While learning Ol-Chiki was part of the Santali language cur-riculum at the local high school, students had the option of using Eastern Brahmiscript to write in Santali, and from my classroom observation, many if not mostcontinued to use the script in class. Indeed, the use of Eastern Brahmi to write Santalihas a long history in Jhilimili; all of the popular authors and playwrights, includingsome who were known in the Santali literary world well beyond the village bound-aries, wrote and published in the script. Santali language flyers for different eventssponsored by local Santal hamlets, such as soccer matches, drama competitions,music nights, and wedding invitations were all written in Eastern Brahmi script.

As Eastern Brahmi was the script in which most Santali speakers had the greatestfunctional proficiency, it is no surprise that the most common Santali language tokensvisible on Jhilimili market’s surfaces were in this script. All the Eastern Brahmi/Santalilanguage tokens I observed (with only a few exceptions) were posters for Santalidramas; the bazaar’s surfaces were covered with them. In rural regions of EasternIndia, and especially among Santals, drama was the most popular performance genre,and therefore, posters advertising drama performances were by far the most visibleand ubiquitous Santali language tokens, significantly outnumbering Ol-Chiki Santalifilm posters, or notices from “All-India” Santali organizations. Yet the use of EasternBrahmi in the drama posters did not necessarily indicate “locality” in terms of eithercontent or performance. In fact, most of the full-length dramas I saw (called gayan or“opera,” lasting four to five hours) were performed by drama troupes that had comefrom the nearby states of Orissa or Jharkhand. Yet unlike Santali language films, whichare mostly bought and sold in the marketplace on cheap VCD’s, full-length dramas aresponsored at a significant expense by local hamlets.

Thus, when I asked a local resident of Jhilimili who used to direct a touring dramacompany which performed throughout the Santali-speaking region where and howhe commissioned his posters, he said that the drama company had nothing to do withthe posters. Instead, he explained, “local” [he used the English word] village com-


mittees who sponsored the drama produced and disseminated the posters, aimingto attract the largest possible audience in order to bring prestige to the village,and, if lucky, recuperate some of the expense. Thus, while he scaled the dramaproduction as not tied to any locality, pointing out all the various states and regionsthat they regularly toured, publicity (and poster production) was explicitly enacted as“local.”

Surface H (left), Jhilimili and Surface I (right), Galudih (Jharkhand). Santali-languageposters for the touring drama Chemek’ Chemek’ Tadam Tam Okoy Koda Jawai Tam (Hey, Girl,with Your Sexy Hip-Shaking Walk, which Boy Will Marry You?) in Eastern Brahmi (H) inJhilimili and Devanagari (I) in the nearby town of Galudih, Jharkhand. Performed by the

“Soren Opera” troupe based in Jharkhand.

Unlike Ol-Chiki/Roman, invariant across different Santali-speaking regions, thescripts deployed on drama posters index region-specificity. For instance, while theposter of a popular drama found on the walls of Jhilimili bazaar relates all therelevant content in Eastern Brahmi script (Surface H), a poster for the same drama(and relating the same content) sponsored by a village committee in the nearbystate of Jharkhand relates the content in Devanagari (since Hindi is the official statelanguage of Jharkhand). These drama posters are replete with text, giving thenames of the playwright, the time, date, and location of play, and filling all emptyspace with poetic quotations from the script. In addition, the posters give the nameof the playwrights, who, among Santals, are equally or better known than theactors. The poster in H, for instance, is for a play by the famous Jharkhand-basedplaywright Ishwar Soren, a name very familiar to Santals in Jhilimili. From myobservation, people often stopped to read these posters, especially if they knew aperformance was coming to the area soon. Sometimes, these posters would promptdiscussion about the play, playwright, or the local village that was sponsoring theproduction. These posters, therefore, functioned to both generate immediate dis-cussion about the play’s content within the bazaar space while also, like many


Santali-language tokens written in Eastern Brahmi, gather people at a specific placeand time. Eastern Brahmi, iconizing “locality” while also indexing functionalityand expediency, was therefore seen as the most appropriate script for relaying suchinformation.

Although Ol-Chiki advocates demanded that media, literary texts, and other cir-culating text-artifacts be written solely in the Ol-Chiki script, I never heard anyonein Jhilimili, including supporters of Ol-Chiki, comment that drama posters shouldbe written in Ol-Chiki, and I never saw a drama poster written in Ol-Chiki.12

Drama posters also never had multigraphic script combinations, presenting allcontent in Eastern Brahmi exclusively. The drama posters thus introduce yetanother metric that complements the Ol-Chiki metric, yet, unlike the Ol-Chikimetric, does not vertically integrate scalings of local, regional, and national. Dramaviewers, producers and performers view Santali dramatic performance as tran-scending region, while at the same time associating what Goffman (1981) wouldcall the “principals” of drama posters with village committees, which were viewedas “local” institutions that nevertheless supported these larger networks. In addi-tion, the posters, like many of the text artifacts written in Santali/Eastern Brahmi,index a specific performance event, locatable in space and time. The presence ofmultiple graphic registers then allows Santals within Jhilimili to scale their lan-guage as national/international as well as local in a nonhierarchical fashion throughthe functionally differentiated deployment of Ol-Chiki/Roman and Eastern Brahmi,respectively, on the bazaar’s surfaces.

Scaling Santali in the Diku Bazaar

Despite Santali’s official recognition by the government of India, or the fact that ithas close to 6 million speakers throughout eastern India,13 caste-Hindus in Jhilimiliwere often confused about why I, a foreign researcher from a U.S. university, hadcome to Jhilimili bazaar to study this language. As alluded to earlier, many caste-Hindus did not even consider Santali a language, or if they did, referred to it as acaste-delimited variety that was specific to this area. The language was eitherreferred to as thar (mute sounds, i.e., not language) or by a younger generation wholived through the rise of the Jharkhand movement, as simply adivasi language, orthe language of the adivasi caste (i.e., Santals), the original inhabitants of the area.The only venue in which I saw Santali used by non-Santals was to promote a kindof local flavor or “authenticity,” such as in the naming of a tourist lodge aimed atmetropolitan tourists set up by the local government as “Rimil Lodge” (rimil is theSantali for “cloud”). While many caste-Hindus knew some Santali, they never usedit with Santals, always preferring to talk to them in Bengali. In fact, the only time Iever heard caste-Hindus use Santali publicly in the bazaar was with me, both as akind of “mock” variety (Hill 1998)14 that excluded Santali speakers and as a displayof their continued incredulity that I, a person from America, knew how to speak theepitome of local varieties.15

For many indigenous communities, the pressure to remain “authentic” andconform to a specific idea of locality has been primarily at the insistence ofliberal settler and legal regimes which control the power of recognition that under-lies the granting or legal and economic rights (Clifford 1988; Ingold 2000; Povinelli2002). In Jhilimili as well, the idea of the Santal adivasi as tied to a specific region,and the perception of the Santali language as a delimited caste- and community-specific variety underlies the hierarchically subordinate position which Santalioccupies. In my conversations with caste-Hindus, many barely registered the dif-ferentiation of Santali language text artifacts and the presence of multiple scripts.The continued hegemony of Bengali, along with an ideology that both localizedand exoticized Santali, scaled these texts as having very little relevance fornon-Santals.


Surface J. “Mahamaya book stall” (from top to bottom) in Ol-Chiki, Roman, and EasternBrahmi scripts.

Surface K. Medicine shop written sign written in Bengali/Eastern Brahmi (oushudh Dokan),top; and Santali/Eastern Brahmi (ran dokan), bottom.

The Jharkhand movement has, however, transformed social relations in the bazaar,and the presence of Santali language and script politics has certainly begun to berecognized by caste-Hindu shopkeepers. Thus, while still not the norm, some caste-Hindus have begun incorporating Santali and the Ol-Chiki script on their signboards(such as in Surface J and Surface K). In Surface J, for example, Ol-Chiki script is usedto signify “Santali” in a three-script constellation, much like in texts created by andfor Santals. However, Surface J departs from the patterning of scripts on surfaces suchas C (above) in that Ol-Chiki is significantly smaller than Eastern Brahmi, and doesnot even transliterate the entire name of the store “Mahamaya book stall” onlytransliterating the name “Mahamaya.” Both the features of the script presentation aswell as the truncated display of content visually subordinate the Ol-Chiki script, andin turn, creates a metric that contrasts significantly with those used by Santals to scaletheir language as national or international.


The same is true for the text on Surface K, a medicine shop. Here Santali andBengali appear together, where the name of the store, “Medicine shop,” is translatedin the two languages using the same script. While Santals often use transcriptionbetween scripts as a diagrammatic format to differentiate or reinforce scalar positions(as with Ol-Chiki/Roman combinations), no signs produced by Santals display trans-lation between Santali and Bengali codes. The two codes remain distinct, eitherthrough iconic script distinctions (Ol-Chiki/Roman vs. Eastern Brahmi) or, as withEastern Brahmi in the drama posters above, through explicit use of poetic languageand other highly marked Santali registers. Hence, Surface K also presents a newconstellation that does not scale along the metrics that govern Santal-producedSantali-language tokens.

The use of Santali in these cases, I suggest, creates what Meek has called in thecontext of language revitalization in Yukon, Canada, a “sociolinguistic disjuncture.”She describes disjunctures as those intertextual gaps that “appear between ideas andpractices, between practices, or between ideas shared by a group or across groups–between indexical orders” (2010b:51). In the case of Jhilimili, I argue that the presenceof Santali or Ol-Chiki on the signboards of caste-Hindu shop owners presents a scalardisjuncture, illuminating the gaps between caste-Hindu scalings of Santali and themetrics on which Santals themselves multiply position their language. It is in andthrough these gaps, I suggest, where power relations are made manifest, and alsowhere they are contested.

The ways in which the shop owners of Surfaces J and K understand Santali inrelation to place and audience illustrate these scalar contrasts. When I first startedfieldwork, the Mahamaya book stall, which was the largest bookstore in the villageand owned by one of Jhilimili’s most prominent Brahmin families, did not displayOl-Chiki in any of the signage. However, as Santali was finally introduced as per statelaw in the high school, the bookstore began stocking Santali language textbooks for itsstudent customers. As more students were exposed to Santali and Ol-Chiki, thebookstore began stocking Santali language magazines and books, too, also rarelyavailable at the store when I first arrived. In the middle of my fieldwork, the ownerdecided to modify the sign to include Ol-Chiki and Roman in small characters abovethe large Eastern Brahmi name of the store.

When I asked the owner, a younger man, why he decided to do this, he respondedto me in English, “when in Rome do as the Romans.” He then explained in Bengalithat this is “their” (oder) place and so they will like it. The implication is that theSantals have a claim to this particular area (Jhilimili) so we should appeal to theirpractices, but also that since Santals form the plurality of customers at the shop, weshould satisfy them. However, as the visual layout of the sign itself implies, Ol-Chikiforms a minor part of the bookstall’s repertoire; the majority of books are in Bengali,all business is conducted in Bengali, and the organization of the book store clearlyperpetuates Bengali (and to a lesser extent English) linguistic hegemony. The ownerof Surface K, a middle caste Hindu, who himself pointed out to me his personalinnovation in using Santali language on his shop-board also responded similarlywhen I asked him why he made this choice: he explained it as an explicit marketingappeal to the subset of his local Santal customers. When his Santal customers see it, hesaid, “they feel nice (bhalo lage); they are happy (ananda hocche).” Unlike Santalimetrics, in which patterned script-code alignments allow for multiple positionings,the caste-Hindu shop owners view their Santali emplacements—whether throughcode (Santali/Eastern Brahmi) or script (Ol-Chiki)—as appealing, in a small way, tothe sentiments of a local Santali consumer base. While the actions of these storeowners mark a significant departure from the status quo by making Santali visible onthe bazaar’s surfaces, the store owners’ representation of Santali language tokens ontheir shops as appealing to a local consuming population does not take into accountthe larger political significations of language and script use, and thereby, reinforcesthe language’s position as subordinate.


The disjuncture between the Santali and caste-Hindu scalings of language andscript surfaced in my conversation about these signs with the local sign painter. Thepainter is a Santal, who resides in a nearby hamlet, and while he is not the only signpainter in the bazaar, he is one of the most established. He has been responsible forpainting many signs, including Surface K. I asked him why Santali store owners andoperators did not use Santali in their signboards, and he responded that Santalspreferred Ol-Chiki, but since most Santals did not know Ol-Chiki, those shop ownerswere not going to use Santali. While this assertion is not uniformly agreed upon, thepainter analyzes the lack of Santali-language tokens through the metric of Ol-Chiki, inwhich Santali is scaled at a position beyond the locality of Jhilimili bazaar. His belief,which he is attributing to all Santals, suggests that any display of “Santali” on shopsigns should include this particular scaling, but since Ol-Chiki has not become func-tionally entrenched in the bazaar, it prevents from shopkeepers from using Santali ontheir signboards. It is the knowledge of this disjuncture, he claims, which distinguishesSantal from non-Santal shopkeepers.

This is illustrated by his response to my questions about why Eastern Brahmi wasused to write Santali on Surface K, which he himself painted. He said that the reasonwas because the shop owner was a diku, and did not understand that Santali shouldbe written in Ol-Chiki. Painters are normally expected to paint signs per the shop-keeper’s request, and therefore the choice of script, which, according to the painterwas not ideal, was attributed to the sign’s “author” and “principal,” the diku shop-keeper, while he, as the “animator” (Goffman 1981) of the sign, eschewed any respon-sibility over form or content. Commenting on Surface J, which did display Ol-Chiki,the painter also voiced skepticism, aesthetically evaluating the Ol-Chiki display as not“nice” (napay) because the painter was a diku and he, as a Santal, could have done abetter job. Thus, even though Ol-Chiki was used, the fact that both the “animator” andthe “principal” were non-Santals led to an “infelicitous” (Austin 1962) use of scriptthat in other situations would be highly valued. The painter compared this inadequateuse of Ol-Chiki to a recent painting of a private residence that he did, where hepainted a Santal family’s clan name on their home entirely in Ol-Chiki script (SurfaceL). This, for him, was a positively valuated performance of Ol-Chiki in which princi-pal, animator, and script diagrammatically aligned.

Surface L. “Hansda bakol” [the Hansda family] home, in Ol-Chiki script, Jhilimili bazaar.

When I asked other Santali students and teachers about the use of Ol-Chiki on theMahamaya bookstall, they expressed ambivalence as well, also immediately evokingthe fact that those who ran the store were diku. The ambivalence about the sign-boards expressed by Santals indicated that the signs, even though responding in


part to Santali political demands, did not display, as the sign painter suggests,appropriate configurations of script and code, nor the appropriate alignmentsbetween author, principal, and script. Although the shopkeepers were reaching outto a local consumer base through the use of Santali-language tokens, their signs,unlike Santali-produced tokens, failed to “presuppose” or “stage” (Jaffe and Olivia2013:101) their imagined Santali viewer as political subject or as an equal stake-holder in the bazaar, neither demonstrating the appropriate participant alignmentsnor the scalar affordances that render Santali significant for Santali speakers (seeWebster 2014). Thus, graphic displays of Santali on signboards, in some cases, con-tinue to reinforce the disjunctures that perpetuate Santali language subordination,Bengali language dominance, and the struggles over language and script within thebazaar.

Non-Santals also responded to the Ol-Chiki on signboards with ambivalence. Onthe one hand, by placing Ol-Chiki on the signboards, the owners of general estab-lishments such as Mahamaya bookstall compelled non-Santals to engage at leastminimally with the presence of Ol-Chiki. For instance, a caste-Hindu schoolteacherwho frequented the bookstall pointed the new addition of Ol-Chiki out to me, askingrhetorically “what is that, doesn’t it look like Urdu?” While to my trained eyesOl-Chiki neither looks nor operates like Urdu, which is written in the Perso-Arabic script, comparing Ol-Chiki to Urdu likened Santals, the excluded “others” ofJhilimili bazaar, to Muslims, the excluded “others” of the Indian nation. The teacher’sobservation displayed simultaneous recognition of Santali (taking notice of theOl-Chiki script within the bazaar) and exclusion (comparing it with Urdu).16

Conclusion

As I have argued in this article, scaling practices in Jhilimili bazaar extend far beyondthe material emplacements of script constellations and the participant frameworksthat organize these emplacements. They emerge through interactions with institu-tions of national, state, and local government, schools, and in the very practices ofmarket exchange within the bazaar space. Santals are keenly aware of the interactionaldynamics and scaling practices of caste-Hindus that produce disjunctures betweentheir own metrics on which the Santali language is positioned in ways that do notconform to an idea of “locality,” authenticity, or territory, and the metrics deployedwithin the bazaar by caste-Hindus who scale Santali as a minor variety, iconic of alocal, place-based, lower caste community.

These scalar disjunctures reveal intertextual gaps and dissonances upon whichSantals within Jhilimili organize their politics. Confrontations or calls to actionamong Santals occur most dramatically at the points where scalings are seen to beincompatible or antagonistic, such as in the struggle by Santals to enforce Santali-language instruction in the local high school, or in dramas where depicted Santalischoolchildren wonder why, if they scale Santali so widely does the diku administra-tion exclude the use of the language entirely, and take up arms on this basis. Non-Santals are aware of this, too, for most non-Santals in Jhilimili bazaar, especiallyyounger ones, no longer consider Santali to be a nonlanguage. Rather, they accept itas an independent language with its own distinct script, even though it remains forthem a locally scaled variety, which, unlike Bengali, English, or Hindi, is tied to casteand place. However, as struggles around language and script continue, how Santaliwill be scaled in the future in Jhilimili bazaar remains to be seen.

The traces of these politics, I have suggested, can be found through an examinationof the surfaces of Jhilimili bazaar, which display complex constellations ofmultiscriptality through which language and politics are scaled. In this analysis, Ihave not tried to subordinate “script” or orthographic practice to linguistic code. Inlieu of viewing the former as a representational technology of the latter, I have shownhow script and scripts themselves “mediate,” as Hull (2012) suggests, ideas aboutlanguage, scalar production and practices, and sociolinguistic disjunctures which lay


the ground for political action. While the Jhilimili bazaar does not routinely witnessexplicit political confrontation, political alignments and misalignments are evident inthe everyday production and reception of signs, and, as I came to see, simmer onevery surface.

Finally, this study poses questions on the methodological and analytical import forthe linguistic anthropological use of “scale.” Following Irvine, I have suggested wemove away from “scales” as spatialized hierarchical levelings of an indexical orderthat accounts for global flows in particular contexts, and look at how discursivelycirculated metrics of locality, nation, or internationalism are differently positioned bysocial actors, and how these acts of positioning and shifting (and the resultant dis-junctures which ensue) precipitate political struggle. In so doing, I have argued forthe importance of paying attention to both the political consequences of the construc-tion of scale and scaling practices. Scale continues to be a way for linguistic anthro-pologists to account for the way communicative practice is organized in urbannodes of transnational migration, global flows of capital, and agglomerations of“superdiversity” (Blommaert 2013). Yet, I suggest, more studies of how scaling worksas a political practice in what Tsing (1993) has called “out-of-the-way” places such asJhilimili, will allow us to better account for the way that indigenous communitiessuch as Santals, living far from any urban center, struggle to extricate themselvesfrom the confines of locality.

Notes

Acknowledgments. Many thanks to Barbra Meek, Sonia Neela Das, Michael Lempert, Alex-andra Jaffe, two anonymous reviewers, and the participants in the Linguistic AnthropologicalLaboratory, University of Michigan for comments on initial drafts of this article. Also thanks toRika Yamashita and Tomoko Endo for assisting me with the Japanese translation of the articleabstract. Finally, a deep debt of gratitude to the residents, shopkeepers, and other denizens ofJhilimili bazaar without whose hospitality this research would not have been made possible.Funding for this research was provided by Fulbright-Hays and the University of Michigan;postdoctoral funding for the completion of this article was provided by the Japanese Society forthe Promotion of Science (JSPS).

1. The term “indexical order” is taken from Silverstein (2003).2. I am particularly drawing on Irvine’s discussant comments during a 2013 American

Anthropological Association panel entitled “Scaling Linguistic Diversity: Language Standard-ization as a Scale-Making Project” (organized by Sonia Das and P. Kerim Friedman). Meek(2010a) has a similar reconceptualization of “scale” in terms of spatial and temporal “axes ofinterpretation.”

3. Other comparable situations of multiscriptality include, but are not limited to, nativeNorth America (Bender 2010) or the Mande-speaking areas of West Africa (Wyrod 2008).

4. The Inuktitut syllabary derives from a missionary history that renders the syllabarysemiotically important as an index of autonomy in Nunavik (QC) but not in the rest of thecircumpolar region (see Das 2012). The point is that this local history, present in the form ofscript contrast within Nunavik itself, is scaled up to the level of circumpolar discourses ofindigenous linguistic autonomy, even if this script is not officially accepted by the ICC.

5. The term “adivasi” literally means “original inhabitant.” It is a politicized term usedmostly by groups who are classified or seek to be classified as ST (Scheduled Tribe) subject tospecial affirmative action provisions according to the Indian constitution. For more on thehistorical development of the term “adivasi” with respect to the Jharkhand movement, seeMun· d· a and Mallick (2003). For debates around the status of “indigeneity” in India, seeKarlsson and Subba (2006) or a critical review by Shah (2007).

6. Anand Yang (1998) discusses how a historical focus on rural bazaars challenges theautonomous village paradigm, emphasizing the “links, networks, and extensions thatenmeshed villages within larger units of rural society organized around the marketing system”(14); bazaars, he suggests act as a “container and crucible of solidarities as well as of antago-nisms and contradictions of a particular locality” (16).

7. In addition to Ol-Chiki, there were many other scripts created for Santali, and otheradivasi languages. For greater discussion, see Choksi (2015).


8. While Hindi is the “official” national language, English is the dominant language in theupper-level bureaucracy and courts, and, unlike India, is taught in schools throughout India.English, for instance, is taught in Jhilimili as a mandatory second language, unlike Hindi, whichis not even taught.

9. Detailed in Hansda (2004), with a decidedly pro-Ol-Chiki slant.10. The recognition of village councils and how much administrative power they have vis-

à-vis the state government varies according to district and state. The areas I am concerned withhere do not fall under the 5th schedule provisions, which is a constitutional provision allowing fora measure of independent village governance in areas of high scheduled tribe (adivasi) popula-tion. In the neighboring state of Jharkhand for instance, 5th schedule provisions are in effect,leading to greater administrative power for tribal councils. For more, see Sundar (2009).

11. For a more detailed analysis of the variety of script-code combinations in Santali lan-guage media and their associated ideologies, see Choksi (2014).

12. Unlike in print publications where disputes over the use of Ol-Chiki as opposed toEastern Brahmi are highly salient, the lack of any kind of contestation over scripts used indrama posters is noteworthy. Seeing as both are targeting Santali audiences, divergent scalingpractices related to expectations for different genres of text artifact may lead to what Bucholtzand Hall (2005) have called “adequation” between scripts for artifacts such as drama posterswhile representing “distinction” in other genres.

13. According to 2001 census numbers.14. The “mock” variety of Santali I heard in Jhilimili would delete word-final glottal stops

and lower vowels, conforming Santali phonology (and morphology) to Bengali.15. I was asked on a few occasions why I would study Santali by caste-Hindus within the

bazaar. Some Santal students also discussed with me how my presence in the bazaar and thefact that I (an American, but also of caste-Hindu Indian-origin) came to Jhilimili to study Santalispurred some confusion among local caste-Hindus, indicating some disruptions in caste rela-tions and expectations.

16. In discussing inclusive exclusion, I am drawing on Povinelli’s (2011) later theorizationsof the way indigenous populations are incorporated into liberal settler-state regimes. WhileIndia is not a settler state, and the situation of adivasis differ substantially from indigenouspeople within settler states, there are noteworthy parallels.

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Surface Politics: scaling multiscriptality in an Indian village market

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