54 – Scripting and Unscripting Vernaculars in South Asia

October 4, 2025
8:30 am
UGX60
Our panel studies the evolution and transformation of vernacular scriptorial practices in South Asia, 600 CE-1950 CE. Recent scholarship has problematized the concept of both pre-modern and modern vernaculars and vernacularization for constituting South Asian vernaculars as always-already subordinate to other ‘cosmopolitan' languages like Sanskrit and later English in assumed literary and linguistic hierarchies. The papers in this panel eschew hierarchical theoretical frameworks and instead ask: Is there a vernacular idiom in South Asian scriptorial practices? If so, what continuities and/or ruptures does it exhibit over the longue durée? Rebecca Darley’s paper addresses multilingual inscriptional and numismatic material from the seventh century CE in southeastern peninsular India. Priyamvada Nambrath examines linguistic evolution vis-á-vis use of mixed-language vocabulary in Yuktibhāṣā, a sixteenth century mathematical manuscript from medieval Malabar (southwest India). Two papers then turn to the religious and consumer-driven scriptorial economy of print in late colonial South India. Savita Ananthan analyzes Peṇ Putti Mālai, an advice manual for Muslim women first printed in c.1870s in the linguistically complex mixed-language of Arabu-Tamil. Finally, Anannya Bohidar delves into how advertisements employed multilingual aesthetic registers to capture and shape localized consumer behaviors in early twentieth century Tamil print advertisements. Together, our papers seek to trace a genealogy of vernacularity which questions not only language hierarchy but also the ways in which language divisions are conceived and manipulated.

Convenors

Ananthan Savita
Anannya Bohidar

Presentations

Localizing Mathematical Pedagogy in Medieval Kerala
Nambrath Priyamvada - University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
For whose eyes? Coinage, communication and multi-scripturalism in Early Historic/Early Medieval South India
Darley Rebecca - School of History, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom
Marketing Multilingualism: Vernacular Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Tamil Print Advertisements
Bohidar Anannya - Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
Multilingual Scripts and the Vernacular Question: A case of Islamic Women’s Advice Literature in Colonial Madras (1870 – 1920)
Ananthan Savita - South Asia Studies Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States