Colonial and postcolonial debates about polygraphia in Marathi

Abstract

The Marathi language has historically had digraphia and certainly in the period of the eighteenth century when the Maratha confederacy was at its greatest. While the debate between the uses of a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing in the nineteenth century, the fast changing social and political landscapes lent their own weight to the discourse. In just 150 years, the war was won by Devanagari, but at least three different debates had been fought. The first argument was about printing types and the legibility and economy of Devanagari. By the end of the nineteenth century, social empowerment of the literati and administrative convenience were the issues debated. By the early twentieth century, the British administration in India embarked on a project of undermining nationalist efforts in western India, particularly among the Marathi-speaking peoples by chipping away at the softer forms of sovereignty like the Modi script. Even sectarian arguments were invoked in justifying the use of Devanagari, drawing upon divisions of language, religion, and caste. This history has largely been forgotten, and the popular narrative is that the British were responsible for the end of the Modi writing system. Ironically, the demise of the Modi script was a result of the nationalist policies of forcing a culturally unified Indian Union and instituting a state where Marathi became the official language. Modern federalism as part of nationalist secularism takes Marathi for granted as static and ancient Nagari phenomena, and this essay explains the political genealogy of its struggle.