Look askance: loss and recovery of writing in
South and Southeast Asia
Author:
Nishaant Choksi
Abstract:
In the twentieth century, forest and hill-dwelling communities throughout
South and Southeast Asia have been involved in the creation of unique
orthographic scripts to represent their languages. While many outsiders
have seen this as the result of literacy initiatives and the rise of identitypolitics in the postcolonial nation-state, the narratives surrounding these
scripts within communities ranging from the Santal (India) to the Hmong
(Southeast Asia) talk about these scripts as having been “recovered” from
the hoary past. These recovery narratives of the recently developed
orthographies contradict the developmental view of literacy, in which reading
and writing are seen as markers of progress, instantiating a view of time
that saturates the present with a lost past recovered from the dustbin of
history. The paper draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of ‘chronotope’ and
Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the “angel of history” who looks askance
to the past as it moves forward, to suggest that scripts arise in a political
moment of suturing. This process occurs when communities seek to assert
alternative historical visions following the violence of dislocation, migration,
and upheaval brought about by state-formation in the Asian post-colonies.