The indexing of linguistic difference as a territorial category in India, within a polyglot polity characterized by immense linguistic diversity, is peculiarly striking. Significantly, such direct identification between the region and ‘its’ linguistic identity to create linguistic units firstly in 1920 within the Congress structure, and eventually in the 1950s as part of the federal structure of the new Republic, has remained largely uninterrogated.
Exploring these paradoxes, this paper traces the category of ‘region’ as a territorial entity around language as it emerged through official documents, constitutional debates, education policy debates and responses by Marathi regional elites in the period between the Bengal Partition (1905) and the early independence period. The paper also dwells upon the tensions between the dual logics of linguistic territorialization and simultaneous leveraging of development agendas in the decades between the 1920s and 1950s.
Speaker:
Veena Naregal is a Professor in Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG), Delhi. Her research interests span historical sociology, language politics, cultural politics, higher education and labour. Prof. Naregal’s current work explores the intersections between marginalization and policy-making. Her current research clusters around three significant themes: i]mapping continuities across social policy domains for India from the 1940s to the present, with a special focus on informality, labour market dualism and escalating precarity [ii] the history of modern economic thought in Asian contexts through a primary engagement with translations of economic treatises into Marathi in colonial Mumbai iii] the twinning of the logic of linguistic territorialisation with developmental agendas between 1920 and 1960, and implications of this federal vision for Indian democracy. Prof. Naregal is the author of Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism.
CSH Seminars are in hybrid mode. We request you to pre-register before Monday, 4 March, 2:00 p.m. IST for both offline and online registration.
To attend at venue: Please note that the room capacity is limited. Seats will be reserved on a first come first basis. Kindly carry an ID proof to be granted access to the venue.
