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QM Global Linguistics Seminar 2024: Nishaant Choksi

When: Wednesday, November 27, 2024, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Where: Online via Zoom

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Nishaant Choksi (IIT Gandhinagar) delivers the very first QM Global Linguistics Seminar, an annual online lecture.

Click here to join via Zoom

Multilingualism and the Semiotic Ecologies of Displacement in the Narmada Valley, Western India
Indian Institute of Technology-Gandhinagar
Wednesday 27th November 2024
10am UK / 3:30pm India
Abstract:
The completion of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River in western India displaced over 41,000 families. These were mostly Adivasi (indigenous) communities, living in the midst of hills and forests, and economically and culturally dependent on the river. Each group spoke a distinct language, and languages often differed from village to village, although certain communities had varieties which were mutually intelligible while others did not. Following the construction of the dam, over 5,000 Project-Affected Families were resettled in the plains of Gujarat.
While there has been some ethnographic research conducted on the lives of those displaced from the dam, most of it has explored the legal, political, or economic ramifications. There has been little analysis of the way in which the move to the plains has affected the culturally-embedded language practices of these communities and the relation of language practices to wider ecologies, both in the valley and in the plains. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the resettlement sites of Gujarat and the Valley, the paper adopts the lens of “semiotic ecology” to understand 1) the reorganization of multilingualism in the wake of forced displacement and how 2) material re-emplacement, aided by the adoption of writing in what was mostly a non-literate community, has allowed displaced residents of the valley to re-inscribe features of their previous ecology in the new surround.


Speaker:
Nishaant Choksi is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar in Gujarat, India. His research areas include the study of script and writing systems, language and performance, the aesthetic component of language, cultural politics of heritage, and issues of self-governance and livelihood. Choksi examines these themes mainly with respect to the situation of Adivasi communities of India, with whom he has been conducting ethnographic research for almost two decades. His ongoing field projects include work with indigenous Adivasi communities in western and eastern India. He has published a monograph, Graphic Politics in Eastern India: Script and the quest for autonomy(Bloomsbury, 2021), co-edited several volumes such as Expressives in the South Asian Linguistic Area (Brill, 2021) and has also published articles in journals such as Language in Society and Signs and Society. He is currently the Associate Editor of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

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