NATIONAL MULTILINGUALISM IN THE HORN OF AFRICA AND SOUTH ASIA

NATIONAL MULTILINGUALISM IN THE HORN OF AFRICA
                                  AND SOUTH ASIA
C ONCEPT N OTE
This workshop aims to explore how nations are imagined as multilingual communities in the Horn of
Africa and South Asia. The model of the nation as ethnically, culturally, and linguistically homogenous
bears little relation to the ground realities of nation-states in the world, particularly in the Global South,
but it continues to exert a powerful influence as a norm against which the latter are measured. In
effecting this South-South comparison, we seek to push back against the top-down model of the global
diffusion of the idea of the nation-state as linguistically homogenous, in which the world’s “peripheries”
are considered only in relation to hegemonic European “centres”. If there is to be a norm, it makes more
sense to instantiate the multilingual nation-state of the Global South as that norm, both in practice and
conceptually, and as the lens through which to view nation-states, including those in the Global North.
Bringing the Horn of Africa and South Asia together in a comparative framework will therefore help to
normalise the multilingual nation-state in the Global South as paradigmatic. In exploring the key issues
of national multilingualism within this framework, we will draw on the linguistically informed, context-
specific, and anti-systemic methodology of area studies, which many "global" disciplines have tended
to depreciate, while remaining mindful of the criticisms of the analytical limitations of area studies.

In comparing the nation-states of these two regions, we will consider how the colonial legacies of
language shape post-colonial policies towards multilingualism without fully determining them. Hence,
we are interested in the manoeuvrability of the post-colonial state in this domain and how it exercised
this manoeuvrability. Our key aims here are to explore how these states managed, institutionalised and
codified multilingualism and language conflicts, and their successes and failures in doing so. We also
seek to differentiate between, and clarify the features of, hierarchical forms of multilingualism which are
hegemonic in both regions, and the potential of counter-hegemonic, democratic linguistic pluralism to
resist these hierarchies.

Language is only one feature used to categorise groups in South Asia and the Horn of Africa: other
features include descent, culture, religion, caste, and class. How language intersects with these other
features, and how and why it becomes prominent in certain socio-political and historical circumstances
as an index of identity and peoplehood, is an important factor in considering how multilingualism
operates and is managed by states. In self-conscious struggles over language and language rights,
language ideologies are not just linguistically significant, they are also important socially and politically.
In these contexts, the iconicity of script, notions of literature, and literary canonicity can acquire crucial
significance, indexing cultural and ethnic traits, as well as irreconcilable differences. Moreover, liturgical
languages (or languages whose liturgical function is foregrounded) function as symbolic vehicles of an
ideology of classical antiquity and/or religiosity in both regions, which underpins the politics of language
purism as well as other purisms. Finally, in both South Asia and the Horn of Africa, multilingualism in
the nation-state cannot be dissociated from how language communities in the diaspora intervene in and
influence the status and development of the languages at stake in the management of national
multilingualism. This, too, challenges the hegemonic model of the nation-state, since the model
assumes nation-states are stable containers of clearly demarcated languages, which can be controlled
within national boundaries.

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

DATE: 24 JUNE, 2021
Join the Teams Meeting Here

13.45 – 14.00: O PENING REMARKS BY P ROFESSOR J AVED M AJEED (KCL) AND D R S ARA M ARZAGORA
(KCL)

Panel 1: 14.00 – 15.30 BST

“Language and nationalism in early twentieth-century Ethiopia: a comparison between the political
thought of Afäwärḳ Gäbrä-Iyyäsus and Gäbrä-Həywät Baykädaň” by Dr Sara Marzagora (KCL)

“The Multilingual Transgress in Namdeo Dhasal’s Tuhi Iyatta Kanchi, Tuhi Iyatta” by Professor Anjali
Nerlekar (Rutgers University)

Chair: Professor Javed Majeed

Panel 2: 15.45 – 17.15 BST

“Belonging, multilingualism, and neoliberalism in India” by Professor Javed Majeed (KCL)

“Managing and Reconciling Linguistic Diversity: The history of language policy formulations in Ethiopia,
current trends, challenges and prospects” by Professor Moges Yigezu (Addis Ababa University)

Chair: Professor Anjali Narlekar

Panel 3: 17.30 – 19.00 BST

“An alternative vision of multilingual India: Ari Gautier’s Indian Francophone literature” by Sheela
Mahadevan (KCL)

“The Literary Management of Multilingualism in Postcolonial India” by Professor Preetha Mani (Rutgers
University)

Chair: Dr Shimelis Bonsa Gulema

DATE: 25 JUNE, 2021
Join the Teams Meeting Here

Panel 1: 13.30-15.00 BST

“Managing a Multilingual Landscape: Periodicals, Language and Frontier Identities” by Sangeeta
Bhagawati (KCL)

“A War of Languages and Lands in a Bohubhashabid (multilingual) Bangladesh” by Dr Mahruba
Mowtushi (BRAC University)

Chair: Dr Sara Marzagora

Panel 2: 15.15 – 16.45 BST

“Politics and a Crisis of Analysis: Understanding Ethiopia’s Current Conundrum” by Dr Shimelis Bonsa
Gulema (Stony Brook University)

“Multilingual Anticolonial Resistance in Eritrea” by Timnet Gedar (University of Michigan)

Chair: Professor Preetha Mani

Panel 3: 17.00 – 18.30 BST

“Multilingualism and Metatextuality: A Relational Reading of Julio Cortázar’s Theory of the Antinovel
and Saurav Kumar Chaliha’s Short Fiction” by Sneha Khaund (Rutgers University)

“Thinking through Language and Thinking beyond Recognition: African languages as Archives” by
Professor Binyam Sisay Mendisu & Dr Semeneh Ayalew Asfaw (Addis Ababa University)

Chair: Professor Javed Majeed

ABSTRACTS

LANGUAGE AND NATIONALISM IN EARLY TWENTIETH - CENTURY ETHIOPIA: A COMPARISON
BETWEEN THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF A FÄWÄRḲ GÄBRÄ-IYYÄSUS AND GÄBRÄ -HƏYWÄT
BAYKÄDAŇ
D R SARA MARZAGORA
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

Ethiopia entered the twentieth century as a formally independent country, after defeating an Italian
colonial invasion at the 1896 Battle of Adwa. The intellectuals of the turn of the century were acutely
aware that Ethiopia’s independence remained under threat, and pushed for an extensive programme
of political reforms. This paper will show how political reformism in early twentieth-century Ethiopia was
linked to a broader project of epistemological renewal in which language played an essential role. Not
all intellectuals that came to prominence in this period were native Amharic speakers, but they all tended
to use Amharic in their writing in order to address the largely Amharic-speaking imperial court. And
although most of these intellectuals converged towards Amharic and agreed it should be the national
language, they did not all embrace the same model of nationhood. I will compare two intellectuals in
particular, Afäwärḳ Gäbrä-Iyyäsus and Gäbrä-Həywät Baykädaň, and the way in which their reflections
on language between 1908 and 1912 are linked to their broader political vision for a modern,
independent Ethiopia. Of the two thinkers, I will argue that it would be Afäwärḳ’s ideas to become
hegemonic and to coalesce, either directly or indirectly, in what would be the monolingual and
assimilationist nationalism of Haile Selassie’s reign (1930-1974). Looking at the beginning of the
century allows us to trace the genealogy of type of monolingual nationalism, and show how it rose in
response to both the political configuration of the nation-state and the global power dynamics of the
time.

THE MULTILINGUAL TRANSGRESS IN NAMDEO DHASAL ’S TUHI I YATTA K ANCHI, TUHI IYATTA
PROFESSOR ANJALI NERLEKAR
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

Mariano Siskind talks about a “desire for the world” with regards to Latin American modernist
cosmopolitanisms of the 20th century: “. . . opening to the world permitted an escape from nationalist cultural
formations and established a symbolic horizon for the realization of the translocal aesthetic potential of
literature and cosmopolitan forms of subjectivation.” After the 1960s, in Marathi literature there were
multiple and not always congruent expressions of a “desire for the world,” to use Mariano Siskind’s
phrase. Bhalchandra Nemade’s “deshivad” (nativism) circumscribed the literature within national
contexts and based itself on an outright rejection of colonial/English heritage in thought and writing. His
associate and collaborator, Chandrakant Patil extended Marathi cosmopolitanism to other regional
linguistic cultures like Hindi and Urdu and actively colluded in destroying the binaries between Marathi
and its others. A third group of poets like Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre enlarged the Marathi vision to
both regional difference as well as international modernisms. And intertwined among these were the

Cold War operatives from the Soviet Union and the USA, trying to enlist the cultural and literary
establishment into the political goals of their world visions.

Against this background, I want to explore the alternative evocations of a different “world,” in the material
paratexts of the Marathi book of poems, Tuhi Yatta Kanchi? Tuhi Yatta. . . (“What grade are you in? What
grade. . . ”). In the front matter of this book, the poet, Namdeo Dhasal includes a personal letter written to him
by Chandrakant Patil. Instead of starting at the landscape view, this paper will focus on the hyperlocal
point of the material artefact and expand from the trajectories that are embedded within.

Through examining the paratexts of this opening letter (thick with intimacies and cross-linguistic
solidarities) that has now become part of a poetic text, I want to explore the ways in which the writing
worlds of Hindi and Marathi intersect and produce a different set of frames to read both literatures and
in the process, also question the regional and national emphasis on separate monolinguistic cultures
and writings. As the multilingual poet, Dilip Chitre writes elsewhere: “Life on the bridge is a life between
languages.” (Bombay Review, no 1, 1989). The in-betweenness of things is key. Patil’s letter to Dhasal,
about the Hindi Sahitya Akademi Parisamvad, published in a prominent Marathi book of poems provides
a hinge to open a space to read the literatures of Hindi and Marathi together and chart a mixed legacy
of modernisms across the two languages. Together, the book and its opening personal letter asks us
to reformulate the idea of region and in the process also transgress the model of the nation that
advocates a state of multiple monolingualisms. The fused and complex multilingual history of this writing
and this book shows that we need a different model to address the multilingual literary practices in
evidence.

BELONGING, MULTILINGUALISM , AND NEOLIBERALISM IN INDIA
PROFESSOR JAVED MAJEED
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

My paper addresses two topics in relation to national multilingualism in India. The first is concepts of
belonging and citizenship, and the second is neoliberalism.

Jayal (2013) has discussed the rival principles of jus soli and jus sanguinis citizenship in India since
1947. With the crisis of secularism and the rise of religious nationalism (Needham and Rajan 2007), jus
sanguinis has become dominant, leading to an embedment of ‘biological citizenship’ (Jayal 2013,
Subramaniam 2019). I consider how the idea of the ‘mother tongue’ may have acquired heightened
significance in this context as an index of bio-cultural belonging. This has reinforced a particular kind
of ‘national multilingualism’ in India, which codifies the notion of the ‘mother tongue’ and the figure of
the ‘native’ speaker. It has been argued that there has been a wider shift in the idea of the nation-state
(Kaldor 1995, Hobsbawm 1996), in which membership was originally defined mainly in terms of a united
commitment to key political ideals, to one in which membership is defined in terms of a supposedly pre-
existing cultural, ethnic, and linguistic unity. Such a shift from an earlier commitment to shared political
ideals, which was evident in the Indian State Reorganisation Commission report of 1955, to the nation-
state as striving to represent a bio-cultural unity, has also been evident in India.

In the current context, any discussion of India’s multilingualism is incomplete without a discussion of
the impact of neoliberalism. Drawing on the growing field of language economics, I consider how
neoliberalism has led to a reconceptualization of language in economic terms (Duchêne & Heller 2012,
Holborow 2015), and how it has affected the language economy of India. The principle of linguistic
states in India was originally a brilliant strategy for managing multilingualism and institutionalising
language conflict. It demonstrated the hard-won manoeuvrability of the post-colonial state in the

traumatic historical constraints of the time. However, drawing on recent discussions of neoliberal
nationalism/postcolonial neoliberal nationalism (Harmes 2012, Kaul 2019), I explore whether the federal
system of India, based on the principle of linguistic states, has been co-opted for and by neoliberalism.

I conclude with a sketch of possible counter-hegemonic forms of linguistic pluralism to the hierarchical
national multilingualism in India. I consider how we might de-reify the ‘national’ and the ‘multilingual’
and contribute to what Yildiz (2013) has called a ‘critical multilingualism’, opening up other affective
paths through linguistic practices not tied to kinship, ethnic, and religious identity.

MANAGING AND RECONCILING LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY: THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE POLICY
FORMULATIONS IN ETHIOPIA, CURRENT TRENDS , CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS
PROFESSOR MOGES YIGEZU
ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY

With over 110 million people and more than eighty-four languages, Ethiopia is certainly one of the
multilingual nations in Africa today. It has a long and rich history, and the diversity and distribution of
its peoples and languages is also of a similar magnitude. Among the four language phyla in our
continent, two of them, the Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan, are found in Ethiopia. Likewise, among the
six language families emerging from the Afro-Asiatic language phylum, three of them, namely, the
Cushitic, Omotic, and Semitic language families, are also spoken in Ethiopia. This is an indication of
the diversity and ancient roots of the peoples and nationalities of Ethiopia.

Over the course of several centuries, the practice of formulating and implementing language policies
in Ethiopia, overt or covert, has witnessed diverse types of language policy implementation models
ranging from assimilationist policies to a more radical type of multilingual pluralist policy. This was due
to the fact that, historically the governments of Ethiopia adopted language policies that were
entrenched in their respective ideologies and political orientations which were also molded by the
social, political and cultural past of the country (cf. Moges 2010, 23-43).

The earliest period that stretches from the Axumite time to the end of the 19th century was dominated
by a one-language policy and the consequent process of enforced linguistic assimilation that was
advocated as a strategy for nation-building process. The policy was largely a covert and de facto
policy with no explicit directives and regulations. Towards the second half of the 19th century,
however, the practice of using a single language, Ge’ez, evolved into a diglossic situation changing
the status quo where Amharic was recognized as the official language of the country while Ge’ez
assumed the status of literary language. In contrast to the earlier periods, the early 20th century had
seen a permissive language policy where a significant level of tolerance was observed in the use of
local languages in certain domains such as in primary education. The post-WWII period (1941-1974)
was a dramatically opposed policy to that of the early 20th century and can be labeled as dismissive
and assimilationist in nature. This period had observed the first explicit legislated language policy
enacted in the Constitution of 1944 that declared a one-language policy as part of the mission of
modernization and building a strong nation. The period of the military government (1974-1991) was
more of a continuation of the policy of its predecessor but guided by socialist principles and values.

The most radical language policy was introduced in 1991 in a sweeping shift from an authoritative
monolingual policy to a multilingual pluralist policy. The policy, which has been in use for nearly three
decades, does not have an independently promulgated language policy provisions. Language issues
are cited mainly as parts of the Constitution (1995) and the Education and Training policy (1994). The
Ethiopian constitution guided by the ideological ream of the right to “self-determination”, states that all

ethnic groups have the right to speak and develop their own language, to express and promote their
own culture and history. The constitution thereby gives equal recognition to all languages of the
country and grants important competencies to the regional states, among other things, the power to
choose its own working language. The policy implementation, nevertheless, has faced serious
challenges which are more visibly observed in the arena of educational language policy in particular.
Some of these challenges include: (a) the policy implementation preceded policy formulation; (b)
there is a gap between the federal policy and planning and the regional policy adoption and
implementation models; (c) the policy making has followed a top-down approach; and (d) the policy
lacks a proper and consolidated provision towards the LWC, i.e. Amharic, or the lingua franca of the
nation, and favors an international language over the official working language of the country (cf.
Moges 2010; Mekonnen 2005, 2009). In recognition of these and other challenges surfaced during
the implementation of the 1991 policy, a comprehensive language policy was drafted in 2015 and had
been in a prolonged review process for over five years. It has now been approved in February 2020
by the Council of Ministers of the Federal government.

In an attempt to understand the capacities of the new language policy in managing and reconciling
the linguistic diversity of the country and in order to examine the emerging language issues within the
wider political reform undergoing over the past year, the current paper focuses on two major focal
points. First, it gives an overview of the history of language policy formulation and implementation vis-
a-vis the nation building process, and discusses the deficiencies observed in the implementation of
the language policy that has been in use for nearly three decades. Second, it outlines the main
features of the newly approved language policy, looks into its prospects and further examines its
wider implications to the regional integration being advocated by leaders of the Horn of Africa region.

AN ALTERNATIVE VISION OF MULTILINGUAL INDIA: ARI GAUTIER’S INDIAN
FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE
SHEELA MAHADEVAN
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

India’s multiple colonial histories have determined its postcolonial language policies in different ways.
Despite the presence of the French Empire in India for almost three centuries, 1 French is no longer an
official language of any region of India, 2 unlike English. Moreover, French is not recognized as an Indian
literary language by the Sahitya Akademi. 3 However, defying these policies, a minority of Indian writers
currently adopt French as their literary language. By shedding light on the Indian Francophone literature
of contemporary diasporic writer Ari Gautier, this paper illustrates how the multilingual policies of
contemporary India obscure the multilingual reality on the ground, embodied in literary forms. Moreover,
through an analysis of Gautier’s multilingual poetics, this paper explores how India’s language
hierarchies and policies are both reshaped and reimagined in Gautier’s literature.

The paper argues that Gautier’s French novels decolonize the national language policy and literary
landscape of India, if French is seen as a colonized tongue in light of the hegemony of Indian languages
and English in contemporary India. Yet Gautier also enacts a retrospective act of linguistic
decolonization by weaving ancient and modern Indian vocabularies into his fiction, thus challenging the

1
  Blake Smith, ‘Translingualism in Francophone Writing from South Asia’, L’Esprit Créateur, 59.4 (2019), 68–80 (p. 68)
.
2
  The Pondicherry Official Languages Act, 1965, pp. 515–16
.
3
  anon., ‘Welcome to Sahitya Akademi - About Us’  [accessed 31 March
2021].

former hegemony of French. The paper additionally sheds light on how Gautier defies the ideologies of
the Tamil Purism movement through the frequent use of Sanskrit vocabulary and the reduction of Tamil
to a minor presence in Carnet Secret de Lakshmi.4 Moreover, the inclusion of the Pondicherrian Creole
dialect in Gautier’s novels reveals a facet of multilingual India which is invisible in both national and
regional language policies. The paper also argues that Gautier unties relations between caste and
language through his multilingual retellings of Dalit interpretations of the Mahabaratha in both French
and Sanskrit in Carnet Secret de Lakshmi. Finally, the paper explores how Gautier defies and critiques
India’s national language policy both by reducing English and Hindi to a minor presence in Le Thinnai,
and also by describing anti-Hindi campaigns of South India in the novel. The novel thus challenges the
hegemony of Hindi both linguistically and in its content.

The paper demonstrates how Indian diasporic literature has the potential to subvert existing Indian
language policies and hierarchies. Furthermore, since the multilingual reality embodied in Gautier’s
literature evades the state’s language policies, might this be seen to highlight the state’s failure to
manage multilingualism in India? Or might we see the state’s oppression of certain languages as a
success, since it incites writers to liberate such languages within the space of literature, thereby
enriching India’s multilingualism? Moreover, since a future National Linguistic Survey of India may
involve a ‘catalogue’ of ‘written language/literary artefacts’,5 might literature have a more substantial
and visible role to play in managing and contributing to India’s multilingualism in the future? Will
diasporic literature be included in such a survey? Gautier’s work also illustrates how a language may
be simultaneously ‘colonial’ and ‘colonized’, which offers alternative possibilities for the theorisation and
practice of linguistic decolonization in multilingual nations such as India.
Selected References:
anon., ‘Welcome to Sahitya Akademi - About Us’ 
[accessed 31 March 2021]
Kidwai, Ayesha, ‘Managing Multilingual India’, The Marxist, XXIV.2 (2008), 7
Ramaswamy, Sumathi, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970
(California: University of California Press, 1997)
Smith, Blake, ‘Translingualism in Francophone Writing from South Asia’, L’Esprit Créateur, 59.4 (2019),
68–80 
The        Pondicherry       Official   Languages        Act,       1965,       pp.      515–16

THE LITERARY MANAGEMENT OF MULTILINGUALISM IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIA
PROFESSOR PREETHA MANI
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

Due to the legacy of colonial language policy in the subcontinent, multilingualism became both a
celebrated aspect of national culture—which differentiated India from its monolingual counterparts in
the West—as well as an obstacle to the newly independent state's aspiration for national unification.
Multilingualism therefore had to be creatively channeled into the energies of postcolonial nation-
building. This presentation examines the role of the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters

4
  Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 (California: University of
California Press, 1997), pp. 144–45.
5 Ayesha Kidwai, ‘Managing Multilingual India’, The Marxist, XXIV.2 (2008), 7 (p. 6).

(founded in 1954), in undertaking this task. Articulating a position of "one literature, though written in
many languages," Sahitya Akademi practices and policies sought to reshape the Indian multilingual
landscape to accord with the discourse of "unity in diversity," Prime Minister Nehru's political philosophy
for achieving national integration.

In the presentation, I explore two main avenues through which the Akademi tackled the problem of
India's linguistic plurality and transformed it into a cultural merit worthy of national and international
recognition: translation and literary history. The Akademi's promotion of translations between regional
Indian languages and English, I show, enabled the institution to support the development of regional
languages, while simultaneously making them intelligible within a global monolingual paradigm
dominated by English. The Akademi's emphasis on literary history worked in tandem with translation to
provide a noncontroversial discursive terrain for accommodating diverse regional understandings of
literature beneath the broadly classifiable rubric of Indian literature that had its roots in ancient Sanskrit.
Ultimately, I argue that through the production of translations and regional literary histories, the Sahitya
Akademi transformed literature into a means for managing multilingualism and making it compatible
with the monolingualism intrinsic to the form of the nation.

This also meant Indian languages henceforth became intelligible as regional languages that functioned
separately from each other, beneath—and sometimes beyond—the purview of the nation. This
multilingual landscape made the postcolonial central government’s aim to create a unified national
literature—exemplified by the Sahitya Akademi’s (India’s national academy of letters, founded in 1954)
slogan of “one literature, though written in many languages”—difficult, if not impossible.

However, there were alternative arenas to government efforts to define a national literature in
postcolonial India. This paper draws attention to how “new poetry” movements arose in multiple regional
language sphere, which drew inspiration from both inter- and intranational conversations about the role
of poetry in imagining and interrogating modern life. For example, in the two decades immediately
following independence, poets working in Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Indian English, Malayalam, Marathi,
Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, and Telugu all played with traditional conventions of language, theme, and form
to produce new innovations in free verse and narrative voice. For this reason, this new poetry offers an
alternative—and arguably more influential—arena to governmental efforts for exploring how a national
Indian literature became instantiated during the postcolonial period, however tentatively.

MANAGING A MULTILINGUAL LANDSCAPE: PERIODICALS, LANGUAGE AND
FRONTIER IDENTITIES
SANGEETA BHAGAWATI
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

The colonial period witnessed a marked engagement with the practice of language standardization and
classification in India (Majeed, Javed). In the State of Assam in Northeast India, a polyethnic region
with hazy linguistic boundaries (Mishra, Sanghamitra), attempts to form distinct categories of language
groups by colonial administrators ran parallel to the rise of ‘national’ consciousness and an effective
print culture among the regional elites (Sharma, Jayeeta). In the post-colonial period, modern language
ideologies, bearing the effects of colonial language classification practices along with current
political/cultural concerns, became more prominent in the backdrop of shifting geographical boundaries
caused by re-shuffling of international as well as internal borders.

This paper will address vernacular periodicals and journals in post-independence Assam, to argue that
political boundary determination and control developed contemporaneously with attempts at regulating
language boundaries and homogenizing the usage of a vernacular. It will explore how this periodical
culture engaged with ideas of Assam as a multilingual linguistic region, and how it evoked familial and
bodily ideas of language, at a time when resistance to institutional measures ordering language diversity
became increasingly visible in the public sphere. To conclude, I will argue that vernacular periodicals,
in this instance, performed a crucial role in consolidating the understanding of languages in the region
as distinct and autonomous objects, rather than as practices of communication that seeped into each
other, adding to the notion of multilingualism as ‘plural monolingualisms’ (Makony and Pennycook).

By focusing on the conflicts arising from managing linguistic heterogeneity in the frontier region of
Assam, this paper will contribute to the workshop’s focus on questioning the premise of nations as
secure parameters containing well-defined language communities and help us to understand frontier
linguistic identities in relation to larger national frameworks.

A WAR OF LANGUAGES AND LANDS IN A BOHUBHASHABID (MULTILINGUAL )
BANGLADESH
D R MAHRUBA MOWTUSHI
BRAC UNIVERSITY

Bangladesh has a rich but complicated relationship with its linguistic heritage. Home to an important
language movement in 1952 and a liberation war in 1971 that was spearheaded by the ideals of a
Bengali language and culture, Bangladesh is also home to over thirty-five non-Bengali communities
that speak a variety of Rakhine, Tibeto-Burman, and Sino-Tibetan vernaculars. While the majority of
the population speak the ‘national language’ which is Bengali, English is widely used in the academic,
administrative and corporate sectors. There is also a growing interest within the middle-class, academic
circles to learn European languages. About two per cent of the non-Bengali citizens speak Kol, Mundari,
Kuki-chin, Boro, Meithei, Austroasiatic and Indo-Aryan languages which do not have official recognition
from the state. Hindu, Urdu, Arabic, Turkish and Korean languages filter through satellite TV and radio.
Notwithstanding the recognition that multilingual abilities advance and foster global citizenship,
Bangladesh continues to have a fraught relationship with its multilingual (called bohubhashabid) history,
going so far as to forcefully implement the official language, Bengali, on its two million non-Bengali
population. Even though the Constitution recognizes the need to ‘conserve the cultural traditions and
heritages of the people’ (in Article 17), the governments in the past and present have repeatedly initiated
constitutional and institutional proceedings to promote Bengali that is illustrative of linguistic hegemony.
The language barriers between the Bengali and non-Bengali communities, coupled with the murky legal
procedures and the governments’ appropriation of indigenous forests, have pushed the vast majority of
the non-Bengali peoples away from their land and resources. In this paper, I look at the protracted land
disputes between Bengalis and the Chakmas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the Garos of Netrokona
and argue that these disputes are a direct result of the language barriers between these communities
exacerbated by the Bangladeshi governments’ imposition of cultural and linguistic homogeneity over its
multi-ethnic and multilingual population and a blatant refusal to recognize its multicultural
distinctiveness.

POLITICS AND A CRISIS OF ANALYSIS: UNDERSTANDING ETHIOPIA’S CURRENT
CONUNDRUM
D R SHIMELIS BONSA GULEMA
STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY

Contemporary Ethiopia is going through one of the most difficult times in its modern history. The
problems it is facing are partly rooted in the very making of Ethiopia’s modern state, complicated further
by the nature of its complicated, not least ambivalent, entanglement with the world. At the same time,
Ethiopia’s political crisis reflects but also stems from the intellectual predicament that has gripped the
country for over half a century. Since the 1960s, analysis of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian condition has
occurred through the conceptual and ideological constructs of class and ethnicity, while disregarding
other vocabularies and frameworks of examination like gender. One can argue that the language and
method of critical social inquiry was and still is theoretically impoverished and politically constraining.
What is needed, urgently at that, is new ways of interrogating the Ethiopian condition and its complex
politics. In this preliminary discussion, I seek to briefly examine the nature of the current crisis around
ethnicity and nationalism and the interpretive frameworks deployed. I ask if there is a way/s out of this
political and intellectual quandary.

MULTILINGUAL ANTICOLONIAL RESISTANCE IN ERITREA
TIMNET GEDAR
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

The transition from colonial rule to independent statehood for former African colonies is often framed
as a struggle between the colony and the metropole, a binary, two-way engagement between the
subject and the colonizer, the Black native and the white foreign master. However, the historical moment
of decolonization also saw contestation, negotiation, and redefinition among a diverse set of ethnic and
linguistic communities within former colonies themselves. My paper focuses on the period of the initial
decolonization of Eritrea from 1941-1952 and examines the rhetorical and practical strategies that
Eritrean intellectuals and activists employed in the pursuit of their political aims. Through historical
archival research, I trace the ways in which regional, linguistic, ethnic, and religious differences
appeared within this ongoing public debate about Eritrea’s future. My preliminary argument is that as
various Eritrean communities (re)negotiated their relationships to one another and to Ethiopia after the
end of Italian colonial rule, the interventions of the British Military Administration and the United Nations
exacerbated existing differences among them. Postcolonial language policies of the Eritrean state, then,
were shaped less by Italian colonial rule than they were by the complex politics of the “long
decolonization” of the Horn of Africa and Eritreans’ relationship to the Ethiopian empire.

MULTILINGUALISM AND METATEXTUALITY: A RELATIONAL READING OF JULIO
CORTÁZAR’S THEORY OF THE ANTINOVEL AND SAURAV KUMAR CHALIHA’S
SHORT FICTION
SNEHA KHAUND
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

Over the past year I have been quite intrigued by the concept of ‘antinovel’ proposed by Julio Cortázar
(1914-84) in Rayuela/Hopscotch (1963/1966). It appears to be a challenge to the conventions of the
novel and an exciting revision of literature itself more generally. I’ve also been fascinated by the
connections that Cortázar draws between the novel (as a dominant literary form) and modernity and
how that relationship can be analyzed and recast through the disruptive force of the antinovel. Cortázar
uses the formal experimentations fundamental to the antinovel to reflect on the intersections of literature
and language, extending a Bakhtinian emphasis on literary language as discourse to envision the task
of the writer as one to ‘set language on fire’ (447). Considering my interests in multilingualism, I have
been curious to explore what the relevance of Cortázar’s metatextual ruminations might be for studying
bilingual code-switching and metatextual address in my research area of modern Assamese short
fiction. Does the antinovel offer a richer alternative framework for considering minor texts and literary
cultures in the field of world literature beyond their typecasting as limitedly ‘local’ or ‘peripheral’?

For the workshop, I am hoping to synthesize two unpublished pieces that I have written in the last year
comparing the modernist aesthetics of Assamese writer Saurav Kumar Chaliha (1933-2011) with
Cortázar’s theory of the antinovel. In one of the essays, I look at Chaliha’s story “Ehat Daaba”/“A Game
of Chess” (1972) to show it uses play, or ‘ludico’ to take Cortázar’s term, as a metatextual strategy for
interpellating its multilingual readers and treats them as ‘accomplices’ for literary construction. I thus
compare the story with Cortázar’s definition of the antinovel as an open, incomplete text that draws
readers into it as a game in which they are accomplices to the author and thereby participate in the
literary process as an interaction with the contemporary moment. In the other essay, I look at Chaliha’s
story “Photo” (2005) which is an adaptation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966), which in
turn is an adaptation of Julio Cortázar short story “Las Babas del Diablo” (1959). I examine the
sequence of adaptations as a translational chain which demonstrates the theory of the antinovel and
argue that in this instance translation operates as a mode of relation between the texts and also that
each of the texts exist as translations though their metatextual performativity. Through multilingual
metatextual tactics and using an Anglophone vernacular, Chaliha appears to prompt us to reconsider
categorizing his writing as minor literature and to step outside of a model of translation in which an
‘original’ acts as a ‘source’ and move towards a framework in which texts exist relationally in a world
literary field. As such, I hope to revise David Damrosch’s observation in What is World Literature?
(2000) that national literatures ‘lose’ because of a failure of translation by underscoring the modes of
relation that enable consideration of minor texts—in this instance doubly-minoritized due to the
hierarchically inflected relationship of Assam to the Indian state and between English and other Indian
languages—on a global scale.

THINKING THROUGH LANGUAGE AND THINKING BEYOND RECOGNITION :
AFRICAN LANGUAGES AS ARCHIVES
PROFESSOR BINYAM SISAY MENDISU & D R SEMENEH AYALEW ASFAW
ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY

In this paper we would like to explore the workings of using the mother tongue as a medium of instruction
at the elementary level in Ethiopian schools. We argue that the role of local languages as mediums of
instruction in Ethiopia while it is commendable its role should go beyond serving the purpose of political
recognition of ethno-national groups in the country. Using the mother tongue has so far served as a
mechanism of ensuring the civil and political rights of using ones own language. Even if this is important
in the process of the guaranteeing of civil and political rights, it is not enough to ensure the promotion
of social, economic and cultural rights of linguistic communities in the country. We propose that
languages should also be used as mediums of knowledge transfer and memory in school systems in
the country. Recognizing the relevance of these languages towards empowering students with
knowledge and information about their local realities and surroundings is very vital. Using the mother
tongue should not be limited to translating a national curriculum into different languages confined to
using local languages to teach students in their mother tongue. Rather using the mother tongue should
also be aimed at equipping students with practices and knowledge systems affecting the social,
economic, political and cultural life of linguistic communities as elementary education has the primary
objective of helping students develop skills and knowledge necessary in their local environment. This
is the only sure way to entrench social and cultural justice and making the much needed epistemological
shift in educational systems in Ethiopia and Africa at large that is capable of producing knowledge that
is relevant to Ethiopian and African realities. In this herculean effort of designing an education system
that is relevant to Ethiopian realities using the mother-tongue both as a medium of instruction and as a
medium of knowledge transfer, research on languages in the humanities plays a very important role.
Research in the humanities that focuses on languages with the aim of using languages as an archive
of knowledge and as sites of “memory and remembrance”, as Ngugi would have it, is critical. Therefore,
research in the humanities should be used to aid this herculean task of overhauling our educational
system in ways that make languages as sources of knowledge and as sites of social and cultural
memory to “produce for Africa in African languages, because language is the basic remembering
practice” (Ngugi: Something Torn and New, 2009). Following Ngugi we will argue that languages should
be studied not only to understand their structures as many linguists are concerned with but also for their
value and indispensability as embedded mediums where knowledge, memory, ways of knowing and as
sites where various cultural and social sensibilities and practices dwell.

STATE AND ETHNO-LINGUISTIC MOVEMENTS IN PAKISTAN: FROM LANGUAGE
TO LAND IN SOUTH PUNJAB
PROFESSOR ASMA FAIZ
LAHORE UNIVERSITY OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCES

This paper attempts to understand the long-running disconnect between the centralizing and
homogenizing policies of the state in Pakistan and the resistance from various ethno-linguistic

communities. Since its inception in 1947, Pakistan has seen the emergence of numerous ethnic
entrepreneurs demanding inclusive policies from the state. These ethno-linguistic movements followed
a familiar trajectory of moving from the demand for recognition of their linguistic rights to some form of
territorial claim. In this sense, Pakistan reflects a typical story of a post-colonial state where a top-down
approach was pursued towards state-nation consolidation. That included the use of national language
as a key instrument of the nation-building project. In case of Pakistan, Urdu as well as Islam has been
the preferred instrument of nation-building by the state elite. Unlike India, where linguistic re-
organization of states mainly took place within the first decade of partition, the ethno-linguistic
reorganization of provinces has remained a pipe dream in Pakistan. The general pattern of the state’s
response to linguistic claims has been resistance against politics of identity at the sub-national level.
Since the creation of the new state, Pakistan has faced numerous linguistic claims from the Bengali,
Sindhi and Siraiki communities. The demand for a varying degree of political autonomy and territorial
claims became part and parcel of these movements.

This paper aims to examine the Siraiki language movement in detail. There are several interesting
aspects to the story of Seraiki ethno-linguistic identity and its engagement with the Centre. The Seraiki
movement has emerged in southern and western regions of Punjab. Prior to the onset of the Siraiki
movement, Punjab was linguistically agnostic, having accepted the hegemony of Urdu language without
any resistance. However, since the early 1960s, the Seraiki intelligentsia has been engaged in
consolidation of various regional dialects, development of Seraiki texts and growth of Siraiki ‘print
capitalism’. Within the span of two decades, the Siraiki movement succeeded in getting its language
recognized in the 1981 Census conducted by the Zia’s martial law regime. This marked a watershed in
the trajectory of Siraiki movement as it quickly transformed into a political claim with a demand for
creation of a new province in Punjab. While the Centre’s response to the linguistic claim was relatively
smooth, the quest for territorial re-organization of Punjab met with total resistance. In addition to this
long duree of the Siraiki linguistic movement, my paper will also analyze the evolution of the movement
for Siraiki province in the light of recent developments. These include the rise of Imran Khan’s Pakistan
Tehreek-I-Insaaf (PTI) to power along with the party’s commitment to create a new South Punjab
province. I will also examine the post-2018 policy measures taken to administratively bifurcate northern
and southern Punjab and the relative weakness of the Siraiki ethno-linguistic entrepreneurs. It will be
interesting to compare the policy preferences of the Pakistan state towards questions of linguistic
mobilization and the extreme rigidity towards re-imaging the territorial boundaries of Punjab. The
management of the Siraiki ethno-linguistic claims can provide interesting insights into the broader
nation-building project in the Global South.