The writerly self: Literacy, discipline and codes of conduct in early modern western India

Prachi Deshpande
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Prachi Deshpande: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2016, vol. 53, issue 4, 449-471

Abstract: This article examines Marathi discourses of good writing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critical scholarship on literacy has highlighted reading and writing as historically situated practices, with complex interactions with orality. South Asian historiography on early modern scribal practices has also addressed the expansion of state power, regional historical imaginations, literary cultures and the sociology of scribal caste groups. Writing proliferated in seventeenth-century Maharashtra with the establishment of the independent Maratha state, and the spread of various religious movements, and generated diverse norms about ideal literate practices. This article closely reads a collection of accountancy manuals called ‘mestak’, alongside literate practices idealised by the poet-saint Ramdas in the DÄ sabodha. While pointing to divergences across these bureaucratic and devotional contexts, the article teases out common emphases of moral conduct and self-fashioning between them. These overlaps, it suggests, are critical to understand the religio-political horizons of Maratha scribal communities; they also help trace a longer, complex history of language practices, history and community in western India.

Keywords: Scribes; reading and writing; literacy practice; Ramdas; Marathas; Marathi; scribal practice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indeco:v:53:y:2016:i:4:p:449-471

DOI: 10.1177/0019464616662137

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