This session builds on recent work in literary studies, postcolonial studies, book history, and the history of empire (Mulholland, Nerlekar, Saxena, Lahiri, Orsini). Each panelist will present a 12-15 minute paper about multilingual entanglements at a specific juncture in South Asian literary history from the late nineteenth-century to the present, touching on concerns ranging from colonial knowledge production and anti-colonial protest to postcolonial nation-building and contemporary language politics.

We start with Priyasha Mukhopadhyay’s “The Multilingual Glossary”, which examines Burnell and Yule’s colonial-era compilation, the Hobson-Jobson (1886). Capturing the printed and sonic realities of English’s encounters with South Asian languages, the glossary presents readers with lists of South Asian words that have been absorbed into everyday English usage in the colony. Rather than simply portraying a multilingual South Asia, Mukhopadhyay uses book historical tools to show how the format of the glossary, its reliance on alphabetical lists, and its two-column format, establishes English as the central node through which South Asian languages come into contact with each other, eliding other rich histories of linguistic interactions. She places this examination in the context of colonial efforts to archive South Asia’s multilingualism and pairs it with literary counter-efforts to understand English’s linguistic debts in the works of the poet Daljit Nagra.

Madhumita Lahiri’s “Listening for India” moves us to the anticolonial period and the genre of the novel. Her focus is the 1926 Bengali novel Pather Dabi (“The Right of Way”) by Saratchandra Chatterjee. She shows that its political content is inseparable from its sonic operations, for Pather Dabi uses its Burmese setting to dramatize how linguistic communities are interwoven with national ones. She argues that the ostensibly quiet form of the novel, also served as a nationalist technology of sound reproduction, by enfolding several languages in a single narrative arc. Situating Pather Dabi within the trajectory of twentieth-century Indian literature in Bengali, Hindi, and English, she invites us to listen for the emergence of the noisy Indian novel: one that taught readers how to listen across languages and to improve their politics in the process.

Supurna Dasgupta’s “Language and its Others in Bangladeshi Fiction” also poses questions about linguistic nationalism. She argues that Bangladeshi fiction depicts language as the country’s overdetermined collaborator: not just during the liberation war of the 1960s-70s, but also in the fiction composed as late as the 1990s. In these literary texts, language stands in for religious, gendered, and class affiliations. Her paper focuses on Ahmad Sofa’s 1975 novella Omkara and Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s 1995 short story “Raincoat.” In both, linguistic identification across a range of languages such as Bengali and Urdu is deemed real labor towards the building of a country. In multilingual South Asia, postcolonial Bangladeshi literature offers an interesting riddle about monolingual paradigms and the collaborative presence of language in the construction of the country.

Finally, Akshya Saxena’s “Multilingualism as Method” turns to English as a South Asian language and reflects on the conceptual possibilities of thinking South Asia within and through the question of language. It develops vocabulary to trace the relations between English and other languages– coming full circle to Mukhopadhyay’s opening presentation–by arguing that the term Anglo-“phone” itself invokes both the people who speak and the technology that makes them heard. As literary scholars, we are used to asking “who speaks” but rarely “who listens?” and “how?” Building upon recent work in postlingual aesthetics by Rebecca Walkowitz and yasseer elhariry, her paper focuses on the auditory practices that inflect critical reading practices. The paper discusses multilingualism in South Asia as well as what’s at stake in thinking about South Asia through multilingualism and our critical methods to access that multilingualism.