The question of script for Sindhi in India: reflections on postcolonial grammatology

Abstract

When Sindhi Hindus came to India after the 1947 Partition, they had little to help them survive as a community. Given the linguistic organization of states in independent India, the community has been striving to forge an identity comparable to other communities that have a state/territory they can flourish in. First, Sindhis struggled to gain recognition for their language as an official language listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India. Second, they demanded that entertainment content be broadcast in Sindhi in official national media spaces. The case of Sindhi stands as a fascinating case study at the intersection of ideas such as nationalism, citizenship, and minority identity. The case of Sindhi is also a narrative of self-transformation, one of which is its struggle for survival that has also led to the revival of the question of its script. In the 1960s, a faction among the Sindhi intelligentsia proposed that in order to stay relevant and alive in India, it must adopt the Devanagari script and give up its Perso-Arabic script associated with the language since the nineteenth century. In this essay, I revisit this debate to uncover postcolonial grammatology as an approach to deal with South Asian sites of language and writing.