Writing off domination: the Chakma and Meitei script movements

Abstract

ABSTRACTAlthough the large number of scripts in use in South Asia is intriguing and causes challenges hardly known from any other region, there is still a dearth of studies looking at the sociopolitical role of scripts. This article will give a comparative overview of the historic background and current situation regarding script movements for two languages that are today still largely written in the script predominantly identified with the Bengali language. For the last few decades, a host of activists have been trying, partly successfully, to implement specific scripts for Chakma, a minority language spoken mainly in the southeast of Bangladesh, and Meitei (today officially Manipuri), the dominant language in the Indian union state of Manipur. An initial juxtaposition of these two examples will allow us to detect the preconditions that encourage certain agents in smaller ethnolinguistic groups in two South Asian states to demand their own distinct script, and the circumstances that facilitate or curb the successful implementation of these demands. This will be done by taking into account the attitudes among Chakmas and Meiteis towards a third group: Bengalis, the biggest ethnolinguistic group in the northeast of South Asia. As a result, the comparison between the Chakma and Meitei script movements will show that today’s identity politics, especially among smaller ethnolinguistic groups in that region, are more than ever interdependently connected with real or imagined interactions with other allegedly or actually dominant groups in the past and present.