Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how 19th century colonial discourses furthered and complicated existing relationships between already inequal languages by translating notions of modernity into the sphere of language.

Paper long abstract:

What is it that makes languages capable of being translated to modernity? What are the characteristics that mark languages that inhabit various spaces and institutions of modernity? Drawing from Richard Bauman and Charles L Briggs's Voices of Modernity, I argue that these characteristics and categories point to inequalities between languages, furthered by existing discourses on languages inseparable from the people who speak them. Taking the case of India, specifically the case of Kannada, the dominant language of the South Indian State of Karnataka and Kodava, a language belonging to the ethno-linguistic minority of Kodavas within the state of Karnataka, I seek to explore how while certain languages and language forms are translated into modernity, certain others remain in the realm of 'tradition', 'not developed', being 'scriptless', 'oral', in the realm of 'private', and as untranslatable into the sphere of modernity. How does the 'lack' of historiographies, literary and of community, belonging to minorities, get articulated in such processes? I shall examine these questions among others through a study of 19th century ethnographic writings on Kodavas. This I hope will help us map ways in which 20th century discourses have juxtaposed, categorized and translated languages sharing contiguous spaces, their implications to the newly emerging public sphere and to the larger network of contexts involving languages, communities and identities.