Script Politics: Border Effects & Everyday Governance in the Bengal Borderlands

National Institute of Technology Silchar (7 March 2026)

Across eastern India and its borderlands, language operates as a dense semiotic field through which political authority, cultural authenticity, and territorial belonging are rendered sensible. In regions such as North Bengal, the Barak Valley, Assam–Bengal, Odisha–Bengal, Bihar–Bengal border zones, and adjacent transnational spaces, linguistic forms function as symbolic condensations that gather histories of migration, labour, indigeneity, and violence into recognisable signs circulating as common sense (Tambiah 1985). Drawing on theories of “script politics” (Brandt & Sohoni 2018, van Schendel 2023), this workshop invites contributions that examine how ethno-linguistic cores are produced, stabilised, and contested through semiotic practices embedded in everyday governance in the Bengal borderlands. The workshop approaches language not merely as representation or identity, but as a material and affective sign system that mediates power (Gal and Irvine 2019; Keane 2007). Scripts, accents, fonts, ritual speech, bureaucratic genres, and media iconography perform metapragmatic labour by marking certain forms of speech and writing as native, moral, or authoritative, while rendering others excessive, suspect, or out of place. The point, therefore, is to understand how linguistic signs come to stand metonymically for “the people,” “the land,” or “the region,” enabling language to operate as a cultural shorthand for political community and belonging (Anderson 2006). 

Conceptually, the workshop treats language as a semiotic infrastructure of rule—one that governs through regimes of visibility, audibility, and legibility rather than formal decree alone (Scott 1998; Hull 2012). In the Bengal borderlands, linguistic dominance is enacted through the visual saturation of scripts in public space, the disciplining of accents and pronunciation in everyday encounters, and the bureaucratic formatting of language in documents that translate lives into administratively recognisable forms (Hull 2012). Choices of script on market notices, linguistic templates in land or citizenship documents, or routine corrections of speech by officials operate as semiotic acts that territorialise ethno-linguistic cores and render them governable (Scott 1998). At the same time, ethno-linguistic cores are unsettled through counter-semiotic practices such as alternative scripts, vernacular spellings, hybrid signboards, parody, refusal, and tactical multilingualism (Gal and Irvine 2019). These practices rework the symbolic field itself, producing counter-archives and rival regimes of meaning that challenge dominant narratives of linguistic purity and origin (Trouillot 1995). Attention to affect and materiality allows us to trace how language becomes felt—as comfort, threat, nostalgia, or injury—within everyday political life (Navaro-Yashin 2012).