Notes: Bios, Abstracts

Limbu is the first Trans-Himalayan language that I investigated, starting back in 1983. This was the first time that I engaged in linguistic fieldwork professionally, but not the first time that I had engaged in linguistic fieldwork and language analysis individually. Experience is one prerequisite, and this experience should encompass personal individual familiarity and, of course, ideally also a working command of a number of structurally different languages, languages that one has not just acquired but also reflected upon in the process. The other prerequisite is a notional instrumentarium. The first time that I set out to tackle and document a new, unfamiliar language, I had at my disposal an arsenal of analytical tools and concepts that had been developed over several centuries by the linguistic school of European structuralism. Much like the seven levels of existence in the universe posited in some Buddhist texts, this theoretical knowledge of language as a phenomenon also operates on seven different levels of reality. Language is a semiotic organism which exhibits certain structural or —to use an apt term from the 19th-century German linguistic literature — physiological properties. A principle underlying the life of this organism is an intimate correspondence between form and meaning. I published my first Limbu grammar in 1987, and last year I was able to publish a revised, enhanced, and augmented edition of the grammar at Lalitpur in 2024. Using this new, improved exercise in language documentation as an example, I would like to speak about the different levels of linguistic analysis and about the real-world phenomena that these distinct approaches seek to document and understand. The seven levels of analysis in descriptive linguistics correspond to demonstrable and observable physical and cognitive realities, and it is our challenge as linguists to confront a language at each of these levels of description as meticulously and thoroughly as possible.

What do seeds and paper have in common when thinking about Indigenous futures? This presentation takes us to highland Asia, into the Indian state of Nagaland. I explore two modalities of thinking about futures and the effort by communities and individuals to make a difference despite the turbulent and tempestuous political climate, the upheaval of traditional ways of life, and the ever-regenerative question of cultivating hope in an uncertain world.

My first vignette takes me to Chizami, a small agrarian community run by North East Network, a women's cooperative working on reviving local seeds as both heritage and heirloom. Seeds are tangible things that are held, felt, and sown. They grow and sprout into food for sustenance, and are associated with memory, history, inheritance, and heritage. Weather, climate, water, soil, and human ingenuity influence their harvest, along with rituals – song, dance, prayers – that celebrate the gift of nature, ancestral relations, and ties to land, spirits, and gods. I ask: what sort of memories do seeds evoke? How are they related to family, kin, and indeed to the very survival of a people?

The second vignette takes me to the Naga Archives & Research Centre, a national archive maintained by Rev. V.K. Nuh. His archive functions as a relation – not formally to any state governments as such or to any institutional holdings – but to his family, friends, and the nation. It exists in a space of vision and memory, narrative and tradition that is an active repository of various forms of visual, aural, and written sources that anticipate those still unborn. In these multiple material forms, the expansive visual and political economies speak and act to remind us of the power of stories to build a nation. I ask: how might we view the archive as an intervention of collective memory? How might we view it as a legacy of hope that will wield its presence in any future realisation of the nation-to-be?

Indigenous Futures plays on the idea of memory, of a past that is not only suspended in limbo, a passive repository of events that no longer hold weight, but something that is actively remembered and enacted in the slowness and stillness of time.

If Fichte represents disturbing components of racism in the tradition of cosmopolitanism and universalism which have passed through a language-culture based supremacism, this paper explores the equally urgent obligation to detect the hypophysics of philosophical nationalism as racism of Humboldtian (and Herderian) multiculturalism animated by Indomania as the (often considered) opposite of cosmopolitanism. Humboldt, as even more than Herder the patron saint of twentieth century liberalism and multiculturalism based on a theory of language and culture stands in need of interrogation in a xenophobic world whose treatment of migrants, refugees, and the ex-colonised as well as countries and regions continuingly colonized now appears in the twenty-first century less as a turning away from the “other” and more as the “denigrate-dominate function” (Dwivedi 2023). 

The problem which Derrida identified via Fichte as philosophical nationalism in his lecture “Onto-Theology of National-Humanism” (1984) is in fact none other than the larger problem of philosophical racisms which are a species of hypophysics rather than metaphysics. Humboldt's theory of language is in fact a racializing discourse of man where the difference of man is the posited on his hypophysical concept of Volksgeist or National Character. Nationalism was deconstructed by Derrida as philosophy’s ownmost possibility

and one intimately arising from the unavoidability of philosophizing in idiom and hence in a natural language; thence, the community (nation) of that language or the identity of that idiom would come to determine the potentiality for philosophy. Humboldt as an arch-theorist of idiom exemplifies how much such deconstruction of philosophical nationalism hides and evades what underlies it – namely, philosophical racism. His multiculturalist alternative to Fichtean cosmopolitanism yields no different result than a racism which today continues to threaten migrants and refugees, first of all because Humboldt's own hidden subscription to the "Aryan" doctrine remains hidden from decontextualising deconstructionist readings. Without insistently implicating caste in the history of European philosophy and European race theories, the purported deconstructions of philosophical nationalism will continue to deny, suppress and perpetuate the racisms which animate it. Worse, they will be silently complicit in the perpetuation of the "Aryan" doctrine which is at the origins of European race theories and racisms and resurgent White supremacism.

TBA

This paper reflects on nearly a decade of film-based collaborations between the Highland Institute in Nagaland and Prof Dr Piyush Roy, currently Dean of RV University’s School of Film, Media and Creative Arts in Bangalore. Initiated in 2017, this partnership has evolved into a sustained experiment in multimodal research and in the role of image, sound, and story in a time of planetary crisis. Drawing on the student films Healing Hands: Tale of an Angami Healer, Axone Ghili: Tasting Tomorrow, and Anieo’s Mepfi: A Look into Indigenous Beekeeping, the paper explores how filmmaking can serve as a phenomenological and ethical method rather than a representational tool, a way of thinking with communities rather than about them. It argues that when collaborative film practice is embedded within fieldwork and pedagogy, it produces a new kind of archive, one based on relation rather than extraction, capable of reimagining research as an act of care, co-creation, and world-making.

The paper explores the various ways in which a formerly non-literate society has tried to understand its own past. From myths that have tried to reconcile with everyday realities to the instrumentalization of these myths for nation-building, to evolving self-perceptions, the paper will explore how the Mizos, a people of a little over a million, have tried to understand and negotiate their past and create their present. The paper explores how writing and the new technologies that people were exposed to helped in the recreation of the ethnic self.

When His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama arrived in India in March 1959, he trod the well-worn path of his compatriots before him. Tibetans had been coming to parts of northern and northeastern India for centuries as traders and pilgrims, monastics and laity. They could enter British India without a passport, visa, or any entry permit—with Indians travelling into Tibet enjoying reciprocal provisions. While a path to citizenship was primarily unavailable to Tibetans who followed the Dalai Lama in 1959, many who arrived in the preceding decades were already on their way to being naturalised as Indian citizens in the early years after Independence.

As the newly founded Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China began to consolidate their borders in the 1950s, they also grew increasingly suspicious of customarily itinerant borderland populations. Records from the Citizenship Section of the Home Ministry reveal how a seemingly straightforward requirement in their application for citizenship became a tragic reminder for Tibetans of their statelessness after the failed uprising against the Chinese in 1959. To be accepted as Indian citizens, applicants had to furnish evidence of having renounced their former nationality before a competent authority of that country. Hence, not only did the authorities have to ascertain a firm place of origin—which was especially difficult for customarily itinerant populations such as monastics and traders—but they also unwittingly required that applicants produce a renunciation certificate from the very regime they had fled.

Concepts of area provide broad delineations of forms and patterns of what we identify as an area. However, from a historical geographical standpoint, if our starting point of enquiry is patterns of different time-space relations, and how they intersect, combine or subvert one another, then how do we relate these processes to our concepts of an area, or to how we examine relations of space and power. In the process, how do we historicize our understanding of an area. The objective of this working paper is to examine these points. To examine the points, the paper focuses on the period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century with regard to the Assam-Burma trans-region. One node to enter this case is the Moamaria rebellion (1769-1805) in the kingdom of Assam, stretching to the Himalayan and Patkai highlands. The other node is the Singpho-Jingphaw rebellion of 1843, stretching between Assam and northern Burma. The data here are mainly the chronicles of Assam and the early British colonial reports vis-à-vis this trans-region. The paper considers these two forms of texts as illustrative when examining the point.

The paper studies short linguistic forms, such as proverbs and proverb-like idioms and catchphrases, that are deeply integrated in daily conversations of the Rongmei Naga speakers. These texts are short in length, thus memorable, often figuratively expressed, and very importantly the teller derives them from ‘tradition’ rather than his/her own individual opinion. This recognised traditional wisdom is rooted in a worldview that shapes the cultural ethos of the group, or their ideas of how the world operates. Although these expressions thrive robustly in oral forms, they remain the least documented folk genre. When collected in isolation, stripped of their dynamic interpretative settings and the spontaneous speech acts in which they occur, they risk being “dead” texts. The paper will, therefore, examine the processes of archiving the proverbs in their high contexts, drawing on the fieldwork conducted among the Rongmei-speaking population in the three districts of Manipur in 2022. A select texts would be analysed in the light of the contemporary theories of paremiology (the study of proverbs) and paremiography(collection of proverbs), with special attention on the indigenous methodologies of archiving folk materials.

In this session, Noopur Desai will discuss the expansive field of art writing in South Asia with an emphasis on non-English writings on modern and contemporary art. While focusing on Asia Art Archive's ongoing projects such as the Bibliography Project and other publication and digitisation projects related to art writing, the presentation will think further about what the bibliography and art writing in multiple languages can enable for the field of modern and contemporary art in the region. The talk will also explore the periodicals and little magazines published from across the region as sites for the formation of diverse publics, innovative design practices, and the production of the visual modern in South Asia.

The presentation will concern itself with the work of Iiedsing Buhphang, a phawar master who made a living as a charcoal burner in the remote jungle canyons of South Khasi hills, Meghalaya. I befriended the gentleman and recorded his work on cassettes in the summer of 1993. The phawar is a traditional Khasi poetic composition that is created spontaneously in response to specific situations and performed during post-funeral ceremonies, post-hunting expeditions, and, more importantly, during archery competitions.

In my study of the phawar, I have observed that the diction and prosody used are traditional in the sense that they draw upon a rich repository of lexicon, which is known to phawar poets and singers, and who use this corpus to articulate and fashion their own unique librettos. I shall also demonstrate how this traditional lexicon and formula is also deployed in Khasi epic singing. I will conclude the presentation by discussing some of the steps taken to conserve this body of recorded texts.

The India-Bangladesh-Myanmar borderland region has long been framed through a history of exceptionality, variously described as a ‘corridor’, ‘location of culture’, ‘imperial frontier,’ and more recently, as a ‘borderland space.’ Recent works have engaged with the region's perceived political exceptionality, highlighting ‘statelessness’ and the topo-geo-political binary between the hills and the valleys. This presentation, however, focuses on a related but distinct trope of exceptionality, one shaped by colonial linguistic discourses. In these accounts, the region was essentialized as a unique linguistic zone- a Tibeto-Burman linguistic frontier, inhabited by ‘oral’ and ‘post-literate’ societies. The implications of such linguistic tropes are particularly significant for understanding the region’s histories.

Colonial linguistics not only laid the foundation for successive linguistic historiographies of the region but also documented local languages in various forms, such as linguistic reports, grammars, dictionaries, primers, and aural recordings from the early 20th century onward. They collectively constitute a vast colonial archive of indigenous languages, which continue to serve as canonical resources for studying the languages of the region. The people involved in colonial linguistics included the saheps (functionaries of the colonial administration), missionaries, and the local literati groups who served as interpreters, translators, and scribes. The interactions among these groups inform us about the contested and collaborative process of language documentation as well as the nature of linguistic knowledge produced. The local literati groups, often rendered invisible, played a crucial role in colonial linguistics. In many instances, they engaged in what I refer to as ghostwriting, blurring the authorship boundary between the saheps, missionaries and their interpreters.

The paucity of reliable resources on the region's languages and literary cultures during the early colonial period led to extensive reliance on the local literati, both old and new. Drawing on specific examples, this presentation argues that colonial linguistic works should be seen as sites of mediation between local and colonial worldviews on language and knowledge. Moreover, beyond their practical and ideological functions, these asymmetrical cultural imbrications also reveal the strategies of resistance against colonial language hegemony.

To think of the archive as resistance is to think beyond preservation, to see it as an act of care, of listening, and of returning what was once taken or silenced. The Northeast India AV Archive, under St. Anthony’s College in Shillong, embodies this ethos. It gathers fragile traces of old recordings, forgotten footage, home videos, and fieldwork material. They are collected not as relics of the past, but as living testimonies that continue to speak. In a region where histories have often been narrated from elsewhere, the Archive resists by insisting on the local, the vernacular, and the intimate. Its work of digitising, cataloguing, and sharing is not merely technical; it is profoundly political. Each restored voice, each image made visible again, challenges erasure and asserts the right to self-representation. Through community collaborations and open access, the Archive becomes a space of encounter where memory is not fixed, but continually reactivated in dialogue with the present. In this sense, the act of archiving becomes a form of witnessing: a refusal to forget, and a gentle but persistent resistance against dominant histories that have long overlooked the complexities of Northeast India.

In this study, I examine Advanced Research Consortium Library and Archives, Manipur (ARCLA)’s Korbek Archive project as a multi-genre corpus of Meitei manuscripts that offers more than textual preservation, but also provides a way of thinking about history, language, and knowledge from within Manipur’s own intellectual traditions. Over time, both colonial frameworks and certain religious revivalist readings have reshaped these traditions, resulting in certain conceptual gaps in how the past is read and understood. Rather than treating the Korbek Archive simply as a collection of old manuscripts, ARCLA views it as a method of inquiry into a living tradition that allows us to reimagine history through indigenous epistemologies.

The Korbek, meaning ‘book’ in Meiteirol, refers to an extensive manuscript tradition comprising a multi-genre corpus including writings on administration, arts and culture, astrology, creation stories, dictionaries, fine arts, geography, genealogy, scripts, descriptions about hills and rivers, poetic compositions, and others. These manuscripts are written primarily on handmade paper and bark in Meitei script. The language is classic Meiteirol. This tradition of writing in Meitei script was gradually displaced by the introduction of the printing press in Manipur in the 1910s. The establishment of modern English school for sons and daughters of the royal family and the aristocratic class which was run briefly during 1836-37 in Political Agent George Gordon’s tenure, and the introduction of schools for masses since 1885 in Political Agent James Johnstone’s tenure, where Bengali script and English are widely taught and learned, are also important factors.

ARCLA adopts indigenous classification systems based on the semantics of title prefixes and suffixes. For example, classification is based on the manuscript's title ending with Lon, Ngamba, Masil, Hui etc. The Korbek archive reveals an indigenous logic of knowledge organization that resists and transcends colonial epistemic frameworks. For example, Chada Laihui and Ningthourol Lambuba are court chronicles based on queen-mothers. Such matrifocal chronicles are rarely found elsewhere in South or Southeast Asia. This study argues that colonial archives have erased and obfuscated indigenous identities by translating, renaming, and classifying communities. For instance, in the 19th century, the Meitei, Tangkhul, Aimol, and others were given new labels like “Manipurian” (standardized into “Manipuri” later on), “Naga,” “Old Kuki,” and “New Kuki” in the census, administration reports, official ethnographies, and other colonial writings. In this context, the Korbek archive could present a counter-archive since it preserves the names, voices, and epistemes silenced by colonial archives. For example, the Korbek archive records the name and presence of communities such as Mahou, Luhuppa, Tusuk, Monthei, etc. whose histories were silenced, subsumed, or erased by the essentialized colonial classificatory regimes. This study at ARCLA proposes a new method of writing history based on the knowledge contained in the Korbek Archive. The Korbek-based epistemological method aims to reconstruct historiography through indigenous epistemologies and recover the complexities of pre-colonial historicisms in Manipur.