Listening in Many Tongues
Multilingual Interpretive Communities and Acts of Translation in Early Modern South Asia
On 2122 October 2024, the South Asian Studies Unit at 51勛圖厙 (IIS) convened scholars from across the UK, Europe, and South Asia for a two-day conference on multilingual textual production in medieval and early modern South Asia. Across seven panels, speakers examined how interpretive communities working in Persian, Sanskrit, Avadhi, Urdu, Arabi-Malayalam, Dakani, Apabhramsa, and Khwjah Sindh蘋/Khojki made equivalences, reinterpretations, and transcreations across literary and performative genres from Sufi romances and Vedntic dialogues to rga treatises and Bengali Puranic verse.
Brajification and the Erasure of Earlier Literary Idioms in Manuscript Transmission
Keynote Address
Brajification and the Erasure of Earlier Literary Idioms in Manuscript Transmission
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Discussant: ()
In this keynote, Dr Bangha examines “translectism” the shift of a text’s literary idiom into another vernacular register, as recorded across manuscript transmission and sets it against the more familiar cosmopolitan-to-vernacular model of translation. Drawing on variant manuscript readings, he shows how scribes routinely “Brajified” archaic literary idioms across religious traditions, reshaping how the historical scope of Braj Bhasha is understood today.4
Conference Panels
- Panel 6: Persian and Hindi Translations (II) (Online)
