Talk: "Handmade Literacy" with Eric Gurevitch

Speaker: Eric Moses Gurevitch, Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University

The epigraphic corpus of medieval Karnataka constitutes a dense record of the loquacious lives of artisans and other literate professionals who worked with their hands. While the labor of inscription was – and continues to be – dismissed as non-intellectual, caste-oppressed artisans used the space they were granted in stone at the bottom of epigraphs and at the bases of sculptures as an opportunity to assert their own epistemic values and their own hierarchy of knowledge. 

These artisans worked closely with poets and scribes from privileged castes in shared poetic, political, and intellectual projects, often laboring in conjunction with the same scholars over the course of many years. At times echoing the ideologies of writing, language, and education that were enunciated in elite literary circles, and at times standing in opposition to them, these artisans articulated a vision of erudition distinct from that often associated with precolonial South Asia. 

Following these artisans allows a significant revision of the role literacy played in pre-colonial South Asia. It offers a moment to reconsider how artisan literacy continues to be used in narratives of divergence that invoke the history of technology.

Sponsored by: South Asia Institute (UT Austin) and Department of Asian Studies (UT Austin)