The Marathi Inscriptions and Imprints of King Serfoji of Tanjore: Writing Power and Vernacular Modernity in Colonial South India

About the event 
In 1803 the Maratha king Serfoji II, who ruled the south Indian city-kingdom of Tanjore from 1798 to 1832 under English East India Company control, ordered Bhonslevaṃśacaritra, a Marathi-language genealogical history of the Bhonsles, the lineage of Shivaji and Marathas, to be inscribed on the walls of the city’s ancient Chola temple to Shiva. This was the grandest of Serfoji’s many Marathi inscriptions. The king also established south India’s first Devanagari press and printed first editions of Sanskrit and Marathi classics, as well as the first complete prose translation of Aesop’s Fables in an Indian language (Marathi). This talk examines Serfoji’s objectives and strategies in the promotion of Marathi, a minority language in the Tamil region, in heterogeneous forms and genres of writing, in linkage with Sanskrit as well as English, and in the non-standard Devanagari script. The king’s “writing” initiatives toward shaping Marathi into a local and translocal modern, public vernacular language formed part of his ambitious project, through innovations in multiple Indian and European languages, knowledge systems, arts and sciences, of becoming the foremost princely leader of modernity in colonial India. The talk illuminates princely agency in the remaking of language, scribal practice, scripts, textuality and education before the colonial interventions of the nineteenth century.

About the speaker
Indira Viswanathan Peterson is David B. Truman Professor of Asian Studies Emerita, Mount Holyoke College. She has been Professor of Sanskrit at Columbia University, and Fortieth Anniversary Professor in the Five College Consortium of Western Massachusetts. She has a B.A. (honours) in English Literature from Bombay University, and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard University. Dr. Peterson specializes in Indian literature in Sanskrit and Tamil, Hinduism, and South Indian cultural history and performing arts, especially Karnatak music and early modern dance drama. Other interests include translation, European-Indian culture contact, and comparative literature. She has published widely on these subjects. ​Indira Peterson has held a number of research fellowships, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The American Institute for Indian Studies, the Social Science ResearchCouncil, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.  Dr.Peterson is completing Tanjore Renaissance: King Serfoji II and Indian Modernity, a biography of the 19th-century royal polymath and innovator Serfoji II of Tanjore (forthcoming in HarperCollins India’s Indian Lives series, edited by Ramachandra Guha).