Abstract: This presentation intends to study how the use of given languages in the Sindhi society was and still is interrelated with the exercise of power, before and after 1947. Drawing on Sheldon Pollock’s work which questions how does culture relate to socio-political orders in pre-modern South Asia (Pollock 2006), it will analyse how language incarnates hegemony in the modern society of Sindh in respect with colonization, as well as power exercised by a number of social formations at the regional, local and community levels. In parallel to the study of the use of languages, particular attention will be paid to the scripts in relation with the exercise of domination. Consequently, the main issues to be addressed are: when did certain languages and scripts become dominant, and why were others vanishing? What are the dominant languages able to express that the other languages did not? And how did these processes inform us about the changes occurring in the Sindhi society? Finally, a comparative perspective will be provided with France, whose official language known as French was imposed by the new elite in late 19th Century.

About scholar: Prof. Dr. Michel Boivin is historian and anthropologist, with a specialization on the Muslim societies in South Asia. A former director of the Centre for South Asian Studies (CNRS-EHESS), he is now affiliated with the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Himalayas (CESAH), he teaches Historical Anthropology of the Muslim Societies in South Asia at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), where he also supervises PhD students. He is co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Sindhi Studies (Brill Publishers) and Critical Pakistan Studies (University of Cambridge Press). In November 2022, he has organized with Rémy Delage (CNRS-CESAH) and Prof. Akbar Zaidi, Executive Director of IBA, the first Social Sciences Winter School in Karachi. He has authored or (co -) edited eighteen books, the two last ones being The Sufi Paradigm and the makings of a vernacular knowledge in Colonial Sindh (1851-1923) (New York, Palgrave, 2020), and The Hindu Sufis of South Asia. Partition, Shrine Culture and the Sindhis of India (London & New York, I. B. Tauris, 2019). He has two forthcoming books.