Poonam Gautam Jain

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Productions explores the politics of hierarchies, erasures and exclusions in languages through a study of five language scripts. Poonam Gautam Jain is the Coordinator for this project. 

Mumbai-based Poonam Gautam Jain is a visual artist. She has a Diploma in Fine Arts from the Rachana Sansad in Mumbai. Poonam has been working on art projects and exhibiting her works since 2009. She has to her credit several group and solo shows in venues across Mumbai, Kochi, Delhi, Pune, and Bangalore as well as in Venice, Poland, Prague, Beirut, and New York. She has been a member of the core team of the Shunya Collective and has served as the director of the Clark House initiative in Mumbai in 2015-16. Given her experience she is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

Since the 1800s, the Nagari or Devanagari script has occupied and replaced many scripts in India. Much like English which began to have an overbearing influence over other languages in India, Devanagari became a popular choice among the upper castes/ native elites who were the first Indians to monopolise the early print and information circulation industry. Balbodh Devanagari was also preferred by Mountstuart Elphinstone, the then Governor of the Bombay Presidency, as a substitute for Modi lipi which was at that time the more popular script. Later with the idea of ‘one nation - one language’, the Devanagari script became a nation building tool among the Hindus in north India. For instance, the elite diaspora from Rajasthan lobbied for the adoption of Hindi as a national language. As a result, when the states were formed, Rajasthan chose to replace its living languages and scripts with the new Hindi written in the Devanagari script.  

Against this backdrop, the present project seeks to understand the blurring of habits and memory, and cultural dilemmas and strategies of survival that languages have struggled with in the face of hierarchies and erasures. Titled Degrees of Exclusion of Languages, this project will reflect on how the linguistic divide was instituted as a core dimension of the national education enterprise and has remained as a crucial and important axis of negotiation within our public domain and democracy. 

To probe these questions, Poonam plans to make letterpress movable types for five scripts namely Mahajani also known as Modiya lipi (Marwari), Modi lipi (Marathi), Tamil numerals, Devanagari and Kannada. Of these, Mahajani, Modi lipi and Tamil numerals have interesting histories of omission and exclusion, which this project will explore. The resulting letterpress types made on resin and wood will be used for printing. Most prints will be made on the discarded rags of printmaking studios, thereby creating a narrative of exclusions. Lithography will be another medium to explore writing on stone which will open possibilities of calligraphy. Since both the Mahajani and Modi lipi were primarily handwritten, exploring writing nuances will be important conceptually. With woodcut and linocut types, the focus will be on experimenting with fonts, styles and textures without the restriction of precision of the letter types. 

Some of the questions that the project will investigate include the reasons for choice of one language over another; the destiny of languages that have lost their script; understanding how a language can have no use of its own numeral system and what difference it makes; the consequences of marking boundaries of states with languages and the impact of bodies that carry the histories of many languages; and so on. Most importantly the project will seek to explore how languages and scripts can become inclusive.

The outcomes from this project will be a set of three-dimensional physical and digital letterpress moveable types for all the five scripts, letterpress prints, lithographs on paper, and a booklet that catalogues all the letters in these scripts in the form that they have existed in so far. All these will be made publicly accessible. The digital models, a set of physical letterpress types, copies of the lithographs, copies of the letterpress prints and the catalogue will be the deliverables from this project to IFA together with the final reports. As other possible upshots of this project in future, Poonam will consider workshops, an installation and studio open days for collaborations.  

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which, through practices of printmaking it retraces erasure and omissions in languages in the early nineteenth century.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.