In the lush, contested linguistic landscape of Konkani, where the winds of the Arabian Sea carry echoes of Portuguese hymns and Vedic chants, a spectral tension simmers beneath the surface. Konkani, the vibrant Dravidian-Indo-Aryan tongue spoken across Goa, coastal Karnataka, and Maharashtra, has long been a battleground for scripts—a polyphonic chorus of Roman, Devanagari, Kannada, Perso- Arabic and Malayalam alphabets that reflect its syncretic soul. Yet, in recent decades, a insidious force has emerged: scripto-centric thinking, a dogmatic fixation on a singular script as the arbiter of authenticity and legitimacy. This is no mere orthographic preference; it is the machine of desire in motion, propelled by the libido of upper-caste hegemonies, riding the relentless waves of casteism. As we peer into the future of Konkani, we confront not a horizon of multiplicity, but a singularity—a geometric point of convergence that threatens to collapse the language’s plural essence into oblivion. This point, however, is no stable origin; it is a phantom, a ghost haunting our society, forever deferred in its arrival, much like the specters in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. In destroying the “other scripts,” we are not building a future; we are exorcising the very plurality that sustains Konkani’s vitality.
The Anatomy of Scripto-Centric Thinking
Scripto-centric thinking posits the script as the sacred vessel of language, elevating one orthography above all others in a hierarchy of purity and power. In the Konkani world, this manifests most acutely as “Nagrization”—the aggressive promotion of the Devanagari script, often shorthand for “Nagari-zation,” a term evoking the Nagari script’s historical ties to Sanskrit and Brahmanical traditions. Coined in the heated debates of Goan politics post-liberation in 1961, Nagrization emerged as a cultural nationalist project, ostensibly to unify Konkani speakers fragmented by colonial legacies and regional dialects. But beneath this veneer of unity lies a deeper pathology: the script becomes a totem of caste ascendancy.
Upper-caste elites, particularly from the Saraswat Brahmin communities who have long dominated Goan intellectual and political spheres, wield Nagrization as an instrument of desire. Here, the “machine of desire”—borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus—operates not as a biological urge but as a productive, rhizomatic engine of social control. Desire is not repressed; it is engineered. The libido of the upper caste, Freudian in its libidinal economy, fixates on Devanagari as the phallic symbol of orthodoxy, a script sanctified by its proximity to Vedic texts and Hindu revivalism. This desire rides the currents of casteism, transforming linguistic policy into a battlefield where lower castes, Christian converts using the Roman script, and Muslim communities employing Perso-Arabic influences are marginalized as “impure” or “inauthentic.”
Consider the historical flashpoints: The 1987 Official Language Act in Goa, which enshrined Devanagari as the primary script, was a triumph for Nagari proponents but a blow to Roman-script advocates, many of whom trace their literary tradition to the 16th-century Doutrina Christã printed in Old Portuguese orthography. Protests erupted then and continue decrying the act as cultural erasure even today. Yet, scripto-centrism persists, infiltrating education, media, and digital platforms. It seems to fail in the digital world. Yet Unicode’s prioritization of Devanagari in Konkani fonts does further entrenches the bias, rendering Roman-script texts glitchy or invisible in the digital realm. This is not mere technicality; it is the machine of desire grinding away, converting caste privilege into linguistic hegemony.
The Singularity’s Geometry: A Point of No Return?
The future of Konkani, under this scripto-centric gaze, is envisioned as a singularity—a black hole of uniformity where all scripts collapse into one geometric point: Devanagari. In mathematical terms, a singularity is a point of infinite density, where laws break down; metaphorically, it represents the endpoint of plurality, a zero-dimensional void devouring diversity. We are haunted by this geometry, not because it has arrived, but because it looms as an asymptotic promise, always approaching yet never quite materializing.
This haunting is societal, spectral. The phantom of the singular script “hosts” our institutions—schools teach only Devanagari primers, government forms ignore Roman inputs, and literary awards favor Nagari publications. In this possession, the ghost drives a purge: other scripts are eliminated, deemed relics of colonialism or regionalism. Roman Konkani, with its 20,000+ titles from the Catholic press, is dismissed as “foreign”; Kannada-script Konkani in Karwar is sidelined as dialectal impurity. The machine of desire fuels this exorcism, its libidinal energy drawn from upper-caste fantasies of a “pure” Konkani reborn in Sanskrit’s image, untainted by the hybridity of Goa’s history.
Yet, as Derrida reminds us in Specters of Marx, the ghost is not a past revenant but a figure of the “to-come”—the future that remains eternally deferred. The arrival of this phantom singularity is delayed, différance in action: a perpetual postponement where meaning (or in this case, linguistic unity) slips away. “The future belongs to the ghost,” Derrida writes, “it will never arrive, only threatening to arrive.” In the Konkani context, this spectral future haunts us precisely because it justifies present destructions. We raze the plural horizon—suppressing multilingual publications, defunding Roman-script academies, and enforcing monolingual policies—all in anticipation of a unity that recedes like a mirage. The ghost whispers promises of national coherence, but in its shadow, we dismantle the very multiplicity that has allowed Konkani to survive invasions, conversions, and migrations.
This Derridean différance manifests in the lived hauntings of Konkani speakers. A young Goan Christian, schooled in Devanagari but praying in Roman, feels the spectral tug-of-war in their bilingual identity. A Karwari fisherman reciting epics in Kannada-script Konkani senses the erasure of his oral traditions. The upper-caste libido, riding casteism’s desire, accelerates this spectral economy, turning language into a commodity of exclusion. The singularity’s point is not a destination but a trap, collapsing the rhizomatic spread of Konkani’s scripts into a hierarchical line, where Devanagari reigns supreme.
Exorcising the Ghost: Reclaiming the Plural Horizon
To confront this machine of desire, we must demystify the phantom. Scripto-centric thinking is not inevitable; it is a construct, as fragile as the ink on a page. The future of Konkani need not be a haunted singularity but a plural explosion—a manifold geometry of scripts coexisting in dialogue. Imagine a Goa where Roman and Devanagari journals are equally subsidized, where digital tools support all orthographies, and where caste desires are decoupled from linguistic policy through inclusive reforms.
Derrida’s ghost, after all, is also a call to justice: to inherit the past without repeating its violences, to welcome the “to-come” as possibility rather than threat. By recognizing the deferred arrival of Nagrization’s utopia, we can halt the destruction of Konkani’s plural horizon. Let the machine of desire be reprogrammed—not to eliminate, but to produce multiplicity. In this way, Konkani’s future escapes the point, blooming into the infinite lines of its diverse scripts, forever evading the spectral grasp of singularity.
As the monsoons drench Goa’s shores, washing away the boundaries of script and caste, we must ask: Will we succumb to the ghost’s haunt, or summon the courage to let plurality thrive? The language awaits our answer, its voices echoing in every alphabet it has ever worn.
