In the linguistic landscape of India, Konkani stands as a testament to plurality and excess—a language that refuses to be neatly contained within the boundaries of standardization. Yet, the process of “Nagrization,” the imposition of the Devanagari (Nagri) script as the singular, official medium for Konkani, seeks to expel this excess, viewing it as a “too much” that must be controlled. This lobby-driven effort, often championed by proponents of linguistic purity, reveals the failure of homogenization: it robs Konkani of its vitality and fertility, haunting the very erasure it attempts. The material life of Konkani—manifest in its diverse scripts (Roman, Kannada, Malayalam, and Perso-Arabic alongside Devanagari), dialects, and cultural embodiments—interrupts and disrupts this project. Nagrization, in its masculinizing drive, delegitimizes Konkani’s plural fertility, reducing it to a sterile, unified form that works against its inherent vitality. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy, particularly his notion of arche-writing, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s postcolonial critique of representation and subaltern silencing, this article argues that Nagri functions as an arch-writing that silences alternative modes of inscription, perpetuating a colonial logic of control and erasure.
Derrida’s Arche-Writing and the Silencing of Konkani’s Plurality
Jacques Derrida’s seminal work, Of Grammatology (1967), introduces the concept of arche-writing (or archi-écriture) as a foundational structure that precedes and exceeds the binary opposition between speech and writing. For Derrida, arche-writing is not merely a script or notation but a general system of traces, differences, and deferrals (différance) that constitutes meaning itself. It challenges phonocentrism—the privileging of speech as pure, immediate presence—by revealing writing as the originary condition of language, always already marked by absence, iteration, and supplementarity.
In the context of Konkani, Nagri can be seen as an imposed arche-writing: a dominant script elevated to the status of the “original” or authentic form, silencing other ways of writing and embodying the language. The Nagri lobby’s push for standardization enacts a phonocentric fantasy, where Devanagari is positioned as the transparent vessel for Konkani’s “essence,” expelling the material excess of alternative scripts as illegitimate supplements. Yet, as Derrida argues, the supplement is never merely additive; it reveals the incompleteness of the origin. Konkani’s Roman script, for instance, carries traces of colonial encounters and diasporic migrations, while Kannada inscriptions embody regional hybridities. These are not aberrations but constitutive elements that haunt Nagrization’s attempt at closure.
The “too much” sensed by the Nagri lobby—the overflowing plurality of Konkani’s material life—exposes the failure of this project. Derrida’s deconstruction shows how efforts to control excess through homogenization inevitably produce ghosts: the repressed returns. The material manifestations of Konkani, from folk songs inscribed in multiple scripts to everyday multilingual practices, interrupt the seamless narrative of Nagri as arch-writing. This disruption underscores différance—Konkani’s meaning is deferred across scripts, never fully captured in one. Nagrization’s masculinizing impulse, which seeks to impose a rigid, patriarchal order (aligning with Derrida’s critique of logocentrism as a phallogocentric structure), erases this fertile plurality as “illegitimate.” But as Derrida reminds us, “there is no outside-text” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte); Konkani’s vitality persists in the traces it leaves beyond Nagri’s limits, robbing the standardization process of its claimed authority.
Spivak’s Subaltern Representation and the Erasure of Konkani’s Fertility
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak extends Derrida’s insights into the postcolonial realm, particularly in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), where she interrogates the politics of representation and the silencing of marginalized voices under colonial and neo-colonial structures. Spivak critiques how dominant discourses construct the subaltern as an object to be “saved” or standardized, often through essentialist frameworks that mask heterogeneity. For Spivak, the subaltern’s speech is not absent but rendered inaudible by the epistemic violence of representation, where the elite speak for rather than with the marginalized.
Applying Spivak to Konkani, Nagrization emerges as a form of epistemic violence that masculinizes the language, framing its plural scripts and dialects as chaotic, feminine excesses to be disciplined into a singular, “legitimate” form. The Nagri lobby, often aligned with nationalist or regionalist agendas, positions Devanagari as the voice of authenticity, echoing colonial strategies of linguistic homogenization (e.g., the British imposition of standardized languages in India). This process robs Konkani of its fertility—the generative, hybrid potential born from centuries of cultural intermingling in Goa and beyond. Spivak’s notion of strategic essentialism, where marginalized groups temporarily adopt unified identities for political gain, is inverted here: Nagrization enforces a false essentialism from above, delegitimizing the subaltern plurality as “illegitimate” and expelling it as excess.
The material life of Konkani haunts this erasure, much like Spivak’s subaltern who disrupts the narrative of seamless representation. Konkani speakers in diasporic communities, using Roman script for literature and media, embody a resistance that interrupts Nagrization’s limits. Spivak warns against the “catachresis” of representation—misusing concepts to fit dominant frames—and Nagri as arch-writing exemplifies this: it silences other inscriptions by claiming to be the universal medium, working against the language’s vitality. The “too much” controlled by the lobby is precisely the subaltern fertility that Spivak urges us to attend to, not as chaos but as a site of potential decolonization. By masculinizing Konkani, Nagrization perpetuates a patriarchal, homogenizing logic that Spivak deconstructs as complicit with imperialism, where the subaltern’s plural voices are rendered mute.
The Interruption: Materiality as Resistance
Integrating Derrida and Spivak, we see Nagrization not as a neutral standardization but as a violent attempt to limit Konkani’s life. Derrida’s arche-writing reveals Nagri as a false origin, haunted by the supplements it expels, while Spivak’s critique exposes the masculinizing erasure of subaltern plurality. Together, they illuminate how Konkani’s material excess—its embodied, fertile disruptions—exhibits the failure of this project. The language’s vitality persists in the interruptions: a Roman-script poem recited in a Goan tavern, a Kannada-inscribed temple stone, or a multilingual tweet that defies script boundaries.
This haunting materiality challenges us to rethink linguistic policy. Rather than viewing plurality as “too much,” we might embrace it as différance’s play, allowing subaltern voices to speak in their multiplicity. In doing so, Konkani reclaims its robbed fertility, disrupting the homogenizing forces that seek to control it.
Conclusion
Nagrization’s attempt to masculinize and homogenize Konkani ultimately falters against the language’s material life, which embodies an excess that cannot be fully expelled. Through Derrida’s deconstruction of arche-writing and Spivak’s postcolonial interrogation of representation, we uncover the silencing at work: Nagri as a dominant script that delegitimizes plurality, robbing Konkani of its vitality. Yet, this failure is productive—it haunts the erasure, interrupting the limits imposed. In recognizing this, we move toward a more fertile linguistics, one that celebrates the “too much” as the essence of living language.
