In Plato’s Phaedrus, the Greek philosopher Socrates critiques the invention of the written word as a supplement to memory, because writing, rather than aiding memory, removes the necessity of memory and therefore eliminates it. This argument, privileging the living presence required by oral speech over the deadness of written script, is now famous because of philosopher Jacques Derrida, who uses the ambivalence of the Greek word “pharmakon”, which means both poison and remedy, to show that writing is never one thing but always other to itself.
In contrast to Derrida’s attempt to rescue writing from the indictment of deadness and absence is the connection of non-Western cultures to living traditions of orality. Indeed, many studies of early modern South Asia have emphasised the rich performative and oral literary and religious traditions which offered a counterpoint to the materialism, textuality, and therefore fixedness of the Western canon. Tyler Williams, in his book, If All The World Were Paper: A History Of Writing In Hindi, surveys the manuscript histories of early modern Hindi-speaking South Asia, offering us a way to read history otherwise than this, and to reconcile these seemingly disparate arguments.
The archive and the method
Williams draws on the vast, understudied archives of early modern Hindi texts...
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