by Sweta Dutta
Project Inspirations
I designed this activity because I struggled to make sense of a Bengali text for a manuscript reading class. I could parse out the letters, make out a word, read the sentence but could not arrive at a meaning. While this is a common experience faced by many who read pre-modern manuscripts, the stages of looking, identifying, and reading are part of a non-unified yet continuous process of studying a text. I wanted to push the limits of how we approach reading a text.
I was lucky enough to find a fellow text-enthusiast in Alina Williams, a friend and colleague who was pursuing similar questions (check out her work on the Playing with Prayer page) and we both agreed that the experience and practice of reading a text was inseparable from the experience and practice of reading it.
In pre-modern South Asia, writing often meant copying a text and members of the scribal community were often illiterate copyists. Did such copying become part of the process of understanding the text? How can we as modern readers and writers come similarly close to an unfamiliar, alien, and unreadable text? What does it tell us about writing as an embodied practice?