Session 1: Pranav Prakash
Moving Books: How the Mobility of Chapbooks Transformed Colonial Mithila
Chair: Coralynn V. Davis
Respondent: Anand Yang
- Tuesday 2026-07-07 09:00-10:30
- Location: Seminar Room
- Type: session
How does the mobility of book objects affect the formation of transregional communities—including their literature, culture, economy and politics—in South Asia and beyond? Does the mobility of book objects follow the same pathways as that of migrants, refugees, displaced communities, itinerant nomads, pilgrims, tourists, labourers and workers? In what ways is their mobility conditioned by pre-existing cross-regional connections, labour markets, technological changes, cultural practices, literacy levels, political ideologies and state institutions? Literary historians have long recognized how consequential the mobility of book objects is for both regional and global cultures. Their reflection has nevertheless been bottlenecked by the framework of reception history, which is primarily utilized to showcase the widespread circulation and popularity of any literary work. Academic historians, on their part, tend to view book objects as a relatively minor commodity—perhaps even a staid commodity—for appraising any aspects of regional history, society and economy. These divergent approaches to and attitudes toward the mobility of book objects foreclose a productive theoretical dialogue among various branches of the humanities and social sciences.
In response, I propose to examine the early history of Maithili chapbooks with a view to unravelling why and how they were produced, circulated and consumed transregionally. More specifically, I will seek evidence of how Maithil communities envisioned the power of mobility and how they attempted to mobilize their book objects locally, cross-culturally and trans-regionally. By way of a critical intervention, I intend to argue that whereas the portability of book objects may essentially be construed as a material and physical attribute, their mobility is a dynamic and multifaceted transhistorical phenomenon that underscores several longstanding changes in society, culture and economy.