Breaking the Binary: Exploring Orality in India through Typography, Cryptography and Craft

This thesis explores the fluidity of language through the fusion of heterogenous visual traditions — creating hybrid forms and coded communication. It voyages through the linguistic landscape of India. Delving into its social, political and cultural identities it finds expression in typography, cryptography, craft arts and poetry. From this body of work emerged the hybrid typeface Latinagari, a character set that fuses the letterforms of the Devanagari and Latin scripts. Embodying both forms it is also neither. Being familiar to readers of either script, yet obscure. It both invites and denies the viewer’s desire to read. Representing the in-between spaces of spoken language in India, it is its own being. Through it, a novel graphic language finds form and with it new opportunities for expression, communication and mis-communication. Like the way Hindi flows to English and back in contemporary Indian culture this visual vocabulary becomes its own thing, An expression of identity, a linguistic code and a way of knowing.