Abstract
This chapter examines how the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) grappled with the proper names of Indian languages and dialects. For the Linguistic Survey, India was a site for integrating the different branches of linguistics as a modern European discipline (phonetics, historical linguistics, dialectology, etymology, and philology) into a unified working project. However, this chapter addresses the modes of thinking and the operations of thought that precede this formal organization into linguistic knowledge. The published volumes of the Linguistic Survey, and especially the unpublished files, foreground the process of naming in the Survey’s attempt to separate individual entities from each other—whether these entities are languages, dialects, individual sounds, or individual persons. At this level, before any formal organization of knowledge, the Survey evinces what might be called a metaphysical mode of thinking. The Survey is an exercise in what Peter Strawson called descriptive metaphysics;1 that is, it seeks to distinguish individual entities or “particulars” from each other. This strand of the Survey reveals a complicated picture of colonial power in the realm of linguistic knowledge that belies the usual characterizations of colonial knowledge in this field in terms of strategies of command and clear-cut definitions.
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Notes
P. F. Strawson, Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959; London: Methuen, 1979), 9, 11, 15.
G. A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, 11 volumes (Calcutta: Government of India, 1903–1928), vol. 1 (1928): 18.
These were G. A. Grierson, The Linguistic Survey of India and the Census of 1911 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1919).
G. A. Grierson, Index of Language-Names (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1920).
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (1988; London/New York: Continuum, 2007), part 1.
Mark Thurner has discussed this in his work on the naming of Peru, in which he argues that the name Peru came from Sindhu/Indus. See Mark Thurner, “The Founding Abyss of Colonial History or ‘The Origin and Principle of the Name’,” History and Theory 48 (February 2009): 44–62.
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979), 101.
This Memorandum is in C. E. Trevelyan, Papers originally published at Calcutta in 1834 and 1836, on the application of the Roman Letters to the Languages of India; to which is added A Letter from the Rev. R. Mather to Sir. C. Trevelyan, Showing the progress made up to the commencement of the Great Mutiny (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans,& Roberts, 1858), 51–64, p. 51. The pagination of this volume runs from 1 to 58, then 1 to 64. Norman’s Memorandum is to be found in the second half of the volume.
R. C. Temple, A Dissertation on the Proper Names of Panjabis, with special reference to the proper names of villagers in the Eastern Panjab (Bombay: Education Society Press, London: Trubner and Co., Calcutta: Thacker, Spink& Co., 1883), vii, 3.
J. Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165–207, 172.
Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 113–138.
G. A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, 3:1 Tibeto-Burman Family (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1909), “Introductory Note.”
Anssi Paasi, “Contested Territories, Boundaries and Regional Identities,” in Contested Territory: Border Disputes at the Edge of the Former Soviet Union, ed. Tuomas Forsberg (Aldershot, England: Edward Elgar, 1995), 42–61, 48.
B. H. Baden-Powell, A Manual of the Land Revenue Systems and Land Tenures of British India. Primarily Intended as a Text-book for the Use of Officers of the Forest Service (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1882), 43.
Some examples include James Mill, The History of British India (1817), 5th edn, With Notes and Continuation by H. H. Wilson, 10 vols. (London: James Madden, Piper, Stephenson, and Spence, 1858)
Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: Being a Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases and of Kindred Terms (London: Murray, 1886).
Eugene Irschick, Dialogue and History. Constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons. The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.
Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire (London/New York: Verso, 1993), 22.
Most famously in the influential essay by B. S. Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276–329.
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© 2011 Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali
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Majeed, J. (2011). What’s in a (Proper) Name? Particulars, Individuals, and Authorship in the Linguistic Survey of India and Colonial Scholarship. In: Sengupta, I., Ali, D. (eds) Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119000_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119000_2
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