Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India [1 ed.] 9781138320086, 1138320080

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Note on transliteration
Introduction: the Survey’s inception
1 Colonial categories of thought
2 The colonial state and the Survey
3 Illness, eyesight and crossing borders
4 Scripts and spectacles
5 White noise and séances: the ‘Gramophone or Phonetic Survey’
6 Archival self-reflexivity
7 Uncertain knowledge in the Survey
8 Names and authorship
Conclusion: the Survey as a colonial project
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

COLONIALISM AND KNOWLEDGE IN GRIERSON’S LINGUISTIC SURVEY OF INDIA

This book is the first detailed examination of George Abraham Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, one of the most complete sources on South Asian languages. It shows that the Survey was characterised by a composite and collaborative mode of producing knowledge, which undermines any clear distinctions between European orientalists and colonised Indians in British India. Its authority lay more in its stress on the provisional nature of its findings, an emphasis on the approximate nature of its results, and a strong sense of its own shortcomings and inadequacies, rather than in any expression of mastery over India’s languages. The book argues that the Survey brings to light a different kind of colonial knowledge, whose relationship to power was much more ambiguous than has hitherto been assumed for colonial projects in modern India. It also highlights the contribution of Indians to the creation of colonial knowledge about South Asia as a linguistic region. Indians were important collaborators and participants in the Survey, and they helped to create the monumental knowledge of India as a linguistic region which is embodied in the Survey. This volume, like its companion volume Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, will be a great resource for scholars and researchers of linguistics, language and literature, history, political studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies. Javed Majeed is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London, UK, and has held appointments at SOAS, University of London, and Queen Mary, University of London. He has published widely on the intellectual and literary history of modern South Asia. His previous books include Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (1992), Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (2007), and Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (2009).

The multi-volume Linguistic Survey of India was one of the most comprehensive investigations into Indian society and culture ever launched under the British Raj. Yet it has been much neglected subsequently and plays little role in contemporary understandings of orientalism and ‘colonial knowledge’. Javed Majeed rescues it and, by so doing, offers a profound critique of how those conceptual categories have been formulated. In particular, he questions whether command and certainty dominated the colonial project so much as insecurity and ambivalence. He also brings out of the shadows one of the most complex intellectuals of the later colonial era, the Survey’s director, George Grierson. These two volumes (Colonialism and Knowledge and Nation and Region) help to reset the broad agenda of colonial and postcolonial studies. David Washbrook, Fellow, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK Displaying exemplary patience and combining it with his unparalleled zest for sustained scholarship, Majeed’s unique study takes us well beyond expositing Grierson’s titular aim, correcting along its way several deep-seated misconceptions around many conceptual categories. Written in transparent prose, it provides us with deep insights on the LSI and numerous literary texts from Lal Ded to Rushdie and shows how Grierson’s epochal work has cast a lengthening shadow on all major scholarship on Indian languages up to our own time. Sumanyu Satpathy, Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India

COLONIALISM AND KNOWLEDGE IN GRIERSON’S LINGUISTIC SURVEY OF INDIA

Javed Majeed

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Javed Majeed The right of Javed Majeed to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-32008-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43923-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Note on transliteration

vi vii

Introduction: the Survey’s inception

1

1

Colonial categories of thought

17

2

The colonial state and the Survey

50

3

Illness, eyesight and crossing borders

78

4

Scripts and spectacles

107

5

White noise and séances: the ‘Gramophone or Phonetic Survey’

141

6

Archival self-reflexivity

175

7

Uncertain knowledge in the Survey

197

8

Names and authorship

212

Conclusion: the Survey as a colonial project

243

Bibliography Index

249 261 v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the British Academy for its award of a Research Leave Fellowship, which enabled me to lay the foundations for this book and its companion volume. Two enjoyable stints as the Mellon Distinguished Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand were very helpful in giving me the time and space to develop aspects of my work. Research leave from Queen Mary and King’s College London was beneficial in giving me relief from teaching and administration. Nilanjan Sarkar read parts of an earlier draft of this volume and thanks are due to him for his careful comments and for his invaluable advice in general. Christopher Shackle gave me some valuable pointers and Janhavi Mittal made many insightful comments on the manuscript of this volume. Chris Bayly’s support in the early stages of this project was vital; his absence is felt keenly by many of us. The staff at the British Library, and especially in the Asia and Africa Reading Room, were accommodating and helpful. I presented parts of this work at the Indian Institute of Statistics, Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, the University of Witwatersrand, Newcastle University, Reading University, SOAS, Ertegun House at the University of Oxford, and the German Historical Institute, London. My thanks go to the participants and organisers on these occasions whose comments were useful in helping me shape my ideas. An earlier version of parts of Chapter 8 was published as ‘What’s in a (Proper) Name? Particulars, Individuals and Authorship in the Linguistic Survey of India and Colonial Scholarship’, in Knowledge Production, Pedagogy and Institutions in Colonial India, ed. Daud Ali and Indra Sengupta (New York: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 19–39. This book is dedicated to my parents and Zahid as a token of my love and gratitude.

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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

I have not added diacritics to the names of South Asian dialects and languages except when I cite directly from sources where they have been used. Some of Grierson’s Indian correspondents Romanise their own names in different ways across their letters; as these are selfdesignations I have respected these variations. I have also respected the orthography of place-names as used by Grierson and his correspondents at the time in the sources.

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INTRODUCTION The Survey’s inception

As a ‘factual masterpiece’, George Abraham Grierson’s (1851–1941) Linguistic Survey of India (hereafter LSI) is a key reference work for the classification of Indian languages, and it has influenced many subsequent studies of the language situation in India.1 Its 21 volumes cover 723 South Asian linguistic varieties, and provide lexical and grammatical information for 268 varieties of the major South Asian language families. It lists 216 vocabulary items in 364 languages and dialects in its Comparative Vocabulary (1928).2 The LSI had an impact on Indian Censuses, especially the 1961 Indian Census.3 B.P. Mahapatra’s The Written Languages of India (1989) draws on the LSI heavily for its coverage of the constitutional and non-constitutional languages he covers. The LSI, therefore, is of immense significance in the understanding and representation of India as a linguistic region.

The chronology and significance of the LSI The Survey began its operations in 1894.4 In 1899 a specimen volume called the Languages of the North-Western Frontier was issued for the Rome Oriental Congress.5 By April 1901 Grierson had finished the survey of the Indo-Chinese languages of Assam and the eastern frontier of India.6 By 1918 Grierson had started work on the introductory volume,7 and by June 1923 he had finished the first draft of this.8 The final proofs for volume 1, part 1 were passed in early 1927; this was the introductory volume, which served as a ‘general summing up of the whole’.9 In April 1927 Grierson was correcting the final proofs for the last volume of the LSI, the Comparative Vocabulary (vol. 1, pt 2, 1928),10 which consisted of English words and grammatical forms translated into 364 languages and dialects.

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There were three stages to the LSI. In the first stage, Grierson compiled ‘a list of all the varieties of speech then known to exist in the area under survey’.11 For this, he sent a form to district officers and political agents to fill out the names of languages in their area and the estimated number of speakers.12 In the second stage officers gathered specimens for each of the dialects and languages listed for their areas. Grierson circulated three specimens for each language and dialect. The first was a modified form of the parable of the prodigal son from the New Testament (Luke 15: verses 11–32), which district administrators had to get translated into ‘every known dialect and sub-dialect spoken in the area covered by the Survey’.13 The parable was chosen because it had ‘the greatest possible variety of grammatical inflection in the minimum space’. It contained a range of pronouns and tenses and a variety of cases of nouns and verbs.14 The second specimen was either a piece of folklore or a passage in narrative prose or verse, and the third was a standard list of words and sentences originally drawn up by Sir George Campbell in 1866, which was in general use in India.15 The first two stages of the LSI – that is, the listing of language and dialect names, and the collection of language specimens – were completed while Grierson was in India. In England Grierson did the work of classification, analysis, the writing up of skeleton grammars and the supervision of printing. Some samples had to be rechecked, so they were shipped back and forth between England and India.16 The specimens began arriving in 1897, and most were received by the end of 1900. The editing and collating of the specimens began in 1898.17 Grierson compiled a list of languages spoken in districts on the basis of the returns he received, and from these local lists he compiled provincial lists.18 He then issued a list of languages in India as a preliminary edition of the LSI and a work of reference; this was ‘the first attempt at a complete list and classification of all the languages spoken in India proper’. Languages in Madras and Burma were included, although the Survey did not extend to these provinces.19 In the LSI’s third stage, dialects and languages were grouped into families and subfamilies, which ‘necessitated the adoption of theories as to relationship’.20 An introduction was provided for each language and dialect covering the numbers and habitat of its speakers, its linguistic characteristics, a grammatical sketch, its relationship to other members of the same family, its literature and its history, and a bibliography.21 The LSI was therefore a massive exercise in comparison, bringing all the languages and dialects in the areas it covered into relationship with each other within one framework. Its 21 volumes encapsulated, 2

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codified and analysed India as a multilingual entity. Each language and dialect was described with a grammatical account.22 The scale of the LSI was therefore colossal and the very size of its volumes evoked the hugeness and complexity of India. As one of Grierson’s collaborators put it, ‘It is almost impossible to understand how you have been able to realise your gigantic plan of the Survey’.23 One scholar writing in the 1940s described it as ‘the biggest thing of the kind that had ever been attempted in any part of the world’.24 The LSI also had an immediate impact at the time in stimulating publications on Indian languages. The Government of India published J. Varley’s Hand-Book for the Mavchi and Pavra Dialects (1902) at the Bombay government’s request to help Grierson’s compilation of the LSI’s ‘Index of Languages’ and the revision of his language classifications.25 Grierson recommended the publication of Pandit Tika Ram Joshi’s A Dictionary of Pahari Dialects (1909) to colonial officials in Panjab when he (Grierson) was researching the hill dialects in question for the Survey.26 Grierson’s inquiries about other dialects played a role in local administrations patronising the publication of grammars.27 Siddeshwar Varma, the professor of Sanskrit at the Prince of Wales College in Jammu in 1927, collected a vocabulary of Bhadarwahi dialects partly in engagement with the LSI, discussing its data on these dialects with Grierson.28 Grierson was also asked to review manuscripts submitted for publication which engaged with sections of the Survey.29 The LSI shaped studies of Indian languages in other ways. Through the Survey, Grierson became aware of gaps in the research on Indian languages and dialects. For example, when he found no account of archaic Meithei, his representations to the chief secretary of the Assam government from 1921 to 1926 led to the appointment of A.H.W. Bentinck as director of historical and antiquarian studies in Assam in June 1928.30 The LSI therefore also stimulated provincial governments’ efforts in linguistic and antiquarian studies within their regions. Some key works in the field of Indian linguistics were offshoots of the LSI, testifying to its generative capacity. This included Sten Konow’s Bashgali Dictionary (1913), which emerged out of the Survey under Grierson’s supervision.31 G.P. Taylor asked Grierson’s permission to incorporate some of the linguistic specimens from the Survey into his The Student’s Gujarātī Grammar (1908); one of the appendices in this Grammar relied on the Gujarati sections in its volumes.32 R.L. Turner’s A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages (1966–71) began as part of the LSI. In 1921, when Turner 3

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was professor of Indian linguistics at Hindu University Benares, he wrote to Grierson about his etymological dictionary, which had been suggested to him as an idea by Grierson. He suggested that the dictionary might be ‘brought under your aegis as an appendix to the Survey’.33 Grierson agreed that it would be an appropriate ‘summing up of the Linguistic Survey’.34 Turner apprised Grierson of his progress in preparing the Dictionary and Grierson also made a number of key recommendations.35 Turner adopted Grierson’s suggestion of grouping words under roots on his card index for the Dictionary.36 He sought an official link with the LSI, because ‘the prestige of being definitely part of the Survey’ would aid the recruitment of a team and would increase the chances of his students getting scholarships from the United Provinces (hereafter UP) government to work on problems arising from his research.37 In June 1921 Grierson wrote to the Government of India, asking for the LSI to be a part of volume 1, and in May 1922 Grierson sent their agreement to Turner.38 Thereafter Turner continued to discuss the progress of his work with Grierson, consulting some of Grierson’s other works, such as his Kāshmīrī Dictionary (1916–32), often in proofs, as well as the proofs of volume 1 of the LSI and its Comparative Vocabulary (1928).39 Turner also received a full set of the Survey’s volumes so that he could consult them.40 As late as 1932 Grierson referred to the letter from the government sanctioning the dictionary’s appearance as part of volume 1 of the LSI.41 In the Dictionary’s preface, Turner refers to how it ‘was encouraged by Sir George Grierson, who proposed that such a dictionary should form an appendix to the volumes of his great Linguistic Survey of India then, in 1920, still in process of publication’. After Grierson’s death in 1941, and with Indian independence, this proposal was put aside by the Indian government, but the Dictionary was dedicated to Grierson.42 For his part, on seeing some pages of Turner’s work, Grierson was sure it would throw ‘immense light’ on the history of Aryan languages in India.43 Turner’s Dictionary was one example of how the LSI generated publications in the field of Indian linguistics. Turner’s close connection with Grierson, as seen in their letters, shows how his Dictionary emerged in tandem with the LSI and how the two were intimately linked as works in progress. The LSI was the soil in which other texts began, and it stimulated both a local and a global economy of knowledge production about Indian languages, and as such, its significance extends beyond its importance as a key reference work for Indian languages and dialects. 4

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The LSI’s aims In contrast to the 19th-century philological preoccupation with ancient India and Sanskrit, for Grierson the LSI’s distinguishing mark was its focus on the ‘facts regarding the languages of India as they stand at present’.44 It was to be what J.P. Hewett of the Home Department called a ‘systematic survey of the vernacular languages of India’.45 In the mid-1880s Grierson circulated a note proposing the LSI, before formally tabling it at the Vienna Congress of Orientalists in 1886.46 In this Grierson referred to his Bihār Peasant Life (1885) and Seven Grammars of the Dialects and Subdialects of the Bihárí Language (1883–87) as the first attempts at surveying spoken languages in British India. His books showed how ‘radically the real language’ of the region differed from Hindi and Hindustani. For him, the linguistic state of affairs in Bihar was ‘in great measure the case throughout all India’ – that is the literary or government language, and the ‘polite language’ used by Europeans and Indians when they interacted with each other, was distinct from the language people spoke in their homes.47 The LSI was necessary because officials seemed to be unaware of the languages of India ‘as they exist at the present moment’.48 Grierson’s aims may reflect the changes in linguistics brought about by the Young Grammarians and their laws of sound change, which led to more weight being given to contemporary living languages and less to the reconstruction of a presumed original Indo-European language. Living languages were no longer seen as corrupt, but were now full of opportunities for linguists.49 One of Grierson’s supporters referred to how linguistics now recognised the importance of contemporary Indian dialects, and hence the timing of the LSI was opportune.50 Influential philologists of the day strongly supported Grierson’s focus on Indian vernaculars. This included William Crooke, then working on his famous glossary,51 John T. Platts,52 and Max Müller, who stressed the value of studying dialects.53 Richard C. Temple promised to put notices in the Athenaeum and other publications and institutions.54 A.F. Rudolph Hoernle was also keen to support it. He proposed translating Grierson’s note into German and circulating it to the German scholars at the Vienna Congress of Orientalists in 1886.55 Robert Needham Cust, author of the Modern Languages of the East Indies (1878), advised Grierson on preparing the proposal for the 1886 Vienna Congress, and lobbied other scholars for their support.56 The Survey’s focus on contemporary languages and dialects resonated with Cust’s own concern as the Royal Asiatic Society (hereafter RAS)

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secretary to diversify the membership of its Council so as ‘not to let the hackneyed subjects of Sanskrit, Arabic and Hebrew usurp a place, which they deserve neither for their novelty, nor their importance, in the great Republic of Oriental knowledge’.57 For Grierson’s supporters, then, the LSI represented a shift towards the study of contemporary Indian languages and dialects, and a move away from Sanskrit’s dominant position in philology. E.B. Cowell, for example, welcomed the LSI as helping to ‘turn the attention of European scholars to the subject’ of India’s modern languages.58 Grierson’s supporters saw his earlier published work as evidence of his commitment to the vernaculars, and Max Müller, Robert Needham Cust and E.B Cowell all referred to these as a factor in their support.59 The list of Grierson’s works for sale in London and India compiled by Trübner and company in 1886 reflects his output on contemporary Indian languages and his substantial profile as a scholar by that date.60 Reinhold Rost described these publications as helping ‘in the good cause immensely’,61 while Hoernle referred to his joint work with Grierson, Comparative Dictionary of the Bihārī Language (pt 1 1885, pt 2 1889), as indicating the LSI would be ‘specially desirable at the present time’.62 The colonial state selected Grierson as its nominee to the Oriental Congress of 1886 on the strength of his research on contemporary Indian languages.63 G. Bühler, who was on the Congress organising committee, referred to Grierson’s work on Bihar and his ‘linguistic publications of the Eastern Dialects of India’ in his support.64 One of Grierson’s other works in this period, The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan (Calcutta, 1889), also broke with the Indological focus on classical texts and referred to how scholars no longer needed to apologise for working on Indian vernacular literature.65 Grierson’s presentation of a paper on the medieval literature of Hindustan at the Oriental Congress alongside his LSI proposal staged a transition from the preoccupation with ancient India to a focus on its contemporary multilingual realities.66 For Grierson, his oeuvre also helped to smooth the bureaucratic pathways along which the Survey had to travel as it matured into published volumes. He advised L.F. Taylor, who was supposed to supervise a planned linguistic survey of Burma, to write a paper for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (JRAS) on his discoveries; publications such as this would help to secure his Survey and would ‘oil the wheels on which red tape is sometimes wound’.67

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However, Grierson expressed different conceptions of the LSI’s aims over the course of his career. His shifting sense of the LSI’s aims is clear even in the late 1880s: in response to the Madras government’s comments on the scheme, he thought the latter had misunderstood the Survey’s aim. It is ‘to be a practical work, for the benefit of Govt. officials of the present day’. This note, however, is struck through, suggesting his fluctuating sense of the LSI’s multiple aims at the time – any absolute statement about its aims could not do justice to its complexity.68 Nonetheless, Grierson stressed the LSI’s usefulness for Indian officials ‘who are not philologists, but who wish to know something about the languages spoken in the country in which they serve’.69 Many government officials could not speak the dialects of tribes they encountered, and the Survey would rectify this.70 In his proposal, Grierson emphasised the importance of European officials learning the dialects of the districts they served in, for many of which there were no grammars or dictionaries.71 Later in 1928, Grierson referred to how his Seven Grammars emerged out of his experience when he was transferred from Rangpur to Tirhut, where he found he could not communicate with villagers in their dialect – the Seven Grammars ‘were really the beginning’ of the Survey. The LSI would enable officials to pick up the main points of a local dialect quickly when they were transferred to a new district.72 Grierson also stressed the practical benefits of the Survey to magistrates, who had to converse with witnesses in courts in their own dialects, rather than in the court language, which was often a ‘foreign’ tongue to many villagers. This would release the magistrate and villagers from dependence on interpreters in and around courts.73 Occasionally Grierson suggested it was easier to get at the truth in court when witnesses were quizzed in their own local languages rather than in a lingua franca, such as Urdu or Hindi.74 At times, Grierson played on colonial fears when proposing the LSI to the state, in one instance citing the case of a European accused of murder who could not understand witnesses because of the dialect they spoke in.75 Thus, Grierson was keen to stress that the LSI would be useful to the colonial state. He also argued it would help him gauge the level of competence officials had in the Indian vernaculars, as they had to collect and sign off specimens. Grierson found officers knew about the main language of the district but very little if anything about ‘the little hole-in-the-corner forms of speech which were discovered as soon as the search was instituted’.76 Grierson also felt the Survey revealed the

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‘average knowledge’ of the local vernacular among officials was lower than in the 1880s. In Bengal alone all executive officers were ignorant of the local patois.77 The LSI, therefore, with its grammars and vocabularies, would not only be of great practical value to such officials but also demonstrated the need for such a Survey in its very conduct by exposing gaps in officials’ linguistic knowledge. On the other hand, some officials saw the LSI as being addressed to the serious student.78 In his proposal Grierson also mentioned the value of the Survey to philologists,79 and at times its philological aims were paramount for Grierson.80 Some officials even referred to the Survey as ‘the philological survey of India’,81 and a large part of Grierson’s correspondence is also taken up with discussing philological issues with linguists. On one level, then, the LSI aimed to present ‘ordered facts’ to linguists for their own study and theorisation.82 In his letters, Grierson characterised the LSI as a collection of facts which provided material for scholars to work on.83 For this reason, Grierson did not want to wait until the Survey was complete before publishing all the volumes at one time, because when the facts concerning one group of languages were collected, their publication would benefit other scholars.84 Hence the LSI’s volumes were published in separate parts. Volume 5, part 2 on the eastern group of Indo-Aryan family of languages was the first to be published in 1903,85 and two other volumes were published in 1903.86 Grierson pointed to how Peter Schmidt on Austric languages, Jules Bloch on Marathi, S.K. Chatterji on Bengali, and Paul Tedesco on the history of ‘Aryan’ languages had all benefited from the Survey in this way.87 The strong connections of Grierson and some of his interlocutors with academe also underline the importance of a scholarly community as the LSI’s contributors and its addressees. Grierson turned down the office of a university appointment to work on the LSI, as did his assistant and collaborator Sten Konow, who later took up a professorship in Norway.88 Some historians of linguistics have suggested that more than any other European country, Britain incorporated the widespread amateur activity of its colonial civil servants and military men into its university system.89 In India the fluid boundaries between professional and amateur scholarship were a defining feature of the learned societies set up under the patronage of the British, such as the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Grierson played a role in the incorporation of amateur scholarship into British universities. He wrote references for figures who had been involved in the LSI, in which he referred to 8

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their contributions. In his reference for A.H. Simcox, who applied for the readership in Marathi at Oxford, Grierson described Simcox’s key contribution in providing specimens for Marathi dialects for volume 7 of the LSI.90 He also wrote references for J.D. Anderson,91 for T.C. Hodson for a chair in Indian history and culture in London,92 and for Colonel P.R. Gurdon for a lectureship in Bengali at Oxford.93 Others approached Grierson as a potential referee when they heard of the possibility of lectureships in Indian and related languages.94 All these figures were associated with the Survey in some way or the other. In addition, Grierson was on the committee for the proposed Institute of Phonetics at University College London (hereafter UCL), and he gave evidence to the Treasury Committee on the Organisation of Oriental Studies in London in 1908.95 He was an inspector of the School of Oriental Studies (as it was then known; hereafter SOS) when it applied for admission as a school to the University of London in the Faculty of Arts, and his name was added to the general committee formed in 1916 to raise £150,000 for SOS.96 Grierson also contributed to the SOS prospectus when it came to brief descriptions of the languages taught there.97 Thus, through the LSI Grierson had connections with academe in Britain and, as we shall see, in India too. When Grierson argued a fulltime officer was required for the LSI from its second stage onwards, he put himself forward because of his close connections with ‘local scholars all over India, with whom I am on friendly terms’.98 The Survey thus became connected to academe through the transfer of personnel into the university sector while retaining links to district officials and colonial officers who did not move into the university system. In its production of knowledge, the lines between amateur and professional scholarship were difficult to define. Grierson also negotiated the gap between philology as a university discipline and the linguistic work of government servants and others who were amateur linguists; for example, he recommended the publication of J.E. Friend Pereira’s A Grammar of the Kūi Language (Calcutta 1909) to the Bengal Secretariat, while acknowledging the justness of Sten Konow’s criticisms of its sections on Dravidian philology and the derivation of forms. Konow’s views were those of a university professor, but nonetheless the grammar presented valuable material and so should be published.99 Grierson’s different emphases at different times on the LSI’s aims therefore reflected its multifaceted nature as a scientific tome for linguists, manual for district officers, and work of reference for an educated transcontinental public. The web of correspondence in which 9

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the LSI was embedded included a range of individuals from district officials, teachers and civil service commissioners to trained philologists, theoreticians and scholars, both European and Indian. Individuals from these different groups were both its collaborators and addressees. As we shall see, an epistolary network which acted as an intercontinental debating club and discussion group was an integral part of the LSI’s culture. As a genre of writing, the Survey was a work for specialists and a rendering of India as a multilingual space for an educated intercontinental public. Some of its volumes, such as volume 11, Gipsy Languages (1922), straddled multiple readerships; this volume was seen by some readers as being particularly appealing to nonspecialist audiences.100

Chapter outline Given the massiveness of the LSI, it is inevitable that there are many different strands and narratives in it. In my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India I show how the Survey collaborated with Indian activists to consolidate regional languages and cultures in India. Here I identify and analyse other strands in the LSI. I begin by considering the extent to which the LSI articulates colonial ways of thinking. While on one level the LSI was undoubtedly colonial in some of its perceptions, in Chapter 2 I show how Grierson’s official standing and that of the LSI were complex. The Survey’s relationship with the colonial state was loose and flexible, rather than tightly controlled, and this is reflected in the way it carved out a space for itself in relation to the Census, while remaining connected to it. The methods Grierson used to steer the LSI to completion reflect the opportunities and stresses its flexible relationship with the colonial government created. Grierson’s successful conduct of the Survey contrasts with the failed Linguistic Survey of Burma, where multiple pressures from different parts of the colonial establishment and tensions between the latter and its superintendent stymied this project. In addition to the LSI’s complex relationship with the colonial state, there are strong countervailing narratives to a colonial language of command in the LSI. In Chapter 3, I explore the links between the Survey, illness and the energy of selfhood and discuss the strained presence of race as a category and the complicated status of English in it. Grierson’s recurring illnesses and impaired eyesight signal how the LSI is rooted less in a narrative of mastery and more in one of vulnerability and fragility. This may partly reflect his Anglo-Irish background, 10

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which meant he had a complex subject position, moving between Britishness, Irishness and Indianness in sometimes enabling and sometimes disabling ways. Ultimately Grierson was a cross-border figure, with what I call a triply hyphenated identity, and it was this which enabled the LSI to take place. In Chapter 4, I show how the LSI’s distinctive idiom of knowledge production begins to emerge in its scenarios of transliteration. I outline the ways in which the Roman script in the LSI is actualised in relation to Indian languages, some of which echo narratives of Christianisation and colonial modernity. On one level, the LSI is a culmination of British imperial schemes to convert the scripts of India to a Roman system and its use of the Roman script is iconic of British colonial authority. However, in the Survey the Roman script unravels as a master script of India and its inadequacies are dramatised in its processes of transliteration. In the final analysis, India’s multi-script environment is given play through the Roman script in the LSI rather than being displaced by it. One of the reasons Grierson undertook gramophone recordings of Indian languages was to overcome the inadequacies of transliteration in the LSI. In Chapter 5, I show how Grierson wanted to secure what I call the ‘auditory order’ of British colonialism in India. In particular, gramophone recordings would lessen the risk of Indians caricaturing the British. They were part of the narrative of techno-modern technology to reinforce British authority. However, these narratives unravel in significant ways. Grierson’s repeated description of the recordings as ‘séances’ expresses key issues about authorship, agency and the discreteness of human bodies and languages which the LSI had to grapple with, and which point to the distinctive mode of its knowledge production. In the final three chapters, I examine this knowledge production in more detail. Chapter 6 considers the relationships between the Survey, the nature of its archive and the production of its knowledge. The LSI re-archived previously published works on Indian languages while generating district-level linguistic data in India, so its assemblage of knowledge about India had a composite character. Moreover, the Survey was also rooted in a distinctive epistolary culture which was part of its fabric of knowledge production. Many figures at the time described the Survey as ‘monumental’. While this term was revealing, it was also at odds with the Survey’s archival self-reflexivity, which reflects the LSI’s hybrid knowledge economy and the distinctive style of its knowledge production. 11

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Just as Grierson foregrounds the LSI’s archivization as a rough and ready process, so too he is clear about the Survey’s production of knowledge as messy and provisional. Chapter 7 examines how the LSI repeatedly foregrounds its shortcomings. An openness to the provisional nature of its knowledge characterises its presentation of its findings. It does not fit the conventional view of colonial surveys as exhibiting a language of command and deploying fixed categories reductively. Its power and authority lie in its idiom of doubt and uncertainty; this was part of its rigour. In part, this is because it acknowledges the ever-changing nature of language itself, which makes conclusively clear-cut formulations in the field of language difficult. There are other aspects of the LSI which do not conform to the idea of colonial surveys as expressing a language of command or as fixing Indian realities through reductive categories. In the final chapter I show how Grierson is at odds with the colonial attempt to fix Indian names, and how his own name is destabilised through the LSI. This is especially apparent in the context of authorship; here the discreteness of Grierson’s name as an author becomes problematic and it is drawn into an orbit of Indian names, with which it begins to share some characteristics. This reflects his own complex subject position, and the way joint authorship characterises the LSI’s production of knowledge and some of Grierson’s other texts too. Ultimately, joint authorship, in which different authors have a range of overlapping connections with the same text, characterises the LSI’s mode of knowledge production. An important strand in the Survey’s culture of learning is joint authorship with Indians, in which Grierson’s self-development as an author is in reciprocal interaction with his Indian correspondents’ own emergence as authors in their own right. Along with Grierson, Indians helped to shape the colonial knowledge of India as a linguistic region embodied in the Survey.

Notes 1 Prabodh B. Pandit, ‘The Linguistic Survey of India: Perspectives on Language Use’, in Sirarpi Ohannessian, Charles A. Ferguson, and Edgar C. Polomé (eds), Language Surveys in Developing Nations, Virginia: Centre for Applied Linguistics, 1975, pp. 71, 80; B.P. Mahapatra, ‘The Written Languages of India’, in B.P. Mahapatra and G.D. McConnell (eds), The Written Languages of the World: A Survey of the Degree and Modes of Use, Vol. 2, Pt. 1: Constitutional Languages, Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1989, p. 197; Jyotirinda D. Gupta, Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, p. 33.

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2 For an assessment of the LSI’s classification of languages in the subcontinent see Colin P. Masica, The Indo-Aryan Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 447–53. For India as a linguistic region, see Anwar S. Dil (ed.), Language and Linguistic Area: Essays by Murray B. Emeneau, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980. For an over view of Indo-Aryan languages and their relationships to non-Indo-European languages in the subcontinent, see George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain (eds), The Indo-Aryan Languages, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, Ch. 1. 3 Mahapatra, Written Languages, p. xxiii; Gupta, Language Conflict, p. 33. 4 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Pt. 1: Introductory, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927, p. 25. 5 Linguistic Survey Files, S/1/1/15, Grierson to Roland B. Dixon, Harvard, 4.11.1913 & S/1/1/13, and Grierson to Dr Lucian Scherman, 6.4.1901, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London, hereafter LS Files. 6 LS Files S/1/1/14, Grierson to Dr August Conrady, 17.4.1901. 7 LS Files S/1/1/15, Grierson to Editor of the Times, 8.10.1919, and European Manuscripts, EUR 223/220, F.H. Brown to Grierson, 15.10.1917. 8 LS Files S/1/1/11, Grierson to R. Kilgour, 6.6.1923. 9 LS Files S/1/2/2, Grierson to Secretary to Government of India, Education Department, 17.6.1921, Grierson to Secretary, Dept. of Industries and Commerce, 24.11. 1926, and S/1/9/10, Grierson to A.H. Simcox, 10.9.1919. 10 European Manuscripts, EUR 223/220, Grierson to F.H. Brown, 10.7.1926, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London, hereafter EUR only; LS Files S/1/1/17, Grierson to A.A. Macdonnell, 16.7.1926, and Grierson to Heffer & Sons, 26.4. 1927. 11 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 18. 12 Ibid., p. 18. 13 Ibid., p. 17. 14 LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 19.12.1917, and C. Morgan Webb to Commissioner, Regu Division, Rangoon, 21.4.1914. 15 On the origins of word lists as a tool for eliciting the historical relations among languages, and examples of earlier word lists to ground definitions of language families, see Thomas R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras, New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006, pp. 22–6, 31–3. 16 Pandit, ‘Linguistic Survey’, p. 77. 17 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 20. 18 LS Files S/1/12/1, Grierson to British Resident in Kashmir, 1.1899. 19 LS Files S/1/1/15, Grierson to Editor of the Times, 8.10.1919. 20 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 21–2, and EUR 223/328, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 7.10.1932. 21 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 21. 22 Ibid., p. 26. 23 LS Files S/1/1/8, Sten Konow to Grierson, 23.8.1921. 24 Menahem Mansoor, The Story of Irish Orientalism, Dublin: Figgis and Co., 1944, p. 35.

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25 LS Files S/1/14/9, Letters between Grierson and R.E. Enthoven, Superintendent of Census Operations, Bombay, 25.3.1901 & 18.4.1901, and H.A. Quin, Secretary to Government of India, to Grierson, 27.6.1901. 26 LS Files S/1/14/6, H.A. Rose, Superintendent of Ethnography, Panjab, to Grierson, 27.8.1910, and Grierson to H.A. Rose, 28.8.1910. 27 LS Files S/1/8/2, Letters between Grierson and Wolseley Haig, 5.2.1902 & 25.2.1902, on John Drake, A Grammar of the Kūrkū Language, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1903. 28 EUR 223/335, Letters between Grierson and Siddeshwar Varma, 12.12.1927 & 12.3.1928, Asian and African Collections, British Library. Varma’s work was later published in 1931 in the journal Indian Linguistics, and as The Bhaleshi Dialect (1948). 29 LS Files S/1/4/4, Philip R. Gurdon to Grierson, 9.5.1917, referring to J.H. Hutton’s The Angami Nagas, London: Macmillan, 1921. 30 LS Files S/1/4/1, Letters between Grierson and Chief Secretary, Government of Assam, 29.12.1921, 25.10.1926 & 3.12.1926, and between Grierson and J.D. Clark, 14.5.1923 & 13.6.1923. For the appointment Circular no. 3E, Government of Assam, R. Friel, Secretary to Government of Assam in the Transferred Departments. 25.6.1928 in this file. 31 EUR 223/208, Grierson to Secretary, Asiatic Society of Bengal, 28.1.1915. 32 LS Files S/1/9/3, G.P. Taylor to Grierson, 21.1.1908, 27.1.1908, 13.3. 1908 & 21.8.1908. 33 EUR 223/332, R.L. Turner to Grierson, 16.1.1921. 34 Ibid., Grierson to Turner, 2.3.1921. 35 Ibid., Letters between Grierson and Turner, 29.3.1921, 21.4.1921 & 19.8.1921. 36 Ibid., Turner to Grierson, 24.5.1921 & 18.7.1921. 37 Ibid., 29.3.1921, and Grierson to Turner, 19.8.1921. 38 Ibid., Grierson to Turner, 17.6.1921 & 16.5.1922. 39 Ibid., Turner to Grierson, 7.4.1924, 28.10.1924, 12.11.1924, 7.12.1924, 2.6.1926, 12.10.1927, 15.10.1927 & 14.12.1927, and Grierson to Turner, 15.12.1924, 24.4.1925 & 22.2.1927. 40 Ibid., 23.9.1926 & 26.9.1926. 41 EUR 223/333, H. Sharp, Secretary to Government of India, to Grierson, 2.3.1922, on publishing Turner’s dictionary as part of the LSI; see also Grierson to Turner, 5.1.1932 & 23.11.1932, and Turner to Grierson, 21.11.1932 & 19.12.1932. 42 Ralph L. Turner, A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages, London: Oxford University Press, 1966, Preface. 43 EUR 223/259, Grierson to Turner, 13.12.1932. 44 EUR 223/299, Grierson to W.W. Hunter, 22.12.1886. 45 LS Files S/1/2/1, J.P. Hewett, Home Dept. India, to Grierson, Magistrate and Collector of Agra, 2.1.1890; my emphasis. 46 EUR 223/299, Grierson to W.W. Hunter, 22.12.1886. 47 Ibid., Grierson’s Note on the Survey. See also George A. Grierson, ‘Some Bhojpūrī Folk Songs’, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, 1886, 18 (2), 207–8; George A. Grierson, ‘A Plea for the People’s Tongue’, The Calcutta Review, 1880, 71: pp. 151–68. 48 Ibid., italics in original.

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49 Pieter A.M. Seuren, Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, p. 90; Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 368. 50 EUR 223/299, A.H. Sayce to Grierson, 6.9.1886. 51 Ibid., William Crooke to Grierson, 3.2.1887. 52 EUR 223/299, J.T. Platts to Grierson, 1.9.1886. 53 EUR 223/300, Max Müller to H.H. Risley, 12.10.1887, and EUR 223/299, Max Müller to Grierson, 21.8.1886. 54 EUR 223/299, Richard Temple to Grierson, 25.6.86 & 12.6.86. 55 Ibid., A.F. Rudolf Hoernle, written comments on Grierson’s Note on the Survey. 56 Ibid., Robert Needham Cust to Grierson, 13.7.1886. 57 Ibid., Robert Cust to Grierson, 22.5.1886. 58 Ibid., E.B. Cowell to Grierson, 1.9.1886. 59 Ibid., Max Müller to Grierson, 5.1.1886, E.B. Cowell to Grierson, 9.4.1885, and Robert Needham Cust to Grierson, 13.6.1886. 60 Ibid., Trübner and co. to Grierson, 20.5.1886. 61 Ibid., Reinhold Rost to Grierson, 9.8.1886. 62 Ibid., Hoernle’s remarks on Grierson’s note, n.d. 63 Ibid., W.W. Hunter to Grierson, 12.8.1885 & 28.10.1885, A.P. MacDonnell, Secretary to Government of Bengal, Revenue Dept., to Secretary to Government of India, Dept. of Finance and Commerce, 28.12.1885. 64 Ibid., G. Bühler to Grierson, 4.5.1886. 65 Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 217; George A. Grierson, The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan, Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1889, pp. vii, x. As late as 1928 Indian publishers approached Grierson to reprint this book; see EUR 223/222, Direct Book Company Ltd, Calcutta to Grierson, 2.8.1928. 66 Ibid., p. vii. 67 LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 11.8.1919. 68 LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 15.1.1890. 69 LS Files S/1/1/14, Grierson to Dr August Conrady, 17.4.1901, and Grierson to Dr August Conrady, 15.4.1901. 70 LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 15.1.1890. For officials who agreed with him, see EUR 223/299, Robert Needham Cust to Grierson, 13.6.1886. 71 EUR 223/299, Grierson’s Note on the Survey. 72 EUR 223/220, Grierson to Edward Gait, 19.4.1928. 73 EUR 223/299, Grierson’s Note on the Survey; George A. Grierson, Seven Grammars of the Dialects and Subdialects of the Bihárí Language Spoken in the Province of Bihár, in the Eastern Portion of the North-Western Provinces, and in the Northern Portion of the Central Provinces, Pt. 1, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1883–87, p. 1. 74 George A. Grierson, ‘A Plea for the People’s Tongue’, The Calcutta Review, 1880, 71: 162–3. 75 LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 15.1.1890. 76 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 18.

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77 LS Files S/1/3/1, Grierson to Fraser, 26.10.1903. 78 LS Files S/1/14/5, Superintendent of Census Operations, NWP and Oudh, to Grierson, 1.1.1902. 79 EUR 223/299, Grierson’s Note on the Survey. 80 LS Files S/1/5/1, Grierson to Burn, 27.10.1916. 81 LS Files S/1/9/10, A.H. Simcox to Grierson, 21.10.1901. 82 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 21–2. 83 LS Files S/1/1/14, Grierson to Dr August Conrady, 17.4.1901 & 15.5.1901, and EUR 223/328, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 7.10.1932. 84 EUR 223/328, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 7.10.1932. 85 LS Files S/1/1/6, Grierson to D.M. de Z. Wickremasinghe, 21.4.1904. 86 These were George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: TibetoBurman Family, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bodo, Nāgā, and Kachin Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing House, India, 1903; Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of the Bengali and Assamese Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903. 87 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 21–2. 88 EUR 223/257, Note by Grierson, 24.1.1902, and Grierson to Revenue Secretary, 31.10.1905. 89 Seuren, Western Linguistics, p. 167. 90 LS Files S/1/9/10, Grierson to A.H. Simcox, 31.1.1921. 91 LS Files S/1/1/15, Grierson to Prof. Browne, 6.1.1919. 92 LS Files S/1/1/15, T.C. Hodson to Grierson, 27.1.1919, and Grierson to Hodson, 31.1.1919. 93 LS Files S/1/1/15, Grierson to P.R. Gurdon, 26.6.1920. 94 LS Files S/1/2/3, L.A. Waddell to Grierson, 27.11.1905. 95 LS Files S/1/1/28, Academic Registrar, University of London, to Grierson, 3.4.1906, Secretary, Treasury committee on the organisation of Oriental Studies in London, to Grierson, 6.2.1908, and Provost, UCL, to Grierson, 10.2.1919. 96 LS Files S/1/1/28, Secretary, School of Oriental Studies, to Grierson, 17.8.1916. 97 LS Files S/1/1/33, Grierson to Secretary, SOS, 20.12.1920. 98 EUR 223/272, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 4.12.1897. 99 LS Files S/1/3/1, Grierson to General Dept. Bengal Secretariat, 29.11.1905 & 1.12.1908. 100 EUR 223/220, F.H. Brown, 15.9.1923.

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1 COLONIAL CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT

This chapter considers the extent to which Grierson articulates colonial categories of thought in the LSI and in his correspondence. It shows how he takes class, criminal tribes and levels of civilisation for granted. He expressed an instrumentalist view of Indian literary studies and tried to safeguard English as a language from creolisation. Furthermore, he sometimes cast the LSI as a heroic narrative of adventure and exploration. He also had links to conservative and imperial lobby groups. However, as we shall see in the following chapters, this is only one aspect of the Survey. Nonetheless, in order to give a full picture of its complexity and multi-stranded nature, it is important to point to the colonial aspects of the Survey, which is what this chapter focuses on.

Princes, criminal tribes and native character Grierson articulates some key categories and powerful clichés of colonial thinking in the LSI and in his correspondence. He was invested in the hierarchical nature of colonial India and his interactions with princely India and princes elsewhere in colonial Asia reflect this. He uses a language of deference when it comes to such figures. He was keen to stress the high status of Chinese individuals in London from whom gramophone recordings had been made, and the aristocratic status of a Siamese nobleman with whom he corresponded about the pronunciation of Siamese.1 He was punctilious about princely and noble titles in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere, seeking clarification of the correct titles to use in his publications and correspondence.2 His interactions with princely India and princes elsewhere, like those with upper-caste Indian learned men and pandits, reflect the conservative colonial hierarchism through which the Survey’s knowledge is produced. 17

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For Grierson India demonstrated ‘various stages of civilization’.3 In his 1883 Report on Emigration from Bengal Presidency, he argues Chinese labour will not compete with Indian labour in the tropical colonies because the former is ‘further developed in civilization’.4 He sometimes applied a vocabulary of civilisational hierarchies to language as well. Tibeto-Burman dialects are typical of languages spoken by tribes ‘in a primitive stage of civilization’. He refers to ‘uncivilized tribes’ and ‘naked savages’ whose language shows they lack a capacity for abstraction.5 In the late 1920s, Grierson described W. Schmidt’s Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erdeo (1926), which argued that classes of languages correspond to stages of civilisation, as ‘most original . . . and well worth a good notice’. One of Grierson’s correspondents felt parts of Grierson’s own work had helped Schmidt’s thesis.6 In 1926 Grierson wrote to the undersecretary of state for India, asking him to ensure Schmidt received the LSI volumes; in doing so he stressed the importance of Schmidt’s work in connecting stages of language with phases of civilisation.7 Furthermore, Grierson used the category of criminal tribes unthinkingly. Volume 11 on ‘Gipsy’ languages begins with the Criminal Tribes Act, and its bibliography lists texts which take the category of criminal tribe for granted. The dialects themselves (rather than the groups speaking them alone) are labelled as ‘criminal’, and this is also the case in the section and specimen headings.8 Grierson draws on his experience as a magistrate in Bihar from the early 1870s to the mid-1880s when he describes the Doms of Bihar as ‘bad characters’.9 For him studies of ‘criminal’ dialects had a practical use for magistrates and police officers.10 In one instance, he compares a ‘criminal’ dialect and the ‘cockney way’ of pronunciation, suggesting how his perceptions of hierarchy in colonial India and in Britain sometimes interleave in the LSI.11 One letter Grierson received refers to the concerns of an English public school governor about the hiring of a young Brahmin, who had been educated in England since the age of 16, as an English teacher to English boys. The governor felt that the ‘very different point of view of the Hindu, even when European culture has been superimposed, makes it morally dangerous to commit lads of 9 or 10 to him for the teaching of English literature & history’. What was at issue was the question of the ‘character’ of the Brahmin, and the intimate link assumed between English literature and history and the formation of ‘character’. It is worth citing Grierson’s response in full: 18

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So much depends on the personality of the Brahman.  .  . . There are Indians and Indians. A Brahman of the Panjab is a very different person, mentally, morally and physically, from a Brahman of, say, Bengal. But, as a general proposition, without knowing the man referred to, I should be unwilling to appoint such a person to a class of such young boys. Even if we put the pupils out of consideration, it would be unfair to the teacher himself. There would be little chance of his maintaining discipline. His caste would engender no respect among a crowd of small English boys of the public school type, and his position would be much that of the French master, – the ‘Froggy’, – in the small schools of my young days, whom, as a rule, no one thought of obeying. Then, there is the question of religion. Is it right to put a class of young boys at the most impressionable age under the tuition of one who is necessarily a disbeliever in Christianity? . . . Again, the average Indian is born and bred in a system of culture and morality which is in some points radically opposed to the standards of this country. I am not condemning the Indian standards, but the difference cannot be denied. The whole Indian standard as regards such elementary subjects as truthfulness and the relations of the sexes is not the same as ours. The fact that the Indian gentleman referred to has been seven years in this country is not, in my opinion, of great importance. His character – no doubt an excellent one according to Indian standards – was fixed before he came to India [sic], and I do not think that seven years’ residence here would alter it in essentials, any more than an Englishman’s character is materially altered by a lengthy residence in India.12 Grierson’s response is interesting on three levels. First, national ‘character’ is fixed. Secondly, the slip on how this individual’s character is fixed before he comes to India (when Grierson meant to say before he came to England) is revealing because it indicates the depth of his belief in character as an ahistorical and even an ontological category. Thirdly, the Indian Brahmin is not named, nor individuated. He is subsumed under the category Brahmin. In this letter, then, Grierson’s response reflects the powerful clichés of the Empire: Indians are not individuals as such, their characters are fixed as members of a group, and their presence in Britain can be morally and religiously dangerous if given positions of responsibility. 19

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Muharrirs and petitions Like Sir William Jones more than a century earlier, whose unease at his reliance on the Indian sacerdotal classes in the Calcutta courts motivated his study of Sanskrit,13 Grierson felt he was over reliant on his muharrir’s translations when he was assistant magistrate and collector in Jessore in 1873 – the muharrir ‘practically dictated my judgement . . . and I suspect that before I was able to stand on my own legs, he was a wealthy man’.14 Grierson also felt his being trained by his muharrir led him to make technical errors; hence in 1905 Grierson recommended junior Indian Civil Service (hereafter ICS) officers attend lectures at the commissioner’s headquarters on criminal procedure, thereby replacing the muharrirs as their instructors.15 For Grierson language expertise was one way of circumventing the reliance on Indian officials in court. However, he went further. For him, the law court is a site for hearing as both a legal and phonological process: he listens as a magistrate to the legal content of the hearing and he listens as a phonetician, questioning his Indian officials on their pronunciation. He stressed his linguistic expertise increased his listening skills to the extent that unlike his Indian subordinates, he could follow different Indian regional accents in his court.16 Thus, his linguistic expertise recovers the law court from Indians’ authority in the legal and phonological realms, and circumvents an improper dependence on them. Majid Siddiqi has examined the role of petitions in Indian interactions with the colonial state, and how the latter closely scrutinised petitions for expressions of sedition and rebellion. From 1885 to 1895 Indian petition writing increased substantially, leading to more rules and regulations to control them.17 Many petitions were withheld in the 1890s as being too aggressive or insubordinate, and petition writing became integral to the emergence of early Indian nationalism.18 Grierson repeatedly stressed ICS candidates should be examined on reading petitions, and especially facsimiles of handwritten petitions.19 His anxiety that junior civilians should pass exams in copperplate writing20 reflects a larger colonial concern to control and incorporate older forms of writing into the quotidian language of the colonial administration.21 As a colonial official, Grierson was obviously engaged with what Raman calls the ‘document Raj’. His 1883 Emigration Report focuses on improving the colonial administration’s paperwork trail when it came to Indian emigrants, and has a clear sense of the life cycle of documents working their way through the colonial repository. For

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him, compiling documents such as the registration forms of emigrants was an ‘art in itself’.22 Grierson’s references to dealing with riots and ‘indigo troubles’ in Gaya, where he was magistrate and collector from 1887 to 1892, further bring home his role in colonial governance. Occasionally he and his European correspondents slip into a language of possession, referring to ‘my’ district or province, ‘my’ languages and ‘my Muslim’.23 When Grierson speaks of the ‘mutiny yarns’ of his ‘chaprasi’ on the settlement of Gaya district after 1857 he expresses notions of sentimental paternalism and Indian loyalism, in this case reinforced by mutiny storytelling as the folklore of loyal subalterns.24 In other letters he fantasises about Indian subalterns validating his colonial persona. When Grierson’s bust was unveiled at the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1933, Van Manen describes how the jamadar who knew Grierson 30 years ago ‘and who did not know at all who the bust was meant to represent enthusiastically proclaimed when he saw it: Grierson saheb hai! So your expression must have been faithfully caught’.25 By taking this at face value, Van Manen’s and Grierson’s naïve colonial egotism is evident.

Race, ethnology and folklore At one level, Grierson takes the category of race for granted. In his 1883 Report on Colonial Emigration from Bengal Presidency Grierson refers to the ‘tropical indogen’ of the colonies as ‘an animal incapable of protracted labour’, and the Indian ‘coolie’ as an ‘animal naturally industrious and skilled in the arts of agriculture’.26 He makes casual references to ‘half-castes’ and ‘half-breeds’, and to the ‘stupidity’ of some castes.27 The LSI also refers to the visual markers of ‘race’ and uses the language of racial types.28 Some of Grierson’s interlocutors spoke about the loss and acquisition of ‘ethnic types’ in ways which were bizarrely circular.29 In this, Grierson reflects an official language of racial types which was institutionalised in the ICS examinations up to the 1920s. The papers on Indian history, for example, required a knowledge of the ‘leading characteristics of racial types and their distribution in India’.30 In the 1880s to the early 1900s Grierson and his correspondents saw anthropometrical measurements as ‘scientific’. They discussed measurements and deployed a pseudo-technical vocabulary of the ‘true Aryan type’ to find out whether it has ‘survived among the population

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of the Himalaya region either pure or as an element . . . recognizable in mixed types, especially within the higher classes of society’.31 In 1900, when writing a chapter on languages for the Census, Grierson described himself as following Haeckel ‘in taking hair as the principle of classification’ for races, and agreed with his view that ‘languages . . . follow races’. He also referred to Haeckel’s ‘hair system of classification’ as ‘agree[ing] beautifully with philology’.32 In 1901 H.H. Risley wrote to Grierson that Brahuis ‘are now being measured and the measurement will place their physical type beyond dispute’, and he asked Grierson for his views on the linguistic connections between the Brahuis and the Todas. Grierson’s response did not challenge Risley’s anthropometric framework.33 Some of Grierson’s correspondents, including Indians, conducted anthropological measurements well into the 1920s.34 B.S. Guha of the Zoological Survey of India took measurements of one group of ‘Kafirs’ in 1929; Guha was best known for his work on classifying the Indian population into racial groups, and the measurements referred to here were incorporated in S.K. Mazumdar’s A Biometric Study on the Tribes of North-Western Himalayan Region (1976) as part of the Indian Anthropological Survey.35 Other Indian savants, like S.K. Chatterji, also took anthropometrical language at face value. Writing to Grierson in 1920, he referred to Ramaprasad Chanda’s The Indo-Aryan Races: A Study of the Origin of Indo-Aryan People and Institutions (1916) and raised the issue of the ‘racial affinity’ between various Indian languages. In doing so, he accepted Chanda’s theory of a twofold ‘racial division’ among the Aryans, and used anthropometrical terminology.36 T.C. Hodson, the first William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge, whose Analysis of the 1931 Census of India categorised physical types in India using anthropometrical models of scientific racism, welcomed the LSI as helping ‘anthropology enormously’.37 In the earlier part of his career, Grierson asked Hodson for ethnological groupings which might help linguistic classification, while Hodson sought linguistic corroboration from Grierson for his racial categories.38 Grierson wrote a reference supporting Hodson’s application to be director of the School of Oriental Studies in 1914, in which he described Hodson’s publications as ‘models of research’.39 Thus, Grierson was writing in a context where for many anthropometry’s scientific status was assured, and this is reflected in the letters Grierson received and his own earlier views.40 Volume 4 of the LSI, prepared by Sten Konow and edited by Grierson, used this language explicitly.41 Its preoccupation with traces of Dravidian elements 22

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in the language of ‘Aryan Indians’ is often racialised,42 and there are slippages between linguistics and the language of race.43 Konow also conflates race and language in his letters.44 Grierson engaged closely with colonial ethnology. In 1903 he requested a copy of Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891–92) from his head assistant, as ‘it is badly wanted for the Survey’.45 He asked the Assam government for ethnological monographs on tribes in exchange for the LSI volumes.46 When referring to ‘racial’ features and types, he cites ethnologists’ work – for example, Ibbetson’s Outlines of Panjab Ethnography (1883) and Crooke’s Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (1896).47 He was also sent anthropological treatises to review for publication.48 He was invited to speak at the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences as late as the 1930s, and was in correspondence with curators at the Pontifico Museo, Missionario-Ethnologico in Rome and with the editor of Anthropos: International Review of Ethnology and Linguistics – Grierson requested that the Survey volumes be sent to Anthropos at discount prices.49 His other correspondents included Berthold Laufer, the curator of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History at Chicago. Laufer stressed the LSI’s value for his own researches, and drew on Grierson for his research into loan words in Tibetan.50 Grierson also endorsed anthropology’s importance for a more effective imperial administration. In January 1914, a Joint Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, chaired by Richard C. Temple, circulated a conference notice. One of its resolutions stated it was in the ‘highest interests of the Empire’ to reorganise the teaching of anthropology at British universities in order to educate those bound for careers in the ‘East’ in a ‘sound and accurate knowledge of the habits, customs, social and religious ideas and ideals of the Eastern and Non-European Races’ who were British subjects. It stressed anthropology’s role in enabling officials to acquire a ‘cultured sympathy’ with ‘populations alien to the British people’ in the Empire. This included a knowledge of ‘the physical and mental development of groups of mankind’. In Grierson’s view, if all colonial officials were trained in anthropology ‘we should then have greater chances of securing not only the obedience, but also the affection of our Indian fellow subjects’. This was especially important because ‘In former times Government Officers in India could content themselves with issuing orders and seeing that they were carried out’ but now orders have to 23

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be issued ‘with sympathy and with an understanding mind’. Anthropology can also ‘save an Englishman from treating natives of India as if they too were English, and as if their habits and customs of thought were the same as his own’. In fact, ‘the most successful administrators of India have all been Anthropologists, even if they did not know it’.51 Thus, for Grierson it was important both to stress Indian difference and to sympathise with it when using a language of command, and for this an anthropologically trained sensibility was invaluable. Popular reception of the Survey tended to echo these views: one correspondent referred to the LSI’s volumes as of ‘much practical value, especially in enabling all concerned to understand the ideas and feelings of the backward races of India’.52 For some, at least, the Survey’s chief value was ethnological rather than linguistic. Thus, Grierson was involved in the institutionalisation of anthropology as a discipline and its close alliance with imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He also stressed the ethnological value of Indian literature for colonial officials who needed to bond with their subjects, especially in rural India. Other linguists in contact with Grierson stressed the importance of a knowledge of Indian languages for colonial governance,53 but Grierson treated Indian literary studies as an instrument of governance. In the early 1900s he argued for the key importance of literature in the ICS exams for ‘sympathetic administration’.54 Moreover, ‘a slight knowledge of that literature gives a Collector immense influence in his district. A single apt quotation will often do more than hours of argument’.55 Indian literature, rather than surveillance, enabled the British to read Indian minds: it is only through a ‘knowledge of the literature of his home-life’ that the British can ‘understand what is at the back of a native’s mind’.56 The ICS officer must ‘win hearts’, and literary knowledge would enable them to do so.57 For Grierson, then, a knowledge of Indian literature was key to effective governance, and even to maintaining public order. The kind of literature he had in mind reflected a widespread ICS view that the continuation of British rule lay in maintaining a hierarchical social order in the countryside. The support of landed elites and peasant proprietors was considered crucial for the British Raj, especially given Indian nationalism’s support among urban commercial and mercantile groups. Hence the Raj adopted strategies to forestall the development of capitalist relations in Indian agrarian society, and it pushed through a conservative agenda in legislation, as in the case of the Land Alienation Act of 1900.58 However, by the early 20th century, when 24

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the LSI volumes were being published, the colonial state’s balancing act between maintaining the forces of production in the agrarian economy required for its economic needs and preserving social and political structures in the countryside necessary for its security came under severe pressure.59 It was in the 1880s, when Grierson’s career in India was well under way, that the Raj found the right equilibrium between the two.60 Writing in 1907, Grierson argued that knowing Indian literature in its original languages was crucial because ‘the old mā bāp system is fading away in parts of India’.61 His instrumental view of Indian literature was therefore partly a response to the crisis of colonial governance in early 20th-century India. Grierson invoked a notion of native authenticity in which Indian literature of a certain kind, such as Tulsidas’s Rāmacartimānas, was an embodied presence in the figure of the Indian peasant – literature like this was ‘absorbed in the marrow of even the humblest peasant’.62 What mattered was what he called ‘real literature, – the classical literature which forms part of the very beings of the natives of India, – not modern books, written under English influence, and read only in the towns’.63 This was the ‘real’ India, which ICS officers, with the right literary training, needed to bond with, as opposed to the urban India of the Englisheducated Indian intelligentsia. This perspective accounts for the preponderance of folk tales and folk songs as the second specimens in the LSI. As an Anglo-Irishman, Grierson may have been influenced by the folklore revival in Ireland, like William Crooke and Richard C. Temple.64 There are about 200 folk tales and 45 folk songs in the Survey’s volumes, far outnumbering the next category of approximately 72 specimens which are legal texts, like plaintiffs’ statements, accounts of arrests, police reports, prisoners’ statements and depositions in a variety of cases, ranging from theft and disputes over land and cattle to homicide. Some specimens are conversations between villagers, or dialogues set in rural and tribal areas, of which there are approximately 16.65 Grierson intervenes in these folk specimens in various ways. He uses footnotes to complete the truncated version of a folk tale, rounding it off for his readers.66 Sometimes the same folk tale is represented in different languages and dialects.67 Grierson explains references to rituals and customs, personages, historical context, geographical spread, and parallels with folk tales in other parts of the world. He presents his specimens as grounded in a wider cultural knowledge of the subcontinent combined with a focus on specific ethnographic detail. He also explains the significance of titles, the narrative devices of stories, and specific terms in the tales.68 25

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Other aspects he touches upon are material objects and items referred to in the narratives, relationships between people, and festivals, deities and mythologies.69 He makes his readers aware of puns and word play, explicates onomatopoeia and highlights ceremonies and proverbs.70 An example of this range of notes occurs in volume 9, part 4, where Grierson comments on cultural practices, family genealogies, and material and other objects in the folk tale, from plants and their medicinal properties to flowers and poisons.71 Occasionally Grierson also summarises the moral of the story.72 Grierson also comments on his specimen folk songs, summarising them, dating historical personages and explaining references to deities and the ritual occasions of the songs.73 These folk songs cover a range of scenarios,74 and they are paralleled by vignettes of dramatic incidents or of everyday life in rural India.75 The volumes also contain more extended ethnographic discussions, like a passage on Ahom cosmogony and statements of mythological beliefs.76 Some of the legal passages contain brief notes of legal anthropology, as when Grierson explains the provenance of a panchayat.77 These directive strategies mean the folktales are an important subtext in the LSI, going beyond its narrow philological remit. They are meant to be understood and read in their own right and not just as linguistic specimens, and they foreground the cultural life of rural Indian society. It is not surprising, then, that one of Grierson’s readers suggested compiling a popular edition of the folk stories contained in the Survey’s volumes.78 At one point, Grierson hints that the colonial state might have conducted a ‘Folklore Survey’, but did not do so because of financial austerity.79 In some ways the LSI was a frustrated folklore survey. In its second specimens, then, the LSI foregrounds a rural and folkloric India, rather than an urban and technologically modernising one. For Grierson, it was folk songs (e.g., those in Bhojpuri) which are ‘trustworthy exponents . . . of the inner thoughts and desires of the people’.80 The setting of the parable of the prodigal son used as one of the specimens for all Indian languages and dialects is also a rural one. Thus, the Survey’s interest in folk literature reflects the imperial state’s concern to buttress its conservative order by a stable landowning rural society and the turn of its official mind towards the rustic and the customary.81 At one point, Grierson argued ICS candidates should get a certificate from the district collector to validate their ability to converse with the peasantry in their patois before being confirmed in posts.82 In emphasising how training in literature and law should play a role in the education of ICS candidates, he stressed candidates 26

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should study vernacular translations of the Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure alongside texts like Tulsidas’s Rāmacaritmānas if stationed in Bihar, or the Chaṇdī of Mukund Ram in Bengal, since this would give officials an insight into the ‘household words’ of the peasantry.83 Grierson also argued for the retention of oriental publishing presses in England during the First World War, against those who felt Indian progress lay in the spread of English and English literature. He endorsed the idea of an ‘Imperial Oriental Press’ which would forge a direct link between ‘ourselves and our dependent races’.84 He supported the oriental publishers Stephen Austin and Sons in their appeal against the call-up of their employees to the army in 1917. In his recommendation to the Military Tribunal, Grierson stressed it is a matter of national importance that there should be opportunities for Oriental printing in this country . . . a knowledge of Oriental languages, with Oriental printing as its necessary concomitant, is one of the most important links that connect us at home with our Indian Empire, with Egypt, with Persia, and with the portions of the Turkish Empire now in occupation of our troops. Grierson also mentioned the foundation of the School of Oriental Studies in London as further proof of the ‘National importance of Oriental learning’.85 Earlier in 1908 Grierson gave evidence to the Treasury Committee on the Organisation of Oriental Studies in London, set up to examine the teaching of oriental languages ‘and subjects connected therewith adequate to the very great interests of the metropolis and of the British Empire generally in the East and Far East’.86

Adventure narrative Grierson and the LSI are caught up in articulations of colonial rule in India in other ways. In one letter, Grierson expresses a familiar colonial epistemological narrative, seeing India as a site for collecting ‘facts’, and Europe as the place for coordinating them to arrive at results.87 He also presents the LSI as a narrative of adventure and exploration, a ‘pioneer work in an unknown country’. He describes his classification of hitherto unclassified languages as ‘a direction in which explorers have not hitherto looked’.88 In this, he followed a colonial tradition of depicting lexicography and the study of languages in terms of travel.89 27

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Grierson’s subjectivity had been shaped partly by boys’ colonial fiction. In one of his letters, he refers to the Boys’ Own Library issued by Beeton in the 1860s. In 1936, he tried to trace one of its volumes in the British Museum, when his childhood memories of reading ‘boys’ romance were revived by his nephew Maurice Collis’s biography Siamese White (1936), an adventure narrative of Samuel White, who sailed to Madras in 1675 and became a ‘mandarin’ in Mergui, Burma, in December 1683.90 Occasionally Grierson also used the language of conquest, speaking of ‘new oriental worlds to conquer’ in the context of knowing India.91 The LSI was described by parts of the British press as a narrative of adventure and exploration. In 1931 the Statesman described the Survey thus: Linguistic Survey of India. Monumental Work. Magnificent Results of Long Research. Much has been heard of the Kanchenjunga, Mount Everest, and Mount Kamet expeditions, in which explorers have attempted to scale immense heights and penetrate to places beyond the reach of man. There are other bands of gallant explorers attempting to penetrate regions of another kind, and the difficulties of access are no less than those confronting the most energetic mountaineers. These are formidable jungles – the linguistic jungles of the scores of major languages and hundreds of dialects which are spoken in India.92 For Grierson’s correspondents, the LSI ‘reads like a romance’, it is ‘heroic’, a ‘story’ that ‘made a stir’, and ‘the whole thing from beginning to end is romantic and great’.93 Some of Grierson’s colleagues, like Grahame Bailey (1872–1942), the author of works on north Indian languages, Himalayan dialects and Shina among others, reminisced how on reading the LSI each dialect carries my mind back to scenes of years ago out in the Himalayas when I sat, notebook in hand, illiterate speakers of the language before me, some river flowing by not far off; of the various accidents which occurred in the course of the language hunts, nearly breaking a leg in one river (the leg was not right again for months), getting into a whirlpool in another, all the weariness and loneliness and heat and rain and snow.94 28

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Here linguistics is combined with physical endeavour in challenging landscapes. In their letters to Grierson, D.L. Lorimer (1876–1962) and his wife, Emily Lorimer (1876–1962), who produced seminal works on the languages and dialects of north-west India and Kashmir, describe the hardships of transporting their notes and typewriters over tough landscapes and the difficulties of writing up their research in camps at high altitudes.95 The figurative and the literal blend into each other, with ‘untrodden ground’ in their narratives referring to both the landscapes they traverse in these regions and the languages and dialects they study in the field.96 Emily Lorimer’s Language Hunting in the Karakoram (1939) also evokes the ‘spice of adventure’ in fieldwork.97 In narratives like these the ruptures between the figurative and the literal, the physical and the cerebral, are sutured together through the rejuvenating effects of linguistic work in India. Ironically, in one case the narrativisation of colonial knowledge is turned against Grierson. In one Indian public library Grierson found his Bihār Peasant Life, a ‘perfect Gradgrind collection of the driest facts’, catalogued under fiction.98 The correspondence between Grierson and Sir Aurel Stein (1862– 1943), the famous archaeologist and explorer who made expeditions to Chinese Turkestan,99 can also be read in these terms. Stein’s letters to Grierson are redolent with evocative place names figuring in the British geopolitical and adventurous imagination at the time. He writes to Grierson from and describes his journeys to Beirut, Syria, Azerbaijan, Luristan, Dizgul, Istanbul, Baghdad, Shiraz, Central Asia, China, Basra, Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Turkestan, Samarkand, Teheran and Bokhara, evincing a privileged colonial mobility.100 A typical letter he wrote to Grierson in 1924 informs him that he has just arrived in Oxford after a tour in Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Syria and Asia Minor.101 The heroic strain of these letters is expressed in descriptions of mountain landscapes, tough weather conditions, a strong physique and physical hardships.102 As commentators have pointed out, colonial adventure narratives tended to focus on the romance of boyhood: Stein mentions how his explorations carried out plans ‘cherished since boyhood’.103 His references to inter-imperial and intra-European rivalries with the French, Germans and Russians in the field of exploration and artefact collection also convey a sense of heroic endeavour.104 Stein’s letters, then, convey a certain kind of colonial persona. They articulate a textual self in the making, by referring to the preparation and writing of his travel accounts in the midst of his travels 29

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or by pointing Grierson to press accounts and journals describing his travels.105 At one point, Stein describes himself as living a ‘good story’.106 At first glance, there is a contrast between Stein’s intrepid travelling identity and Grierson’s sedentary scholarly existence. Stein stresses ‘my true line of work lies in the field and not in the study’.107 However, Stein and Grierson form a composite colonial persona. Stein is dependent on Grierson as one of the addressees before whom he performs his heroic self. For him, Grierson is a ‘collaborator’ and ‘follower’ on his journeys.108 Grierson publicised Stein’s travel accounts109 and he intervened with officials to support Stein’s expeditions.110 Grierson was also the proofreader of Stein’s Serindia (1921), and echoed Stein’s outlook by referring to the ‘grand and virgin field’ of the latter’s adventures.111 Stein collected Tirahi and Torwali specimens for the LSI,112 and in the case of Tirahi, Grierson suggested they publish a summary of the Survey’s results with ethnographical and geographical notes by Stein. This resulted in their linked articles in the JRAS volume of July 1925.113 Grierson’s Torwali: An Account of a Dardic language of the Swat Kohistan (1929) relied on Stein’s fieldwork and included a note by him.114 For Grierson this book was a ‘great advance’ on the LSI because of its thorough grammatical and phonetical analysis, while for Stein it represented Grierson’s ‘precious collaboration . . . for this the latest of my expeditions’.115 There are other cross-fertilisations between the Survey and Stein’s journeys; for example, Stein found the Survey useful in interpreting Marco Polo’s account of the Mongol inroad from Badakshan into Kashmir.116 In their correspondence, then, Grierson and Stein fused together a mobile colonial heroism with sedentary studiousness to create a composite identity. A boyish tone of treasure-hunting imbues some of Stein’s letters, as when he refers to the ‘rich mine’ and ‘sacred treasure’ of Dunhuang guarded by ‘ignorant and timorous priests’,117 and he frames the LSI in similar terms: ‘It always makes me pause in wonder how you have managed to ransack every corner of the vast field from the Oxus to farthest Burma’.118 Grierson’s entanglement with colonial adventure narrative is evident in other ways. Stein asked Grierson to support Major General Lionel C. Dunsterville (1865–1946) for election to the Society of Authors. He had encouraged Dunsterville to write his account of the campaign at Baku in 1917–18, which appeared as The Adventures of Dunsterforce (1920); in his view, Dunsterville was a skilful writer as befitted an old schoolfellow of Kipling.119 This book was not a record of military operations alone, as it was cast in terms 30

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of ‘adventures’ covering the ‘whole stretch of country lying between Baghdad and Baku’.120

Indian dialects and English The LSI’s colonial aspects also come to the fore in Grierson’s anxieties about the creolisation of English. The Survey coincided almost exactly with the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) appearance in fascicles between 1882 and 1928. It was also in this period that the first largescale corpus of English was compiled by Edward L. Thorndike as the Teacher’s Word Book (1921), which had a word count of 4.5 million. There are hints of an English language patriotism in the LSI. In 1901 Risley argued the Census should note the impact of English on Indian languages and ‘the tendency [among Indians] to employ in writing and speaking English adaptations of vernacular idioms’.121 J.P. Hewett also stressed the need for information in the 1901 Census about the ‘English-knowing’ population,122 and during his last ten years as a collector Grierson observed English increasingly replacing vernaculars in ‘official work’.123 In his 1883 Emigration Report Grierson refers to the creolised English of Indian indentured labourers who had returned from the colonies.124 However, in spite of the fame of Hobson-Jobson (1886) and glossaries like A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant, Embracing English, American and Anglo-Indian Slang, Pidgin English, Tinker’s Jargon, and Other Irregular Phraseology (1888), which Grierson ordered for his own use,125 there is no discussion in the LSI of the Anglo-Indian patois or the Indianisation of English by Indian speakers. There is one reference in a footnote to the comic hybridity of Indian English,126 and there are fleeting references to other forms of global English, as when Grierson draws an analogy between the effect of Tibetan languages on the vocabulary and grammatical structure of Naipali and ‘the pigeon-English of China’.127 Moreover, in terms of its translational strategies, the LSI begins with the passage of the prodigal son in English, and ends with its literal and ‘free’ translation back into English. Thus, an English language circularity determines the volumes’ presentation of Indian specimens, and English is both the source and target language in its translations. The LSI draws analogies between English and Indian languages, but these analogies are aimed primarily at a British readership, as when the ‘homely’ character of Panjabi is compared with Burns’s lowland Scots, and its folk poetry to the border ballads of northern England and Scotland.128 The mixing of dialects and/or languages such as Marwari 31

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and Sindhi, or Magahi and Bengali, is likened to the way French and English speakers borrow from each other’s languages.129 Grierson also compares the Sanskrit mlećcha to ‘our’ original meaning of the word ‘Welsh’ (foreigner, stranger) and the secret argots of ‘criminal tribes’ and ‘gipsy’ languages to the ‘Latin patter of London thieves’.130 Moreover, he evokes childhood memories to illustrate ‘criminal’ dialects in which letters are prefixed or suffixed to common words or initial letters are changed – these ‘will be familiar to English readers from memories of their childish games’.131 Analogies such as this create an intimate bond with his English readers while rendering Indian ‘criminal’ dialects childish in relation to their adult selves. This is also suggestive of the pleasurable feeling of regression which was an important part of the reading experience of colonial romance narratives.132 Grierson also uses English to illustrate the pronunciation of Indian words. At times these illustrations transport the reader across continents to vignettes rooted in Britain, as when the pronunciation of the letter l in Oriya words is brought to life by ‘how we hear it in London in the morning cry of “milk”, pronounced “mulk” ’.133 He refers to specific examples of epenthesis in ‘our own English’ to explain epenthesis in the Pahari, Dardic and Lahnda dialects; in the case of the latter, its distinctive sounds are highlighted with reference to Scottish and northern English, while a shift in pronunciation between its northern and southern dialects is likened to a shift from Scottish and northern English to southern English.134 Grierson also mentions ‘the Welsh pronunciation of English in the days of Shakespeare’ to illustrate Indian language pronunciation.135 To convey the archaic nature of the pronunciation of Sanskrit words in Bengali he draws an analogy (citing Chaucer) with the way ‘Englishmen speak “Frenche ful fayre and fetisly, after the scole of Startford atte bowe” ’.136 Elsewhere Grierson draws on archaic English to explicate a grammatical point or justify a translation.137 In other instances, he is more technical; sounding the labial v in Indian languages is accompanied by comments on the dento-labial v of the English language.138 These analogies privilege a ‘native’ English experience and a British cultural and linguistic repertoire. The cumulative effect of such analogies is to render India familiar to British readers while simultaneously distancing it. Hence sometimes analogies are suggested and then withdrawn to highlight the distance of the Indian example from British terms of reference. For example, calling the defenders of Sanskritised Bengali literature of the 19th-century ‘conservative’ is like saying an English Conservative is a person who wishes to retain all 32

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the civilisation and all the ‘complex national existence’ of 1899, but to ‘administer them by the laws of Ina of Wessex’.139 Here the English term ‘conservative’ is both used and withdrawn at the same time to suggest the absurdity of the Indian case. Similarly, when criticising the Sanskritisation of Hindi and Bengali, Grierson suggests that the ‘wildest Johnsonese’ is like a ‘specimen of Saxon English’ in comparison.140 Here again a comparison is made and then withdrawn to highlight the Indian example, which can be explicated only by the incomplete nature of the comparison. When Grierson used an analogy which might problematise English, this is skewed to protect it. In volume 1, part 1, Grierson discusses Bengali orthography and pronunciation: Like English, but for a different reason, its [Bengali’s] pronunciation is not represented by its spelling. The vocabulary of the modern literary language is largely Sanskrit, and few of these words are pronounced as they are written. Bengalis themselves struggle vainly with a number of complicated sounds, which the disuse of centuries has rendered their vocal organs unable, or too lazy, to produce. The result is a maze of half-pronounced consonants and broken vowels not provided for by their alphabet, amid which the unfortunate foreigner wanders without a guide, and for which his own larynx is as unsuited as is a Bengali’s for the sounds of Sanskrit.141 Here the foreigner’s predicament is equalised in relation to the Bengalis’ pronunciation of their own language while English speakers do not struggle in the same way to pronounce their language as Bengalis do. The difference between the literary dialect in Bengali and the ‘true vernacular’ is not the same as between the language of the educated and the uneducated in England; the ‘dissimilarity is much greater’.142 Thus, partial overlap highlights the English-Bengali difference more effectively. As is clear from the foregoing citations, Grierson sometimes refers to archaic English to illustrate features of Indian languages. This creates a sense of India as antiquated and quaint; the antiquity of India is important for Grierson’s version of an India pitted against secular Indian nationalism.143 Grierson’s use of varieties of English to illustrate points about Indian languages is rooted in the British Isles, and little reference is made to the creolisation of English in India or elsewhere. His commitment to British English is also clear in his remarks 33

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on American English.144 He recommended an Urdu manual written by an American missionary should be revised to exclude Americanisms because ‘such expressions do repel a reader unaccustomed to them’.145 This ignores the increasing importance of American English at the time, as reflected in the long history of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language, since its first edition of 1828,146 but it also dovetails with the OED’s own deficient coverage of North American usage in this period.147 As the foregoing citations show, in the LSI British English is not monolithic – its varieties are mobilised and reframed in its encounter with India. The Survey overlaps with the publication of Joseph Wright’s monumental English Dialect Dictionary, which appeared in six volumes between 1898 and 1905. Some British officials’ work on Indian dialects led to their heightened awareness of English dialects in Britain. After his work on Siraiki, Sir James Wilson published books on English and Scottish dialects,148 such as The Dialect of the New Forest in Hampshire as Spoken in the Village of Burley (1913), The Dialect of Robert Burns as Spoken in Central Ayrshire (1923) and Scottish Poems of Robert Burns in His Native Dialect (1925). The proposal for a Phonetic Institute in London, sent to Grierson, includes the suggestion of a phonographic museum of the British Isles’ English dialects.149 However, Grierson underplayed the English dialectal variations he used to illustrate Indian languages and he foregrounded Indian dialectal differences in contrast to English ones. As Grierson noted, the LSI ‘goes with the most minute detail into dialects and subdialects’ of India.150 His preoccupation with the detail of dialectal differences in India is evident in volume 10, for example, where minor differences in pronunciation lead to separate entries for forms of speech as ‘dialects’. The Buner dialect is noted as differing only slightly from standard Pashto, and yet a specimen of it is reproduced, with a note on its minor differences from the standard.151 When the variations between forms of speech are too minor to class them as dialects, the differences are still noted and a specimen of the prodigal son is reproduced to illustrate these.152 In the case of a western dialectal variety of Bengali, ‘the difference between it and Western Bengali is so slight that it is not worthy of the title of a separate dialect’; nonetheless these differences are listed.153 Two dialects of the North Assam group are so closely related they can be considered the same language, but a list of their differences in parallel columns is presented.154 Some of Grierson’s Indian interlocutors questioned this tendency. In 1930 A. Latifi, an Indian delegate to the Indian Round-Table 34

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conference, commented on the Survey’s enumeration of India’s languages at 179 and its dialects at 544: I think I am correct in saying that a good many of these dialects do not differ from each other very much more than some of the dialects of English spoken in the various rural areas of this country within the last century. I wonder if you could let me know, for purposes of comparison, how many (a) languages and (b) dialects of this sort there were within the British isles (including both North and South Ireland) in say, about the middle of the 19th century. Grierson’s response was evasive. In his ‘boyhood days in Ireland’, people distinguished between a Belfast, Dublin and Cork dialect of English, but these differences, while strong, did not constitute dialects ‘in the sense in which I have used it’ in the LSI.155 Other Indian correspondents had made similar objections earlier. Syamacharan Ganguli compared specimens of Bengali dialects in volume 5, part 1 of the LSI, with specimens of English dialects in the 5th edition of R.G. Latham’s English Language (1862). In his view, this showed that provincial Bengali diverged no more from colloquial Calcutta Bengali than English dialects did from literary English. He argued that Bengali textbooks for primary school education should be in Calcutta Bengali, and well-marked local divergences should be footnoted for pupils, just as Tennyson’s Northern Farmer, Old Style and Northern Farmer, New Style and Robert Burns’s poetry were glossed for English readers.156 In the 1911 notes for provincial Census superintendents, the Census commissioner commented on the ‘tendency in some quarters to protest against the linguistic and dialectic distinctions recognised by the Linguistic Survey, and to assert that they are based on minute differences of pronunciation and grammatical structure which ought not to be taken into consideration’. He also noted the claim that the latter ‘are often no greater than occur in the English spoken in different parts of the British Isles’.157 Grierson’s response here shows an asymmetrical approach to dialectal differences in British English and Indian languages. While agreeing ‘many dialects differ from each other only just as much as the English spoken in different parts of England, and it would be absurd to take note of them in the Census report except in special cases’, he also asserted that these differences should be noted, and in some cases, what were hitherto seen as dialects (e.g., 35

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Rajasthani) should be recognised as languages.158 With regard to his division of Hindi into Bihari, Eastern Hindi and Western Hindi, the UP Census report for 1921 commented that The difference between speaking to a villager of Gorakhpur [where the language is Bihari] and to a jungleman of Jhansi [where the language is Western Hindi] is precisely the difference between speaking to a peasant of Devon and to a crofter of Aberdeen. If you are intelligible to the one you can make yourself intelligible to the other. For Grierson, however, the question is not whether ‘an educated third person can master the two dialects, but whether a Devon peasant suddenly transported to Aberdeen would be able to communicate with the surrounding crofters’. In his view, such communication would be difficult. However, he does not suggest that therefore the Devon and Aberdeen dialects are separate languages.159 There is thus a preoccupation in the LSI to highlight even minor differences between forms of speech in India. This partly reflects the nature of British rule in India after 1857, with its focus on India as an agglomeration of small societies, its increasing engagement with local custom, and an accumulation of ground-level data through the more systematic and detailed operations of the Census and revenue systems. The taxonomising of castes in the work of Mackenzie, Elliot, Hodgson and others led to an increase in British understandings of little traditions.160 There is also a lack of clarity in the Survey about what constitutes a dialect. For Grierson, the terms ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ are ‘incapable of mutually exclusive definition’ and like ‘hill’ and ‘mountain’ ‘they are convenient methods of expression, but no one can say at what exact point a hill ceases to be a hill and becomes a mountain’.161 In his response to Latifi’s criticism of the Survey’s overemphasis on dialectal differences, Grierson stresses that in India ‘mutual intelligibility [of dialects of the same language] cannot always be the deciding factor’ in distinguishing between dialects and languages because many Indians are bilingual, using one language at home, and some form of the lingua franca Hindi or ‘Hindustani’ outside their homes.162 However, on the basis of the data he received, Grierson divided dialects into two categories: those of the localities from which they were reported, and those spoken by ‘foreigners’ in each locality. He excluded the latter and focused on the former.163 The LSI did not engage with bilingualism in its mapping of languages or enumeration of speakers, and 36

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hence it could focus on dialectal and linguistic differences without bilingualism complicating its picture of India. The LSI’s predilection for the minutiae of dialectal differences, then, partly reflects its open-ended use of the term ‘dialect’. The terms Grierson uses, such as ‘true dialect’, ‘sub-dialect’, ‘mixed sub-dialect’, ‘mechanical mixture’ and ‘broken dialect’, suggests a flexible approach to dialectal variations.164 Masica has stressed there is no generally accepted criterion for distinguishing between a dialect and a language. There is also no universal criterion of how different a speech-variety needs to be from another to qualify as a separate language. In his view, while the LSI is not a dialect geography, it is a step in the right direction.165 Grierson’s ruminations on the difficulties of distinguishing between a dialect and language therefore also reflect how the distinction between the two cannot be clear-cut. Nonetheless, it is clear the Survey tends to highlight dialectal differences in India, while downplaying them in Britain itself. In his ambiguous responses to questions about the minuteness of dialectal variations in India and in the British Isles, Grierson wants to hold onto English as a diverse but contained entity. This is underlined by his comment in volume 1, part 1 of the LSI that In Northern India, there is no word exactly corresponding to our ‘language’, as distinct from ‘dialect’. All that the average Indian recognizes is dialect. Unless taught by European methods, he has no word for denoting a group of cognate dialects under one general head. He has numerous (hundreds of) dialect names, just as we talk of the Somersetshire and Yorkshire dialects, but no word parallel to our general term, ‘English’.166 For Grierson’s Indian critics, the question of India’s linguistic diversity touched on the issue of political unity, as is hinted in Latifi’s comments earlier. In 1911 the Census commissioner observed ‘a tendency in certain quarters to belittle linguistic differences’ in an effort to push Hindi forward as a pan-Indian lingua franca.167 For Gandhi, terms like Hindi, Hindustani and Urdu were different names of the same speech, like the dialects of Cornwall, Lancashire and Middlesex were of English, and he wanted the language known under these different names to be the link language in independent India.168 As far as Gandhi was concerned, there ought to be a parity between thinking of the dialects of Hindi-Urdu as one language and the dialects of English in the British Isles as one language. Nehru was more forthright in his Autobiography (1936). He criticised colonial Censuses for classing 37

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many ‘petty languages’ with only a few thousand speakers as different languages. This was a deliberate act of misrepresentation: ‘one of the legends about India which our English rulers have persistently circulated all over the world is that India has several hundred languages’. Moreover, multilingualism in European nations such as Germany is not seen as proof of its ‘disunity’.169 In Discovery of India (1946), in an implicit reference to Grierson, Nehru refers to the colonial tendency to highlight India’s linguistic diversity as ‘a fiction of the mind of the philologist and the census commissioner’, who note every dialectal variation and every ‘petty hill-tongue’ with a few speakers as a separate language.170 He also argued that if the same method were to be applied to Europe, it would have ‘hundreds of languages’ and Germany alone would have 60. Thus, for some Indian nationalists, the linguistic diversity of India as presented by the LSI and the Censuses reflected colonial hostility to India’s political unity. British responses to the completion of the LSI, on the other hand, were different, with some seeing it as evidence of the benefits of British rule in India: ‘no country in the world has a parallel to this achievement, and I hope that no one in India questions this benefit of British rule’.171 This was echoed by some scholars in the 1940s, for whom the Survey was ‘one of the most unquestioned glories of British rule’.172 Nehru, Gandhi and other Indians, however, were more sceptical about the Survey when it came to its enumeration of Indian dialects.

Grierson’s political affiliations In addition to the Survey’s colonial aspects, Grierson and some of his British correspondents held conservative political views, sometimes linking communism with anti-colonial nationalism in a map of fear. In 1920 D.L. Lorimer referred to how ‘we have Afghan wars and Bolshevism and revolt hanging over us in India’. Emily Lorimer was of the view that the Germans were in league with ‘Sinn Fein & Gandhi & Bolshevism’.173 In 1918 Sten Konow was fearful of Bolshevism and ‘the lust after others’ possessions [which] is a contagious disease’, and hoped the social fabric of England and France would be strong enough to resist the communist challenge.174 Grierson helped with the papers of a Russian scholar who was a refugee from Bolshevism,175 and saw the global situation in 1920 in terms of a conflict between capital and labour, with labour winning.176 For Lorimer, if India became a self-governing dominion in the Empire, Indians would ‘swamp all our crown colonies and Dominions which will cease to be British in any 38

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effective way . . . Purge the Empire of all large wholly alien and nonassimilable elements & it may continue to flourish for centuries, not otherwise’.177 Emily Lorimer was supportive of Dyer, who in her view ‘had an impregnable case & spoilt it with his silly talk’. When the Simon Report came out, Lorimer was dismayed that the idea of one ‘race’ ruling another for its own good had become an ‘anachronism’.178 From the early 1920s onwards Grierson and his European correspondents began feeling the pressures of Indian and Asian nationalism in academe. The difficulties of keeping the periodical Indian Antiquity afloat were interpreted in this light by Aurel Stein, who in the early 1930s saw it as a record of the Indian researches of British ICS officers and European scholars that needed to be preserved.179 He expressed irritation at the difficulties created in his Central Asian fieldwork by the ‘nationalist agitation of young China and the tergiversations of the Nanking government’. His view about the threat of nationalism extended to the ‘intellectual poison gas’ of ‘self-determination’ in Ireland.180 Ralph Turner (1888–1983), who from 1920 to 1922 was professor of Indian linguistics at Benares Hindu University, felt his tenure in India would be insecure with an Indian minister of education and the likelihood of an Indian director of public instruction (hereafter DPI) ‘in the midst of the constant intrigues that are proceeding against Englishmen’. He was afraid his present post would be earmarked for an Indian, and hence decided to apply to the Sanskrit chair at SOS with Grierson as a referee. The visit of the British prince to India reinforced his anxieties, because the prince was met with a complete strike; ‘this and worse has happened wherever he has gone in British India’.181 Grierson was also sensitive about British criticisms of colonial India, sending an article by M.M. Chatterjee called ‘The Revolutionary Spirit in Bengal’, which appeared in the Calcutta Review, to a correspondent who wanted to use it as ‘a definite answer to the mischievous ideas embodied in “A Passage to India” ’. Grierson was therefore on the lookout for Indian expressions of loyalty in the Indian press which could be of service against increasing criticism of British rule.182 In the 1930s, when the legitimacy of British rule in India was looking increasingly frail, Grierson had connections with three conservative lobby groups committed to protecting the imperial tie with India. On the bicentenary of Warren Hastings’s birth in December 1932 the ICS Retired Association (of which Grierson was a member) placed before Hastings’s monument in Westminster Abbey a tribute ‘In grateful memory of one of the greatest Britons who have served India; the man whose steadfast courage saved India from chaos, and established for 39

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her enduring links of Union in Peace, Justice, and Humanity’.183 Grierson also played an active role in the Camberley committee (where he resided from 1900 onwards) of the organisation called the Union of Britain and India (hereafter UBI), aimed at preserving Britain’s imperial ties with India. In 1935 the president of this committee wrote to Grierson about the 1935 Government of India Act, thanking him for his help as a member of the UBI, which ‘had a considerable effect in moulding public opinion here on sound lines’ in relation to the act. The UBI’s president, Lord Goschen, also wrote to the Camberley committee in appreciation of their contribution to the UBI’s ‘effective reply to some of the propagandist efforts made by the other side’.184 Grierson was also connected to the Indian Empire Society. In 1930 Sir Mark Hunter wrote to him on behalf of the society, asking for his support in increasing public ‘understanding of the vital issues at stake and of the dangers which now lie directly ahead of us’ in India. The society consisted of those sympathetic to maintaining British rule in India, and former governors of Indian provinces ‘intimately acquainted with Indian conditions, and with all sections of the vast populations for whose welfare the British people have become responsible’.185 It saw Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation and the Government of India Act 1919 as making pledges ‘to administer the Government of the Country for the benefit of all our subjects therein’ and stressed any constitutional advance should be subject to conditions embodied in the Government of India Act 1919, in particular the ‘provision that India should remain an integral part of the British Empire’. Its Draft Constitution sent to Grierson emphasised the Crown’s duty to safeguard the rights of peasants, artisans, industrial workers and minority and backward communities, who ‘are incapable of protecting their own interests under any elective system’, to ensure the ‘observance of Treaties and Sanads which link the Indian states to the Crown’, and to maintain the recruitment of the ‘British element’ to public services to guarantee the discharge of these obligations. Grierson expressed his ‘warmest sympathy’, and his name was included in the list of supporters. For Sir Mark Hunter, the prestige of Grierson’s name ‘is an asset and an encouragement’.186

Conclusion Up to a point, then, the LSI articulates, reflects and reinforces colonial categories of thought. However, when Sir Mark Hunter asked for Grierson’s subscription to the Indian Empire Society in 1930, Grierson 40

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responded he was happy to be entered on the list of supporters but not to subscribe to the society. When his current subscription expired, he did not want it renewed.187 This ambiguity in his support alerts us to interruptions and tensions in the LSI’s colonial narratives. In fact, the latter are not as clearly dominant as they appear at first sight. As I shall show in the following chapters, much of the LSI consists of narratives and idioms which are at odds with a colonial sense of mastery. In the next chapter I consider the LSI’s distinctive relationship with the colonial state, which was loose and flexible, rather than a carefully administered one. As such, the Survey cannot be seen simply as a project of the colonial state that reflected its imperatives and power.

Notes 1 Linguistic Survey Files, S/1/1/19, Grierson to Manager, Gramophone Company, 18.6.1919, 21.6.1919 & 28.2.1921, and S/1/1/15, Grierson to Monsieur Cabaton, 24.6.1918, Asia and African Collections, British Library, London, hereafter LS Files. 2 LS Files S/1/2/2, Grierson to Secretary to Government of India, 4.10.1926, and Secretary to Government of India to Grierson, 24.11.1926. 3 George A. Grierson, The Bible in India, Anarkali, Lahore: Punjab Bible Society, c. 1904, p. 1. 4 India Office Records, IOR P. 2058, Major Pitcher and Mr. Grierson’s Inquiry into Emigration, 8.1883, Introduction. 5 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 1: General Introduction, Specimens of the Tibetan Dialects, the Himalayan Dialects, and the North Assam Group, Calcutta: Superintendent of the Government Press, 1909, pp. 5, 575; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Pt. 1: Introductory, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927, p. 193. 6 European Manuscripts, EUR 223/302, Grierson to Sir Richard Gregory, 4.7.1927, and Sir Richard Gregory to Grierson, 2.8.1927, Asian and African Collections, British Library, London, hereafter EUR only. 7 EUR 223/258, Grierson to Under Secretary of State for India, 15.11.1926. See also EUR 223/243, Grierson to Secretary, High Commissioner of India, 18.6.1929. 8 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 11: Gipsy Languages, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1922, pp. 17, 49, 64–6, 77–81. 9 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 190. 10 EUR 223/258, Grierson to P.H. Dumbell, 31.5.1923. 11 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 11, p. 83. 12 EUR 223/220, F.H. Brown to Grierson, 13.2.1917, and Grierson to F.H. Brown, 16.2.1917. 13 Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s the History of British India and Orientalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 19–20.

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29

30 31 32 33

EUR 223/320, Grierson to A.G. Shirreff, 11.7.1928. LS Files S/1/3/1, Grierson to Sir Andrew Fraser, 28.10.1905. EUR 223/332, Grierson to R.L. Turner, 12.6.1926. Majid Siddiqi, The British Historical Context and Petitioning in Colonial India, New Delhi: Jamia Millia Islamia, 2005, pp. 29–30. Ibid., p. 17. EUR 223/227, Mair, Civil Service Commission, to Grierson, 26.5.1908. EUR 223/227, Grierson to Mair, Civil Service Commission, 25.11.1908. Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. 93. India Office Records, IOR, p. 2058, Major Pitcher and Mr. Grierson’s Inquiry into Emigration, 8.1883, Ch. 10; hereafter Emigration Inquiry. LS Files S/1/1/15, Frederick G. Mynett to Grierson, EUR 223/320, Grierson to Shirreff, 26.4.1932, and EUR 223/297, Col. D.C. Phillott to Grierson, 3.1.1928. EUR 223/238, Grierson to Edward Gait, 21.3.1918. EUR 223/210, Van Manen, Asiatic Society of Bengal, to Grierson, 10.2.1933, and Grierson to Van Manen, 7.3.1933. Grierson, Emigration Inquiry, Ch. 10. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bodo, Nāgā, and Kachin Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, pp. 499, 502; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Western Hindī and Pañjābī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1916, p. 303; EUR 223/297, Col. D.C. Phillott to Grierson, 15.2.1923, 28.5.1925 & 22.2.1927. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 10: Specimens of Languages of the Eranian Family, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1921, p. 8; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 95; Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 2: Mōn-Khmēr and Siamese-Chinese Families (Including Khassi and Tai), Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1904, p. 5; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 93; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 11, pp. 10–11. LS Files S/1/14/2, Edward Gait to Grierson, 10.6.1910, in which the question is raised of how the Dravidian ‘ethnic type’ might really be the Munda ‘ethnic type’, and how through intermarriage their children gained a Munda ‘ethnic type’. Hence the Brahuis, who speak a Dravidian language, have neither ‘a Dravidian nor a Munda ethnic type’: ‘If the socalled “Dravidian” ethnic type were really “Dravidian”, we should expect some signs of it still to be found among the Brahuis. But there are none’. EUR 223/228, Mair, Civil Service Commission, to Grierson, 27.11.1923, attaching syllabi for ICS examinations. EUR 223/300, Francis Galton to H.H. Risley, 13.7.1886, and Prof Karl Penka, Müglitz, Austria, to Risley, 29.9.1886. LS Files S/1/14/1, Grierson to H.H. Risley, 30.12.1900, and H.H. Risley to Grierson, 31.1.1901. LS Files S/1/14/1, H.H. Risley to Grierson, 8.11.1901, and Grierson to Risley, 30.11.1901.

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34 EUR 223/324, Aurel Stein to Grierson, 3.2.1923, EUR223/283, D.L. Lorimer to Grierson, 18.11.1923, and Mrs Emily Lorimer, 19.11.1923. 35 EUR 223/289, Morgenstierne to Grierson, 20.7.1929. 36 EUR 223/226, S.K. Chatterji to Grierson, 22.2.1920. 37 EUR 223/301, T.C. Hodson to Grierson, 20.3.1928. 38 LS Files S/1/4/11, Grierson to T.C. Hodson, 30.1.1900, and T.C. Hodson to Grierson, 23.12.1900. 39 LS Files S/1/1/15, Grierson to T.C. Hodson, 18.5 1914. 40 LS Files S/1/4/4, Fardon to Grierson, 16.9.1907. 41 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 4: Muṇḍā and Dravidian Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906, ‘Introductory Note’. 42 Ibid., pp. 5, 278. 43 Ibid., p. 2. 44 LS Files S/1/1/7, Sten Konow to Grierson, 4.3.1904 & 29.3.1904. 45 LS Files S/1/2/4, Grierson to Babu Gauri Kant Roy, 6.3.1903. 46 LS Files S/1/4/4, Grierson to Gurdon, 22.10.1908. 47 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 3: The Bhīl Languages, including Khāndēśí, Banjārī or Labhānī, Bahrūpiā, & c., Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1907, p. 310; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bihārī and Oṛiyā Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, p. 311. 48 LS Files S/1/1/16, Grierson to E.H. Fallaize, Honorary Secretary of Royal Anthropological Institute, 7.12.1922, A.P. Percival to Grierson, 14.2.1923, and Grierson to Percival, 12.3.1923. 49 EUR 223/303, Grierson to Congress Secretary, Royal Anthropological Institute, 15.6.1934, and EUR 223/243, Grierson to Secretary to High Commissioner of India, 18.6.1929. 50 LS Files S/1/1/15, B. Laufer to Grierson, 2.5.1918 & 16.11.1918, and Grierson to B. Laufer, 17.5.1918. 51 LS Files S/1/1/15, Notice of Joint Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 15.1.1914, and Grierson to T.C. Hudson, 17.1.1914. 52 LS Files S/1/1/15, To Grierson, 26.10.1920, sender’s name illegible. 53 EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’. 54 LS Files S/1/3/1, Grierson to Sir Andrew Fraser, 28.10.1905. 55 Ibid., Grierson to Sir Andrew Fraser, 26.10.1903. 56 Ibid., 20.6.1907. 57 EUR 223/228, Grierson to Mair, Civil Service Commission, 14.5.1912. 58 David Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in India’, Modern Asian Studies, 1981, 15 (3): 649–721. 59 Ibid., p. 692 ff. 60 Ibid., pp. 692–3. 61 LS Files S/1/3/1, Grierson to Sir Andrew Fraser, 20.6.1907. 62 EUR 223/228, Grierson to Mair, Civil Service Commission, 14.5.1912.

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63 LS Files S/1/3/1, Grierson to Sir Andrew Fraser, 28.10.1905. 64 Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 354–5. 65 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 314–5; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, pp. 55, 67; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of the Bengali and Assamese Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent, Government Press, 1903, pp. 62–3; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 672–76, 714–18; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Rājasthānī and Gujarātī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1908, pp. 419–23; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 3, pp. 48, 66–8, 71, 78–83, 90, 115–18, 127–9, 134–6, 149–50. For a proverbial dialogue between a woman and a king, see George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8: Indo-Aryan Family (North-Western Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Sindhī and Lahndā, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919, pp. 144– 46; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 123–4. 66 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 6: Indo-Aryan Family (Mediate Group), Specimens of the Eastern Hindī Language, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1908, pp. 219–21. 67 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, pp. 273–9 where he refers the reader to Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 442, for the complete version; also ibid., pp. 728– 30, where he refers to another version in Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 309. For the same folk tale being used across languages and dialects, see George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Dardic or Piśācha Languages (including Kāshmīrī), Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919, pp. 104–5, 109–10; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 7: Indo-Aryan Family (Southern Group), Specimens of the Marāṭhī Language, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1905, pp. 348–50, 383–5; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, pp. 464, 474. For geographical spread and global parallels see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, pp. 269–99, 228; LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, pp. 408–11; LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 272, 408. 68 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 372, 378; LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 3, pp. 42–6. See also George A. Grierson, ‘A Further Folk-Lore Parallel’, Indian Antiquary, 1879, 8: 288–9. 69 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 699–702; LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 131–99, 268, 303; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: IndoAryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 4: Specimens of the Pahārī languages and Gujurī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1916, pp. 177, 178. 70 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 157–63; LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 304–6; LSI, Vol. 6, pp. 63, 99; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 724–7, 728–30. 71 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, pp. 411–12. 72 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, pp. 95–6. 73 For example, see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 126–9, and LSI, Vol. 11, p. 26.

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74 For example, Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 192–4; LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 134; LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 479. See also Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 3, pp. 158–62; LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 221–5, 444, 463–4; LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, pp. 184–5, 319, 322, 382, 403, 414–19; LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 54, 133–4, 221, 419; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: TibetoBurman Family, Pt. 3: Specimens of the Kuki-Chin and Burma Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1904, pp. 223–5, 233, 253, 280, 271, 291. 75 For example, Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, pp. 137–9, 210–12; LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 81–2, 150–2; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 7, pp. 103–5, 40–2. 76 George A. Grierson, Grierson, LSI, Vol. 2, p. 118; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 423. 77 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 419–22. 78 EUR 223/284, Grierson to Dhirendra Varma, 30.1.1924. 79 EUR 223/303, Grierson to J. Ph. Vogel, 27.10.1931. 80 George A. Grierson, ‘Some Bhojpūrī folksongs’, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, 1886, 18 (2): 211. 81 Christopher Shackle, From Wuch to Southern Lahnda: A Century of Siraiki Studies in English, Multan: Bazm-e Saqaft, 1983, p. 39, on how officials in Panjab for this reason marginalised older works of Siraiki literature produced by social groups linked to towns and cities; Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 353. 82 LS Files Grierson to Sir Andrew Fraser, 28.10.1905. 83 Ibid., Grierson to Sir Andrew Fraser, 28.10.1905. Some of Grierson’s Indian interlocutors broadly agreed with Grierson’s position. See EUR 223/291, Alkondaville Govindacharya to Grierson, 22.8.1909, on how the sympathetic binds created by literature would consolidate the British Empire and ‘the hearts of the East and West are certain to be brought nearer’. Some missionaries expressed similar views; see EUR 223/228, Grierson to Blaikie, Civil Service Commission, 15.10.1925, attaching a letter from a missionary in northern India to this effect. 84 LS Files S/1/1/15, The Royal Society of Literature, 2 Bloomsbury Square, London, n.d. 85 LS Files S/1/1/23, Grierson to Victor Harrison, Stephen Austin and Sons, 19.4.1917. 86 LS Files S/1/1/28, P.J. Hartog, Treasury Committee on the Organisation of Oriental Studies in London, to Grierson, 6.2.1908 & 8.2.1908. 87 LS Files S/1/1/17, Grierson to Charlotte Krause, 6.4.1926. 88 LS Files S/1/1/33, Grierson to Denison Ross, 1.10.1919; S/1/2/1, Grierson to Deputy Secretary of Government of India, Home Dept., 30.3.1903. 89 Javed Majeed, ‘Globalising the Goths: “The Siren Shores of Oriental Literature” in John Richardson’s A Dictionary of Persian, Arabic and English (1777–1780)’, in Simon Davies, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, and Gabriel Sanchez Espinosa (eds), India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Volatire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2014, pp. 53–77; Richard Steadman-Jones, Colonialism and Grammatical Representation: John Gilchrist and the Analysis of the ‘Hindustani’ Language in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Oxford: Philological Society, 2007, Conclusion.

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90 EUR 223/304, Grierson to Barnett, 22.7.1936. The biography is of Samuel White, who sailed to Madras in 1675 and became a ‘mandarin’ in Mergui, Burma, in December 1683. The author presents White and his companions ‘as if they were characters in an historical novel’; see Maurice Collis, Siamese White, London: Faber and Faber, 1936, p. 73. For examinations of colonial adventure narratives and the colonial romance quest, see Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling and Conan Doyle, Plymouth: Northcote House Publishing, 1998; Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980; Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 91 EUR 223/297, Grierson to Col. D.C. Phillott, 30.3.1928. 92 EUR 223/303, Stuart N. Wolfenden to Grierson, 29.5.1931, attaching cutting from ‘The Statesmen’ for 16.5.1931. 93 EUR 223/273, C. Trench to Grierson, 27.6.1928, and Maurice Collin to Grierson, 10.6.1928. 94 LS Files S/1/1/12, T. Grahame Bailey, 28.4.1929. 95 EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 2.1.1922 & 31.1.1924. 96 Ibid., 19.6.1921. 97 Emily O. Lorimer, Language Hunting in the Karakoram, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939, p. 5. 98 EUR 223/283, Grierson to Emily Lorimer, 9.7.1918. 99 Stein was also registrar of Panjab University and principal of Oriental College, Lahore (1888–1899), and principal of Calcutta Madrasah (1899–1900). 100 EUR 223/323, Stein to Grierson, 3.2.1906, 26.9.1915 & 29.2.1916, and EUR 223/324, Stein to Grierson, 25.3.1922, 7.1.1924, 21.1.1938, 14.9.1936, 6.4.1935 & 5.1.1935. 101 EUR 223/324, Stein to Grierson, 3.6.1924. 102 For frostbite see EUR 223/323, Stein to Grierson, 14.11.1908; see also Stein to Grierson, 4.2.1907, on having to endure icy winds; for mountain views and alpine vegetation see Stein to Grierson, 9.6.1918. See EUR 223/324, Stein to Grierson, 14.9.1936, on enduring heat, 24.6.1936 on living at high altitudes, 16.7.1931 on living on mountain tops. 103 EUR 223/323, Stein to Grierson, 15.6.1912. For this aspect of the boyishness of these narratives, see Jonathan Rutherford, Forever England: Reflections on Race, Masculinity and Empire, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997, Ch. 2. 104 Ibid., Stein to Grierson, 4.2.1907 & 27.9.1907. 105 Ibid., Stein to Grierson, 3.2.1906 referring to Ancient Khotan (1907), 14.11.1908 for accounts in the Times and Geographical Journal, 24.3.1910 on his writing of the Ruins of Desert Cathay (1912), 20.2.1917 on his Central Asian expedition 1913–16 and published accounts in the Geographical Journal in 1916, and 21.3.1918 attaching a cutting from The Pioneer reporting his lecture on his Central Asian travels to the French Academy. See also EUR 223/324, Stein to Grierson, 24.6.1936, on receiving and correcting the proofs of his Archaeological Reconnaisances in North-Western India and South-Eastern Iran (1937) in Kurdistan; to

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106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

Grierson, 15.7.1921, on receiving the proofs of The Thousand Buddhas (1921) and writing another travel memoir in Mohand Marg; to Grierson, 25.3.1922, on the progress of this memoir; and to Grierson, 27.1.1926, on correcting proofs of Innermost Asia (1928, 4 vols.) while travelling on a ship called ‘China’. EUR 223/323, Stein to Grierson, 27.9.1908. EUR 223/324, Stein to Grierson, 16.7.1931. Ibid., Stein to Grierson, 16.7.1931, and EUR 223/323, Stein to Grierson, 20.2.17. EUR 223/323, Stein to Grierson, 2.1.1919. Ibid., Stein to Grierson, 3.3.1902 & 27.9.1907. Ibid., Grierson to Stein, 8.7.1912, and Stein to Grierson, 29.2.1916. EUR 223/324, see letters between Stein and Grierson on Tirahi, 15.9.1921, 25.9.1921 & 30.9.1921, and on Torwali, 6.9.1926, 29.6.1927, 11.8.1927, 19.8.1927, 13.9.1927, 23.10.1927 & 22.2.1928. Ibid., Grierson to Stein, 20.5.1923; see George A. Grierson’s, ‘On the Tirahi Language’, JRAS, 1925, 25 (3): 405–16; Aurel Stein’s ‘Notes on Tirahi: The Speakers of Tirahi’, JRAS, 1925, 25 (3): 399–404. George A. Grierson, Torwali: An Account of a Dardic Language of the Swat Kohistan, Based on the Materials Collected in Torwal with a Note on Torwal and Its People and a Map, London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1929. EUR 223/324, Stein to Grierson, 6.11.1929. EUR 223/323, Stein to Grierson, 2.1.1919 – the essay in question is ‘Marco Polo’s Account of a Mongol Inroad into Kashmir’, Geographical Journal, 1919, 54: 92–103. EUR 223/323, Stein to Grierson, 27.9.1907. Ibid., 15.10.1916. EUR223/324, 18.6.1919. Lionel C. Dunsterville, The Adventures of Dunsterforce, London: Edward Arnold, 1920, pp. v, 1. The book’s foregrounding of its literary qualities is evident on the first page, with its playful reference to a military and strategic campaign which ‘abounds in unavoidable alliterations’ (p. 1). The term ‘adventure’ is frequently used in the book. LS Files S/1/14/1, H.H. Risley to Grierson, 10.9.1902, Census Report (Seventh Note): Language. EUR 223/260, Government of India, Home Dept. Enclosures of Public Despatch to Her Majesty’s Under Secretary of State for India, No. 58, dated 16.8.1900. LS Files S/1/3/1, Grierson to Sir Andrew Fraser, 26.10.1903. European Manuscripts, EUR 223/227, Grierson to Bonar, Senior Examiner, Civil Service Commission, 15.7.1905. Grierson, Emigration Report, diary entry for 6 January and 15 January 1883. EUR 223/300, To Grierson, 5.5.1888 (sender’s name illegible). Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 45 footnote. EUR 223/220, Grierson to F.H. Brown, 11.5.1917. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 617–18, and LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 170. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 6, and LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 162.

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130 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 1, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 30 f.n., and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 30. See also the analogy between khari boli and ‘the old language of Kent’, LS Files S/1/5/1, Grierson to DPI, UP, 30.1.1917. 131 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 189. 132 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 231–2, 240–1, 245–6. 133 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 379. 134 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, pp. 109, 376, 821, 882, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, pp. 257, 260, 262, and LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, pp. 250, 246. 135 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 326, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 628, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 201, and LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, pp. 3–4. 136 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 154. 137 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 360, and EUR 223/291, Grierson to A. Govichandra, 15.9.1909. 138 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 4–5, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 627, and LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 173. 139 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 16. 140 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 129. 141 Ibid., p. 155. 142 Ibid., p. 153. 143 See my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, Ch. 5–7. 144 EUR 223/226, Grierson to S.K. Chatterji, 28.2.1920. 145 LS Files S/1/1/15, Grierson to Thomas P. Cummings, 29.8.1914. 146 For which, see Sidney I. Landau, Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 70–1. 147 Ibid., p. 81. 148 LS Files S/1/6/15, Sir James Wilson to Grierson, 19.9.1911. 149 LS Files S/1/1/28, Proposal for Phonetics Institute, p. 3. 150 LS Files S/1/1/35, Grierson to Sonnenschein, 31.10.1918. 151 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, pp. 28, 31, 35. 152 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, pp. 392–3 for Oriya in Balasore, and 201–4 on the ‘dialect’ of the eastern half of Ghazipur with very minor differences from the Shahpur dialect. 153 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 86–7. For another example, see LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 99. 154 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 586–602. 155 EUR 223/302, Grierson to A. Latifi, 12.12.1930. 156 EUR 223/222, Syamacharan Ganguli, ‘A Note on Some Points in the Government Resolution, No. 658, dated the 7th February 1905, on the Establishment of Rural Primary Schools in Bengal’. 157 LS Files S/1/14/2, Edward Gait to Grierson, 6.7.1911, ‘Notes for Report’, para. 5. 158 Ibid., Grierson to Gait, 1.8.1911. 159 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 23. 160 Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 352. 161 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 393–4, and LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 22–5. 162 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 22–3.

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163 Ibid., p. 19. 164 For some examples of these see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 321, and LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 186 for ‘broken dialects’, for ‘sub-dialects’ see LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 18–19, for a ‘mixed sub-dialect’ see ibid., p. 105, and for a ‘mechanical mixture’ see LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 369. 165 Colin P. Masica, The Indo-Aryan Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 23–5; for a definition of language and dialect, see Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, pp. 186–8, 216. 166 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 13. 167 LS Files S/1/14/2, Edward Gait to Grierson, 6.7.1911. 168 Mohandas K. Gandhi, Our Language Problem, Karachi: Anand T. Hingorani, 1942, p. 15. 169 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, 1936, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1982, pp. 453–4. 170 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, 1946, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 169. 171 MSS 223/330, F.W. Thomas to Grierson, 28.8.1927. 172 Menahem Mansoor, The Story of Irish Orientalism, Dublin: Hodges, Figgis and Co., 1944, p. 35. 173 EUR223/283, D.L. Lorimer to Grierson, 24.5.1920, and Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 14.2.1921 & 2.1.1922. 174 EUR 223/323, Stein to Grierson, 14.11.1918. 175 Ibid., Stein to Grierson, 5.9.1918. 176 EUR 223/270, Grierson to Sten Konow, 28.2.1920. For British fears of the spread of Bolshevism to India through Soviet agents and the development of Indian left politics in the 1920s, see Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947, Delhi: Macmillan India, 1983, pp. 117, 244–53. 177 E223/283, D.L. Lorimer to Grierson, 24.2.1922. 178 E223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 30.7.1922, and D.L. Lorimer to Grierson, 10.7.1930. 179 EUR223/324, Stein to Grierson, no date but c. 1924. 180 Ibid., Stein to Grierson, 15.7.1921 & 16.7.1931. 181 EUR 223/332, Turner to Grierson, 7.12.1921 & 14.12.1921. 182 EUR 223/220, F.H. Brown to Grierson, 25.2.1925. 183 EUR 223/256, ICS Retired Association Annual Report, 15.5.1933. 184 EUR 223/304, Sir William Heneker to Grierson, 8.8.1935, see also EUR 223/303, Owen Tweedy to Grierson, Union of Britain and India, 26.6.1934. 185 EUR 223/302, Sir Mark Hunter, the Indian Empire Society, to Grierson, 25.6.1930 & 30.6.1930. 186 Ibid. 187 Ibid.

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2 THE COLONIAL STATE AND THE SURVEY

From the outset Grierson felt the Survey was ‘beyond the power of private enterprize [sic]’ and that it needed the colonial state’s backing.1 The alternative of the various learned Asiatic Societies in India conducting it was unviable because of the ‘want of the power of official control’. ‘Official discipline’ was necessary because this would secure consistency in information gathering and presentation of results.2 Grierson therefore endorsed the Bengal government’s suggestion there should be an overall director for the whole survey rather than a set of provincial directors. This would ‘keep the whole in focus’ and ensure a systematic inquiry through ‘official control over the actual workers’.3 He reiterated this in his letters, stressing how having one person in charge guaranteed ‘a uniform scale’ of work.4 However, as I shall show in this chapter, Grierson’s official standing and that of the LSI were complex, and this gave him a degree of autonomy he otherwise might not have had. The Survey was not simply tethered to the colonial state, and the way Grierson steered it to its successful conclusion reflects both the opportunities and stresses of his complex relationship with the colonial government. Grierson’s conduct of the LSI is thrown into sharp relief by the failed Linguistic Survey of Burma, where multiple pressures from different parts of the colonial establishment and tensions between the latter and its superintendent derailed the project. Grierson also felt the colonial state should back the LSI because it had undertaken large-scale projects, like the Gazetteers and statistical surveys.5 In some ways, the Survey belonged to the earlier phase of comprehensive colonial data collection, which began in the 1860– 1870 decade and was exemplified by the first decennial Census of 1870–71.6 One of the reasons the state supported the Survey was that its results could be ‘usefully dovetailed into the Census results’.7 This was also the view of some involved in collecting information for the 50

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LSI in the 1890s. Abdullah Yusuf Ali wrote a note to the collector of Saharanpur in 1896 referring to the difficulties of making ‘ordinary people understand what is required’ for the Survey and complained about how work for it generated ‘meagre’ results. In his view, it ought to be folded into the next Census, as the best way to gather information for it was on an ‘individual by individual’ basis during the Census operations.8 A note appended to one of the LSI files attests to its close connection to the Census: ‘Much of this correspondence is more nearly connected with the Linguistic Survey than with the Census, but it is difficult to separate one from the other’.9 The Survey served the immediate requirements of the Census and provided a frame of reference for the identification of languages and dialects.10 However, the LSI’s relationship with the Census was by no means straightforward, and this again indicates how it was not simply a creature of the colonial state and its imperatives.

Grierson’s official status Grierson’s official status was complex. It is not clear whether Grierson attended the 7th International Congress of Orientalists in Vienna in 1886, where the idea of the LSI was mooted, as a representative of the Bengal government, the Government of India or the Asiatic Society of Bengal.11 This confusion is indicative of Grierson’s own complex role as the LSI’s superintendent, as he moved between colonial officialdom and scholarship conducted in his personal capacity, interacting with a range of groups in the production of Indian knowledge. According to Grierson, he presented the LSI proposal at the Congress in his personal capacity, although a communication from the secretary of state for India said he was to attend the Congress as the government’s representative.12 Grierson later attended the Paris Congress in 1896 as a delegate of both the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Indian government.13 Apart from the complexities of managing data gathering on a vast scale, and collating, analysing and writing it up, Grierson had to struggle with issues of government bureaucracy. It was not always clear which department the LSI came under, because departments morphed into new entities while it was in progress. At various stages Grierson reported to the Home Department, the Education Department, the Department of Industries and Commerce and the Department of Education, Health and Lands.14 This delayed the emergence of some of the volumes.15 At one point proofs were lost, because the official 51

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they were addressed to was no longer in service.16 Grierson also did not know whether the clerk employed in England for the LSI, Ernest H. Hall, was his or the secretary of state for India’s employee. It later transpired he was the India Office’s employee.17 Grierson was also not informed of the separation of the Central Publication Branch from the Government Press in 1924 until February 1928, which meant that the distribution of the volumes was no longer done by the press.18 At the provincial level, officials complained of how the Survey’s correspondence was passed from department to department before it reached them after considerable delay.19 Grierson had to deal with the bureaucracies of the princely states as well. For example, he obtained the parable of the prodigal son in the Sarada script by appealing to the chief minister to the Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir.20 In the 1930s as Grierson tried to bring the gramophone recordings to a close, communication between him and India became even more complex; he had to communicate with the Indian High Commission in London, which communicated with the Government of India, which in turn communicated with local governments.21 Thus, the LSI’s interaction with the colonial state was far from smooth and it was not an unproblematic extension of the colonial state’s machinery.

The LSI’s finances The Survey’s finances were also uncertain. In 1890 Grierson estimated 3.5 lakh rupees as the Survey’s cost, based on provincial governments’ estimates. This did not cover the cost of the grammars, which had to be met independently. Provincial governments and some Rajput states promised further ‘indefinite’ sums, so at this stage Grierson hoped for a mixture of financial sources. This seemed to be part of the course for at least some British orientalist and lexicographical works; Turner’s Comparative and Etymological Dictionary of the Nepali Language (1931), for example, was jointly financed by the Nepali government, the RAS, the Government of Bengal and the undersecretary of state for India.22 Of the 3.5 lakhs about 1 lakh was estimated as the cost for the Survey of Dravidian languages, to be borne by the Madras government. The latter, however, felt it should do its own survey, ‘on its own system, and . . . for less money’. It intimated that ‘that there are no officers in Madras competent to concoct the skeleton grammar’ and suggested this ‘should be done in Europe’.23 It thus appears Madras opted out of the Survey partly because of lack of funds. After the Vienna Congress recommended the Survey to the Indian government, Grierson felt that 52

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‘financial pressure’ would mean the Survey would not be accepted, ‘unless it can be shown that the cost will not be excessive’.24 Officials stressed the ‘troublesome and expensive’ work involved in compiling lists and specimens of dialects. H.G. Joshi, assistant master of a high school in Belgaum, referred to the ‘arduous nature’ of this task, which required travelling around on vacation time and making payments to ‘wild tribes’ to get information. He asked for extra payment for writing up the specimens of hitherto unwritten dialects and an honorarium on completion.25 When the LSI was proposed Risley questioned putting European officers on special duty given the state of Indian finances, and for this reason he thought it should be part of the Ethnological Survey.26 In 1895 the Indian government sanctioned only 2,000 rupees annually for three years for the Survey.27 In the end no special funds were allocated to it except for the cost of printing and one clerk; it had to be carried out by officials ‘as part of their regular duties’.28 As Grierson put it succinctly, the LSI consisted of himself and one clerk. For the cost of the gramophone recordings, and for the Survey in general, he relied on ‘the charity of the various Indian local Governments’ and the Government of India.29 Similar issues about funding were also faced by the planned Linguistic Survey of Burma.30 The LSI, therefore, was not heavily financially dependent on the colonial state; this contributed to the looseness of its relationship with the government while increasing its dependence on the goodwill of colonial officials, which Grierson had to cultivate.

‘Special duty’ Grierson supervised the Survey’s first stage in his spare time as it was not then part of his official duties.31 Works like Bihār Peasant Life (1885) were also written in his spare time; one of its reviewers wanted to call attention to the fact that ‘an Indian civilian, overwhelmed with official work, has had the energy and found the time to engage in literary work’.32 However, in 1896–97 Grierson told the India Office (hereafter IO) the Survey’s second stage required a full-time officer.33 He could edit and arrange the specimens only if he were placed on ‘special duty’. The Indian government turned this request down because it could not spare him from his duties as a senior official.34 In December 1897 Grierson announced he would take his entitled furlough in April 1898 as a prelude to his retirement after 25 years of service. He could work on the Survey in Shimla while on furlough and then in his retirement, with an additional allowance.35 In January 1898 Grierson had 53

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an interview with J.P. Hewett of the IO about an honorarium for the LSI and an additional allowance to his furlough pay. In a follow-up letter in February, he argued that he would accept a smaller honorarium if the Indian government consented to his going to England on furlough pay, where he would then draw his pension in sterling. Grierson sold this idea as a money-saving exercise, while stressing that such a move would delay the completion of the Survey because of the distance from his sources and the time for conducting correspondence between India and Britain.36 The secretary of state agreed to the additional allowance, but not to the move to England.37 Grierson’s official title of ‘On Special Duty with the Linguistic Survey’ was sanctioned on 5 May 1898, and his salary for this was considerably less than his salary as opium agent in Bihar, the post he held at the time of his LSI appointment.38 However, in 1898 Grierson announced he would have to move to England for health reasons. Unless he could complete the Survey in England, it would have to be abandoned.39 Faced with this ultimatum, the IO agreed, with Grierson retaining his official title of ‘On Special Duty’.40 While in England he worked for free on the LSI during his furlough period.41 Grierson retired from the ICS in September 1903, and carried on with the Survey from that date without any salary, although he continued to receive an allowance from the IO of £400 per annum for expenses, such as clerical assistance and typewriters; this was considerably less than his estimate of the total cost of work in England of £1,000 per annum.42 His assistant in London, Sten Konow, was paid from November 1900 to December 1905, after which his salary was halved and Grierson’s yearly allowance was reduced from £400 to £300.43 Thus, the Survey became ‘official’ with Grierson’s appointment to ‘Special Duty’. The term ‘Special Duty’ encapsulates Grierson’s distinctive position in relation to the colonial state. It suggested a flexibility and degree of autonomy outside the normal parameters of official service. Grierson also had a loose connection with the colonial state because he supervised most of the Survey while in retirement. In some ways, the Survey had no official place in India itself since for 25 of his 30 years as superintendent, Grierson was overseeing it from Camberley in Surrey.44 Its ‘office’ in England was Grierson’s study in his house in Camberley, which one of his correspondents called ‘your own workshop of languages’.45 The distance between Camberley and India reinforced the LSI’s semi-detached relationship to the colonial state in India, especially after its Calcutta office was closed in March 1901, 54

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and its Shimla office in September 1901.46 At the same time, Grierson was anxious to retain his title of ‘Officer on Special Duty’ after his retirement in 1903; this would give him locus standi in his correspondence with officials in India, and it would increase the chances of officials following instructions and requests within the allotted time.47 Moreover, for some time after his move to Camberley, Grierson gave his address as the India Office, Whitehall,48 thereby calling attention to his official standing for a period of time after his retirement. Thus, for a variety of reasons, Grierson’s formal relationship with the colonial state in India was a flexible one rather than a carefully managed and supervised connection. This gave Grierson a degree of autonomy he might not otherwise have had. While Grierson’s interactions with local officials in India were extensive, and enabled in part by the information in the Civil Lists he was sent by provincial governments, which were of great help in its prosecution,49 a significant part of the Survey’s work was done in collaboration with non-officials. He was ‘indebted for a great portion of my materials to missionaries and non-officials’, and proofs of the volumes, or parts of volumes, were sent to them to be corrected.50 The LSI files and volumes testify to this extensive reliance on non-officials, and this again underlines the Survey’s semi-official status. At the same time, this semi-detached relationship to the colonial state created challenges for Grierson. At the time of the original proposal the Bombay government commented that the director ‘must be able to make his influence felt throughout the whole survey’.51 Grierson had to create an aura around his name and an authoritative persona to make the LSI work, as he was reliant on the ‘charity’ of the Indian and provincial governments, and on the goodwill of district officers who had to collect information for it on top of their other duties. As he put it, the Survey was a ‘thousand-men job’ with material collected all over India by officials and non-officials.52 Grierson had to use his personal contacts to obtain information from district commissioners, many of whom saw the Survey as a burdensome extra duty for which no real provision had been made. He made personal requests to officials to complete tasks for the LSI in their own offices because ‘here in England, I have to do all such work myself, and your office could do it much better’.53 The Survey’s correspondence gives us an insight into how often specimens had to be chased up.54 At times the Indian government intervened directly to get provincial governments to co-operate with Grierson.55 One officer baldly stated, ‘there is no officer in the District who is competent or has the 55

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leisure to undertake the task’.56 The assistant collector in Bombay, A.H.A. Simcox, succinctly expressed this problem to the DPI when he wrote, ‘This work needs to be done by people who are interested in it alone, and they should have a knowledge of the principles of comparative philology. . . . General departmental orders will hardly produce much genuine result’.57 At times Grierson asked for a minutiae of information which officials with no linguistic background found difficult to produce, such as details about pronunciation which officials who were not phonetically trained would have found challenging.58 In a subsequent letter to the DPI, Simcox reiterated that LSI work ‘cannot be done in the ordinary course of official routine’.59 Grierson responded that he could have got the work accomplished more effectively if he had had an official assistant in each presidency, but financial stringency prevented this. In fact, the Survey’s original scheme envisaged a fuller organisational structure, either a hierarchical structure of provincial directors working under the superintendent or ‘a staff of experts, each responsible for one particular group of cognate languages’. However, this was considered too expensive.60 Moreover, in 1900 Grierson had requested the Bombay government to put an officer on special duty for the LSI, but this request was not granted.61 Grierson agreed with Simcox that ‘official routine is not the best way of getting the information which I want . . . but under the circumstances in which I am placed in this Survey it is the only one available’.62 These problems became more acute when the LSI’s ‘office’ was closed in December 1928, after which Grierson felt he had no authority to direct the completion of the Survey’s gramophone recordings and he had to appeal to the Indian high commissioner to undertake this task.63

The LSI and the Census Language was of interest to the colonial Census in India from the first Census of 1872, but only as an index of ‘nationality’ and a measure of population change. The 1881 Census saw both language and birth place as indicators of ‘nationality’.64 In these Censuses there was no overall scheme for language.65 In October 1900 H.H. Risley, the Census commissioner, told Grierson that because of the progress in knowledge about Indian languages brought about by the LSI since the 1891 Census, he had instructed officials to refer any ‘doubtful names’ of languages and dialects to Grierson, who would fill out the columns for linguistic classification and the geographical spread of languages.66 56

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Risley stressed that officials’ statistical enumeration of languages and dialects should be in accordance with Grierson’s classification.67 According to Risley, in the 1891 Census one officer had postulated a ‘wild’ classification of languages; he wanted to guard against such ‘eccentricities’ by getting Grierson to inform superintendents about what the authorities in the field were saying.68 Another colonial official noted how a scanty knowledge of philology had resulted in ‘absurd’ conjectures about dialects which could distort specimens.69 Grierson was asked to send a note on each province’s linguistic history and on the ‘philological characteristics’ of languages to superintendents by mid-January 1901 for the Census. This material was to be the basis for provincial reports, ‘supplemented by any further particulars and local colouring’ by superintendents.70 Risley also wanted Grierson’s language chapter for the Census to summarise the LSI’s ongoing conclusions,71 and local governments were instructed to supply Grierson with copies of their Census reports.72 Grierson’s chapter for languages in the 1901 Census report was a preliminary draft of volume 1, part 1 of the LSI.73 His involvement in the 1901 Census made it the first one in which a competent linguist worked with Census commissioners to establish valid categories for the recordings of languages.74 Grierson was sent advance copies of the language chapters and statistics for the provinces of the 1911 Indian Census for the LSI, and in 1924 he requested the All India report and statistics from the Census commissioner so that the final volume of the LSI could go to press.75 Thus the exchange of information between Grierson and the Census continued into the Survey’s final stages in the 1920s, with Grierson requesting proofs of the Census and its 1921 figures for the Survey’s introductory volume, and Census officials likewise requesting proofs of the Survey’s volumes.76 Grierson also used the maps in the 1911 Report on the Census of India as a template for the small-sized maps of India to be inserted into volume 1, part 1.77 His statistical summary of the LSI and its comparison with the 1911 Census was printed separately for Census officials, but the type was left standing for volume 1.78 Grierson continued to receive Census reports until 1931 for all the Indian provinces.79 Thus, there was a close connection between the Census and the LSI. However, Grierson’s work for the 1911 Census also appeared separately, as The Linguistic Survey of India and the Census of 1911 (Calcutta, 1919).80 In 1903 Grierson asked the Census commissioner to print extra copies of his Census chapter on languages for scholars ‘who only wanted to study the question of Indian languages’.81 These 57

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publications show how the Survey’s work could be detached from the Census to serve another readership. Grierson also described himself as skimming ‘the cream’ of each Census volume rather than incorporating the Census results entirely into the Survey.82 From the outset, he was anxious about how his engagement with the Census might hinder the Survey’s progress, since the LSI’s work could not be ‘dropped altogether for a lengthened period, and then taken on again, without injury and considerable expense’.83 Equally, he felt there was a conflict between his LSI work and his work for the Gazetteers.84 It was therefore in Grierson’s interest to make sure that his work for the Census could be utilised in the LSI, while also ensuring that the Survey came into its own as a project in its own right. At the same time, it could ride on the back of the Census for some of its information. The correspondence between Grierson and the Census officials from the early 1900s onwards shows how the latter were apprised of and worked with the reclassification of languages in the LSI, with some of them recasting their material accordingly.85 Sometimes officials contested Grierson’s classifications. There was also some discussion as to the feasibility of translating the LSI’s advances in the knowledge of Indian languages into the structure of the Census’s returns.86 However, as the Survey progressed, it ceased to be subordinate to the Census. By 1911 the Census commissioner noted that the ‘question of language and dialect has now been fully dealt with . . . in the volumes of the Linguistic Survey’ so the language chapter in the next Census could be briefer.87 In 1920 the Census commissioner stressed this again; by now the LSI had done so much to place the classification of languages and dialects in India on a scientific basis and to clear up vexed questions regarding linguistic affinities that it seems doubtful whether there is much scope left at this census for a detailed treatment of language.88 Thus the Census was adjusting to the LSI when it came to languages and its scope was being reduced. The notes circulated to provincial superintendents in 1921 contain a number of references to the Survey, and superintendents were required to explain any variations between their own figures and the distribution of languages and the LSI’s findings.89 In 1921 provincial superintendents were sent Grierson’s index of language names prepared as an appendix for volume 1, part 1, as well as his pamphlet comparing the 1901 Census with the LSI figures.90 58

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After the Census commissioner read the typescript of volume 1 of the Survey, he opined, ‘There is practically nothing left for us to say on the subject of the languages of India in this census except to bring out such statistics as we have been able to collect, and collate them with those of your Survey’.91 In general, there were differences between how the Census and the Survey approached languages, given that they were different kinds of projects, and the Census sometimes struggled to translate the LSI’s findings into its own framework. The Census tended to deal with languages rather than dialects, while the Survey was an ‘exhaustive conspectus of all the dialects of each language examined’;92 hence Grierson sometimes had to modify his ‘Index of Languages and Dialects’ for the purposes of the Census. For the 1901 Census, he did not include a number of dialects ‘on the principle that only main dialects were to be included in the classification’; these omitted dialects were ‘all hybrids, – mixtures of two languages – which a census could hardly be called upon to tabulate out’.93 As one correspondent commented, the list of languages Census officers were given to work with does not give all the details a philologist would like, but the Census was not concerned with philological niceties.94 Similarly, in an exchange of letters with L.G. Sedgwick in 1922 on the Bombay Census report on languages, Grierson agreed the distinction between Lahnda [Siraiki] and Panjabi was a ‘purely Grammarian’s business’. It was fine to ‘lump’ them together in the Census schedules. The LSI had to make distinctions ‘from the point of view of philology, [but] it is not . . . of consequence for administrative purposes’.95 Grierson’s philological distinctions also disorientated Census officials. In the early 1900s they stressed the difficulty in distinguishing between Bihari and Hindi, since many respondents returned their language as ‘Hindi’. Grierson had to plead with officials, ‘Can you not separate Bihārī as a whole from Hindī? The two languages are so entirely different that it is worth trying’.96 Census officials also struggled with Grierson’s differentiation between Rajasthani and Hindi.97 The DPI of UP found it difficult to translate the LSI’s fine-grained philological distinctions into school-level pedagogy, and was unclear as to whether school and matric courses should teach a knowledge of the history, distribution and classification of different language groups under the generic name of ‘Hindi’.98 As late as 1923 the ICS commissioners asked for clarification about the category of Hindi; they were ‘uncertain as to which language it is that is prescribed under the name of Hindi for Bihar and Orissa and the Central Provinces’. Following 59

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Grierson’s scheme in the LSI of an inner ring, outer ring and midland group of Aryan languages, they asked, Is our Hindi the Western Hindi of the Midland Group or the Eastern Hindi of the Inner Ring? If it is Western Hindi, does it differ from Urdu mainly in being written in Sanskrit characters instead of Persian characters, and ought we to say that for the purpose of the rules in question Urdu and Hindi are the same language?99 So Grierson contributed to some officials’ uncertainties about Hindi and Urdu, and they found it difficult to grapple with his philological niceties in their enumeration. Grierson’s philological distinctions were also ignored when these clashed with the administration’s perception of languages – for example, in Bihar, when it was politically convenient to group Bihari under Hindi because it suited the government’s emerging language policy in the region.100 In fact, as Brass has stressed, there have been very few, if any, scientific counts of language based on philological distinctions in the Census of India.101 The politicisation of the Hindi-Urdu issue affected Census returns, as well as the state’s decision to sometimes count them as separate languages and sometimes under Hindustani.102 There was also genuine uncertainty on the part of speakers and Census officials at the ground level as to the differences between Hindi and Urdu, Hindi, Bihari and Rajasthani, and Hindi, Urdu and Panjabi. This partly reflected the remnants of a linguistic ecology in India in which these languages, and the names for them, had not completely stabilised into clear-cut discrete entities.103

The Linguistic Survey of Burma Thus, the LSI carved out a space for itself in relation to the Census, while remaining connected to it, and as it progressed, it overtook the Census when it came to language. It was not simply an extension of the Census, and the latter found it difficult to incorporate the LSI’s findings fully. The Survey also had an ambivalent relationship to the statistical enumeration integral to the Census.104 Similarly, the planned Linguistic Survey of Burma (hereafter LSB) emerged from the Burmese Census. Morgan Webb saw a possible LSB as a ‘natural sequence’ to his role as superintendent of Census operations in Burma from 1910 to 1912, and also saw it as remedying the defects of the 1911 Census in Burma when it came to languages and dialects.105 When he floated the 60

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idea of the LSB, he referred to how the Burma Census report of 1911 contained comparative vocabularies and linguistic information which supplemented the LSI and how the 1911 Census report for India had stressed the need for a survey of Burmese languages.106 However, unlike the LSI, the Burmese Survey did not get off the ground. The LSI required Grierson to cultivate his aura and his public relations skills – in many ways, it was an exercise in goodwill both towards the colonial state and on behalf of it, as well as towards many prominent Indians in the field. The skill with which Grierson managed his complex position and his persona as an amalgam of semiofficial colonial servant in retirement while on ‘Special Duty’, survey superintendent, academic philologist and author in his own right is apparent in contrast to L.F. Taylor’s struggles with the planned Linguistic Survey of Burma. Burma was excluded from the LSI because in the latter’s earlier phases administrative control over the more remote districts of upper Burma was insecure and the Burmese government was preoccupied with its ‘primary and essential functions’ rather than ‘with secondary enterprises of the nature of a Linguistic Survey’. Burmese languages and dialects were relatively unknown, and preliminary work had to be done before a survey could be undertaken.107 In 1903 the Burmese government had provided a language map of the province for the LSI with difficulty; the 1901 Census did not have one for Burma.108 Moreover, grammars and dictionaries of the most important Indian languages were available to Grierson; this was not the case for Burmese languages. Hence, as Grierson said, the LSB would need to be ‘more thorough in fixing its foundations’ than the LSI.109 In May 1912 Morgan Webb, at the time the Burmese government’s secretary, contacted Grierson about conducting a LSB before the next Census. Grierson suggested collecting specimens on the model of the LSI.110 In 1914 Webb stated that administrative control over the remoter provinces in Burma was now more secure and there was more information available on Burmese languages and dialects, as seen in Major H.R. Davies’s work on frontier dialects in Yün-nan: The Link between India and Yangtze (1909).111 Webb felt an LSB, modelled on the LSI, and using its set piece of the prodigal son passage, was now feasible. The LSB would also be superintended by an officer on special duty who had ‘considerable linguistic attainments’ without necessarily being a philologist. It would rectify Grierson’s ‘partial and ineffective treatment’ of Burmese languages and dialects, which, in Webb’s view, prejudiced the LSI’s value; in fact, its volumes dealing with Burmese languages had not been ‘considered suitable’ for distribution in 61

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Burma. Until these volumes were ‘superseded by a record, complete in all respects for the eight groups of languages indigenous to Burma, the Linguistic Survey of India will not be an accomplished fact’.112 Volume 3, part 3 of the LSI declared that most of the dialects of Burma were as yet unknown; this was cited by Webb to argue for a LSB.113 The prospect of an LSB was enhanced by the existence of the Burmese Research Society, which was already conducting work on the lines of a survey on its own initiative. It did not, though, have adequate resources; hence Webb envisaged the society providing guiding expertise, with the government providing the infrastructure. The involvement of the society would ensure that investigations would not ‘degenerate into formal routine, reluctantly performed by an official in addition to his own duties, selected because he happened to be the only officer available on the spot’.114 For Webb, then, an LSB would complete the LSI, and it would learn from the latter’s difficulties with regard to reluctant officials.115 Grierson agreed with Webb’s assessment of the LSI’s handling of TibetoBurmese languages,116 and he hoped the LSB would solve the ‘great puzzle’ of classifying some Burmese languages and dialects.117 For Grierson an LSB would make up for the exclusion of Burma from the LSI, and it would ‘dovetail into and correct’ it; ‘the two together will  .  .  . form a complete picture of the linguistic conditions of the Eastern portion of the Indian Empire’.118 According to Sir Harcourt Butler in a speech to the Burma Legislature in April 1917, the first stage of the LSB had been completed by then.119 By July 1921 Grierson described the LSB as an ‘independent affair’ conducted by the Burmese government.120 In volume 1, part 1 Grierson referred to the LSB and the publication of a preliminary list of languages spoken in Burma. He incorporated this into his ‘Index of Languages Names’.121 Grierson requested permission from the Burmese government to use the LSB’s material for his own Survey.122 The Burmese government planned to use the 1921 Census to carry the LSB a stage further, and in February 1920 L.F. Taylor of the Imperial Educational Service was chosen as the deputy superintendent of the Census Operations in Burma for this purpose, his name being put forward by H. Tonkinson, the secretary to the Burmese government, because of his expertise in linguistics and ethnology.123 In November 1920 a copy of Taylor’s ‘Proposals for the Linguistic Survey of Burma’ was sent to Grierson.124 Taylor provided the technical linguistic knowledge for the language tables in the 1921 Burmese Census, and the superintendent wrote to Grierson in 1923 seeking his approval of Taylor’s linguistic 62

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classifications, which Grierson was happy to do.125 In general, Grierson deferred to Taylor’s greater knowledge of Burma as a linguistic region.126 There was also a close connection between the LSI and the planned LSB when it came to gramophone recordings of Indian and Burmese languages and dialects. In 1917 Taylor (then principal of the Government High School in Rangoon) was put in charge of the ‘Gramophone Survey of Burmese Languages and Dialects’, which was suggested to the local government by the Indian government at Grierson’s request in January 1917. The 38 records of 29 Burmese languages and dialects, with phonetic transcriptions, interlinear and free translations, short grammatical notes and vocabularies, and brief ethnological introductions, anticipated the next stage of the LSB.127 Taylor described the Gramophone Survey as ‘a small trial survey in itself’,128 and as the ‘skeleton’ of the LSB,129 and for a while Taylor conducted his correspondence using letters headed with ‘Gramophone Survey’.130 As Grierson noted, while in the LSI the gramophone recordings emerged well after the LSI began, in the planned LSB the two were connected from the start.131 Grierson hinted that the Burmese government, when proposing to start the LSB, had sent him a report suggesting that the value of the LSI would be increased by gramophone recordings. In this sense, then, while the LSB emerged out of the LSI, a part of the latter was also motivated by the LSB.132 The fact that both Taylor and Grierson attributed the idea of the gramophone recordings to each other suggests how closely intertwined the LSI and LSB were at this stage. When corresponding with organisations about the use of gramophone recordings in teaching civil servants Indian languages, Grierson referred to the LSB and its recordings.133 Like Morgan Webb, Taylor felt the LSB could learn from the LSI’s deficiencies. He criticised the latter’s use of scanty materials, the way it obtained the ‘maximum of constructions embodied in the minimum of material’, and the constraints of information produced by the set passage of the prodigal son. Taylor stressed he would be in the field, unlike Grierson. In his view, ‘it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of a method which enables one to investigate one’s language material in the field with the speakers of the language around to appeal to in all cases of difficulty’. The collection of materials would be ‘digested on the spot with the original speakers and be ready for comparison’, and when it came to classification, the superintendent would be ‘well equipped and able to test all views on the spot and to reconcile conflicting opinions’.134 63

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Taylor provided much information to Grierson up until the late 1930s, and the connections between the LSI and the LSB remained close. In 1919–20 Taylor sent Grierson the vocabulary of 38 Burmese dialects for the LSI’s Comparative Vocabulary.135 He also sent Grierson more information on varieties of Karen not noted in the Gazetteer of Upper Burma, as well as vocabularies of other tribal languages. For Taylor, sending Grierson lists of words from Burma meant he did not have to wait for the completion of the LSB to publish them and the lists also demonstrated that the time was ripe for a LSB.136 He intended to include the LSI’s vocabularies and collection of phrases in the LSB and frequently asked Grierson’s advice about how to conduct the LSB.137 His final standard vocabulary and set of phrases included all the words in Grierson’s standard vocabulary.138 He asked Grierson for copies of papers and minutes regarding the LSI’s operations as well as the circulars sent to district officers and missionaries who supplied materials.139 He also wanted advice on how to deal with the large quantity of linguistic material he collected.140 In 1918 when Taylor sent Grierson some recordings, he acknowledged that without Grierson’s help ‘the records would have been collected on a much smaller scale’.141 In 1929 the Department of Education, Health and Lands, under which the LSI had fallen, informed Grierson that Taylor had been entrusted with writing a short brochure on the Burmese ‘gramophone Survey’. This was to include notes on each of the languages/ dialects recorded, with cross-references to the accounts in the LSI.142 Later, in 1937 when Taylor proposed publishing the Burmese gramophone transcripts with ‘Linguistic Survey of Burma’ inscribed on the cover page, he stressed he would refer to how they were first prepared at Grierson’s request to supplement the records and results of the LSI.143 He wanted to make these transcriptions ‘worthy of a work which is the final instalment of the Linguistic Survey of India on the one hand, and the first instalment of the Linguistic Survey of Burma on the other’.144 He also asked Grierson to write a short foreword to this ‘first-fruit of the Burma Survey [as] it deserves such a christening from so appropriate an authority as yourself. It springs out of your activities, and nobody can better sponsor it’.145 Thus, the planned LSB and the LSI remained closely entangled with each other. Grierson and Taylor also shared an interest in tonal languages. In 1920 Grierson sent Taylor 30 copies of a note he compiled on tones for distribution in Burma, which had a number of tonal languages. As editor of the Journal of the Burma Research Society, Taylor facilitated the publication of this.146 In the same year, Grierson sent 64

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Taylor’s notes on tones in Burmese languages to Denison Ross at SOS, requesting him to publish these as an article in its Bulletin. Grierson arranged Taylor’s notes into an article form, which appeared in volume 1, part 4 of the Bulletin in 1920.147 However, while Grierson balanced a commitment to both the practical and philological aims of the LSI, thereby catering to its different constituencies, Taylor was perceived by senior officials as ‘more interested in the philological and scientific study of languages than in their practical use as means of speech’.148 This was also clear from Taylor’s plan to author a scholarly monograph on the languages of Burma as a prelude to the LSB.149 In a note on the LSB Taylor focused entirely on its appeal to philologists.150 In contrast, Grierson stressed the practical value of the planned LSB to district officers when he recommended it to officials.151 Thus, Taylor did not sell the LSB as useful to the colonial state in Burma, and this made its passage through the government machinery rougher than the LSI’s. Taylor’s connection to the LSB sheds a contrasting light on Grierson’s handling of the LSI. Like Grierson, Taylor suffered health problems and in 1918 he had to go on medical leave. In his view, this was brought on by overwork. His travel allowance had not been paid and he described himself as destitute.152 Taylor complained to Grierson in 1919 that the government ‘never realized the nature and the difficulty of the work, and on the other hand I fear that they doubt my ability to succeed. If they knew for certain that I could do work of any value, they would listen to me more readily’.153 Moreover, in 1921 Taylor had not yet passed the Burmese examinations required of local government officers. For the colonial authorities, he needed to be acquainted ‘in a practical manner with the premier language of Burma’ before he could lead any survey.154 As we have seen, Grierson was a substantial author on Indian languages and culture in his own right before he was appointed as superintendent of the Survey; as already noted, he had earlier advised Taylor to write a paper for the JRAS on his linguistic discoveries as this would help to secure the LSB and would ‘oil the wheels on which red tape is sometimes wound’.155 In the case of the LSI Grierson negotiated the interaction between professional and amateur scholarship, and between academe and colonial officialdom carefully. The LSI emerged from and was grounded in the interface between these different fields and their institutions. The LSB, however, moved from one institutional space to another and could not maintain multiple locations in different institutional spaces. In February 1922 Taylor said the Indian government was not 65

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sanctioning the LSB; instead he was to be appointed as research lecturer in linguistics and ethnology in Rangoon University, in which capacity he would conduct the LSB. This would release him from his official duties as a government servant.156 In July 1922 the Indian government recommended this appointment as an ‘experimental measure’, partly because it could not fund the LSB; it assumed that provincial governments would bear the cost.157 Taylor began as research lecturer at the university on 1 January 1923, his appointment being sanctioned for two years. Like Grierson, he struggled with byzantine bureaucracy, and his papers and applications ‘oscillated between the Director of Public Instruction, the Educational Secretary, the Finance and Revenue Secretary and the Minister for Education’, as well as the Governing Body of the College. In his view the bottom of the whole trouble is that all the Officials concerned are so overworked that they keep on putting off consideration of Linguistic Survey matters in order to deal with other matters, and when they do consider it they don’t read the papers carefully and express views which the next man immediately dissents from.158 The bureaucratic situation was such that even though he had completed the standard vocabulary and set of phrases in January 1924, Taylor could not get the material ‘printed until the Survey is officially recognized as being in existence’.159 Thus, while Grierson capitalised on and managed the LSI’s semi-official status, Taylor was working on a survey that was neither official, nor semi-official, nor non-official. It kept falling between different stools. Others referred to issues of bureaucratic delay as well. J.T. Marten, writing from the office of the Census commissioner in March 1920, complained that the All India Language Table was held up because of the Burma Table.160 In January 1924 Taylor complained to Grierson that he had to pay the touring expenses of his staff and their monthly salaries from his own pocket.161 However, in August 1924 the education minister recommended that the LSB be sanctioned for five years, and by November Taylor, writing on paper headed ‘University College Ethnographical and Linguistic Survey of Burma’ from Rangoon, intimated that the LSB was now officially in existence.162 His research lectureship was extended for three years from 1 January 1925, so that he could collect materials.163 In November 1926 the government decided not to fund the survey after the end of December 1927, but it then postponed that decision and 66

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extended it to December 1929. It was placed under the supervision of the College’s Governing Body by August 1928.164 By 1929, however, Taylor’s clerks had left to get more secure employment elsewhere and his office at Rangoon was locked. He had refused to publish his work when pressured to do so by the College Committee, as in his view, ‘publication of unrevised scientific work was a crime’. The College had decided that the attempt to ‘control my work by means of a Committee had proved a failure’. In August 1929 Taylor offered to retire from the Indian Educational Service and accept a special contract on reduced pay. His concern now seemed to be to resist ‘outside influence’ and interference in the LSB.165 By the late 1920s and early 1930s Taylor’s relationship with the colonial authorities had broken down. In November 1930 Taylor decided to continue the LSB ‘privately’; for him, the government’s sanction of the survey for only two years at a time had prevented the LSB’s completion.166 In June 1931 the government asked Taylor to refrain from criticising it, and the University of Rangoon no longer supported the Survey.167 In fact, Grierson thought the government felt Taylor was ‘insubordinate’.168 The onus was now on Taylor to fund the Survey and the issue arose of who ‘owned’ it. For Taylor, his labour and his pecuniary sacrifice meant the materials collected were his property. In the meantime, the secretary of education offered Rangoon University ‘the property of the Survey, a grant of 10,000 rupees per annum and my services’, which they rejected, while in August 1930 the secretary to government, Department of Education, refused to admit Taylor’s ‘preposterous claim that because half the work was done in Mr Taylor’s spare time the property in it remains with him’. For them, Taylor could resign from government service and carry on in a ‘private capacity’.169 By early October 1932 Taylor was referring to the Survey as ‘now definitely my own personal property, having been made over to me as such by the Government of Burma’.170 Taylor was also prohibited from communicating the contents of his official correspondence on the LSB, and according to him officials no longer recognised his position as supervisor of the LSB.171 Regarding the Burmese gramophone transcriptions, new type was cut by the firm Caslon and Company, but in January 1931 the government refused to bear the costs of printing.172 Once again, Taylor was under pressure to publish his results.173 He contrasted the LSB with the LSI to defend himself, pointing out that he had to collect and record languages himself – the materials for each language were ‘several times more copious’ than those collected for Grierson.174 He had had to do everything single-handedly.175 67

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In January 1934 Taylor was still using headed notepaper that referred to the Survey when corresponding from London, where he moved briefly in the early 1930s.176 In his memorial to the governor of Burma on the LSB, the issue of agency and ownership was again referred to. Here Taylor marshalled written testimonials and reports from organisations and individuals like Grierson, the Cambridge Board of Anthropological Studies, Dr C. Otto Blagden of SOS, Professor T.C. Hodson, Sir J.G. Frazer and Denison Ross, among others.177 Taylor’s troubled relationship with the Burmese authorities and the university continued into the 1930s, and Taylor tried to find money from private foundations, such as the Carnegie Trust, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. He also approached Heffer’s about printing the gramophone transcripts.178 From Grierson’s correspondence it appears that Taylor made an appeal for funds in a letter to the Times in July 1937.179 In the meantime, the Indian government complained that recordings of languages and dialects lent to Taylor by local governments had not been returned by him.180 In 1937 Taylor proposed printing the transcripts with both ‘Linguistic Survey of Burma’ and the University of Rangoon inscribed on the cover.181 In April 1937 Taylor implied that the university agreed to fund the printing of the transcriptions by Heffer’s.182 However, the printer melted down the type during the war without printing off any copies. Writing in 1948, Taylor mentioned he still had three sets of proofs and his original manuscript but there were no printed copies.183 Taylor’s struggles with the LSB affected his health. In August 1918 Webb told Grierson that Taylor had been recommended six months’ leave because of poor health. For Taylor this was brought on by overwork while doing the gramophone recordings and their transcripts in his spare time.184 Earlier Webb told Grierson that his own intention to do the LSB was frustrated by the illnesses of both his wife and child, followed by a ‘nervous breakdown on my own part’.185 In 1920 when Taylor was recommended as superintendent of the Survey, the secretary to the Burmese government noted Taylor’s ‘indifferent health’ and his involvement in a ‘protracted departmental case which affected his nerves and caused a severe nervous break-down’. In that year Taylor also confessed to ‘a bad fit of the blues’ about his tenure in government service.186 Six years later the government was again worried about Taylor’s health and wondered whether he could undertake the task.187 When Taylor corrected the section of the proofs of volume 1, part 1 of the LSI relating to Burma, he suffered a crisis of confidence and was ‘appalled at the responsibility I am undertaking 68

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in seeking to conduct a Linguistic Survey of Burma’.188 He was also alienated from a supremacist discourse of European civilisation, at one point expressing scepticism about the values of Europe’s civilisation in a quasi-official document, adding the comment ‘civilization will never deserve its name until it learns to save and not to destroy’.189 At other times Taylor expresses bitterness, a sense of persecution, stress, despair, demoralisation and some of the symptoms of depression.190 He was also elusive at times, with his whereabouts not always known; his address in London, for example, was given as care of Grindlays Bank and at other times he wrote to Grierson from Gibraltar.191

Conclusion By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, Taylor had amassed a considerable amount of material for the LSB, some of which had been given to the LSI, including recordings, an initial comparative survey of Burmese dialects,192 the vocabulary for 38 Burmese dialects (printed in the LSI, vol. 1, pt 2), and 1,194 words of vocabulary and 478 phrases in Burmese and English.193 He had also amassed a large collection of books on Burma, so here he matched the size of Grierson’s own private library and Grierson’s archival self.194 Like Grierson, he sought to do the Survey by retiring on his pension to continue the work.195 However, the LSB was never completed once the war was over, as Taylor was too advanced in age and could not get private funding to bring it to a close; the conditions in Burma were also too unsettled after the war to conduct fieldwork.196 Taylor’s struggles show how easily a linguistic survey in the subcontinent could unravel under multiple pressures. The question of whether the survey materials were his ‘private property’, the shift between government and private funding, and a government ‘fascist decree forbidding me to use my leisure time in my own way’ when Taylor offered to do the LSB in his spare time, point to problems with colonial officials’ scholarship in relation to the institutions of the Raj. On the one hand, such officials had to rely on the colonial state to support their projects; on the other hand, this raised questions about their autonomy in the field as scholars and the ownership of the knowledge and materials they produced and collected. Knowledge production and its institutionalisation could be at odds with each other. The LSB fell victim to an unwieldy and clashing medley of institutions. In the case of the LSI, Grierson operated in the grey area between officialdom and ‘private’ scholarship, balancing both against each other, forging relationships with people 69

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in and out of officialdom to keep the Survey afloat. Geographical distance from India, while a problem in some ways, also helped, as it meant Grierson did not get personally bogged down in the politics, both petty and otherwise, of institutions and their staff. It also made it easier for Grierson to project an aura and authority around his name, unblemished by day-to-day politics in India, and bolstered by his own scholarly oeuvre. While by the mid-1920s Taylor was described as persona non grata by the Burmese government,197 Grierson’s relationship with the colonial state, while complex, remained intact. At the same time, Grierson also had to grapple with long bouts of illness, and specifically with what he termed the ‘break down’ of his eyes. In the next chapter, I explore the links between the LSI, illness and selfhood to show how there are strong countervailing narratives to a colonial language of command in the LSI. Moreover, while Grierson did not seem as clearly alienated from a supremacist discourse of European civilisation as Taylor was, his Anglo-Irish background meant he had a complex subject position. This subject position meant he did not fully subscribe to such a supremacist discourse and, in fact, on one occasion he was seen by senior officials as providing support to Indian nationalism in his work.198 Some of Taylor’s assertions about governmental and university conspiracies against him have the whiff of paranoia about them.199 He frequently expressed being ‘disheartened by the lack of encouragement and even opposition met with in getting the Survey started’.200 However, not all of this was necessarily paranoia. One historian has argued one reason Taylor was frustrated in the LSB was that the colonial scholarly establishment in Burma saw Taylor and the LSB as a threat to their project to define a ‘Burmano-Buddhist narrative’ as the core ideology of the modern Burmese state. Taylor had explicitly criticised this narrative in an address to the Burmese Research Society in 1922.201 In contrast, as I argue in Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, some of Grierson’s views overlapped with one emerging form of Indian nationalism.202 This may have been another reason for the success of the LSI – it appealed to one important section of India’s political classes. This again reflected Grierson’s complex subject position, which is the topic of the next chapter.

Notes 1 European Manuscripts, EUR 223/299, Grierson’s Note on the LSI, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London; hereafter EUR only.

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2 Linguistic Survey Files, S/1/2/1, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, Home Dept., India, 15.1.1890, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London; hereafter LS Files. 3 Ibid. 4 LS Files S/1/4/13, Grierson to A.W. Davis, 16.4.1900. 5 EUR 223/299, Grierson’s note on the LSI. 6 Prabodh B. Pandit, ‘The Linguistic Survey of India: Perspectives on Language Use’, in Sirarpi Ohannessian, Charles A. Ferguson, and Edgar C. Polomé (eds), Language Surveys in Developing Nations, Virginia: Centre for Applied Linguistics, 1975, p. 71. 7 Pandit, ‘Linguistic Survey’, p. 73. 8 LS Files S/1/5/3, Note by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, 20.7.1896. 9 LS Files S/1/14/6, appended note. 10 Pandit, ‘Linguistic Survey’, p. 77. 11 EUR 223/272, Horace Walpole to Grierson, 24.8.1894, EUR 223/299, A.P. MacDonnell, Secretary to Government of Bengal, to Dept. of Finance and Commerce, Government of India, 28.12.1885, and W.W. Hunter to Grierson, 28.10.1885, 3.11.1885, 10.6.1886 & 30.6.1886. 12 EUR 223/272, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 4.12.1897, and EUR 223/299, India Office (hereafter IO) to Grierson, 13.8.1886. 13 EUR 223/182, Proceedings, Asiatic Society of Bengal, 11.1897. 14 LS Files S/1/2/2, Grierson to Secretary, Dept. of Industries and Commerce, 18.5.1926. 15 EUR 223/310, Grierson to Mrs Frazer, Secretary, RAS, 4.2.1928. 16 LS Files S/1/2/4, Babu Gauri Kant Roy, 20.3.1901. 17 EUR 223/257, Secretary of State to India to Grierson, 19.2.1907, and EUR 223/258, IO to Grierson, 16.10.1924. 18 EUR 223/258, Grierson to Sir Malcolm Seton, 21.9.1928. 19 LS Files S/1/9/10, A.H.A. Simcox to Grierson, 21.10.1901. 20 LS Files S/1/12/1, Grierson to Resident in Kashmir, 17.12.1914. 21 EUR 223/285, Grierson to F.H. Graveley, Superintendent, Government Museum, Madras, 27.5.1936. 22 EUR 223/333, R.L. Turner to Grierson, 3.7.1929, to Under Secretary of State for India, 15.12.1930, and to Grierson, 15.12.1930. 23 LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, Home Dept., India, 15.1.1890. 24 EUR 223/299, Grierson to W.W. Hunter, 22.12.1886. 25 LS Files S/1/9/12, Collector, Belgaum District, to Grierson, 19.7.1901, and H.G. Joshi, Assistant Master, Sirdar’s High School, Belgaum, to Collector, 5.12.1901 & 23.1.1902. 26 EUR 223/300, H.H. Risley to Grierson, 11.1.1887. 27 EUR 223/272, J.P. Hewett to Grierson, 26.6.1896. 28 EUR 223/302, Grierson to A.A. Bake, 19.2.1930. 29 EUR 223/279, Grierson to C. Latimer, 21.5.1917, and 223/275, Grierson to Chevenix Trench, 18.9.1917. 30 EUR 223/327, L.F. Taylor, 31.7.1922. 31 EUR 223/272, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 10.6.1896 & 4.12.1897. 32 EUR 223/299, P. Kielhorn to Grierson, 30.1.1886. For an important discussion of this text amongst others, see Shahid Amin (ed.), A Concise Encyclopaedia of North Indian Peasant Life, Being a Compilation from

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62

the Writings of William Crooke, J.R. Reid, G.A. Grierson, New Delhi: Manohar, 2005. EUR 223/272, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 10.6.1896 & 4.12.1897. Ibid., J.P. Hewett to Grierson, 26.6.1896. Ibid., Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 14.12.1897. Ibid., 7.2.1898. Ibid., J.P. Hewett to Grierson, 3.2.1898 & 22.2.1898. Ibid., Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 7. 2. 1898, and EUR 223/257, Statement by Grierson, 24.1.1902. EUR 223/272, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 2.3.1898, and to Fraser 28.5.1899 & 8.6.1899. Ibid., 10.6.1898. EUR 223/257, Statement by Grierson, 24.1.1902. Ibid., IO to Grierson, 23.10.1902, 13.3.1903 & 19.8.1903. Ibid., Grierson to IO, 7.11.1900 & 31.10.1905. LS Files S/1/14/1, Grierson to Herbert Risley, 18.9.1900, in which Grierson says that he has now been in Camberley for a year. EUR 223/229, Johnson, Clarendon Press, to Grierson, 22.6.1928. LS Files S/1/2/4, Babu Gauri Kant Roy, 20.3.1901 & 12.9.1901. EUR 223/257, Grierson to IO, 5.5.1903, and LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, Home Dept., India, 15.1.1890. LS Files S/1/12/3, Grierson to R.T. Clarke, 27.9.1900. EUR 223/249, Grierson to Secretary Government of India, 12.7.1932, and EUR 223/214, Grierson to Secretary Government of Bihar and Orissa, 13.7.1932, pp. 223–4. LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to J.P. Hewett, 10.9.1901. Ibid., Grierson to Hewett, 15.1.1890. EUR 223/328, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 13.9.1932. LS Files S/1/14/1, G. A. Grierson to Census Commissioner for India, 20.10.1921. For example, see LS Files S/1/2/4, Grierson to Babu Gauri Kant Roy, 17.12.1900, 5.2.1901 & 26.3.1901, and S/1/6/6, Grierson to Dept Commissioner, Firozpur, 12.1.1903, chasing up the specimens from Firozpur. LS Files S/1/9/10, Copy of Letter from Government of India, Home Dept., No. 2698, 21.11.1889. LS Files S/1/9/7, B.A. Brendon Acting Collector of Ahmadnagar, to Grierson, 29.11.1901. LS Files S/1/9/10, A. H. A. Simcox to DPI, 13.6.1900. For example, see LS Files S/1/6/9, Grierson to Deputy Commissioner, Rawalpindi, about the genitive postposition in some of the specimens returned; for some good examples of minute details of pronunciation, see, for example, George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 10: Specimens of Languages of the Eranian Family, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1921, pp. 28, 35, 39. LS Files S/1/9/10, A. H. A. Simcox to DPI, 17.7.1900. EUR 223/327, Grierson to Secretary, Burmese Government, 20.6.1921. LS Files S/1/9/16, Grierson to Chief Secretary, Government of Bombay, 17.12.1900. LS Files S/1/9/10, Grierson to A. H. A. Simcox, 16.8.1900.

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63 EUR 223/243, Grierson to Indian High Commissioner, 1.3.1935; 223/327, Grierson to Secretary, Burmese Government, 20.6.1921. 64 Richard Burghart, ‘A Quarrel in the Language Family: Agency and Representations of Speech in Mithila’, Modern Asian Studies: 1993, 27 (4): 780. 65 Pandit, ‘Linguistic Survey’, pp. 77–8. 66 LS Files S/1/14/1, H.H. Risley to Grierson, 17.10.1900. 67 Ibid., 10.9.1902. 68 Ibid., 13.12.1900. 69 LS Files S/1/9/16, DPI, Poona Office, to Grierson, 17.2.1903, attaching note from A.H.A. Simcox, 22.1.1903. 70 EUR 223/260, Home Dept., Government of India, to Under Secretary of State for India, 16.8.1900, LS Files S/1/14/1, Grierson to H.H. Risley, 18.9.1900, and H.H. Risley to Grierson, 10.9.1902. 71 LS Files S/1/14/1, H.H. Risley to Grierson, 11.1901. 72 LS Files S/1/2/1, A. Williams, 6.11.1902. 73 Pandit, ‘Linguistic Survey’, p. 78. 74 Burghart, ‘Speech in Mithila’, p. 783. 75 EUR 223/258, Grierson to William Foster, 1.4.1924. 76 Ibid., Grierson to J.T. Marten, 1.9.1921. 77 LS Files S/1/2/8, Grierson to Superintendent of Government Printing, 5.12.1921. 78 LS Files S/1/2/2, J.M. Mitra, Assistant Secretary to Government of India, 29.4.1918. 79 EUR 223/251, Correspondence acknowledging receipt of Census Reports for 1931 for different provinces of India; EUR 223/214, Grierson to Census Commissioner, Simla, 7.12.1932. 80 LS Files S/1/1/16, Grierson to Director, Universitäts-bibliothek, 23.10. 1923. 81 LS Files S/1/14/2, Grierson to Edward Gait, 26.2.1903. 82 Ibid., Grierson to Gait, 25.1.1903. 83 EUR 223/260, Grierson’s Note on Sir A. Goodley’s Letter, 5.3.1901. 84 Ibid., IO to H.H. Risley, 12.4.1901. 85 For example, see LS Files S/1/14/2, Edward Gait to Grierson, 19.3.1903 & 9.7.1911 on the need to have an additional heading in the Census tables for Assam and Burma and on the reclassification of Lahnda as a separate language. 86 LS Files S/1/14/4, Edward Gait to Grierson, 22.3.1912. 87 LS Files S/1/14/2, ‘Note for Report. Ch. IX. Language’, p. 1, attached to Edward Gait to Grierson, 6.7.1911. 88 LS Files S/1/14/1, J.T. Marten to Grierson, 11.3.1920. 89 Ibid., J.T. Marten to Grierson, 3.12.1921. 90 Ibid., Grierson to J.T. Marten, 20.10.1921, J.T. Marten to Grierson, 3.12.1921, and LS Files S/1/2/2, Grierson to Secretary, Education Dept., Government of India, 7.10.1919. 91 LS Files S/1/14/1, J.T. Marten to Grierson, 23.9.1922. 92 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Pt. 1: Introductory, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927, p. 25.

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93 LS Files S/1/14/3, Grierson to Edward Gait, 2.6.1901. 94 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 27.9.1920. 95 LS Files S/1/14/9, Grierson to L.G. Sedgwick, 10.11.1922. On Siraiki and Panjabi, see chapter 1 and chapter 6 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. 96 LS Files S/1/14/3, Grierson to Edward Gait, 3.11.1901; S/1/14/10, Captain A.D. Bannerman to Grierson, 4.4.1901, and S/1/14/1, Grierson to Risley, 25.11.1902. 97 LS Files S/1/14/2, Edward Gait to Grierson, 24. 9. 1911. 98 LS Files S/1/5/1, L. Stuart, Secretary to Government, UP, to DPI, UP, 18.8.1911. 99 EUR 223/228, David Mair to Grierson, 22.11.1923. 100 Burghart, ‘Speech in Mithila’, p. 784. 101 Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. 74. 102 Ibid., p. 75. 103 See Ch. 3 in my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. 104 See Ch. 7 below. 105 LS Files S/1/13/2, C. Morgan Webb to Grierson, 21.4.1914, and EUR 223/221, C. Morgan Webb, Officiating Secretary to Government of Burma, to Secretary, Government of India, Dept. of Education, 21.9.1914. 106 LS Files S/1/13/2, Webb, ‘The Linguistic Survey of India’, p. 7. 107 EUR 223/221, C. Morgan Webb, Officiating Secretary to Government of Burma, to Secretary, Government of India, Dept. of Education, 21.9.1914. See also Leslie F. Taylor, The Ethnographical and Linguistic Survey of Burma: An Account of Its Institution and Progress, together with Proposals for Its Completion, Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1948, p. 4. 108 LS Files S/1/14/2, Edward Gait to Grierson, 6.1.1903 & 8.1.1903, and S/1/14/12, C.C. Lowis, Superintendent of Census, Burma, to Grierson, 19.2.1903. 109 EUR 223/327, Grierson to Secretary, Burmese Government, 20.6.1921, and to L.F. Taylor, 17.3.1926. 110 LS Files S/1/14/12, Grierson to C. Morgan Webb, 20.5.1912. 111 EUR 223/221, C. Morgan Webb, Officiating Secretary to Government of Burma, to Secretary, Government of India, Dept. of Education, 21.9.1914. 112 Ibid. 113 LS Files S/1/13/2, C. Morgan Webb to Grierson, 21.4.1914; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 3: Specimens of the Kuki-Chin and Burma Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1904, p. 379. 114 LS Files S/1/13/2, ‘The Linguistic Survey of Burma’, p. 14. 115 EUR 223/221, C. Morgan Webb, Officiating Secretary to Government of Burma, to Secretary, Government of India, Dept. of Education, 21.9.1914. 116 LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to C. Morgan Webb, 20.6.1917. 117 LS Files S/1/14/1, Grierson to Superintendent of Census Operations, Rangoon, 6.7.1920. 118 LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to C. Morgan Webb, 20.6.1917. 119 EUR 223/220, F.H. Brown to Grierson, 29.5.1917. 120 LS Files S/1/1/19, Grierson to Gramophone Company, 1.7.1921.

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121 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 425, and LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 13.11.1917. Taylor referred Grierson to the list of the languages and dialects of Burma on pp. 53–9 in the ‘Linguistic Survey of Burma, Preparatory Stage or Linguistic Census’. 122 Ibid., Grierson to C. Morgan Webb, 26.11.1917. 123 EUR 223/221, Finance Dept., Government of India, to Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, 9.9.1920, and H. Tonkinson, Secretary to Government of Burma, to Secretary, Government of India, Dept. of Education, 24.2.1920. 124 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 8.11.1920. 125 LS Files S/1/14/12, S. Grantham, Superintendent of Census, Burma, to Grierson, 5.2.1923. 126 LS Files S/1/14/1, Grierson to J.T. Marten, 23.7.1922. 127 EUR 223/221, H. Tonkinson, Secretary to Government of Burma, to Secretary, Government of India, Dept. of Education, 24.2.1920, and LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 20.6.1918. 128 EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’. 129 Taylor, Linguistic Survey of Burma, p. 4. 130 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 8.12.1919. 131 EUR 223/328, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 7.4.1936. 132 LS Files S/1/1/19, Grierson to Gramophone Company, 21.5.1921. 133 LS Files S/1/1/30, Grierson to International Correspondence Schools Ltd., 20.6.1921. 134 EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’, n.d. 135 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to C. Morgan Webb, 27.1.1919, C. Morgan Webb to Grierson, 4.2.1919, and L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 8.12.1919 & 20.5.1920. See also Taylor, Linguistic Survey of Burma, p. 5. 136 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 27.9.1920. 137 EUR 223/327, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 20.5.1921, 20.2.1922 & 4.1.1924. 138 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 4.1.1924. 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid. 141 LS Files S/1/13/2, Taylor to Grierson, 11.11.1918. 142 EUR 223/249, Department of Education, Health and Lands, Government of India, to Grierson, 7.2.1929. 143 EUR 223/328, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 27.1.1937. 144 Ibid., 21.9.1937. 145 Ibid. 146 LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to Taylor, 12.10.1920 & 6.12.1920. 147 LS Files S/1/1/33, Grierson to Denison Ross, 25.3.1920, Grierson to Mrs Nossiter, 15.9.1920; S/1/1/16, Grierson to J.B. Wingate, 16.3.1922; S/1/13/2, and Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 17.6.1920. 148 EUR 223/221, H. Tonkinson, Secretary to Government of Burma, to Secretary, Government of India, Dept. of Education, 24.2.1920. 149 LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 11.8.1919. 150 EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’, n.d.

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151 EUR 223/327, Grierson to Officer in Charge, Ethnographical and Linguistic Survey of Burma, 17.3.1926. 152 LS Files S/1/13/2, C. Morgan Webb to Grierson, 1.8.1918, and L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 11.11.1918 & 9.7.1919. 153 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 9.7.1919. 154 EUR 223/221, H. Tonkinson, Secretary to Government of Burma, to Secretary, Government of India, Dept. of Education, 24.2.1920. 155 LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to Taylor, 11.8.1919. 156 EUR 223/327, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 20.2.1922. 157 Ibid., L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 31.7.1922. 158 Ibid., 4.1.1924. 159 Ibid., 4.1.1924. 160 LS Files S/1/14/1, J.T. Marten, 27.9.1922. 161 EUR 223/327, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 4.1.1924. 162 Ibid., L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 30.8.1924 & 24.11.1924. 163 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 24.11.1924. 164 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 12.11.1926 & 20.8.1928. 165 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 20.8.1928. 166 EUR 223/328, Taylor to Grierson, 11.11.1930. 167 Ibid., 6.6.1931. 168 EUR 223/311, Grierson to D.M.F. Hoysted, 20.7.1937. 169 EUR 223/328, Copy of Letter Secretary to Government, Dept. of Education, to DPI, 29.8.1930; ‘Reports on the work of the “Ethnographical and Linguistic Survey of Burma”’, attached to L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 1.1.1934. 170 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 5.10.1932. 171 Ibid., Taylor, ‘For the information and kind consideration of H.E the Governor of Burma’, 17.2.1931. 172 Ibid., Taylor, ‘Note for the Kind Consideration of H.E. the Governor of Burma’, 9.5.1931. 173 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 12.10.1932. 174 Ibid., Taylor, ‘Note for the Kind Consideration of H.E. the Governor of Burma’, 9.5.1931. 175 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 27.3.1936. 176 Ibid., Taylor, 1.1.1934. 177 ‘Reports on the work of the “Ethnographical and Linguistic Survey of Burma”’, attached to Taylor to Grierson, 1.1.1934. Many of these were reproduced in Taylor, Linguistic Survey of Burma, pp. 13–23, when Taylor appealed for funds. 178 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 27.3.1936 & 28.12.1936. 179 EUR 223/311, Grierson to D.M.F. Hoysted, 20.7.1937. 180 EUR 223/243, Secretary, Government of India, to Indian High Commissioner, London, 7.5.1936. 181 EUR 223/328, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 28.12.1936. 182 Ibid., 27.1.1937. 183 Taylor, Linguistic Survey of Burma, p. 6. 184 LS Files S/1/13/2, Morgan Webb to Grierson, 1.8.1918, and L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 11.11.1918 & 9.7.1919.

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185 Ibid., Morgan Webb to Grierson, 11.6.1914. 186 EUR 223/221, H. Tonkinson, Secretary to Government of Burma, to Secretary, Government of India, Dept. of Education, 24.2.1920, and LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 22.8.1920. 187 EUR 223/327, Taylor to Grierson, 27.3.1926. 188 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 27.4.1925. 189 Ibid., Taylor. ‘Ethnological and Linguistic Research in Burma and South East Asia’, paper read at AGM, Burma Research Society, 10.2.1922. 190 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 12.10.1932 & 2.4.1937. 191 EUR 223/328, Taylor to Grierson, 1.1.1934 & 27.3.1936, EUR 223/327, Grierson to Taylor, 18.10.1924, and Taylor to Grierson, 19.7.1925; for his move to Gibraltar, see Taylor, Linguistic Survey of Burma, p. 6. 192 Leslie F. Taylor, ‘The Dialects of Burmese’, The Journal of the Burma Research Society, 1921, 11: 89–97. 193 Taylor, Linguistic Survey of Burma, pp. 4–5. 194 Ibid., p. 8; for this archival self, see Ch. 6 (this volume). 195 Taylor, Linguistic Survey of Burma, p. 6. 196 See his poignant appeal in ibid., and Addendum 1. 197 EUR 223/317, Denison Ross to Grierson, 28.12.1926. 198 See my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey, ‘Conclusion’. 199 EUR 223/328, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 6.5.1931. 200 EUR 223/327, Taylor to Grierson, 27.3.1926. 201 Carol A. Boshier, ‘Leslie Fernandes Taylor and the “Lost” Linguistic and Ethnographical Survey of Burma’, SOAS Journal of Postgraduate Research, 2014, 6: 49–76. 202 See Ch. 5–7 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India.

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In the last chapter, I showed how the LSI had a semi-official status. It was not straightforwardly tethered to the colonial state and its projects, and its connection with the colonial state was loose and flexible. Grierson’s careful management of this complex relationship is highlighted when we contrast his handling of the LSI with the fate of the LSB. In keeping with the LSI’s semi-detached connection with the colonial state, there are other ways in which the LSI cannot be read in terms of a language of colonial power and command alone. In this chapter I address three areas to show how the LSI contains countervailing narratives to its articulations of colonial categories – namely, the strained presence of race as a category, Grierson’s illness and his impaired eyesight, and the complicated status of English in its volumes. Grierson’s subject position was complex; he was a cross-border figure, and it was this which enabled him to conduct the LSI.

Race While categories of race were used in the LSI and Grierson drew on imperial anthropology and ethnology, the discourse of race and ethnology in the Survey is strained. By the time the LSI was under way, India was at the centre of a quarrel between ethnology and philology. The Indo-European concept of kinship between Indians and Europeans conflicted with the stress on discrete races in race ‘science’ from the mid-19th century onwards.1 George Campbell’s Ethnology of India (1866) and Isaac Taylor’s The Origin of the Aryans (c. 1889) reflected this move towards race as the master category for differentiating groups of people.2 By the time of Caldwell’s Comparative Grammar (1856, 1875) ethnology and philology were growing apart.3 The tension between race and language is evident in the LSI. In volume 1, part 1, 78

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Grierson opens the section ‘Philology and Ethnology’ with the statement ‘nowhere are there presented stronger warnings against basing ethnological theories on linguistic facts than in India’. The ‘unholy alliance’ between the two has fallen into disrepute, and hence he refrains as ‘far as was possible from discussing questions of racial origin’.4 Grierson also expresses this view to Census superintendents.5 Other volumes draw a distinction between ethnology and linguistics. Thus, irrespective of how the Bhils are categorised ethnologically in Census reports and Gazetteers, the LSI is concerned with their language only.6 The question of the origin and distribution of the Dravidian race cannot be solved by philologists. This is the ‘domain of anthropology, and of anthropology alone’.7 Grierson also casts doubt on the use of the word ‘race’ for Dravidians: this term is ‘given by anthropologists’, and for the philologist it is just as ‘unsuitable as the name Aryan which is used by some to denote the old people whose language is the origin of the various Indo-European tongues’.8 Grierson is also forthright about the LSI’s focus on ‘the facts of grammar’ rather than ‘ethnic relations’.9 The phrase ‘unholy alliance’ echoes Max Müller, whose warning that ‘the existence of Indo-European languages does not necessarily postulate the existence of one Indo-European race’ is cited by Grierson.10 Writing to H.H. Risley in 1887, Müller reflected on the absurdities of anthropometrical measurements in the context of the ‘misunderstanding’ between philology and ethnology: ‘We never speak of a black language, why should we speak of an Aryan race?’11 For Müller, terms like Aryan and Dravidian have ‘nothing to do with blood, or bones, or hair, or facial angles but simply and solely with language. Aryans are those who speak Aryan languages, whatever their colour, whatever their blood’.12 In a letter to Grierson in 1886 Müller draws attention to how ethnology had recently lost some of its prestige. He adds, ‘You are fully aware of the mischief that is produced by employing the terminology of Comparative Philology in an ethnological sense. I have uttered the same warning again and again’. Müller also described himself as protesting ‘as strongly as I could against the unholy alliance of these two sciences – Comparative Philology and Ethnology’, adding ‘as the philologist classifies his languages without asking a single question by whom they were spoken, let the ethnologist classify his skulls without inquiring what language had its habitat in them’.13 While the LSI shifted between government departments in its long career, it was in Risley’s department until 1907 at least.14 Risley played a key role in sustaining the two-race theory of Indian civilisation through the spurious scientism of anthropometry.15 An earlier 79

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proposal for the LSI envisaged it as part of an ethnology survey, run by a committee under Risley.16 One press report on the Survey cites from Isaac Taylor’s Etruscan Researches (1874) to the effect that language is the ‘ultimate test of race’ and ‘the ultimate and surest test of race is language’. This newspaper assumed that the LSI was also an ethnological survey which would throw light on the origins of races in India.17 However, by 1902 Grierson was distancing the LSI from Risley’s ethnology. Risley asked Grierson to examine the ethnological value of linguistic evidence in his chapter on languages for the 1901 Census.18 For him, ‘the ethnological indications given by language’ supported conclusions made about race through anthropometry. In responding, Grierson cast doubt on the ‘ethnological value of linguistic evidence’, and described ethnology as ‘full of pitfalls to the amateur’. A term like ‘Scythian’ may be a ‘lawful word in ethnology’, but it has been ‘banished from philology’. He stressed he did not use terms like Dravidian to refer to a race.19 Grierson also criticised Sten Konow for conflating philology and anthropology; Konow’s response was long and rambling, reflecting his inability to abandon the paradigm of a racialised linguistics.20 However, while Müller was critical of philology’s ‘unholy alliance’ with ethnology, he also admitted he sometimes ‘used linguistic terms in an ethnological sense. Still it is an evil that ought to be resisted with all our might’.21 Moreover, he suggested the way to reduce the tension between philology and ethnology was to develop more scientific and accurate anthropometrical measurements.22 Similarly, while Grierson echoed Müller’s anxieties about the ‘unholy alliance’, like him he was unable to make a clean break from it. Grierson occasionally suggests that the LSI’s data would be useful to ethnologists, so the two disciplines were not mutually exclusive,23 and he refers to the Survey as opening questions and opportunities for ethnologists.24 He is prepared to accept ethnological theories when they are supported by linguistic facts, suggesting that racialised ethnology is not inadmissible per se.25 At one point, he speaks simultaneously of the need to distinguish between philology and ethnology, and using philology to throw light on the ‘origin of nationalities’ postulated by ethnologists.26 When discussing the ‘ethnic relationship’ of the Hindu Kush inhabitants, Grierson opines that philology can be prised apart from ethnology but he strikes a deferential note. His assertion that philology can sometimes guide ethnology is justified by adding that ‘it was first suggested to me by so distinguished an ethnologist as the late Sir Herbert Risley’.27 Thus, at times Grierson suggests linguistics and ethnology can remain in dialogue with each other, and at other times he disconnects linguistics 80

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from ethnology. To a certain extent this reflects the powerful place of ethnographic knowledge in the British Raj in India, which was not equalled in any other colonial regime in the British Empire,28 as well as the elasticity of the concept of race itself. Race as a category had been institutionalised in the earlier Censuses, in which it underpinned language classification, while the first Census of Bengal Presidency relied on Dalton’s Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872). The institutional weight of ethnology and race in the British Raj made it a master discourse hard to break free from. For Grierson and his correspondents, the key issue is whether the connections between languages ought to be seen through the prism of linguistics or ‘race’.29 Nonetheless, Grierson does try to distance the LSI from race science. This is thrown into sharper relief by the planned Linguistic Survey of Burma, which had a more unreflective relationship with racialised ethnology. One argument put forward for the LSB was that it would throw light on the origins of ‘races’ in Burma. Some Burmese officials assumed that a language map was not required for Burma as a ‘racial’ map would serve this purpose.30 In September 1904 the Rangoon Gazette had an article entitled ‘Dialects in Burma’, which collapses ‘race’ and language and discusses cranial measurements.31 The superintendent of the Burmese Census appreciated Grierson’s work as valuable for the chapter on languages and for ‘all ethnical questions’.32 Taylor was appointed research lecturer in Indo-Chinese ethnology and linguistics at Rangoon University from January 1923, the double title showing how in Burma the ‘unholy alliance’ was not problematic.33 The proposal for the LSB also went through different titles, one of which was the ‘Ethnographical and Linguistic Survey of Burma’.34 Taylor saw himself as studying language, culture and physical appearance together. He presented ethnology as analogous to technological advances like electricity and in terms of the general advancement of science.35 A later version of the LSB had a section on ‘Indo-Chinese racial stocks’ and one on ‘race’, which asked informants about ‘physical appearance’, ‘physical resemblances between members of the tribe’, colour, facial features, hair and temperament.36 The planned LSB did not problematise ‘race’, and it fused philology and ethnology, in contrast to the LSI.

English Like the category of race, the status of English in the LSI is more complex than it first appears. Much of Grierson’s personal correspondence 81

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reflects the hybridised idiolect of the British in India. In his letters, words and phrases like ‘bahut bahut salāms’,37 ‘shikast’ (for feeling tired),38 ‘strictest purdah’ (for retiring into solitude to finish a manuscript),39 ‘hukum’ (an order),40 ‘guru’ (for his academic mentors),41 ‘shauq’ (for one’s hobbies)42 ‘mai har-gaya’ (I give up),43 ‘Allah knows best’ and ‘Allah alam’ appear.44 Grierson chose to live in Camberley partly because he felt linguistically at home there: it was ‘full of old Indians [so] that one can talk of pucca and bundobusts without people staring at you’.45 However, there is a distinctive aspect to this idiolect in Grierson’s correspondence because many of his correspondents were Indologists and Indian cultural frames of meaning reshaped some of their perceptions. For example, I.D. Barnett, of the Department of Oriental Books and Manuscripts in the British Museum, looks forward to spring when he can resume ‘surya-puja’, and he complains of the weather as finding out ‘all our śarīra-marmāni, and stabs us through them’.46 Sir Aurel Stein describes England’s greenery as the ‘blessing provided by its Nāgas’.47 Friendships and ageing are filtered through Indian cultural references too. Reminiscing on his long association with Grierson, Sten Konow writes of how there must be some adṛṣta at work, and looking back I feel thankful for what happened and brought me within your horizon. . . . The actors come and pass, but the stage remains and the saṃsāra remain. There is eternity within the saṃsāra, and ours is a shore in that eternity, if only we drop the ahaṃkāra.48 Stein comforts Grierson when he is ill, saying, ‘you have acquired so much puṇya even in this jāti that you have richly deserved to be freed from such nasty sensations’.49 On Grierson’s 80th birthday, he speaks of how Time has taken away his ‘āyus’ but left his mental faculties intact.50 Writing on Grierson’s 86th birthday, he uses the term ‘viruddhā’ to describe Grierson and his wife’s constitution, and expresses his feeling of ‘maitrī’.51 Even geopolitics is evoked through an Indian cultural lens. In the 1930s, referring to the global situation, Stein opines, ‘The Indians are right, it is ajnāna which causes all troubles in the world, and ahaṃkāra is our worst foe’.52 Other references allude to the production of knowledge, suggesting an authorial self-legitimisation through Indian idioms. Stein described the first part of Grierson’s Kāshmīrī Dictionary (1916–32) as a ‘special 82

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avatāra of Sāradā’.53 On the dictionary’s completion, Van Manen cited a passage from the Pañcaviṃśa-Brāhmaṇa: A great thing thou hast announced unto me, a thing of splendour thou hast announced unto me, a thing of glory thou hast announced unto me, a thing of honour thou hast announced unto me, enjoyment thou hast announced unto me, all thou hast announced unto me, let it succour me, let it enter into me, may I enjoy it.54 He depicted his involvement in the Dictionary as ‘touching this basket of flowers offered to the shrine of Sarasvati’. Grierson described himself as the ‘Vyāsa’ of Lal Ded’s Kashmiri songs.55 Stein saw Hatim’s Tales as the ‘legacy of an earlier birth of mine’, and he uses the same conceit about his notes on metre, describing them as ‘like going into a former birth to try and catch details of Kashmiri phonetics’.56 When Stein sends Grierson some of Pandit Nityananda’s translations of verses from the Mahānaya prakāśa, he exclaims, ‘may the task auspiciously started under the eyes of Siva enthroned on Haramukh promptly reach completion!’ and later he exclaims, ‘The work has indeed been auspiciously started, not only as being under the eyes of Śiva or Haramukh, but also under yours!’57 Grierson looked forward to a publication as the ‘Chātaka looks for the Rain-drops of Swātī’,58 while another correspondent described Bihār Peasant Life as having ‘the Rishi quality’.59 Others speak of extracting the ‘rasa’ of Grierson’s works.60 This cultural reframing can also create a crisis of value – for example, when Sten Konow, using Madhyamika philosophy, raises the question of the value of Grierson’s personal library: As an independent entity, as a svabhārn it does not exist at all. It is simply śunya, sāpekṣa. It has been accumulated with infinite trouble, and for you it has, like your puṇya, incalculable value, but that value is sāpekṣa. In modern language you cannot say how much it is worth in itself.61 Here, then, the material weight of colonial textuality is juxtaposed with the universal emptiness of all entities, as posited in Buddhist philosophy. Thus, whereas in the LSI’s volumes English is safeguarded against Indian languages, Grierson’s letters contain a hybridised English in 83

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a learned Indian register, suggestive of a linguistic self that is split between colonial guardedness in public and a hybridised EnglishIndianness in private. Moreover, in the Survey’s volumes it is not clear where English ends and Indian languages begin. When negotiating the cost of typing the manuscript of one of the volumes, Grierson’s typist mentions she doubles her charge for foreign languages. Grierson asks her to clarify ‘what is meant by “foreign languages”’: ‘In work such as mine in which the matter contains foreign words scattered through the text, is the whole reckoned as a foreign language, or how is the account made up?’ In her response, she argues the manuscript is not in ‘straight-forward English’, and a large proportion of Indian words ‘were frequently scattered amongst the English’.62 The boundaries between English and Indian languages are not clear-cut in the LSI’s volumes. Sometimes Grierson also applies Indian terms like tatsamas and tadbhavas to features of English and European languages.63 Discussing the coining of scientific and technical vocabulary in the languages of Bombay, he refers to technical vocabularies in English and German, with English borrowings from Latin and Greek as being tatsamas, and German using its own resources is likened to tadbhavas.64 Grierson therefore sometimes presents the English lexicon in ways which reinforce the primacy of Indian languages and their analysis within Indian traditions of linguistics. In one forum, he later championed this tradition against European linguistics.65

Grierson’s eyes In one respect, Grierson’s identity is conventionally masculinist. While it is unclear whether Grierson’s wife contributed any material to the LSI in terms of its data or analysis, there is a hint that she may have been a burgeoning linguist, given her compilation of an index of ‘Gipsy’ names, for which Grierson penned an introductory note.66 Her first name is not given in this article and she is referred to as Mrs Grierson only. It seems she was totally subsumed under ‘Grierson’. Moreover, at the RAS’s celebration lunch on the Survey’s completion, Grierson describes how ‘familiarity had made it [the Survey] almost a commonplace to us’, referring to his wife and himself.67 This suggests that at the very least Grierson’s wife provided much valuable moral support and was closely involved in the Survey without necessarily contributing to its data compilation or classificatory labours (although the latter is also possible, but there is no way of knowing this on the current state of evidence). However, Grierson does not acknowledge his wife in the volumes. 84

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In many respects, though, his identity is not a conventionally masculinist and colonial one. The Survey’s completion required, as one of his correspondents put it, ‘self-effacing unselfishness’ because it involved ‘putting all your own knowledge & soul into dishing up other men’s ill digested stuff’.68 For some it was rooted in Grierson’s self-effacement, not egotism. The colonial heroism of the LSI outlined in Chapter 1 is entangled with another narrative, that of Grierson’s ill health and the ‘breakdown’ of his eyes. In 1897 Grierson mentioned how he was not paid for the work he had done for the LSI. While stressing this did not undermine his ‘more legitimate work’, he remarks that all he had ‘gained’ was the ‘breakdown’ of his eyes.69 For the rest of his life he suffered problems with his eyes which impaired his ability to read and write. In 1910, he wrote of how ‘my eyes broke down some months ago, and for some months I was not able to read or write’. In that year, he went to Switzerland to consult a specialist.70 His struggles with his eyes continued throughout the 1920s.71 In addition to his eye problems, he was dogged by ill health from the early 1920s onwards. In June 1922 he suffered internal bleeding and a tumour and in the mid-1920s was confined to a wheelchair.72 He was bedridden as an invalid on a number of occasions, and others had to write his letters for him.73 With his increasing age, failing eyesight and illness in the 1930s, he turned down invitations to review books, lecture and contribute to publications and organisations and he resigned from various committees.74 By early 1933 he was a recluse, who had lost touch with oriental scholars except when one paid him a visit, but he was not always well enough to receive them.75 As we have seen, Grierson’s return to England in 1899 was caused by ill health; he refers to ‘how hurriedly unwell I was when I left India’.76 He made it clear that unless he could leave for England, the LSI would remain unfinished. Thus, the LSI and Grierson’s ill health were entangled from the beginning. His ill health was exacerbated by the Survey but it also enabled it, because it led to his move to England to complete it. The frequent breakdowns of his eyes can be variously interpreted. On one level, it suggests India and the LSI had an emasculating effect on him. As noted earlier, when Grierson first mentioned his eyes breaking down, he also mentioned the question of more legitimate work and payment. At another level, the breakdown of his eyes may be ‘payment’ in the form of punishment for his work, a punishment expressive of repressed or unacknowledged guilt about the Survey’s legitimacy as a colonial project, and of a conflicted self who identified deeply with India but was unable or unwilling to go completely ‘native’.77 85

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At the same time, his partial-sightedness was also enabling, because it made possible what one correspondent called the ‘superhuman’ focus required to finish the LSI;78 other distractions had to be cut out, and only the Survey with its massive volumes could occupy his visual field. However one might interpret Grierson’s breakdowns, it is clear the LSI was entangled with an epistolary narrative of failing eyesight and poor health from its inception. While Grierson retained his Christian faith and did not cross over to Hinduism fully, it is worth noting he wrote to Sita Ram about how ‘my eyes began to lose their sight, but, Paramēśwara kī dayā sē, they are now much better, and I can read and write again’.79 In The Bible in India, Grierson refers to the distribution of the braille Bible for the sightless and how one blind boy has become a colporteur: ‘Here one who sits in darkness is opening the eyes of the blind who see’.80 The motif of the loss and the restoration of sight, and the paradox of the sightless seeing more clearly than the sighted, articulate Grierson’s own experience of sight loss and vision in relation to India. When Grierson was sent photographs of his bust unveiled at the Asiatic Society of Bengal, he commented ‘the eyes are not so vivacious as they would be in a photograph’.81 This remark is interesting because he does not focus on any facial features other than his eyes, and secondly, he does not compare the bust’s eyes to his actual eyes – rather they are compared to a photograph. His actual eyes are no longer available as a point of reference, and his concern is with his eyes as objects of representation rather than as organs with which to see. In Chapter 6 I discuss how the LSI was repeatedly characterised as a monument, and how in some ways the solidity of its volumes is an optical illusion. The Survey was both a monument to Grierson’s myopia and a compensation for it. Like the bust and the touched-up photograph, it restored his eyes by embodying what he saw in India, but it was also an optical illusion created by the myopia required to finish the task of the Survey in the first place. Like many other key figures in this period, including Gandhi, Grierson was preoccupied with the energy of selfhood. From the early 1920s Grierson used the French psychotherapist Émile Coué’s (1857–1926) popular method of autosuggestion to maintain his mental health in the face of the ‘gigantic undertaking of a systematic description of all Indian languages’.82 He recommended Coué to Lorimer and also to S.K. Chatterji.83 Grierson and his coterie therefore struggled with questions of energy and discussed self-help strategies. Emily Lorimer described Coué’s method as increasing one’s ‘income of strength’,84 and she suggested further reading on autosuggestion to Grierson.85 She, her husband and their daughter used these techniques.86 At one 86

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point she also hints at the tensions within a British colonial masculinity in the case of her husband, whose artistic predilections were ‘smothered’ by ‘soldiering and scholarship’.87 Her letters suggest that the Church was critical of Coué’s method, seeing it as rivalling their provision of pastoral care. For her, though, Coué’s work was Christ’s message in ‘more modern speech for it does not need any great acumen to see that the two gifts of healing are akin’. Moreover ‘Christ taught us all about electricity – & how few availed themselves of it! – Coué has found out how to “press the button” & has brought the power within reach even of those whose faith was too weak’.88 Lorimer also sent Grierson a pamphlet on ‘Overbeck’s Rejuvenator’, an electrotherapy device used to treat illnesses and ailments at home. He described this as an instrument for applying electricity to one’s self, on the theory that ‘when one is down-hearted electricity is what one wants’. He himself had been ‘physically mentally rather down & out for the last few years, & nothing else has had the slightest effect’.89 Thus, Grierson and his coterie struggled and experimented with energy and selfhood and they articulated eclectic assemblages of religious thinking in doing so. In this, they paralleled experimental approaches to religion like Gandhi’s and, more broadly, reflected how colonial India was a site for the definition and redefinition of religion on a largescale.90 At one point, referring to how the more one struggles with a dominant idea the more one cannot escape its dominance, Lorimer felt Grierson was trying too hard with Coué, and had therefore experienced a ‘reversed effect’.91 Lorimer’s reference to the ‘reversed effect’ suggests Grierson was struggling with completing the Survey, which of necessity had an obsessive quality about it, and was using ‘Coué-ism’ to maintain levels of energy to achieve his goal but also to explore different, non-linear ways of completing it. Like Gandhi in this period, Grierson and his coterie therefore also experimented with subtler and alternative forms of agency to achieve their goals. However ‘colonial’ Grierson may have been, some of his preoccupations and strategies of agency reflect larger questions about agency and selfhood which key figures in the period, both Indian and colonial, grappled with, and in his case, this stems from his ill health and sense of fragility, not a sense of confident colonial power.

Grierson as a cross-border figure There are a number of aspects to Grierson’s complex subject position but they all point to a cross-border selfhood which is managed by him 87

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in different ways in different contexts. Ultimately, Grierson’s expertise rests on an in-between position between Britain and India. From 1918 to 1921 Grierson served on the Oriental Advisory Committee to the Standing Committee of Grammatical Reform, convened by Professor E.A. Sonnenschein. In his interventions on this committee, Grierson used an epistemological hybridity to assert an Indian ‘native point of view’ against attempts to marginalise it in European thinking on grammar.92 Here I point to three illustrative examples of Grierson’s being in-between. The first relates to his in-between sense of hearing. In a letter of 1926 when discussing nasalisation and the intervocalic ḍ, he notes how they vary across provinces in India, and in the case of the former, sometimes from person to person. Here his ear is attuned to sounds that Indians and the English cannot always hear. When it comes to the intervocalic ḍ, ‘few Europeans .  .  . produce the sound correctly’, including himself. He then turns to the Indian tradition of phonetics and discusses its theorisation of the intervocalic ḍ. He ends this letter with his court experiences: It was my fate for many years to listen to a native clerk rattling through the daily recitations of the police reports of the preceding day. The reading was necessarily rapid. Sometimes I would not catch an important word, and . . . I have asked such a question as ‘did you say kharā (with dental r) or khaṛā (with cerebral ṛ)?’ He would then speak slowly and distinctly and say ‘I said khaḍā’, with a strong cerebral ḍ (not ṛ) and with the tip of the tongue well doubled back to the beginning of the soft palate. All this time he had no idea that he was uttering a different sound. All that he thought was that he was uttering the same sound more distinctly.93 He then comments on how both the English and the Mughals pronounced the intervocalic ḍ as an r. In this letter, then, Grierson moves between European and Indian phonetics, aligns the English with Mughals as outsiders, while listening in to all the groups concerned. In one respect, that of not being able to pronounce the intervocalic ḍ, he is English, but he can also identify the sound neither the English nor Indians can identify. These shifting positions contribute to a moving framework of analysis, in which Grierson is insider and outsider to both English and Indian sounds at different points in time and space. The other example relates to Grierson’s comments on Shirreff’s Hindi Folk Songs (1936), in which the folk songs are translated into a 88

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Scots dialect. Here Grierson mentions his Scottish ancestry (the Irish branch of the Grierson family from Scotland was formed by Sir James Grierson, who died in 1566), but he ‘knows nothing of that dialect’ and to ‘my foreign ears’ it seems to work. But of the original dialect from which you have translated, I can speak with more familiarity, and every now and then, even through the Scottish veil, there came to me a whiff of the village smoke the reek of which was so familiar to me when I camped in my old District of Gaya.94 Grierson’s ear is foreign in relation to the Scottish dialect, yet attuned to what is Indian behind it. While moving between the two, he expresses closeness to the Indian dialect and distance from the Scottish one, but this is based on a position of colonial privilege and a sense of ownership in ‘my’ district. The third example relates to Grierson’s sensitivity to the difference between the self-designations of speakers of Indian languages and the names other groups apply to them.95 Grierson notes when a group of speakers do not recognise the appellations other groups apply to them, and refers to these as ‘foreign’ to these groups.96 He also notes how self-designations are corrupted by other speakers, as in the Manipuri corruption of the tribal self-designation Kolren,97 while Shina is called ‘Gilyit’ by its own speakers, but is misheard by other ‘races’ as Gilgit.98 In the domain of self-designations and the designations applied to speakers of languages by other groups, Grierson moves between locally rooted ‘native’ speakers and their others within India. He enters the world of self-designation while marking the alienating effects of the usage of other names to label those speakers, sometimes through the corruption or mishearing of these self-designations. This veering between being at home in the world of self-designation and evoking the distancing effect of how others designate speakers reflects Grierson’s flexible subject position as he moves across being at home and foreign at the same time in both India and Britain. Thus, illness, the fluidity of being in between and colonial elitism come together in Grierson’s identity. His strengths are his weaknesses (and vice versa) in a complicated colonial subjectivity which does not fit the watertight categories of ‘British’ or ‘Indian’. Grierson was also connected to two elite colonial groups simultaneously, the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Indian ICS officials.99 Being part of the Anglo-Irish elite he was neither straightforwardly Irish nor straightforwardly English. 89

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While Grierson was of Scottish ancestry, he was born in Glenageary, county Dublin. From 1830 up to his father’s death in 1875, his family held the office of the King’s and Queen’s printer in Ireland.100 In 1936 and 1938 Grierson sent and corrected the entry for his family to Burke’s Landed Gentry and Burke’s Peerage.101 Grierson was therefore a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, who were an integral part of the British elite providing rulers for the Empire.102 His brother, Charles Thornton Primrose Grierson, was appointed bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore in 1919.103 When Grierson was knighted, one correspondent from Belfast noted on the back of an envelope, ‘Belfast Bishops brother honoured. Many of many languages’.104 Some correspondents saw Grierson as Irish and referred to him as such, despite his living in England after he left India in October 1899 until his death in 1941, except for a brief period he spent in Avonmore, Killeny, county Dublin, and in Enniskerry, county Wicklow, in 1899.105 In the 1930s his correspondents continued to refer to him as Irish, and one even sent a letter addressed to him in ‘Camberley, Ireland’.106 Some refer to him as a ‘fellow Irishman’, others felt that only a ‘great Irishman’ could have completed the LSI, and on receiving the last volume, one was of the view that it refuted stereotypes of the Irish: ‘Many men, faced with the difficulties & delays you have encountered, would have thrown up the task; & yet they tell us the Irishman is rash and impetuous!’107 Some saw his 86th birthday as proof of the toughness of the Irish.108 Moreover, in the late 1920s, Grierson tried to reconnect with his Irish roots – he contacted booksellers for a copy of Gilbert’s A History of the City of Dublin (1854–9), ascertaining if it contained the name ‘Grierson’ in its index.109 He also found some proceedings and transactions of the Royal Irish Academy in his family papers, belonging to his father, who was a member of the Academy, and he sent these to the Academy in 1929.110 Grierson was involved in the appointment of Eleanor Hull as secretary of the RAS in November 1918. Hull was a distinguished scholar of Old Irish, who authored many books and articles on pre-Christian and early Christian Ireland, and on Irish literature. She also helped to set up the Irish Texts Society in 1889 with Prof. F. York Powell and served both as its president and vice-president. Unlike Whitley Stokes (1830–1909), the Irish scholar who both codified Anglo-Indian law and was a Celticist, she did no substantial work on India itself, but she did write an obituary on Stokes in volume 21 of Folklore (1909).111 Historians have pointed to the significant Irish contingent in the ICS in the 19th century. Of the 285 men in the ICS in 1886 and after, at 90

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least 188 had been born in Ireland.112 In 1886 100 Irish civilians were assigned to Bengal, which employed 615 officers.113 Grierson, who was assistant and then officiating magistrate and collector at Patna in 1881, and joint magistrate and collector there in 1884, was part of this Irish contingent. He went on to become magistrate and collector at Gaya in 1890, additional commissioner at Patna in 1895, and opium agent for Bihar in 1896. He was very much a product of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. It was from Trinity College Dublin, the prestigious college that had educated the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland since 1592,114 that Grierson passed into the ICS in 1871. He spent a further two probationary years there, winning prizes for Sanskrit and Hindustani. The college had tailored its curriculum for the ICS exams, establishing chairs in Sanskrit and Hindustani in the late 1850s. By the end of the 19th century, over 200 of its graduates had passed into the ICS. The growth of oriental studies at Trinity furthered Ireland’s place in the Empire.115 Grierson recounts how the idea for the LSI was first suggested to him by his Sanskrit teacher, Professor Robert Atkinson, at the college in 1868.116 Bayly has argued that the background of Irish administrators and personnel in India made them aware of the cultural and linguistic assimilation accompanying British rule, and this may have predisposed them to Indian languages.117 It is possible to read Grierson’s acute sensitivity to Indian languages in this light. Grierson was especially preoccupied with Indian names for languages and places. It is worth pointing out that in the 1890s Whitley Stokes edited and translated many Irish dinnschenchas texts in the 1890s; these onomastic texts of early Irish literature may have influenced Grierson’s strong sense of India’s topography.118 Historians have also outlined how colonial administration in India was influenced by Ireland and vice versa.119 On one occasion, Grierson discussed the political administration of both Ireland and India.120 However, it is important to stress that he was unsympathetic to Irish nationalism. Grierson was a member of the Camberley branch of the National Unionist Association, dedicated to the Union of Britain and Ireland.121 In the 1920s some Anglo-Irish compatriots shared their anxiety about Irish nationalism with Grierson, referring to the ‘terrible ordeal’ of ‘our poor Anglo-Irish brethren’.122 Grierson’s correspondence with D.L.R. Lorimer and Emily Lorimer is revealing here. While David Lorimer was Scottish, Emily was Anglo-Irish. She was born in Dublin and her father, Thomas George Overend (1846–1915), was a county court judge and recorder of Londonderry. Her anti-Irish and anti-Roman Catholic views are stridently expressed in her letters 91

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to Grierson. It seems that Grierson offered a qualified defence of the Black and Tans, as she writes, I can more than believe what you hint about the provocation to the Black & Tans. Do get your Bishop [referring to Grierson’s brother; see earlier] & ½ a dozen big men who are above suspicion to publish the unvarnished facts as soon as the political situation has ceased to be so delicate. She regrets that they cannot do what they might have done two centuries ago – that is, ‘put down all Sinn Fein trouble at the beginning, by hanging in every case a parish priest or Catholic curate nearest to scene of each murder’.123 In her view, English families who live too long in the south and west of Ireland lose their stamina: they ‘acquire some of the regrettable characteristics of their celtic and roman catholic neighbours – casualness, irresponsibility & grievous aversion from honest work’.124 Only Protestants of ‘good British blood’ can be appointed to positions of trust in an Irish government, while the ‘real Irish I take to be really a survival of pre Stone-age, or at least Palaeolithic savages’. The Irish are useful only when they are in a ‘servile state’, ‘free they are about as much benefit to the world as a mad dog’.125 In another letter Colonel Lorimer thanks Grierson for his tales of Ireland, which to him show the inferior quality of the Irish as a people: their Republic, therefore, can be only ‘a sort of stone age one’.126 The shocking virulence of these views of the Catholic Irish far exceeds anything expressed against Indians in Grierson’s correspondence. While Grierson’s responses to the Lorimers are not in the file, they clearly saw him as sharing their perspective, as Emily’s allusion to the Black and Tans cited earlier suggests. While like Whitley Stokes, there was a symbiosis between Grierson’s legal career and his literary and linguistic scholarship (as we have seen, legal hearings were also hearings in a linguistic sense for Grierson), unlike Stokes Grierson was not a Celtic scholar. Stokes had an agonised reaction to the violent turn in Irish nationalism but he remained an Irish patriot.127 In Grierson’s case there is no expression of Irish patriotism. There are also hints of sectarianism in Grierson’s letters. When the Theologians’ Indian Academy in September 1922 contacted Grierson for a set of LSI volumes, after ascertaining that they were a Jesuit college Grierson’s response was an unusually curt refusal.128 Emily Lorimer’s letters also express a conflict between being AngloIrish and being part of the imperial ruling class in India. On the one 92

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hand, the Lorimers sought to maintain a distance between themselves and Indians.129 But she and her husband felt alienated from English civil servants in India. She described being ‘ashamed’ of them, with their lack of a clear sense of duty, myopic concerns about their careers, and their elitist public school backgrounds. She reflects on her and her husband’s different backgrounds: ‘Scotch and Ulster traditions are possibly Puritanical & unduly inclined to be hard on an ideal of life in which games & shikar are the one pursuit of man’.130 She expressed disapproval of the lifestyles of the British ruling elite in India.131 Thus, in Grierson’s correspondence we also find evidence of a sense of Anglo-Irish difference from other members of the British civil service in India. As Cook has pointed out, while Irishmen played a significant role in the British colonial administration in India, they faced antiIrish prejudice, irrespective of whether they were Protestant or not.132 From the late 1850s onwards, there was alarm in the Tory press at the ‘Hibernicisation’ of the ICS, and various strategies were put in place to discriminate against Irish recruitment into the service.133 In addition, Emily Lorimer expresses a fragile sense of ‘whiteness’. In her letters, it is not a fixed attribute; rather it is something that can be gained and lost. For her, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, ‘none of this generation could afford to take the risk of considering any German as a “white man”’. Her letters are particularly strained on this topic, because she was a distinguished German scholar in her own right, and thus there is another level of internal conflict here.134 In another letter, she wonders what the Irish settlement will bring, adding, ‘I confess the outlook of white people outside Ulster doesn’t strike me as cheering’; this suggests that for her the Catholic Irish are not ‘white’. She also sees her brothers in Dublin as ‘white’, with the same implication.135 Thus, Emily Lorimer saw ‘whiteness’ as fragile and fluctuating. Similarly, colonial ‘whiteness’ in India needed to be constantly reinforced – this, along with the shifting nomenclature surrounding it of ‘Anglo-Indian’, ‘Eurasian’, ‘English’ and ‘European’, indicated its precariousness in India.136 However, for those of Anglo-Irish ancestry in the ICS, there was another dimension to this because of the complex history of the racial identity of the Irish in the British Empire and elsewhere. Ignatiev has shown how the Irish ‘became white’ in America – they were initially associated with other coloured and subaltern groups.137 Moreover, one of the effects of the racialisation of Aryans because of the Indo-European hypothesis was to open ‘whiteness’ to multiple appropriations. In the 1920s, in similar ways to Irish immigrants of 93

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the preceding decades, Indians in the US claimed status as ‘white’ to qualify for US citizenship by virtue of belonging to the ‘Caucasian or Aryan race’.138 The Lorimers’ insecurity was exacerbated by a sense of ‘whiteness’ as beleaguered in 1920s India. When in Baluchistan, Emily Lorimer remarks how she and her husband inhabit the only corner of India where ‘the white man’ is still comfortable.139 Others, such as Sten Konow, also express a sense of whiteness under pressure: ‘India is not the place to go for a man with a white skin just now’.140 AngloIndians’ return to Britain after a long period of service in India was fraught because of the loss of the privileges they were accustomed to in India. Many felt this loss keenly; as one of Grierson’s correspondents who returned to Britain put it, ‘We Anglo-Indians are no bodies in this country’.141 At one point, this anxiety about a loss of privilege was connected to the Irish Free State by all retired Anglo-Indians, irrespective of whether they had Irish backgrounds. The ICS Retired Association, which Grierson belonged to, contacted its members about the future of their pensions under an independent Indian government. Fears were expressed over whether any future Government of India would default, given the conduct of the Irish Free State in this regard; hence its members opted for their funds to be transferred to Britain.142 There are some indications of anxiety about whiteness in India in Grierson’s letters too. As examiner of the Cambridge Board for examinations in Hindi, which held separate exams for European candidates and Indian candidates, Grierson noted it was sometimes difficult to define European in this context. Some candidates would be on ‘the border line, with some little European blood’; they might claim to be ‘European’ and ‘yet [they] have been practically brought up as Indians and among Indians’.143 Grierson and his correspondents like Emily Lorimer therefore inhabited a triply hyphenated identity, which we can term Anglo-IndianIrish. They were neither straightforwardly Irish nor straightforwardly English. Grierson’s identification with India was deep and complex, but he did not go fully ‘native’.144 Anglo-Indian returnees were often set apart by distinct imperial experiences and understandings, and, as Buettner has argued, they personified both the differences and the blurring of boundaries between Britain’s domestic and imperial histories.145 Many chose to retire to areas where there were enclaves of ex-Indian civil servants, and as we have seen, Grierson chose Camberley for this reason; it had a reputation for being a favourite location for returning Anglo-Indians.146 Like all returning officials, Grierson’s notion of home was complex – for many Anglo-Indian families, going 94

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‘home’ was an experience of separation from India, and ‘exile’ was part of their family lineage, involving ‘permanent impermanence’ and repeated comings and goings between the metropole and colony.147 But Grierson’s Anglo-Irish background further complicated the notion of home, because home in Ireland was deeply divided. Thus, given their intricate subject positions, Grierson’s and the Lorimers’ ‘return’ to England was additionally fraught. Grierson did not return to Ireland; rather he settled in England, so this was not a return but a relocation. Moreover, he named his house after Rathfarnham in county Dublin, as the address on his letters show, testifying to his Anglo-Irish roots while building a house in Surrey. This is only one indication of how the notion of home is complex for Grierson. The Lorimers settled in Welwyn Garden City, attracted to it as an experiment in cooperative work, and a place which promised to leave behind the class system of the 19th century.148 Their relocation was also less a return home than a participation in a new experiment. In one of her letters from Welwyn Garden City when their house was being built Emily exclaims, ‘now we are really at home’ we can say with the Germans ‘Morgen ist auch ein Tag’.149 Here being at home is expressed both in English and in German, the language whose speakers she had earlier denounced as not being ‘white’; she is unable to express a sense of home in English alone. Her husband referred to coping with their garden in Welwyn Garden City and its ‘infernal clay’, which accounts for the ‘solidity and stodginess of the true-born Englishman’, and ‘you don’t find anything like it in Ireland or Scotland’.150 The very soil of England tests his attempt to root himself and highlights his and his wife’s different background. At one point, he suggested to Grierson, I suppose the Celt in learning English has carried with him his Celtic way of thinking. The same sort of thing has been going on in Gilgit facilitated by frequent intermarriage of people with different mother tongues, & the fact that a large percentage of the people are at least bilingual.151 Thus his complex sense of self is brought into play in relation to the linguistic region of India he researched upon, and indicates how for him Celtic ways of speaking opened up a different relationship with the English language from those who counted as unambiguously English. These complexities of home are evident not just in the name of Grierson’s house in Camberley but also in the Survey’s project. From 1900 onwards, Grierson’s entire life in England was taken up by the LSI; the 95

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latter was neither fully located in India nor fully in England. Grierson is psychically, intellectually and emotionally engaged with India while being physically absent from it. In some ways, Grierson is at home only in the poly-situated LSI. As we have seen, Grierson circulated the parable of the prodigal son to be translated into all the languages and dialects the LSI surveyed. As a result, there are approximately 740 versions of the parable in Indian languages and dialects in the LSI volumes. This makes it the most widely translated biblical passage in the subcontinent.152 Grierson’s earlier compilation of all the known versions of the prodigal son parable in Indian languages, published in 1897 as Specimen Translations in Various Indian Languages, was seen by some as ‘a promising instalment’ of ‘a full and linguistic survey of our Indian empire’,153 indicating how central the parable was to the very inception of the Survey. The parable is a narrative about homecoming, belonging and forgiveness, but it is also inconclusive – there is no clear ending to it. The obsessive repetition of the prodigal son in the Survey reflects the unresolved nature of home and belonging in it and Grierson’s own experience as Anglo-Irish-Indian. In many ways, the LSI is about home, migration and belonging and it is a work about immigration as a politically charged issue, as we shall see.154 The parable of the prodigal son is also about the reunification of a family. As Trautmann notes, the Aryan theory in colonial India was a story about ‘family reunion’,155 and Grierson engaged with Aryanism in depth in the LSI and in his writings.156 Moreover, cladistics or the construction of family trees for languages is key to historical linguistics.157 The family tree model of Indo-European was first proposed by August Schleicher in 1861, approximately 25 or so years before the inception of the LSI, and its groupings of languages into families are obviously permeated with this model. Sometimes, though, Grierson uses terms of kinship more loosely. For example, words in Hindustani borrowed from Sanskrit directly are ‘grand-uncles’ of ‘genuine’ words in Hindi.158 He also uses the language of first and second cousins to discuss language relationships.159 Occasionally this slips into metaphorical expressions of paternity, as when he describes himself as taking an interest in the condition of Bihari, because he had been in attendance at its birth as a separate language.160 This looser language of kinship reminds us of the complex familial experience Anglo-Indians had in India. Apart from encountering different kinds of family units in India, such as extended families, their own households and families were not nuclear. Often their children were reared by relatives when they were sent to England; parenting was a role extended beyond biological 96

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parents. As Margot Finn has shown, networks encompassing in-laws, cousins, godparents, nieces and servants were crucial to the diffuse familial identities of Anglo-Indians.161 Grierson was childless but he had personal experience of these complexities, as he was chosen to be godfather to the Lorimers’ adopted son Jack in 1922. Moreover, because Grierson could not attend the christening, a proxy attended in his stead, and he too became a godfather of the boy, who therefore acquired ‘all kinds of parents’. Grierson’s correspondence here mixes child rearing and adoption with linguistic references and questions of naming. Apart from Jack’s baptismal ‘provisional renaming’ as ‘John Grierson Lorimer’, there are allusions to Jack’s speech in Gilgit, where he spent part of his childhood, as neither English nor Shina, with references to how in the latter kinship terms are difficult to translate into English, and may indicate the fragments of a matriarchal society.162 In addition, Lorimer uses an analogy between the dedication of one of his works to Grierson and the adoption of Jack: ‘You accepted the Dedication of the Baktiari Phonology, but then you knew exactly what you were in for. You cannot tell, and no more can we, what Jack’s later developments and latter end may be’.163 Lorimer also describes his own collaboration with the Survey and his relationship with it as ‘step-fatherly’.164 Such multiple senses of kinship terms, mixing familial relations between individuals and between languages in the same letter, point to Grierson’s own complex subject position, in which senses of kinship, identification and affiliation are negotiable and complicated.

Conclusion Thus, there are countervailing narratives to the colonial categories in the Survey. While colonial knowledge was often the product of asymmetrical power relations, it could also be driven by forms of scholarly practice that tried to break free from discourses and intellectual practices institutionalised by imperial power.165 This is the case with the concept of race in the LSI. Grierson tries to move away from the dominant category of race in British imperial ethnology and attempts to dissociate philology from race science, with mixed success. Nonetheless, his attempt must be noted. Moreover, a narrative of illness and failing eyesight runs through his correspondence, which is not suggestive of a straightforward sense of power. Grierson also had a complex subject position, reflected in his use of English in his letters and in the LSI volumes, in which the boundaries between English and Indian languages are unclear. 97

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Grierson was a cross-border figure, whose in-between position is often evident in the LSI. He inhabited a triply hyphenated identity as Anglo-Irish-Indian, in which no single term was dominant; rather he was a partial participant in all three. While the family trees in the Survey reflect the importance of cladistics in historical linguistics, they also extend to broader issues of home and belonging, and complex notions of kinship and affinity in Grierson’s writings. These are at odds with any secure or seamless narrative of colonial mastery. As Trautmann notes, ‘everyone within the structure [of the linguistic tree] . . . is related to everyone else’. In contrast to the binary of Self versus Other, the segmentary idea of the tree ‘assumes sameness (kinship), which it then partitions along a calculus of distance’.166 Cladistics enables us to think about relationships of closeness and distance without falling into the trap of binary opposites. Grierson’s shifting movement between closeness to and distance from India dovetails with this. The fate of Grierson’s personal library of over 600 volumes is indicative of his habitation of this in-between space. When Grierson came to dispose of his library, he contacted many libraries and institutions, stressing that he would not sell his library piecemeal. In the end, he offered it to the Indian High Commission in London, commenting, ‘it is one of the finest private libraries connected with Indian languages in this country’.167 As an Indian space within the capital of Britain and the empire, this location for his library was the logical choice for Grierson. Grierson was also a go-between and knowledge broker. Historians have addressed the importance of these figures in making and changing ‘the contents and paths of knowledge’ from the late 18th century onwards, and in transgressing and questioning the borders around European milieux.168 Grierson’s subject position made him what Simmel calls a ‘third party’; as such, he reflects ‘the abandonment of absolute contrast’ between two parties antithetical to each other.169 As we shall see in the following chapters, and in Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, Grierson is often a mediator between the terms ‘British’ and ‘Indian’. At the same time, his illnesses suggest he suffered the consequences of being a third party. He sometimes inhabited the difficult situation of the third party ‘whom love or duty, fate or habit have made equally intimate with both [other parties]’, and who ‘can be crushed by the conflict-much more so than if he himself took sides’.170 In fact, Grierson identified with one form of Indian nationalism in his writings, and he espoused a quasi-Indian cultural nationalism in some forums.171 Elsewhere I discuss Grierson’s 98

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interest in Kashmiri Shaivism in terms of shoring up the precarious position of pandits in Kashmir in the early 20th century.172 However, Grierson may also have been drawn to Kashmiri Shaivism because of the way it inscribed a heterodox self within an orthodox social order, and brought radical sects ‘in from the visionary fringe to accommodate areas of orthodox self-representation’.173 In other words, it was a fitting analogue to the combination of his own in-between position as simultaneously conservative and radical, colonial and nationalist, and British and Indian. In the next two chapters, we will see how colonial narratives of mastery unravel in the Survey’s transliteration strategies and its gramophone recordings, and in Chapter 6 I move beyond these narratives to look at how the Survey’s authority lies in its open avowal of uncertainty and the provisional nature of its findings rather than in a sense of colonial mastery. In many ways, this is its governing idiom rather than a language of command and control.

Notes 1 Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans in British India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, pp. 182–3. 2 Ibid., pp. 161, 184–9. 3 Ibid., pp. 163–4. 4 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Pt. 1: Introductory, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927, p. 28; see also p. 22 on how philology and ethnology should not be confounded. 5 LS Files S/1/14/12, Grierson to S. Grantham, 19.2.1923, Asian and African Collections, British Library, London, hereafter LS Files. 6 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 3: The Bhīl Languages, including Khāndēśí, Banjārī or Labhānī, Bahrūpiā, & c., Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1907, p. 5. 7 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 4: Muṇḍā and Dravidian Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906, p. 5; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 82. 8 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 5. 9 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bihārī and Oṛiyā Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, p. 1. 10 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 95. 11 EUR 223/300, Max Müller to H.H. Risley, 12.10.1887, Asia and Africa Collection, British Library, London, hereafter EUR only. 12 Ibid., Max Müller to Grierson, 20.7.1886. 13 Ibid.

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14 LS Files S/1/1/7, Sir John Marshall to Grierson, 17.6.1926. 15 Trautmann, Aryans, pp. 198–202. 16 EUR 223/300, H.H. Risley to Grierson, 11.1.1887, and Max Müller to H.H. Risley, 12.10.1887. 17 EUR 223/272, The Pioneer, 3.12.1897. 18 LS Files S/1/14/1, H.H. Risley to Grierson, 9.4.1902. 19 Ibid. 20 LS Files S/1/1/7, Sten Konow to Grierson, 29.3.1904. 21 EUR 223/300, Max Müller to Grierson, 20.7.1886. 22 Ibid., Max Müller to H.H. Risley, 12.10.1887. 23 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 44; LSI, Vol. 4, p. 472; LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, p. 59. 24 LS Files S/1/9/16, Grierson to H.E.M. James, 30.12.1900, and S/1/6/11, Grierson to Sir John Donald, 5.7.1916; see also S/1/9/16, Grierson to R.E. Enthoven on Gujarati and Konkani opening out ‘some very interesting ethnological problems’. 25 LS Files S/1/4/14, Grierson to J.H. Hutton, 23.5.1922. 26 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 28–30. 27 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Dardic or Piśācha Languages (including Kāshmīrī), Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919, p. 6. 28 Tony Ballantyne, ‘Colonial Knowledge’, in Sarah Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2008, p. 193; Richard Burghart, ‘A Quarrel in the Language Family: Agency and Representations of Speech in Mithila’, Modern Asian Studies, 1993, 27 (4): 781. 29 LS Files S/1/14/9, R.E. Enthoven to Grierson, 18.4.1901, and S/1/1/8, Grierson to Sten Konow, 23.1.11; see also S/1/6/10, Col. Fox-Strangways to Grierson, 21.6.1912. 30 LS Files S/1/14/2, Edward Gait to Grierson, 19.1.1903, and S/1/14/12, C.C. Lowis to Grierson, 19.2.1903. 31 Ibid., Grant-Brown, ‘Dialects in Burma’, Rangoon Gazette, 15.9.1904. 32 Ibid., C. Morgan Webb to Grierson, 27.5.1912. 33 EUR 223/327, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 31.7.1922 & 4.1.1924. 34 EUR 223/328, 1.1.1934. 35 EUR 223/327, L.F. Taylor, ‘Ethnological and Linguistic Research in Burma and South-East Asia’, paper read at AGM, Burma Research Society, 10.2.1922. 36 EUR 223/328, ‘Advance Proof’ of ‘Linguistic Survey of Burma’. 37 LS Files S/1/1/8, Grierson to Sten Konow, 31.7.1913, EUR 223/301, Grierson to T.C. Hodson, 27.3.1928, EUR 223/333, Grierson to R.L. Turner, 23.11.1932, EUR 223/241, Grierson to E.K. Lockyer, 6.8.1929, and EUR 223/323, Grierson to Sir Aurel Stein, 21.11.1912. 38 EUR 223/306, Grierson to A.C. Woolner, 18.5.1922, EUR 223/259, Grierson to Sir Denys de S. Bray, 13.5.1931, and EUR 223/231, Grierson to Maharajadhiraja of Darbhanga, 26.4.1933. 39 EUR 223/323, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 5.8.1916. 40 EUR 223/270, Sten Konow to Grierson, 26.6.1928. 41 EUR 223/338, Prof. M. Winternitz to Grierson, 19.1.1931, and EUR 223/303, Grierson to Sir Richard Burn, 8.12.1931.

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42 EUR 223/207, Grierson cited in obituary for J.D. Anderson, The Cambridge Review, 14.1.1921. 43 EUR 223/297, Colonel D.C. Phillott to Grierson, 31.12.1919. 44 EUR 223/304, Barnett to Grierson, 17.7.1936 & 19.7.1939. 45 LS Files S/1/9/17, Grierson to H.E.M. James, 7.10.1900. 46 EUR 223/304, Barnett to Grierson, 17.1.1936 & 1.8.1939. 47 EUR 223/324, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 14.9.1936. 48 EUR 223/270, Sten Konow to Grierson, 19.12.1925. 49 Ibid., Konow to Grierson, 4.1.1933. 50 EUR 223/302, L. Barnett to Grierson, L. Barnett to Grierson, 15.12.1930. 51 EUR 223/270, Sten Konow to Grierson, 3.1.1937. 52 Ibid., Konow to Grierson, 7.4.1935. 53 EUR 223/323, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 1.07.1916, and EUR 223/324, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 14.9.1936. 54 EUR 223/210, Johan van Manen to Grierson, 12.10.1932; the citation is from W. Caland’s translation (Calcutta, 1931). 55 EUR 223/210, Johan van Manen to Grierson, 8.3.1932, and EUR 223/264, Grierson to Prof. Hermann Jacobi, 29.2.1924; see also EUR 223/338, Grierson to Prof. M. Winternitz, 27.2.1924 on how his pandit has helped him ‘be their Vyāsa’. The reference is to Grierson and Lionel Barnett’s edition, Lallā-Vākyāni or the Wise Sayings of Lal Ded, London: RAS, 1920. 56 EUR 223/323, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 29.2.1916 & 5.09.1918. 57 EUR 223/324, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 21.8.1921 & 15.9.1921. 58 EUR 223/223, Grierson to D.R. Bhandarkar, 24.10.1921, and EUR 223/231, Grierson to Sri Narayan Babu, n.d. 59 EUR 223/330, Grierson to Professor F.W. Thomas, 21.6.1937. 60 EUR 223/289, Georg Morgenstierne to Grierson, 22.4.1935. 61 EUR 223/270, Sten Konow to Grierson, 1.1.1937. 62 LS Files S/1/1/31, Grierson to E.E. Bate, 9.4.1915, and E.E. Bate to Grierson, 10.4.1915. 63 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 128, f.n. For Grierson’s conception of tatsamas and tadbhavas see ibid., p. 128 ff., and George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 4: Specimens of the Pahārī languages and Gujurī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1916, p. 113 f.n, 379 f.n, 460 f.n.; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Western Hindī and Pañjābī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1916, p. 54 f.n., and EUR 223/316, Grierson to Lloyd James, 27.3.1928. 64 LS Files S/1/2/10, Grierson to H.W. Orange, 9.9.1904. 65 See Ch. 4 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. 66 George A. Grierson and Mrs. Grierson (first name not given), ‘An EnglishGipsy Index: Compiled by Mrs. Grierson: With an Introductory Note by George A. Grierson’, Indian Antiquary, 1886, 15: 14–19. 67 See Ch. 6. 68 EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 10.7.1924. 69 EUR 223/272, Grierson to Hewett, 4.12.1897.

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70 LS Files S/1/2/5, Grierson to Rai Bahadur Gouri Kant Roy, 17.8.1910, and EUR 223/291, Grierson to A. Govindacharya, 29.3.1910, on conjunctivitis, also EUR 223/285, Grierson to K.V. Subhaiya, 4.3.1910, on how his eyes had broken down. 71 For example, see LS Files S/1/2/5, Grierson to Roy, 29.4.1924, S/1/4/1, Grierson to J.D. Clarke, 14.5.1923, S/1/4/14, Grierson to J.H. Hutton, 26.4.1923 & 1.3.1924, S/1/5/2, Grierson to Dhirendra Varma, 25.5.1925, S/1/10/3, Grierson to Pandit Gauri Shaukar Ojha, 28.9.1925, and EUR 223/308, Grierson to Sita Ram, 24.10.1923 & 15.1.1924. 72 EUR 223/324, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 18.6.1922, and EUR 223/267, Grierson to E.J. Neve, 11.5.1926. 73 EUR 223/263, Grierson to A.D. Parkinson, 5.11.1925, EUR 223/223, Ernest J. Hall to Taraporewala, 25.04.1922 & 2.05.1922, and EUR 223/265, Grierson to K.P. Jayaswal, 31.12.1929. 74 EUR 223/303, Grierson to Congress Secretary, Royal Anthropological Institute, 15.6.1934, Grierson to Owen Tweedy, Union of Britain and India, 3.7.1924, EUR 223/298, Grierson to Editorial Committee, Dr K.B. Pathak Commemoration Volume, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, 29.4.1930, Grierson to Honorary Secretary, Reverend Thomas C.N. Fernandez, The Konkani Committee, 13.2.1934, Grierson to S.M. Katre and P.K. Gode, 21.12.1938, EUR 223/295, Grierson to Mrs Rhys Davis, 6.10.1931, Grierson to Secretary, Pali Society, 17.10.1939, EUR 223/263, Grierson to Secretary of International Society of Experimental Phonetics, 25.4.1930, EUR 223/265, Grierson to K.P. Jayaswal, 31.12.1929, and EUR 223/328, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 28.9.1937. 75 EUR 223/295, Grierson to Mrs Rhys Davis, 29.7.1933. 76 LS Files S/1/2/3, Grierson to Waddell, 8.10.1899. 77 I discuss this more fully in Ch. 5 and 6 in Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. 78 EUR 223/273 Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 16.6.1928, and EUR 223/302, Charpentier to Grierson, 1.7.1928. 79 EUR 223/308, Grierson to Sita Ram, 28.8.1910. 80 George A. Grierson, The Bible in India, Anarkali, Lahore: Punjab Bible Society, c. 1904, pp. 12–13. 81 EUR 223/210, Grierson to G to Van Manen, 7.3.1933. 82 EUR 223/210, Johan van Manen to Grierson, Calcutta, 30.7.1932. 83 EUR 223/283, D.L.R. Lorimer to Grierson, 24.2.1922, and EUR 223/226, S.K. Chatterji to Grierson, 29.3.1922. 84 EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 25.10.1922 & 31.1.1924. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., D.L.R. Lorimer to Grierson, 24.2.1922, and Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 25.10.1922. 87 Ibid., Emily Lorimer to Grierson 27.7.1923. 88 Ibid., Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 25.10.1922. 89 Ibid., D.L.R. Lorimer to Grierson, 13.11.1926. 90 Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 91 EUR 223/283, D.L.R. Lorimer to Grierson, 24.2.1922 & 1.7.1922. 92 See Ch. 4 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India.

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93 LS Files S/1/1/17, Grierson to Lloyd James, 7.12.1926. 94 EUR 223/320, Grierson to A.G. Shirreff, 26.4.1932. 95 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 522 on Miaya labelled by other groups as Kohistani; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 3: Specimens of the Kuki-Chin and Burma Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1904, p. 331, on the self-designations of A-sho/Hiou/Shou/ Shyu/Shoa and the Burmese labelling of these groups as Chins, with the Arakanese pronunciation of this word; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bodo, Nāgā, and Kachin Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, p. 204, on what the Angamis call themselves and the three different names they are called by surrounding tribes. 96 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 55, on the Yo/Zo not recognising the term ‘Chin’; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, pp. 411, 204–5, on the Empeo/Embo not recognising the term ‘Naga’ and on it being ‘foreign’ to the people themselves, and p. 235, on Rengma, a foreign Assamese name, ‘unknown to the people themselves [who call themselves Unza] or any of their neighbours’. 97 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, p. 234. 98 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 150; for notes on other self-designations, George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 2: Mōn-Khmēr and Siamese-Chinese Families (Including Khassi and Tai), Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1904, pp. 283, 373. 99 The term ‘Anglo-Indian’ is used in different ways; throughout I use it to refer to the British who resided in India during a tenure of official service. 100 EUR 223/304, Grierson to Bernard Quattrich, 26.2.1936. 101 Ibid., Burke’s Landed Gentry to Grierson, 7.3.1936, and Grierson to The Editor, Burke’s Peerage, 8.11.1938. 102 For this elite and its role in India, see Thomas G. Fraser, ‘Ireland and India’, in Keith Jeffery (ed.), ‘An Irish Empire?’ Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, pp. 77–93. 103 EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 2.1.1922. 104 EUR 223/273, see back of envelope, sent to Grierson on 4.6.1928. 105 LS Files S/1/2/3, Grierson to Waddell, 8.2.1900. 106 EUR 223/206, Robert Shafer to Grierson, 25.3.1932 & 4.5.1932. 107 EUR 223/273, Stewart Macmillan to Grierson, 4.6.1928, and Scott to Grierson, 4.6.1928. See also EUR 223/330, Professor F.W. Thomas to Grierson, 9.10.1917. 108 EUR 223/270, Sten Konow to Grierson, 3.1.1937. 109 EUR 223/304, Grierson to Bernard Quattrich, 24.2.1936. 110 EUR 223/302, Grierson to the Secretary, Royal Irish Academy, 21.12. 1928. 111 EUR 223/323, Grierson to Sir Aurel Stein, 6.2.1919, and EUR 223/309, Eleanor Hull to Grierson, 11.3.1918. For an excellent study of Whitley Stokes, see Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell (eds), The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes (1830–1909), Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011.

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112 Scott B. Cook, ‘The Irish Raj: Social Origins and Careers of Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service, 1855–1914’, Journal of Social History, 1987, 20 (3): 516. 113 Ibid., p. 520. 114 Ibid., p. 510. 115 Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004, p. 175. For an earlier assessment of Trinity College’s contributions to Indology, see Menahem Mansoor, The Story of Irish Orientalism, Dublin: Figgis and Co., and London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1944, p. 27ff. 116 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 198. 117 Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Ireland, India and the Empire: 1780–1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2000, 10: 390. 118 For the Survey’s cartography and naming practices, see Ch. 2–3 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. 119 Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2009, p. 68. 120 EUR 223/299, Prof J. Jolly to Grierson, 21.2.1886. 121 EUR 223/303, Grierson to D.A. Gunnell, 15.5.1934. 122 EUR 223/337, Sir William Ridgeway to Grierson, 16.10.1923. 123 EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 2.1.1922. 124 Ibid., Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 10.4.1923. 125 Ibid., D.L.R. Lorimer to Grierson, 30.4.1922, and Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 10.4.1923. 126 Ibid., 11.8.1918 & 9.10.1922. 127 Nigel Chancellor, ‘Patriot Hare or Colonial Hound? Whitley Stokes and Irish Identity in British India 1862–81’, in Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell (eds), The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes (1830–1909), Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011, pp. 71, 75. 128 EUR 223/232, Grierson to Secretary, Theologians’ Indian Academy, St. Mary’s, Kurseong, 4.10.1922. 129 EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer, ‘Copy for Jack’s Godfather of a home diary’, 25.2.1923. 130 Ibid., Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 31.1.1924. 131 Ibid., Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 3.7.1922. 132 Cook, ‘Irish Raj’, pp. 507–8. 133 Ibid., pp. 513–4. 134 EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 21.8.1920 & 23.11.1920. 135 Ibid., Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 23.11.1920 & 4.10.1921. 136 Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 10–13. 137 Silvestri, Ireland and India, p. 38; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, New York: Routledge, 1995. 138 Silvestri, Ireland and India, p. 39, on the case of Bhagat Singh Thind. 139 EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 2.1.1922. 140 EUR 223/270, Sten Konow to Grierson, 20.12.1932. 141 LS Files S/1/1/29, Sir George Watt to Grierson, 14.10.1915. 142 EUR 223/256, Sir Charles Fawcett, Honorary Secretary, ICS (Retired) Association, to Under Secretary of State for India, Services and General

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143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157

158 159 160 161

162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169

Department, India Office, 21.7.1932, Sir Charles Fawcett to Grierson, 1.9.1935, and Duncan Fraser, Report on Indian Civil Service Family Pension Fund, 14.5.1936. EUR 223/282, Grierson to J.O. Roach, 17.11.17, 1926. See Ch. 5 and 6 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. Buettner, Empire Families, pp. 2, 20. Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 1. EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 31.1.1924. Ibid., 15.6.1925. Ibid., D.L.R. Lorimer, 23.9.1925. Ibid., 13.11.1926. Christopher Shackle, From Wuch to Southern Lahnda: A Century of Siraiki Studies in English, Multan: Bazm-e Saqaft, 1983, p. 54. EUR 223/272, cutting from The Athenaeum, 2.10.1897. See Ch. 5 and 6 in my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. Trautmann, Aryans, p. 15. For which, see Ch. 5 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. James Clackson, Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 5–15; Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, Ch. 6. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 54. EUR 223/226, Grierson to S.K. Chatterji, 3.3.1920. EUR 223/299, Grierson’s Note on the Linguistic Survey. Margot Finn, ‘Family Formations: Anglo India and the Familial Protostate’, in David Feldman and Jon Lawrence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 100–17; Margot Finn, ‘The Barlow Bastards: Romance Comes Home from the Empire’, in Margot Finn, Michael Lobban, and Jenny Bourne Taylor (eds), Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History, New York and Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 25–47; Buettner, Empire Families, p. 14. EUR 223/283, D.L.R. Lorimer to Grierson, 6.4.1922, 1.7.1922 & 30.7.1922, and Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 3.7.1922 & 25.10.1922. Ibid., D.L.R. Lorimer to Grierson, 6.4.1922. Ibid., D.L.R. Lorimer to Grierson, 16.5.1928. For a discussion of this, see Ballantyne, ‘Colonial Knowledge’, p. 194. Trautmann, Aryans, p. 10. EUR 223/243, Grierson to Secretary, High Commission of India, 13.1.1931. Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World: Go-betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, Washington: Science History Publications, 2009, pp. x–xi. Kurt H. Wolff (transl. and ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, London: Collier-Macmillan Limited, 1950, p. 148, Ch. 4.

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170 171 172 173

Ibid., p. 150. See Ch. 4–7 in Nation and Region. Ibid., Ch. 1. Alexis Sanderson, ‘Purity and Power among the Brahmans of Kashmir’, in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 190–216.

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4 SCRIPTS AND SPECTACLES

Among other things, the LSI is an exercise in Roman transliteration. This chapter outlines the ways in which the Roman script in the LSI is actualised in relation to Indian languages, some of which echo narratives of Christianisation and colonial modernity. The Survey is partly a culmination of British imperial schemes to convert the scripts of India to the Roman script and the latter is iconic of British colonial authority. However, the Roman script unravels as a master script of India and its inadequacies are laid bare in the Survey’s processes of transliteration. It is in the area of transliteration that the LSI’s distinctive idiom of knowledge production begins to emerge.

The Roman script as a corrective In the LSI, there are approximately 740 versions of the parable of the prodigal son in Indian languages and dialects. Of these some 375 are in the Roman script only, while the rest are in an Indian script followed by a Roman transliteration. In addition, some 474 other passages are used as samples. Some of these are in Roman only and some are in an Indian script followed by Roman transliteration. In total, there are about 1,214 passages transliterated into the Roman script. This does not include the list of words in the comparative vocabularies, or individual words and phrases in the grammars. The Survey is therefore a massive exercise in Roman transliteration. It played an important role in adding the Roman script to the two other main script systems in India, those derived from Brahmi and from Arabic.1 In keeping with British colonial views about its print order in India as indicative of its authority, Grierson stressed the importance of the quality of printing for the LSI’s volumes.2 He emphasised to the superintendent of the Government Press in Calcutta 107

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that ‘in a work of this kind it is absolutely necessary that the many diacritical marks should be absolutely correct’. This extended to the presentation of tone marks.3 For Grierson, correct Romanisation of Indian languages and texts expressed epistemological authority. In some volumes of the LSI the specimens are dominated by the Roman script. Volume 3, part 1 on the Tibeto-Himalayan group of languages presents around 37 prodigal son passages, 32 of which are in the Roman script only. Of the 19 other passages presented in this volume, only 2 are presented in a non-Roman script.4 All the specimens of the ‘Gipsy’ languages in volume 11 are given in the Roman script only. At least until the 1980s some languages in India were in the Roman script only; some of these overlapped with those in Roman only in the LSI.5 Even when Grierson receives specimens in multiple scripts, he sometimes presents these in the Roman script only, as with those of the Baori dialect from Lahore district, which were received in three scripts (Devanagari, Gurmukhi and Persian), and with the specimen of Bagri from Ferozepur, received in the Persian script and Gurmukhi.6 He discusses how Siraiki is written in three scripts, but asserts it has no ‘written character of its own’ – a surprising assertion given the nearby example of Panjabi, which was and continues to be written in three scripts.7 Most of the Siraiki specimens are presented in Roman only.8 In some cases, then, the Roman script displaces the Indian scripts in which specimens are received. Grierson also presents Romanisation as a corrective to Indian scripts’ inadequacies. He justified organising his Kāshmīrī Dictionary according to the Roman alphabet because of the inadequacies of the Persian script in representing vowels, and the disagreements between writers using the Sarada and Devanagari scripts about how to represent these.9 When asked to help with transliterating Kashmiri names on maps, Grierson wanted the names to be supplied in both the Devanagari and Persian scripts so that he could ‘give their correct full spelling in the Roman character’.10 In one case a specimen is described as unsatisfactory because it is in the Persian script, and so its ‘deficiencies’ are corrected in the transliteration.11 Other examples of transliteration making good perceived problems in the Persian script include Ormuri and Baluchi.12 The Magahi dialect specimen from the district of Gaya is printed in the Kaithi type ‘exactly as written, so as to show the inaccuracies of spelling .  .  . which are common in the written character’. These are ‘corrected in the transliteration’.13 The same applies to a Bihari passage written in the Bengali script.14 In other instances,

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because the Nagari character does not usually represent the doubling of consonants, this is made good in the Romanised transliteration.15 For Grierson, then, Roman transliteration corrects source texts in the Indian script. Sometimes this is done through double transliteration, once to follow the source text as it is written, and the second time to correct its spelling.16 Here Grierson reverses the values of source and target script, and the transliterated text takes precedence over the source text as the ‘better text’.17 There are also cases of ‘phantom’ transliteration, where the transliterated text prescribes what the source text ought to be. For example, Grierson presents a specimen in facsimile, with a line-for-line and letter-for-letter transcription in the Roman character, ‘showing the words not as they were written, but as they would be written if spelt correctly in the Nāgarī character’.18 In one case, Grierson modifies the source text to agree with the transliteration.19 In another case, the Roman transliteration corrects a rhyme in the original source text, again presenting the source text as it ought to be, rather than rendering it as it is.20 Grierson often refers to his transliterations as ‘silent’ corrections, as in the case of specimen passages of Baluchi,21 Magahi,22 Tibetan23 and Maithili.24 The ‘capricious’ spelling of a specimen in the Kaithi script is ‘silently corrected’ in the transliteration.25 In these cases, transliteration is a background system of control and correction, but by calling itself ‘silent’ it is paradoxically articulate. The use of the adjective ‘silent’ is revealing because of the concern Grierson has for pronunciation in general and the difficulties of capturing the sounds of Indian languages.26 It is as though a voluble silence characterises the transliteration machinery of the LSI, which both highlights and is at odds with the noisy babble of India and its multiple scripts. When Grierson finds that the same script varies from district to district, as in the case of the Multani version of the Landa script for Siraiki, the reader is referred to a table in which Romanisation is used to compare the Multani with the standard version of the script.27 In another table the Landa script is compared with Gurmukhi through Romanisation.28 Similarly, Romanisation is deployed to ‘facilitate comparison’ between the Gurmukhi, Kangra and Dogra scripts.29 A table for Gurmukhi, Landa, Takri and Sarada shows ‘the close connection between these four alphabets’ by giving them in parallel columns with Roman equivalents.30 When Grierson comes across three varieties of Kaithi for writing Bihari, he produces a table in Roman highlighting the Kaithi alphabet in its three varieties.31 A similar strategy is used for the three alphabets in use

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in Mithila.32 Thus, Romanisation facilitates comparisons between different Indian scripts and provides a stabilising framework for them, and micro-level variations in Indian scripts are both highlighted and made comprehensible through the Roman script. For Grierson because ‘local characters vary so greatly, . . . without a transcription in the Roman characters, the specimens will be useless’,33 so Romanisation also lends value to the specimens on which the Survey is based.

Scripts and spectacles At one level, the Survey’s Romanisation is analogous to the task of the colonial state; it brings European order to Indian chaos. As a silent transliterating machine, it creates unity and quiet firmness in the noisy babble of India. The status of the Roman script in the LSI is clear from a simile Grierson draws between scripts and spectacles. When the dialect of Eastern Magahi is written in the Bengali script, the ‘language is looked at . . . through Bengali spectacles’. In another district this dialect is written in the Kaithi alphabet, and is seen ‘through Hindī spectacles’.34 A subdialect of Eastern Magahi is also seen ‘through Bengali spectacles’.35 Some Santali specimens have likewise been ‘seen through Bengali spectacles’, while a few Kurukh specimens have been viewed through Oriya ‘spectacles’.36 The specimens for the Bodo group of language have been prepared by Indians ‘through Assamese spectacles’.37 While generally spectacles are used to correct poor sight, Indian scripts as spectacles distort one’s vision. Grierson does not use this analogy for the Roman script; Roman transliteration is not implicated in the distortion caused by Indian scriptspectacles when applied to languages or dialects. It seems the Roman script compensates for the problems of vision discussed in the last chapter, as it helps to see things clearly in India’s multi-script environment. Moreover, Grierson expresses the view that few Indians can transcribe into the Roman character correctly. Some ‘think they have done beautifully when they fill a pepper-box with diacritical marks, and scatter them over the page at random’. Hence he had to transcribe every version of the prodigal son in the LSI himself.38 Thus, the LSI’s judicious use of diacritics contrasts with Indian diacritical disorder, and colonial Romanisation capitalises on and rectifies the effects of native error.

Romanisation and British imperialism To a certain extent, the LSI is a culmination of British imperial schemes to convert Indian languages to a Roman system, in which the latter is 110

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an icon for civilisational superiority and the unifying framework of British rule. Just as British rule can govern India’s multiple religious, caste and language communities, so the Roman script can transcend and frame its welter of scripts and tongues.39 In October 1912, when chairing a talk by Grant Brown to the East India Association, Grierson agreed India needed a common alphabet and thought the Roman script should be the basis for this.40 When Grierson was collector in Gaya, he experimented with introducing the Roman character into official documents. He described this as a ‘complete success’, but the local government ordered him to revert to the ‘local character’.41 At one point in his career, then, Grierson was committed to having local government documents in the Roman script. Grierson also cites with approval a leading Muslim figure’s view that with Muslim rule ‘our’ alphabet and language were adopted all over India; as the British now rule, they should employ their own script for all official documents.42 Elsewhere Grierson states his preference for the Roman script as a ‘secondary character’ for all of India, adding, ‘This is what the Moguls did with their character, – the Persian, and I do not see why we should not do the same with ours’.43 Grierson, then, expresses support for the Roman script as a secondary imperial alphabet in the subcontinent; for him this would symbolise the British possession of India. Grierson uses the term ‘character’ to refer to script. This term is obviously slippery because it can also refer to the attributes of a group of people or of an individual. Some of Grierson’s correspondents implicitly associated Indians’ carelessness in transliteration with native unreliability; natives are ‘too fond of their own way and of affectations’ in their transliterations, and ‘there are many “barbarisms” of which they should rid themselves’.44 Grierson depicts India as a congeries of language-based nationalities wedded to particular scripts, with little chance of ‘inducing any Indian nationality to abandon its national alphabet’.45 Indian nationalities will not give up their alphabets because ‘script is too deeply engrained in the very nature, or in the religion, of each group of people’. In India scripts are ‘matters of nationality or religion, and no one will give up his own script for another contemporary script of equal importance’.46 Referring to the Bombay government’s defeat in the Legislative Council on the question of the Modi script, Grierson writes, ‘What a commentary on the cry of “India one nation”, and on the movement to have one alphabet in use all over India! The cry for Modi is distinctly separatist in character’.47 For Grierson, then, India’s multiple scripts reflect the multinational nature of the subcontinent while the Devanagari and 111

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Perso-Arabic scripts reflect irreconcilable differences between monolithically conceived Hindu and Muslim communities. I discuss this in more detail in my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, but here we can note Grierson’s description of the differences between these two scripts as a ‘geist-gulf’.48 It is as if script is a primary ontological reality in relation to which communities are secondary. This ‘geist-gulf’ means any attempt to define a national script using an Indian script will fail, as Muslims and Hindus will not give up their respective scripts.49 There are also signs of script as visceral in the LSI. Sumathi Ramaswamy has shown how linguistic subnationalism in the colonial period feminised Indian languages using a range of figures, including that of a female deity.50 The Survey rarely uses the term ‘mother-tongue’; instead its preferred term is ‘home language’.51 This is in contrast to the use of the term ‘mother tongue’ by linguistic and cultural associations, such as the Maithili Sahitya Parishad Darbhanga, when it makes its case for the teaching of Maithili at Patna University.52 However, when discussing how Indian scripts are a matter of nationality or religion, Grierson states Indians may adopt a secondary script but this will never supersede ‘the mother-script’.53 For Grierson, the visceral relationship with language captured in the term ‘mother tongue’ lies more in one’s relationship to script than to the tongue itself.

Romanisation and Christianity As we have seen, a version of the biblical parable of the prodigal son was translated into every known dialect and subdialect spoken in the area covered by the LSI. Scholars have examined the connections between schemes for Roman transliteration and projects to spread Christianity from the early 19th century onwards. Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) took the first step towards an international system of transcription when he published his proposal for a phonetic alphabet in 1855. He dedicated this to the British Church Missionary Society, who commissioned him to write an enlarged English edition in 1863. One of its aims was to ‘facilitate the propagation of the Christian faith and the introduction of the Christian civilization among heathen nations’.54 Some of the diacritical marks and signs he proposed were incorporated into the International Phonetic Alphabet (hereafter IPA).55 Max Müller (1823–1900) devised a ‘Missionary Alphabet’ for India, while Sir Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899), who published several treatises on the transcription of Indian languages, considered 112

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it a duty to propagate the Gospel. He suggested the Sermon of the Mount as the standard passage to be circulated for translation in the LSI.56 The Reverend J. Knowles’s transliteration schemes for Indian languages in the early 20th century typified the endeavours of missionary and Bible societies,57 and as noted earlier, Grierson commented on one of these. To a certain extent, there is a Christian subtext in Grierson’s correspondence and in the LSI. Missionaries figured prominently among his correspondents. He recommended some of them as examiners in Indian languages58 and testified to being ‘indebted for a great portion of my materials to missionaries’.59 Many provided him with linguistic information, specimen passages, grammars and other texts. Some prodigal son specimens in Indian languages are reproduced from texts printed by Bible societies, such as the Panjab Auxiliary Bible Society,60 the North India Bible Society,61 the Madras Auxiliary Bible Society,62 the Calcutta Auxiliary Bible Society,63 the Bangalore Auxiliary Bible Society64 and the British and Foreign Bible Society (hereafter BFBS).65 Many were provided by individual clerics.66 Grierson also drew on the survey of Jaipur conducted by the Reverend G. Macalister in 1898 to illustrate different forms of Jaipuri.67 Missionaries, clerics and Bible societies, then, made a substantial contribution to the LSI. In his letters Grierson expressed his ‘greatest interest’ in translating the scripture into Indian languages.68 In The Bible in India, he referred to the ‘special duty’ to spread the Gospel in India.69 One LSI volume has an appendix of early translations of the scriptures into the various dialects of Western Hindi.70 The use of the Lord’s Prayer as a paradigm for expounding languages and scripts has a long history.71 Grierson outlined the role translations of this prayer played in extending knowledge about Indian languages and dialects, from those by the renowned Serampore missionaries to John Chamberlayne’s Sylloge (1715), with its preface by David Wilkins.72 In his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), Wilkins had compiled a comparative table of the prayer in 49 languages and in his invented philosophical language.73 In the British Empire exhibition of 1924 the School of Oriental Studies planned to exhibit a small handbook of the Lord’s Prayer in all the languages taught at the institution.74 Grierson also refers to John Friedrich Fritz’s Orientalisch-und occidentalischer Sprachmeister (Leipzig, 1748), which presents translations of the Lord’s Prayer, some of them in Indian languages.75 The Survey reproduces some translations of the prayer, including the earliest known translation into ‘Hindostani’ by John 113

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Joshua Ketelaer in 1743, the Dutch envoy to the Mughal court.76 The prayer in the Roman script is also the only specimen for some dialects, such as Namsangia.77 The Christian aspect of the LSI is evident in other ways. The title page of each volume of the LSI contains a citation in Greek from 1 Corinthians 14, verses 10 and 11, on the multiplicity of tongues in the world. The term ‘shibboleth’ also recurs in the LSI.78 In one instance the biblical provenance of the term is made explicit: ‘The Bengalis, like the men of Gilead, say “shibboleth”’, while Hindustanis, ‘like the Ephraimites, can only say “sibboleth”’.79 Grierson uses the word a number of times in his correspondence when discussing issues of pronunciation.80 Other biblical analogies are also drawn – for example, when describing how a conquered tribe in Assam became the Gibeonites of their vanquishers.81 Grierson uses similar analogies in his correspondence,82 while another volume refers to one group as the ‘Levites of the tribe’.83 Grierson also compares the 14th-century Maithili poet Vidyapati’s songs to the ‘Psalms of David’.84 Grierson expressed a strong affinity with the Serampore Baptist missionaries’ pioneering work in Indian languages. In his view, the Serampore trio’s 1816 collection of 34 specimens in 33 Indian languages was the ‘first attempt at a systematic survey of the languages of India’.85 He frequently refers to the Serampore mission’s work in Indian languages through their translations of the Bible.86 At least two of the prodigal son specimens in the LSI are taken directly from their translations.87 He edited a revised version of William Carey’s Gospel of St Mark into the Magahi dialect for the BFBS, and helped it arrange Carey’s Indian translations in its archives.88 At Grierson’s request, the British Missionary Society sent him Carey’s memoirs on the translations of the scriptures from its library.89 Some Urdu texts for the ICS exams recommended by Grierson were issued by the Baptist Mission Press.90 Grierson was conversant with missionary work in India and its impact on education and the medium of instruction.91 He read the Church Missionary Intelligencer regularly,92 and gave advice to missionaries in the field.93 His impact on biblical translation in India is evident from a paper read at the annual meeting of the north India Bible Society in Allahabad in March 1903 on the linguistic form and literary style of Christian literature in north India, which made a number of references to him.94 He also exchanged letters with missionaries in Kashmir about using his Manual of the Kāshmīrī Language (2 vols., 1911), and he sent instalments of his Kāshmīrī Dictionary to the Church Missionary Society,95 while the Christian Literature Society 114

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of India at Pallavaram wanted to incorporate one of his articles in a booklet.96 It is worth noting that when Grierson was looking to sell his personal library without breaking it up, he made it clear that his books on biblical literature and on Hebrew were not up for sale – this may have reflected his deep personal faith.97 Grierson also had close links with the BFBS. He compiled the Specimen Translations in Various Indian Languages (1897) with its help.98 His correspondence with the BFBS has an attached note referring to the ‘many hundred letters’ between them, whittled down to those directly relevant to the Survey.99 Grierson played a proactive role in a proposal made to the BFBS to translate the Gospel of St Mark into the Magahi dialect.100 He also supported a proposal to lithograph parts of St Mark’s Gospel into local languages,101 and participated in BFBS decisions to publish translations of the Gospel into tribal dialects.102 On occasion Grierson cites from its reports on the quality of biblical translations.103 In volume 1, part1, he referred to how the Historical Catalogue of Holy Scriptures in the BFBS library ‘was a never-failing source of accurate information, much of which has been embodied in the bibliographical sections of the Survey’.104 Grierson also consulted and was sent Indian translations of the scriptures from the library, and he discussed details of how to translate Christian terms into Angami with the BFBS’s editor.105 He was a member of the BFBS editorial committee and its editor sought his advice on a number of proposals to translate the scriptures.106 The BFBS alluded to the warmth of its relationship with Grierson when he was knighted, and also the value it placed on his work for its editorial committee.107 Grierson recommended a set of the Survey volumes be sent to the BFBS’s Bible House in Calcutta, thereby cementing its relationship with the society.108 Grierson’s work for it continued after the LSI was over until at least 1930, when he was invited to serve on its editorial committee again.109 He continued to receive reports from auxiliary Bible societies until the late 1920s and early 1930s, and in 1937 was sent a BFBS memorandum on the ‘Desirability of a Survey of Languages in Africa’, which appeared to be modelled on the LSI, the main aim of which was to ground missionary work more thoroughly in the languages of Africa.110 Thus, there is a proselytising dimension in Grierson’s correspondence. This is reflected not just in his choice of the prodigal son parable but also in one aspect of his Romanising strategies, his interest in translating the Bible in India, and his close connections with the BFBS and missionaries. However, Grierson’s religious faith does not in and of itself invalidate the linguistic knowledge he produced. Some of 115

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Grierson’s correspondents expressed a much more extreme and intolerant ‘Christian’ view than Grierson ever did. For such interlocutors Babel was a ‘terrible catastrophe’.111 Grierson does use the image of the Tower of Babel to evoke India as a linguistic entity. In volume 1, part 1 he writes, ‘There are parts of India which seem to have had each a special Tower of Babel of its own’,112 and he refers to separate provinces as having their own Towers of Babel.113 However, in The Bible in India, he balances references to the ‘Indian Babel’ with the way India gives opportunities to missionaries to exercise their gifts in the ‘interpretation of tongues’.114 On the whole, Grierson did not see Babel as a curse. On the title page of each published volume of the LSI is a quotation from 1 Corinthians 14, verses 10 and 11, on the blessings of the multiplicity of tongues in the world.115 Clearly, Grierson wanted this view to have priority over the apparent curse of Babel in Genesis 11. Moreover, Grierson’s subject position, discussed in the previous chapter, was much more complex than the term ‘Christian’ allows, and he was anxious to sketch out common ground between his Christian beliefs and some strands of Hinduism.116 It is likely that his religious faith gave him the strength to complete the LSI, and it is also possible that the Survey’s openness to uncertainty and approximation in its discursive and epistemological style (for which, see Chapter 6) has a personal tinge of humility about it – in this case a specifically Christian humility. The citation which ends the concluding remarks of the opening volume of the LSI from Sir Thomas Browne’s Christian Morals (1716), prefaced by Grierson’s expression of willingness to be corrected and criticised, captures this: ‘Weigh not thyself in the scales of thy own opinion, but let the Judgement of the Judicious be the Standard of thy Merit’.117

Modernity’s script In addition to the historical link between Christian proselytisation and Romanisation, previous schemes of Romanisation in India equated it with a universalising and global modernity,118 and the LSI reflects this too. A conference of linguists was convened in Copenhagen in 1925 whose report was the basis for the IPA. The conference assumed the target language or script would be in Roman, and paid no attention to transliterating from Roman into non-Roman scripts.119 The LSI made this assumption too, as did some other institutions with which Grierson was associated, such as the Institute of Phonetics.120 Even as late as 1954 the International Organisation for Standardisation’s ‘Introductory Note’ considered transliteration only into the Roman script 116

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and assumed all major non-Roman scripts could be converted into the Roman script.121 As Wellisch has stressed, the predominance of the Roman script as the vehicle of graphic communication used by the politically most powerful Western nations and their cultural institutions is the reason that almost all efforts at script conversion for philological, cartographic and bibliographic purposes have been made in one direction only – from non-Roman scripts into one or more of the European Roman alphabets.122 In 1964, one Indian librarian pointed out that during the last two centuries transliteration ‘virtually meant transliteration into Roman script’. This assumption had ‘become such a rigid part of the mental set of the cataloguers of the West that the reverse movement of transliteration seems to have very little chance to be recognized, even at the international level’.123 This connection between Western power and transliteration is reflected in the LSI’s orientation towards Romanisation. Because of its international importance, the Survey contributed to the project to universalise the Roman script. Grierson was approached by organisations aiming to standardise the international application of the Roman script in transliteration.124 In 1929 one of the League of Nations’ agencies, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (a forbear of UNESCO), established an inquiry into the global use of the Roman script as a way of improving understanding between the West and the ‘Orient’. The conversion of Turkish to the Roman script, Latinisation in the USSR, China’s first official Romanisation scheme and Japan’s two Romanisation schemes125 seemed to point towards the universal adoption of the Roman script, which was the title of the committee’s report.126 The International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation’s report of its 10th Plenary Session, held at Geneva on 10 August 1928, lists its subcommittees and their aims. These fell into two categories: international standardisation, whether of intellectual rights, copyright, or scientific bibliographies, and even the ‘unification of pitch’ in music; and ‘intellectual cooperation’ through information and knowledge exchange between institutions and the compilation of bibliographies. The Sub-Committee on Arts and Letters approached Grierson for an Indian linguistics bibliography.127 Thus, Grierson participated in projects for the international standardisation and co-ordination of knowledge and information, and the globalisation of 117

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the Roman script. For him the two went together; the real importance of a transliteration system is ‘it dovetails properly into the rest of the world’s knowledge. . . . It enables each new contribution to knowledge to drop into its proper place, and to fit there’.128 Grierson and his correspondents associated the Roman script with modernisation. One referred to Mustafa Kemal’s Romanisation of Turkish as a sign of modernisation.129 In the 19th-century Indian officials like C.E. Trevelyan had associated the Roman script with values seen as characteristic of modernity, like speed and efficiency.130 The same link was made by some Indian writers and thinkers. S.K. Chatterji (1890–1977), who had a long and close association with Grierson, was on a committee convened in October 1920 to discuss a simplified phonetic script for Bengali. Its aim was to suggest Roman symbols for Bengali, ‘using, as far as possible, letters of the English alphabet, to denote the sound most commonly represented by those letters in English’.131 Chatterji supported this, though he stressed the scheme should be furthered through Indian institutions like Calcutta University and the Sahitya Parishad, rather than through British and missionary endeavour.132 Nehru was impressed by the Roman script’s success in Turkey and Central Asia and the arguments in its favour, and at one point he felt the opposition to it as a national script in India would be based ‘merely on emotion’;133 he was not opposed to the idea of the Roman script as an all-India script per se. Others, such as Alma Latiff of the ICS, gave a paper in May 1929 advocating the Roman script as the national alphabet of India.134 According to Coppola, Latiff had done extensive work devising a Roman script for Urdu earlier in the century.135 Some Indian radicals associated the Roman script with progressive causes. The manifesto of the Marxistinspired All India Progressive Writers’ Association, published in the Left Review in 1936, referred to the need for ‘a common script (IndoRoman) for India’. The suggestion for this resolution came from S.K. Chatterji.136 Gandhi opposed schemes like this, and was adamant the Roman script should not be adopted as an all-India script.137 Given the Roman script’s association with modernity, this may have reflected his anti-modern views, and not just his cultural nationalism.

Systems of transliteration To some extent, then, the LSI reflects the idea of the Roman script as progressively modern, and this idea was shared by some of Grierson’s Indian interlocutors. After 1947 linguistic minorities in some of the 118

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British Raj’s successor states adopted the Roman script as a symbol of resistance to the national language and its script.138 However, the LSI’s narratives of Romanising power unravel in different ways. First, when discussing the Hindi-Urdu conflict in which ‘fanatics’ have confused alphabet with language, Grierson remarks that ‘the written character does not make a language’ – otherwise Hindustani written in ‘English characters’ would be English.139 The LSI volumes demonstrate this point because some language or dialect specimens are presented in more than one script.140 The Roman script as a stable icon of colonial power and authority is at odds with the gap the LSI foregrounds between script and language. Here Grierson broaches the possibility, if only for a fleeting moment, that even English and the Roman script are not necessarily bound together either. Secondly, the LSI drew attention to the multiple systems of transliteration it had to engage with. This contributed to a sense that the Roman script’s application to other languages was problematic. The Survey’s files and volumes refer to these multiple systems in use at the time, such as the ‘Geneva system’ promulgated by the Geneva Oriental Congress in 1894 at the time the LSI was conceived. Grierson described this as a working compromise adopted by European oriental scholars. He noted that alterations in this system would cause ‘havoc’ because library catalogues would have to be changed.141 In other words, there was a built-in inertia to systems of transliteration like this, because of the labour required to re-transliterate the data in bibliographies. Transliteration schemes into Roman therefore persisted for reasons other than their scientific accuracy. The other system in play was the Royal Asiatic Society’s. Grierson chaired its Committee of Transliteration, appointed by the Society’s Council in January 1922, on 20 February 1923. The committee was convened because of discrepancies in the scheme of transliteration published in its journal and the inconsistent adherence to that scheme by contributing authors.142 Its report produced a compromise between the RAS scheme, the Geneva scheme and existing British conventions of transliteration in India which had arisen independently. Here transliteration becomes a site for the assertion of a distinctive historical relationship between Britain and India that cannot be entirely subsumed within or overwritten by European transliteration conventions. This sense of the separateness of British India from European experience in the area of transliteration is conveyed by some of Grierson’s correspondents, who insisted that European bodies should take account of questions of transliteration ‘as they appear to us in India’.143 119

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The LSI and the IPA Other organisations with links to the LSI had their own transliteration systems. This included missionaries and the BFBS.144 The Survey sometimes reproduced passages in the BFBS scheme without alteration.145 Learned societies in India, like the Asiatic Society of Bengal, also followed their own transliteration practices. With the development of the IPA another transliteration scenario came into play. In 1912 the International Phonetic Association invited Grierson to be an honorary member, and it sent him copies of its journal Le Maître Phonétique in the 1920s.146 This association devised the IPA for ‘transcribing any language phonetically’.147 Grierson was also a member of the International Society of Phonetics.148 He corresponded with Daniel Jones (1881–1967), a key figure in the association who established the first phonetics laboratory in Britain in 1912.149 Grierson was therefore fully cognisant of the IPA’s development. Indeed, some of the key terms in the IPA and phonetics may have been suggested by British colonials in India. Jones claimed the term ‘retroflex’ was first put forward by J.A. Yates, inspector of schools at Bangalore, and he adopted this in his A Colloquial Sinhalese Reader in Phonetic Transcription (1919), co-authored with H.S. Perera.150 However, as Grierson pointed out in volume 1, part 1, when the LSI began phonetics was in its ‘childhood’ and was ‘hardly known in India’. Most of the materials were received from government officials who were not phoneticians. Hence although an ideal Survey would have used the IPA, it was not possible for the LSI to do so.151 When Grierson did receive materials in the IPA he had to re-transliterate them into the LSI’s system, and acknowledged that he was thereby sacrificing greater accuracy.152 In contrast, Taylor could use the IPA for his transcriptions of Burmese language gramophone recordings from the start. He also used it to prepare the LSI’s Palaung vocabulary,153 and recorded 54 languages and dialects in the IPA for the planned Linguistic Survey of Burma.154 Indians also used the IPA in the period when the LSI was being conducted. Grierson was not able to use G.V. Ramamurti’s manual of Savara, which used the IPA, because his assistants were not phoneticians.155 The Panjabi dictionary started by Banarsi Das of Oriental College Lahore in 1919, and taken over by L. Dani Chandra in 1924, indicated pronunciation using the IPA.156 In fact, by the 1920s phonetics with special reference to Indian languages had become a subject in the ICS exams, and a number of phonetic readers were prescribed texts, including S.K. Chatterji’s A Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics (1921).157

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Thus, the IPA developed in tandem with the LSI but the latter was not able to take advantage of it. Grierson also stressed that the use of a phonetic script might give the reader a ‘false sense of security’ since one can only hope for ‘an approximate representation, which may or may not be accurate, of the various sounds’ of Indian languages.158 When it came to early texts in modern Indian languages the exact sounds were uncertain, so here it was best to have ‘a purely mechanical transcription’ since any system based on contemporary phonetics would be necessarily limited.159 After the IPA was adopted, new languages seemed to expose defects in the system; as Gitelman has pointed out, phonetic schemes were beset by alien sounds which reinforced the problems of converting aural experience into inscriptions.160 The IPA was applied differently by different linguists, and lexicographers and authors of language textbooks continued to devise their own systems after its inception.161 Taylor, for example, drew up his lists for the LSI based on both Henry Sweet and the IPA,162 while Chatterji used a modified form of the IPA for his Bengali Language (Calcutta, 1926). Grierson and his correspondents also touched on another issue – namely, the limited applicability of terms like ‘cerebral’ and ‘retroflex’ for non-European languages.163 Some of the LSI’s letters debate the IPA’s key terms and how to apply them to Indian languages.164 The tone of Grierson’s discussions with Daniel Jones on how the vowel sounds in specific dialects might be rendered using the IPA is hesitant rather than categorical.165 It is not clear, then, that using the IPA would have totally resolved the issues Grierson faced. It would also have reduced the LSI’s readership to those who were phonetically trained; without it, the knowledge the Survey produced was available to a wider range of readers. Grierson was also aware of the gap between ‘systems of record elaborated by the learned and the phonetic facts which the average ear can distinguish’,166 a gap which he had to negotiate in some of his other works, like Hatim’s Tales (1923) and The Lay of Alha (1923). In the case of the latter, he omitted diacritics in the title, as they look ‘learned, and might frighten people’.167 Both in the LSI and his other works, Grierson had to negotiate this tension between learned and popular transliteration practices. For R.C. Temple, this was the main issue when it came to transliteration: the ‘Scylla is uncertainty and indefiniteness and the Charybdis is ultra-refinement: you get wrecked on the former by catering too freely for “the public” . . . and on the latter by catering too freely for the “scientific” philologist’.168 121

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Indian provincial governments and transliteration The Survey also encountered multiple transliteration systems used by provincial governments in India, and it is not clear that the IPA would have made any inroads here. Burma and UP had their own systems.169 The Burmese system, like many provincial systems, aimed for practicality, not precision, so the proposed LSB’s use of the IPA ran the danger of ‘running a tilt against the Government system’.170 Grierson was unable to find the official schemes for transliterating names of places in Baluchistan and Panjab.171 He notes the differences between north and south India in the transliteration of Indian names, and how the Bombay government does not use diacritics in place names while ‘other and independent principles prevail’ in the Madras government.172 There is also no uniform spelling for the names of rivers as they flow through more than one province.173 Aside from differences across provinces, there were also differences within provinces, with different government handbooks in the same province transliterating according to different schemes.174 In some cases, regions brought their previous schemes with them when they were integrated into larger provinces.175 Officials were also constrained by the inertia of transliteration systems, as governments were reluctant to change them because of the labour and confusion which would ensue. This meant officers sometimes used separate schemes of transliteration in their various reports.176 Grierson was adamant that a ‘multiplicity of systems of transliteration is a great evil, and leads to endless confusion’.177 In some respects, though, rather than resolving this confusion, the LSI’s transliteration practices actually contributed to it, by calling attention and adding to the multiplicity and heterogeneity of colonial transliteration practices.

‘Personal equation’ Grierson and his interlocutors also refer to how personal idiosyncrasies affected transliteration, especially in the absence of a unified scheme. Taylor pointed to the difficulties of the ‘effective comparison of vocabularies taken down by different writers with different systems of representation’ when he was filling out the word lists for the LSI.178 According to Grierson, when thousands of papers and documents were received in one script, hardly any two agreed with each other in their transliteration.179 Some Census officers described how in the Census enumeration one dialect name could be spelt in three to four 122

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different ways, and they consequently regarded ‘diacritical marks to names obtained from the Census a matter of guesswork’.180 There are other references to the difficulties of transliteration in the Survey’s volumes.181 In the volumes and in Grierson’s correspondence we get a sense of the tension between the rough schemes used by individuals and the LSI’s system of transliteration. Here transliteration becomes symptomatic of the thousands of individuals brought together under the LSI whose work had to be harnessed and systematised by its governing scheme, itself rough and provisional. The negotiation with such individual schemes is captured by Grierson when he refers to how ‘the personal equation of the writer’ can affect the transcription of sounds.182 What Grierson calls ‘personal equation’ also caused the differences in transcription between the lists, specimens and published notes on Bashgali.183 Thus, the LSI’s transliteration strategies also bring to light the ‘personal equations’ disrupting its transliteration protocols. However, at times Grierson relied on ‘personal equations’ to supplement what he called ‘mere transliteration’ when it could not capture the ‘exact shades’ of sound, as when he drew on a pandit’s individual scheme to refine his own transliteration.184 Some texts became the site of transliteration conflicts between different individuals, as in the case of the proofs of F.W. Skemp’s Multani Stories (1917), with Grierson and others debating about transliteration in marginal notes on the proofs.185 Here we get a sense of a text emerging through a skein of transliteration and counter-transliteration strategies, with individuals’ notes framing the text in terms of transliteration choices – in this instance, colonial textuality is constituted through the criss-crossing of different transliteration protocols and practices, undermining the idea that the Roman script could be a stable icon of the steadiness of colonial rule.

Transcription and transliteration in the LSI The complexities of transliteration in the LSI also stem from the difficulties of consistently distinguishing between transliteration and transcription. Transliteration tries to establish an equivalence between characters in the script of a source language and corresponding characters in the script of a target language, whereas transcription links the phonemes of a source language with their written representation in the target language’s script. Technically, transliteration systems are graphemic but non-phonological writing systems, while transcription 123

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systems are phonological, and convert phonemes. Their aim is to convey the sounds of a source language to a target language’s readers, enabling them to pronounce the converted words or phrases by using sounds in the latter approximating to those in the source language.186 In effect, most script conversion schemes are a mixture of transliteration and transcription.187 Moreover, both terms have not always been distinguished from each other, and both have been used to denote any method of script conversion; the 1914 OED edition treated both as synonymous.188 At the time the LSI was being conducted, the term ‘transliteration’ was a portmanteau one, used for any operation that converted one script into another. This is reflected in a questionnaire sent to Grierson in 1912 on the ‘Transliteration of Indo-Chinese (Including Tibetan) Scripts’. It wanted to define a scheme for the ‘exact conversion into the original alphabet’ via transliteration, and ‘a representation of the actual pronunciation’, thereby asking for one scheme to cover both transliteration and transcription simultaneously.189 In this context, F.W. Thomas referred to how, where a marked divergence exists between spelling and pronunciation as in case of the literary languages of Indo-China, then ‘a double transliteration’ was needed because no single ‘transcription’ could render the written and the spoken forms of these languages.190 Grierson sometimes took a pragmatic approach, distinguishing in some of the printed volumes between transliteration and ‘phonetic transcription’; at other times he referred to his transliteration as based on a ‘semi-phonetic system’ or as ‘partly phonetic’. Sometimes he produced what he called ‘an interlinear phonetic transcription’, with three lines accompanying the specimen – a transliteration, a phonetic transcription and a literal translation. At other times, he juxtaposes what he calls a ‘literatim’ transliteration with a ‘phonetic transcription’.191 In part, his pragmatism reflects the difficulties of distinguishing between transcription and transliteration in all cases involving the conversion of one script into another, but again it reveals the messiness of the Survey’s transliteration practices rather than any smooth assumption of control and power over India’s multi-script environment.

The instability of the Roman script In fact, the Survey dramatises how the Roman script is destabilised by India’s multi-script environment. Wellisch has pointed out that schemes of transliteration in the late 19th and 20th centuries assumed

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the graphemes of the source script are immutable and there can be one-to-one transformation of these into the Roman script’s graphemes. However, Roman letters have divergent sound values in different languages as the orthographies of most languages written in the Roman script are not phonetic.192 When the Roman script was adapted to European vernaculars, its uniformity was superficial, and was restricted to the visual image of individual basic letters. Some of these were used to represent divergent sounds, and the use of diacritics added to this diversity.193 In its transliteration of Indian scripts, the LSI brings this aspect of the Roman script to the surface. When commenting on Knowles’s ‘A National Alphabet for India’ in March 1913, Grierson notes how ‘the alphabet of every language in Europe differs from that of every other language, for, though the signs coincide, the sounds each indicates differ for each language’; hence Knowles’s stress on the ‘simplicity’ of the Roman character was misplaced.194 The issue of variable phonetic values for Roman graphemes is implicitly addressed in the Report of the Committee for a Simplified Phonetic Script for Bengali. The committee suggested the Roman letters used should, as far as possible, be ‘letters of the English alphabet’, denoting sounds as represented by letters in English.195 In his ‘Note on the Transliteration of The Nāgari Alphabet’, Sten Konow discusses how the Roman transliteration of Devanagari shifts between continental and English sound values, and how this can mislead readers.196 F.W. Thomas, in his questionnaire on the transliteration of Indo-Chinese scripts and its accompanying note, declared, ‘the values assigned to the Roman characters used in transliteration should be . . . international and should avoid all special peculiarities prevalent in the several European countries’.197 Grierson is unable to avoid these peculiarities. Grierson often addresses the reader on how to pronounce some of the letters in his transcriptions.198 In doing so, he foregrounds the variable sound values of individual Roman letters. The Survey’s system of transliteration is printed at the start of each volume; in one section of this, Grierson refers to both French and German to explicate his transliteration.199 His prompts on how to pronounce words transliterated from Indian languages draw on English, Italian, German, Finnish, French and even Anglo-Saxon.200 He notes how the transliteration of Khassi by Welsh Calvinist Methodists was influenced by Welsh.201 In another case, he guides the reader by referring to the Scottish pronunciation of English202 – that is, the variable sound values of the Roman script are illustrated by their

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variation within the same language and not just across Western European languages. At times, Grierson amplifies the elusiveness of Indian sounds by using complex analogies of foreignness, as when he comments on how Bengalis pronounce Sanskrit in the same way that the English speak French. Here the analogy of French in an English accent to explicate Indian accents tends to heighten the difficulties at stake rather than to resolve them.203 Commenting on the pronunciation of Wakhi, Grierson draws on the sounds of Italian, English and German, and indicates how one of its sounds is intermediate between the rough German ch, the softer ich and sh.204 In other cases Grierson is not sure whether the use of ‘eu’ to signify a phoneme operates as in the French ‘jeu’ or as the ü in the German ‘Güte’.205 When referring to the Bengali alphabet, complex cross-referring and diacritical usage guide pronunciation: The sound which I call o is the short sound of the long ō in ‘home’ ‘vôtre’. It must be carefully distinguished from the short ŏ we hear in ‘hot’. We hear it in the French word ‘votre’ ‘your’, as compared with ‘vôtre’ ‘yours’. In English it is the first o in the word promote, in which the second o would be represented by ō.206 In this kind of guidance, the abiding impression is of the heterogeneous nature of the Roman script, rather than of its unifying potential. In the case of Baluchi, Grierson even resorts to Greek letters to represent sounds, thereby departing from Roman signs altogether.207 Grierson’s explicit guidance also supplements the elaborate use of diacritics in the LSI, which themselves supplement the Roman script. This two-layered supplementation indicates how India lays bare the insufficiency of the Roman script in the Survey. At times Grierson slips into describing how the Roman script needs to be controlled by Indian scripts. In the case of some Tibeto-Burman dialects, he instructed colonial officials to provide specimens written in both the Devanagari and the Roman scripts, to ‘secure two, mutually correcting, copies of each’. Thus, the Roman script is not always the controlling and correcting one; sometimes it needed to be controlled and corrected in reciprocal relations with other scripts. While the LSI’s volumes are a strong visual index of the Roman script’s presence in India, they are an equally strong visual reminder of Indian scripts. Of the 740 or so versions of the prodigal son in the LSI, approximately 375 are in the Roman script alone, but the rest 126

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are in Indian scripts. Of the other 474 non-prodigal son passages used as samples, approximately half are in Indian scripts. Thus, there are some 602 passages in the LSI’s volumes presented in Indian scripts. Its volumes are therefore a vivid reminder of the reach and power of Indian scripts. Grierson also provides facsimiles of written hands in Indian scripts.208 Some volumes compile comparative tables of handwritten forms,209 and one presents the same script as written by different scribes from different regions.210 At one point Grierson discusses how Oriya is written on palm leaves, how this affects the script, and the problems this creates for making type.211 These presentations of handwriting in facsimile dovetail with Grierson’s own insistence that ICS candidates should be trained to read Indian scripts in their handwritten forms.212 He also wrote manuals for ICS officers when it came to cursive scripts used for writing certain documents, such as Kaithi. His Handbook to the Kaithi Character (Calcutta, 1899) was required reading for ICS officers posted to certain provinces.213 The Survey therefore gives us Indian scripts both in print and in a range of written forms, while the Roman script appears only in printed form and therefore seems constrained by comparison. Grierson, then, engages deeply with and lays out the extensiveness of the Indian scriptorium. Overall, the LSI is more a re-archiving of India’s many scripts rather than a Romanising exercise which displaces the Indian multi-script environment. In addition, Grierson sometimes gives a passage for a dialect in multiple scripts, as in the case of Kashmiri,214 ‘Literary Hindostani’215 and the standard dialect of Sindhi from the district of Hyderabad.216 Dialects of Oriya are presented in Devanagari, Oriya or Bengali scripts,217 while Panjabi specimens are presented in Gurmukhi, Devanagari, Dogra, Takri and Persian. One Panjabi passage is given in two Indian scripts.218 Grierson alerts his readers to cases when he receives specimens in multiple scripts, but presents them only in one script – for example, the Kachchi dialect from Cutch district,219 the standard Sindhi of Karachi220 and the Bagri dialect of Rajasthani.221 So even when passages are presented in one Indian script alone, we are sometimes reminded of other possibilities of script for their writing. Grierson also draws attention to dialects written in multiple scripts in which ‘the choice of alphabet lies with the writer’.222 The possibility of choice is dramatised in the case of Konkani. A committee chaired by the Reverend Thomas C.N. Fernandez in Bombay wrote to Grierson for help in ‘improving the wretched condition of Konkani’. They wanted to decide whether the dialect should be written in the Devanagari or the 127

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Roman script; the committee posed questions about representing specific phonetic values of the dialect in the case of both scripts. The questionnaire is interesting in showing how the technical vocabulary of phonetics had entered the discourse of some language movements.223 In the Survey’s volumes Konkani specimens are presented in either the Devanagari, Roman or ‘Kanarese’ script224 – that is, the choice of script is reinforced, rather than closed off.225 The LSI, then, also presents India’s multi-script environment in terms of possible choices in script agency. In its transliteration scenarios, we begin to see its distinctive idiom of knowledge production emerging. Grierson described the LSI’s transliteration as ‘a rough and ready system’ and its renderings of Shina as ‘inaccurate’.226 He admits its system is ‘rougher’ than other transliteration schemes.227 The Survey can aim only for an ‘approximate representation, which may or may not be accurate, of the various sounds’ of Indian languages. In addition to describing its representation of sounds as ‘mere approximation’,228 Grierson suggests that in some cases transliteration and transcription, no matter how systematised, cannot be wholly accurate. In Ormuri there is no ‘exact equivalent’ in the Roman script of the opening consonant.229 One of Grierson’s correspondents suggested that aiming for too much accuracy in transliteration might actually increase the possibility of misunderstanding. It was better to keep the transliteration open when difficulties were encountered (e.g., when distinguishing between aspirated and non-aspirated consonants or long and short vowels) than commit to a transliteration which obscured uncertainty.230 The LSI also had to confront another issue. Emily Lorimer remarked ‘how nice it would be if all speakers of one language w’all pronounce alike or even if one speaker c’be consistent with himself’.231 Her observation on how the same individual does not always pronounce the same word consistently, let alone different individuals of the same speech community, is repeated by others in their work for the Survey.232 Bailey notes it was difficult to transcribe speech when speakers were not consistent in the way they pronounced words,233 and Grierson observed that speakers of a speech community sometimes inflected the same word differently even when they shared the same speech style.234 Also, while a written language has a fixed standard of spelling and of pronunciation with which it is possible to secure conformity, . . . when a language has no standard, – and to a less extent, even in every language which 128

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has a standard, – the actual pronunciation of each word varies each time it is uttered, according to its collocation in the sentence or the mood of the speaker. In the case of Tirahi, the same word is pronounced by the same individual in different ways at different times.235 Others also pointed out that variations between the specimens were due to the greater diversity of pronunciation in unwritten languages.236 In fact, for Grierson ‘it is often impossible to say what are the exact sounds which are to be represented in written form’ anyway.237 For Grierson, then, the uncertain nature of transliteration also stems from the difficulties of identifying the exact sounds of languages in the first place and from the variations in pronunciation even in the same individual’s speech. As we shall see in the following chapters, the LSI’s distinctive idiom of knowledge production consists of approximation, provisionality, doubt and guesswork, and as in the case of its transliteration strategies, it calls attention to its own inadequacies rather than to its successes.

Conclusion One of Grierson’s correspondents was correct, then, in assuming a major issue in the LSI must have been ‘the transliteration difficulty’.238 In the end, the Roman script’s internal heterogeneity comes to the fore in the LSI’s transcription of Indian languages, not its unified or readily available presence as a master script for British rule. It is not so much that the Roman script stabilises the Indian script environment; instead it is destabilised by the latter. The Survey labours over the Roman script to make it serviceable in India, and some of Grierson’s letters give us glimpses of the rough-hewing of the script to make it usable.239 When Grierson does draw elaborate analogies with continental languages as a guide for his readers, it is often the failings of these analogies which are illuminating rather than their success. It is as if Indian sounds can be captured only in the interstices between ‘vôtre’ and ‘votre’, ‘jeu’ and ‘güte’ – they can be figured through the internal fissures of Roman signs rather than through their colonial fulsomeness.240 Moreover, India’s multi-script environment is given play through the Roman script rather than being displaced by it. This had a corollary in the training of ICS officers, who had to internalise this environment in their training in multiple scripts, in preparation for their handling of documents in a range of scripts in their work.241 In the 129

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final analysis, rather than displacing Indian scripts, the LSI’s Romanisation weaves in and out of India’s multi-script environment, its presence highlighting rather than erasing India’s scriptoral heterogeneity. The Roman character becomes a secondary script held in place by the primacy of Indian scripts, dependent on the latter for its very presence as a transliterating script in India. In fact, the Roman script has rarely been adopted systematically for writing major Indian languages. For Cardona and Jain, the script’s failure to supplant Indian scripts is indicative of the sense of personal, sentimental and patriotic attachment Indians, like people everywhere, feel for their familiar systems of writing.242 As we have seen, Grierson commented on this sense of attachment among Indians. In addition, in South Asia script is often felt to be an intrinsic part of a language’s identity.243 Grierson not only noted this but also seemed to share and sympathise with this view at times. It is in relation to the difficulties of using the Roman script in the LSI that we begin to see hints of the LSI’s distinctive idiom of knowledge production as approximate and provisional emerging. The following chapters investigate this idiom in more detail. First, though, I will consider the LSI’s gramophone recordings. These were suggested by Grierson as a way of overcoming the inadequacies of the written word and problems of transliteration in the LSI, but as we shall see, these recordings also contributed to his sense of the LSI’s inadequacies in producing knowledge in the Indian linguistic realm.

Notes 1 For the script systems in India, see George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain (eds), The Indo-Aryan Languages, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, Ch. 3; B.P. Mahapatra, ‘The Written Languages of India’, in B.P. Mahapatra and G.D. McConnell, The Written Languages of the World: A Survey of the Degree and Modes of Use, Vol. 2, Pt. 1: Constitutional Languages, Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1989, p. xxx. 2 I discuss this in more detail in Ch. 6. 3 Linguistic Survey Files, S/1/2/8, Grierson to Superintendent of Government Printing, 16.2.1926, 18.5.1926, 16.7.1926 & 5.1.1927, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London, hereafter LS Files. 4 For these, see George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 1: General Introduction, Specimens of the Tibetan Dialects, the Himalayan Dialects, and the North Assam Group, Calcutta: Superintendent of the Government Press, 1909, pp. 65, 247. 5 For those languages written in Roman only, see Mahapatra, Written Languages, pp. 614, 648, 774, 856, 928, 952, 1080, 1098, 1204, 1220, 1260, 1279, 1298.

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6 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 3: The Bhīl Languages, including Khāndēśí, Banjārī or Labhānī, Bahrūpiā, & c., Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1907, p. 179, see the passages pp. 178–82. 7 For other languages in India written in multiple scripts, see Mahapatra, Written Languages, pp. xxx, 1151, 1170, 1187, 1231, 1316. 8 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8, Pt. 1: Specimens of the Dardic or Piśācha Languages (including Kāshmīrī), Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919, p. 247; see the specimens on pp. 282–300. 9 EUR 223/208, Grierson to Honorary Secretary, Asiatic Society of Bengal, 9.12.1908. 10 LS Files, S/1/12/1, Grierson to Major F.W. Pirree, 2.10.1912. 11 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 4: Specimens of the Pahārī languages and Gujurī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1916, p. 582; see also pp. 513–14. 12 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 10: Specimens of Languages of the Eranian Family, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1921, pp. 127–8, 336, 363; see also George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Dardic or Piśācha Languages (including Kāshmīrī), Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919, p. 327. 13 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bihārī and Oṛiyā Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, pp. 123–4. 14 Ibid., p. 162. 15 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 508. 16 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Western Hindī and Pañjābī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1916, p. 639. 17 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 91. 18 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 615. 19 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 3, p. 24. 20 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 224. 21 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 363. 22 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 123. 23 Grierson, LSI,Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 91. 24 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 55; for other examples see George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Rājasthānī and Gujarātī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1908, p. 131; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 400. 25 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 88. 26 See Ch. 5. 27 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, see the table on p. 311, and the passage on pp. 312–22. Other examples of where the same script varies according to geographical area are Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, pp. 670–1.

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 248. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 642. Ibid., p. 625. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 6, 10. Ibid., pp. 20–1. LS Files S/1/12/1, Grierson to British Resident in Kashmir, 1.1899. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, pp. 166, 179. Ibid., p. 166. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 4: Muṇḍā and Dravidian Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906, pp. 36, 411. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bodo, Nāgā, and Kachin Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, p. 3. LS Files S/1/7/1, Grierson to F.S.A. Slocock, 4.9.1918. Javed Majeed, ‘Modernity’s Script and a Tom Thumb Performance: English Linguistic Modernity and Persian/Urdu Lexicography in NineteenthCentury India’, in Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher (eds), TransColonial Modernities in South Asia, London and New York: Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia, 2012, pp. 95–115. EUR 223/220, Grierson to F.H. Brown, 15.2.1917. Ibid., Grierson to Brown, 15.1.1917. Ibid. LS Files S/1/7/1, Grierson to F.S.A. Slocock, 10.4.1918. LS Files S/1/1/9, H. Roberts to Grierson, 18.3.1904. EUR 223/220, Grierson to F.H. Brown, 15.2.1917. Ibid. Ibid., 30.11.1917. EUR 223/261, Grierson’s note on Knowles’s ‘A National Alphabet for India’, 3.1913. EUR 223/220, Grierson to F.H. Brown, 15.2.1917, and F.H. Brown to Grierson, 15.1.1918. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 7: Indo-Aryan Family (Southern Group), Specimens of the Marāṭhī Language, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1905, pp. 2, 211, 42, Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 403, Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 363, and Grierson, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 187, where the term is used twice. EUR 223/231, ‘The Case of Maithili before the Patna University’. EUR 223/220, Grierson to F.H. Brown, 15.2.1917. Hans H. Wellisch, The Conversion of Scripts: Its Nature, History and Utilization, New York: John Wiley & Sons 1978, pp. 209–10. Wellisch, Conversion of Scripts, p. 214. EUR 223/299, Sir Monier Monier-Williams to Grierson, 9.9.1886 and attached note on linguistic survey. Wellisch, Conversion of Scripts, pp. 214–15. EUR 223/282, Grierson to University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, 26.3.1927 & 31.3.1927.

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59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81

LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to Hewett, 10.9.1901. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 135–7. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., pp. 204–6, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, pp. 354, 549–51. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, pp. 56–60. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 586. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 646–50, Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 365–8, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, pt 1, pp. 111–13. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 39–41, 46–8, 60–4, 439–41, 459–60, 465–6, 496–8, 582–3, Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, pp. 18–20, 75–7, 78–80, 82–4, 86–8, 278–80, 405–7, 468–70, 516–18; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 3: Specimens of the Kuki-Chin and Burma Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1904, pp. 32–9; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, pp. 55–7, 72–3, 104–6, 111–13, 140–1, 158–9, 174–6, 201–3, 420–2; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of the Bengali and Assamese Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent, Government Press, 1903, pp. 100–3, 405–8; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, pp. 283–6; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, pp. 498–500, 517–19; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, pp. 383–5, 453–5; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 344–8, 356–7; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 86, 179–82, 221–5. See also S/1/4/5 Deputy Commissioner to Grierson, 14.12.1899, sending a revision of the parable specimen in Mikir done by the Reverend P.E. Moore of the American Baptist mission. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 31. LS Files S/1/1/11, Grierson to Reverend Sharp, 15.2.1901. George A. Grierson, The Bible in India, Anarkali, Lahore: Punjab Bible Society, c. 1904, p. 3. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 40–1. Ibid., pp. 171–2. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 4, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 8. Wellisch, Conversion of Scripts, pp. 186–7. EUR 223/317, Secretary, School of Oriental Studies, to Grierson, 24.10. 1922. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 4–5. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 6. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 340. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, pp. 243, 477, where the question of pronunciation (not surprisingly) is discussed. For the biblical provenance of the term, see the Book of Judges, Ch. 12. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 2. LS Files S/1/14/3, Grierson to Edward Gait, 9. 12. 1900, referring to ‘a useful shibboleth between Kolarian and Dravidian languages’, S/1/14/10, Grierson to Superintendent, Census for Rajputana, 25.3.1901, S/1/14/7, Grierson to Superintendent Census Operations Central Provinces, 25.3.1901, and S/1/14/5, Grierson to Superintendent of Census Operations, North-West Provinces, 25.3.1901. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 65; for the Gibeonites in the Bible, see Joshua, Ch. 9 & 10, and 2 Samuel, Ch. 21.

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82 LS Files S/1/4/14, Grierson to J.H. Hutton, 29.8.1922. 83 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 118. The references to the Levites in the Bible are too numerous to be mentioned here, but for some examples see Exodus, Ch. 32, Numbers, Ch. 1 & 3, and Deuteronomy, Ch. 33. 84 EUR 223/226, Grierson to Sten Konow, 17.5.1921; the reference is to the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament in the Bible. 85 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 11–12. See George A. Grierson, ‘The Early Publications of the Serampore Missionaries’, Indian Antiquary, 1903, 32: 241–54, on the Serampore mission’s valuable work on Indian languages and the importance of the ‘Sixth memoir’. See also Grierson, Bible in India, p. 8. 86 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 16; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 4, 333; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 83, 618; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 7, p. 17; and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 35. For other references to their work, see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 238, on the New Testament, the Pentateuch and Joshua-Kings in the Sarada type in 1821, 1827 and 1832, and their 1825 translation of St. Matthew into Sindhi, which was not published; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 7, p. 17, on the Pentateuch and prophetic books translated into Marathi in 1807 and 1821; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 111, on their partial translation of the New Testament in Kumauni in 1832. 87 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 742, from their 1842 translation for Panjabi, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, from their 1827 translation into the Palpa dialect of Naipali. 88 EUR 223/254, Grierson to Reverend Michael D. Lyons, 22.1.1929, LS Files S/1/1/11, A. Taylor, Secretary, British and Foreign Bible Society, to Grierson, 12.2.1901, and Grierson to A. Taylor, 18.2.1901. 89 LS Files S/1/1/11, John Brown Myers, BMS, 20.6 & 23.6 1902 to Grierson. 90 For example, see EUR 223/228 Instructions to two-year probationers for these set texts. 91 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 2: Mōn-Khmēr and Siamese-Chinese Families (Including Khassi and Tai), Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1904, pp. 5–6. 92 LS Files S/1/1/11, Grierson to Reverend John Sharp, 18.2.1901. 93 EUR 223/254, Grierson to Reverend Michael D. Lyons, 22.1.1929. 94 LS Files S/1/14/5, R. Burn, ‘Linguistic Form and Literary Style As Related to Christian Literature in North India. A Paper Read at the Annual Meeting, North India Bible Society, Allahabad’, 30.3.1903. 95 EUR 223/267, E.J. Neve to Grierson, 20.6.1923, and LS Files S/1/1/15, Cummings, Bible Teachers Training School New York, to Grierson 17.8.1914. 96 EUR 223/255, Superintendent, British India Press, to Grierson, 28.4.1927. 97 EUR 223/303, Grierson to Kegan Paul, 6.12.1932. 98 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 19. 99 LS Files S/1/1/11 Attached note. 100 EUR 223/300, W. Wright to Ball, 2.8.1888. 101 EUR 223/336, G. Bühler to Grierson, 23.3.1894. 102 LS Files S/1/1/11, R. Kilgour to Grierson, 31.5 & 8.6.1918. 103 EUR 223/227, Grierson to Bonar, Senior Examiner, Civil Service Commission, 26.6.1903.

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104 EUR 223/310, Grierson to Sykes, 30.5.1914, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 199. 105 LS Files S/1/1/11, R. Kilgour, Editorial Superintendent, BFBS, to Grierson 19.2 1914, 19.6. & 19.10.1917, and Grierson to Kilgour, 22.6.1917, also Kilgour to Grierson, 9.4.1923, and Grierson to Kilgour, 11.4.1923. 106 LS Files S/1/1/11, Grierson to Kilgour, 11.4.1923, Kilgour to Grierson, 17.4.1923, 7.12. 1926 & Kilgour to Grierson, 10.2.1927. 107 EUR 223/273, BFBS to Grierson, 4.6.1928, and R. Kilgour to Grierson, 10.5.1928. 108 LS Files S/1/1/11, Kilgour to Grierson, 1.12.1921, and Grierson to Kilgour, 5.12.1921. 109 EUR 223/302, BFBS to Grierson, 9.5.1930; for some references to these meetings and how they encouraged his own interests, see EUR 223/232, Grierson to Reverend R. Kilgour, 12.2. 1907. 110 EUR 223/219, E.W. Smith, Memorandum on the Desirability of a Survey of Languages in Africa, 27.10.1937. 111 For example, see EUR 223/301, Reverend A. Patton-Le Feuvre to Grierson, 9.1928. 112 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 16. See also EUR 223/249, Grierson to Secretary, Government of India, Dept. of Education, Health and Lands, 2.5.1928, for Grierson’s reference to Assam ‘with its extraordinary Babel of languages’. 113 LS Files S/1/14/4, Grierson to Lloyd, Office of Superintendent of Census, Assam, 23.1.1923. 114 Grierson, Bible in India, p. 3. 115 The relevant lines in the King James Version of 1 Corinthians are: ‘There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification. Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me’. 116 See Ch. 6 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. 117 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 198. 118 Majeed, ‘Modernity’s Script’. 119 Ibid., pp. 24–5. 120 LS Files S/1/1/28, Provost, UCL, Sir Gregory Foster to Grierson, 10.2.1919. 121 Wellisch, Conversion of Scripts, pp. 26–7. 122 Ibid., p. 245. 123 Cited in Ibid., p. 311. 124 EUR 223/261, F.W. Thomas to Grierson, 2.2.1912, with attached note ‘Transliteration of Indo-Chinese (Including Tibetan) Scripts’. 125 Miyako Inoue, Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, pp. 82–3. 126 Wellisch, Conversion of Scripts, p. 102. 127 EUR 223/302, International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, League of Nations to Grierson, 8.12.1928. 128 LS Files S/1/14/11, Grierson to John Shakespear, 18.10.1905. 129 EUR 223/301, P.J. Hartog to Grierson, 19.8.1928. 130 Majeed, ‘Modernity’s Script’.

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131 EUR 223/207, ‘Report of the Committee convened to discuss a Simplified Phonetic Script for Bengali’. 132 EUR 223/226, S.K. Chatterji to Grierson, 22.8.1920. 133 Robert D. King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 86. 134 EUR 223/220, F.H. Brown to Grierson, 24.1.1929 & 2.5.1929. 135 Carlo Coppola, ‘The All-India Progressive Writers’ Association’, in C. Coppola (ed.), Marxist Influences and South Asian Literature, East Lansing, MI: Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1974, p. 36, note 41. 136 Coppola, ‘The All-India Progressive Writers’ Association’, p. 16. Chatterji also sent his comments on a pamphlet called ‘Typewriter Bengali’, by an Education Department officer, to Grierson, describing it as a bid to make the typewriter ‘an agent in the romanisation of Bengali’; see EUR 223/226, S.K. Chatterji to Grierson, 22.8.1920. 137 Mohandas K. Gandhi, Our Language Problem, Karachi: Anand T. Hingorani, 1942, pp. 29–30, 36, 44–5. 138 Amena Mohsin, ‘Language, Identity and the State in Bangladesh’, in Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly (eds), Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 96–7. 139 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 49, 624. 140 Ibid., p. 49 for Urdu written in Oriya characters; LS Files S/1/2/2, Letter to Grierson, June 7.6.1928 (sender illegible), on ‘Roman Urdu’ Army manuals. 141 EUR 223/261, Grierson’s note on Knowles’s ‘A National Alphabet for India’, 3.1913, and EUR 223/220, Grierson to F.H. Brown, 15.2.1917. 142 Or as one correspondent put it, the society does not enforce its system in its journal. See LS Files S/1/1/7, ‘Memorandum by J.H. Marshall’, attached to Grierson’s ‘Dr. Konow’s Note on Transliteration’, n.d. 143 Ibid. 144 LS Files S/1/1/16, Grierson to Reverend G.O. Fraser, 24.11.1923, on the missionary system of transliteration and its disadvantages in comparison to the IPA. 145 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 134; for the passage see pp. 135–7. 146 EUR 223/263, International Phonetic Association, London to Grierson, 15/2/1912, A.D. Parkinson to Daniel Jones, IPA, University College, Gower Street, London, 4.11.1925. 147 Ibid., IPA Flyer. 148 EUR 223/302, Prof. E.W. Scripture to Grierson, 21.5.1928. 149 Pieter A.M. Seuren, Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, pp. 168–9. 150 LS Files S/1/1/15, Daniel Jones to Grierson, 23.1.1919. 151 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 194–5; on the birth of phonology and its key players, see Seuren, Western Linguistics, pp. 140–1, 144–5. 152 LS Files S/1/1/15, Grierson to Mrs L. Milne, 22.4.1918; see also Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, Addenda Majora, pp. 328–30. 153 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 9.7.1919; see also the ‘Advance Proof’ of the ‘Linguistic Survey of Burma’, which includes proofs of the

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154

155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181

gramophone recordings’ transcriptions, with interlinear IPA transcription and literal translations in EUR 223/328. LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 10.7.1919 & 29.5.1920, which gives tables of the sounds of nine Burmese dialects using the IPA, and EUR 223/328, ‘Reports on the work of the “Ethnographical and Linguistic Survey of Burma”’, and ‘Advance Proof’ of ‘Linguistic Survey of Burma’. EUR 223/285, Grierson to G.V. Ramamurti, 29.11.1932. EUR 223/305, Report on Progress of Dictionary, 4.12.1925, attached to J.M. Dunnett to Grierson, 4.2.1926. EUR 223/228, for the curriculum of the ICS exams, shows how important phonetics became in these exams; the prescribed reading for Bengali for two-year probationers selected in 1923 included Chatterji’s work. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 194. LS Files S/1/1/16, Grierson to Dr Charlotte Krause, 7.10.1924. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 56. Wellisch, Conversion of Scripts, p. 8. LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor, 9.7.1919; for Henry Sweet’s contributions to the IPA and phonetics, see Seuren, Western Linguistics, p. 168. LS Files S/1/1/35, E.A. Sonnenschein to Grierson, 28.1.1919. LS Files S/1/1/16, Daniel Jones to Grierson, 26.9.1922. Ibid. EUR 223/323, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 28.1.1919. EUR 223/337, Grierson to Philip Waterfield, 6.12.1922. EUR 223/309, R.C. Temple to Grierson, 5.2.1922; see also EUR 223/237, Hugh Chisholm to Grierson, 13.7.1906, on the difficulties of reconciling ‘philological accuracy and conventional spelling’ in the use of diacritics. LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to Morgan Webb, 20.6.1917, and EUR 223/292, Grierson to S.P. O’Donnell, Secretary to Government, UP, 22.9.1914. Ibid., 5.12.1917. LS Files S/1/14/2, Grierson to Edward Gait, 5.5.1903. EUR 223/292, Grierson to S.P. O’Donnell, Secretary to Government, UP, 22.9.1914, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 196. EUR 223/260, George Hamilton, India Office, to Governor General of India in Council, 7.3.1902. LS Files S/1/14/2, Grierson to Edward Gait, 5.5.1903. LS Files S/1/4/11, as in the case of the Lushai hills when they became part of Assam province; see Grierson to John Shakespear, 24.1.1906. LS Files S/1/1/7, Sten Konow, ‘Note on the Transliteration of the Nāgari Alphabet’. LS Files S/1/5/1, Grierson to S.P. O’Donnell, 22.9.1914. EUR 223/327, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 20.6.1921. EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’. LS Files S/1/14/9, L.G. Sedgwick to Grierson, 14.3.1923. For example, the transcription of the Pashto specimens from the PersoArabic script into the Roman script, Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 17, and

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182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

192 193 194 195 196 197 198

199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206

Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 513, for Bhagati specimens in the Persian script and p. 508 for Western Pahari specimens in Devanagari. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 173. See also Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 383, on the orthography of words in native script varying according to the ‘caprice’ of the writer, referring to Jaunsari. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 32. The term is also applied to orthography, such as Kashmiri, where ‘each writer is a law unto himself’, see ibid., p. 257. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 112. LS Files S/1/6/13, Grierson to F.W. Skemp, 2.8.1915. Wellisch, Conversion of Scripts, pp. 25, 32. Ibid., pp. 33, 313, 343. Ibid., pp. 23–4. EUR 223/261, F.W. Thomas to Grierson, 2.2.1912, with attached note ‘Transliteration of Indo-Chinese (Including Tibetan) Scripts’. Ibid., Thomas to Grierson, 6.2.1912. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 296, referring to dialects in Chittagong district, and p. 37, referring to the specimen of the Sanskritised style of modern Bengali literature from Calcutta, given on pp. 42–5. See also p. 209, referring to specimens of the Bengali dialect in the Mymensingh District, and pp. 211–13. See also pp. 229–33, for a ‘semi-phonetic’ system, and pp. 285–8, for dialects of the Jessore district, where similar issues are aired. See Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 119, referring to the specimens on 123–8 of the Danjong-ka dialect of Tibetan, with a ‘phonetical transliteration in italics’. Wellisch, Conversion of Scripts, pp. 311–12. Ibid., p. 103. EUR 223/261, Grierson’s Note on Knowles’ ‘A National Alphabet for India’, March 1913. EUR 223/207, ‘Report of the Committee convened to discuss a Simplified Phonetic Script for Bengali’. LS Files S/1/1/7, Sten Konow, ‘Note on the Transliteration of the Nāgari Alphabet’. EUR 223/261, F.W. Thomas to Grierson, 2.2.1912. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1. This note first accompanies the specimen passage for the Rajbangsi dialect of Bengali on p. 168, and is then repeated for another 19 transcriptions: see pp. 175, 207, 212, 235, 238, 250, 254, 262, 267, 273, 276, 281, 303, 307, 310, 314, 318, 406, 416. The pagination varies from volume to volume. For example, see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, pp. 792, 882; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 213; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, pp. 39, 287–8; and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 92. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 2, pp. 6–7, and LS Files S/1/4/11, Grierson to John Shakespear, 24.1.1906. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 18. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 154. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 458. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 340. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 30.

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207 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, pp. 336–7. 208 For example, see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, pp. 28, 31, 81, 88, 132, 228, 382, 422; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 310; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 116, 128, 651, 776, 794; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 19, 63, 204, 263; and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, pp. 615, 821. See also Prabodh B. Pandit, ‘The Linguistic Survey of India: Perspectives on Language Use’, in Sirarpi Ohannessian, Charles A. Ferguson, and Edgar C. Polomé (eds), Language Surveys in Developing Nations, Virginia: Centre for Applied Linguistics, 1975, p. 76. 209 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 642, gives a table comparing the written forms of Gurmukhi, Kangra and Dogra, and p. 625 gives a table of Gurmukhi, Landa, Takri and Sarada. 210 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 28, the Kaithi alphabet written by Tirhuti, Bhojpuri and Magahi scribes. 211 Ibid., p. 375. 212 EUR 223/227, Grierson to Bonar, Senior Examiner, Civil Service Commission, 26.6.1903, & 15.7.1905, and Grierson to Mair, Civil Service Commission, 12.1.1908 & 25.11.1908. 213 EUR 223/228, where the script training of ICS officers is discussed, and Grierson’s handbook is referred to. However, by 1927 it appears that the use of Kaithi cursive character had diminished considerably in Bihar and Orissa, and ICS probationers were not required to study it before their appointments and Nagari was universally used as the printed script. See Grierson to Mair, 9.2.1927, Mair’s Reply, 10.2.1927, and Edward Gait to Grierson, 12.2.1927. 214 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 316. For the various scripts used for Kashmiri, see Omkar N. Koul, ‘Kashmiri’, in Cardona and Jain (eds), IndoAryan Languages, p. 899. 215 Grierson, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 95–102, 111–15. 216 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, pp. 97–110. For the writing systems of Sindhi, see L.M. Khubchandani, ‘Sindhi’, in Cardona and Jain (eds), Indo-Aryan Languages, pp. 634–6. 217 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2; see the run of passages from pp. 383–439. See also Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 9, where Grierson explains that in north Bengal Oriya is written in Bengali and on the borders of the Marathi and ‘Eastern Hindi’ regions it is Devanagari. 218 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 757–69; the passages for the Dogra dialect of Panjabi in Jammu state is given in Chamba Takri type and Dogra handwriting. 219 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 196; for the passages, see pp. 197–206. For the use of different scripts for Panjabi, see Christopher Shackle, ‘Panjabi’, in Cardona and Jain (eds), Indo-Aryan Languages, pp. 594–9. 220 Ibid., p. 114. 221 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 148. 222 Ibid., p. 50. 223 EUR 223/298, Reverend Thomas C.N. Fernandez, The Konkani Committee, to Grierson, 25.1.1934, attaching the questionnaire. 224 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 7, pp. 83, 134–6, 175–9, 184–6, 190–4, 196–9, 202–5.

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225 Konkani is a notable exception among Indo-Aryan languages in being written widely in the Roman script since the 16th century. However, the orthography of Konkani in Roman, which is influenced by Portuguese, does not use diacritic marks, and vowel quantity is left unspecified, while retroflex consonants are distinguished from corresponding dentals by being written as germinates; see Cardona and Jain (eds), Indo-Aryan Languages, p. 100. 226 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 328–30. 227 Ibid., p. 247. 228 Ibid., pp. 194–5. 229 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, pp. 127–8; see also EUR 223/261, F.W. Thomas to Grierson, 6.2.1912 on Talaing. 230 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 8.12.1919. 231 LS Files, EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 31.1.1924. 232 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 8.12.1919. This issue was also raised by critics of the Young Grammarians; see Seuren, Western Linguistics, pp. 95–7. 233 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 346. 234 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 42. 235 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 267. 236 LS Files S/1/13/4, J.G. Partridge, Acting Agent to Governor in Ganjam, to Grierson, 20.7.1903. 237 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 194–5. 238 LS Files S/1/1/18, R.R. Marrett to Grierson, 5.5.1910. 239 LS Files S/1/1/32, L.P. Tessitori to Grierson, 22.7.1915 & 18.5.1916, and Grierson to Tessitori, 14.6.1916. 240 Others also highlighted the in-between nature of sounds when filtered through English. One of Grierson’s correspondents, for example, referred to a ‘peculiar sound’ in Ormuri which is somewhere between sr, hr and thr as ‘sounded in English’, see LS Files S/1/6/12, A.J. Grant to Grierson, 27.1.1900. 241 EUR 223/228, W. Hoey, ‘Memorandum for Conference on the Subject of Hindustani-Teaching’, which outlines these requirements to read multiple scripts in detail. 242 Cardona and Jain, Indo-Aryan Languages (eds), p. 100. 243 Ibid., p. 100.

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5 WHITE NOISE AND SÉANCES The ‘Gramophone or Phonetic Survey’1

This chapter examines the circumstances surrounding the inception of the LSI’s recordings of Indian languages. One purpose of its recordings was to overcome the inadequacy of the written word. Another was to secure what I call the ‘auditory order’ of British colonialism in India. Grierson lamented the poor pronunciation of Indian languages by English ICS officers, and for him using gramophone recordings to teach English ICS officers Indian languages would safeguard the authority of colonial pronouncements and their voices. Grierson was also anxious about how colonial (mis)pronouncements exposed the British to Indian mockery, and so the gramophone recordings would minimise this risk of caricature. As such, the recordings had a problematic relationship with pleasure, laughter and musicality. Moreover, the gramophone recordings were part of a narrative of techno-modern technology which reinforced British authority and there were other narratives of mastery in the LSI’s culture of recordings. However, these narratives unravel in significant ways and this chapter shows how this occurs. Grierson’s repeated description of the recordings as ‘séances’ expresses key issues about authorship, agency and the discreteness of human bodies and languages which the LSI struggled with.

The aims of the recordings Grierson’s concern with recording the sounds of Indian languages reflects developments in linguistics from the late 1870s onwards, just before the start of his career, brought about by the Young Grammarians and their laws of sound change. The assumptions underlying historical and comparative method in linguistics were also based on the study of sound change.2 Hence, by the time the Survey came about, sound change was firmly at the centre of philology. However, other 141

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factors led to the recordings. Grierson describes the LSI as ‘but a representation of the written word’, which could not record the syllabic stresses or the cadence and ‘swing’ of sentences.3 Similarly, its comparative vocabularies were unable to indicate ‘delicate shades of pronunciation’.4 The inadequacies of written representations of speech would be rectified by gramophone recordings which could reproduce ‘the emphasis and melody of each sentence’.5 The defect of the written word was further exacerbated in the Survey’s case because officials who collected information for the Survey were not trained phoneticians. This meant the LSI had only ‘ambiguous exhibitions’ of the spoken word, and ‘niceties of pronunciation’ went unrecorded.6 Thus, the recordings aimed to overcome the inadequacy of the written word in representing speech. They also were supposed to resolve the difficulties of transcription. When Grierson questioned Aurel Stein about the lack of any marking of cerebro-palatals in his transcription of Shina, Stein’s response was he was not aware that Shina had such palatals – otherwise he would have noted them.7 The recordings would therefore provide specimens independent of the vagaries of listening and transliteration by inexpert hands. They would also overcome the problem of the same sound striking different ‘English ears differently’,8 and Europeans’ inability to hear certain sounds. In Sindhi, for example, short final vowels are ‘scarcely perceptible to a European, although to Sindhīs the distinction is apparent and marked’.9 L.F. Taylor made a similar point about the recordings: when writing down languages by ear the differing ‘auditory powers’ of writers, compounded by differences in dialect and script, led to confused transcriptions,10 and he revised his own transcriptions of Burmese languages by using gramophone recordings.11 The recordings also aimed to identify tones, which were particularly difficult to identify, transcribe and represent, as, for example, in the case of Kamti.12 Grierson described being ‘brought up sharp by the question of tones’ in his Comparative Vocabulary to volume 1, part 1, and in the case of some languages and dialects, when it came to tones, ‘I am utterly at sea’.13 For Taylor, tones were a ‘baffling and confused subject’.14 The Oriental Congress in Copenhagen in August 1908 set up an International Committee to devise a scheme for the representation of tones but its work was interrupted by the war.15 After the war Grierson presented a scheme for representing tones to a joint meeting of oriental societies in Paris, which was published in October 1920.16 One of his articles on tones was circulated to district officers in Assam in the hope of reducing ‘chaos’ to order in their representation.17 In 142

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spite of the Royal Asiatic Society adopting the system approved by the joint meeting of Asiatic Societies in Paris, different systems for representing tones continued to be used.18 Hence, in the case of tonal languages, such as some Indo-Chinese dialects, the gramophone recordings were especially useful.19

Inter-provincial and European rivalries Thus, the LSI’s recordings brought into focus distinctions of sound and tone not easily perceptible in the normal course of hearing. Its recordings therefore match its focus on micro-level dialectal variations in India. There had been earlier recordings of Indian languages. Sir George Roos-Keppel, chief commissioner of the North-West Frontier Province, had recorded Pashto songs, but the wax cylinders of these did not survive.20 The LSI’s own recordings began just before the First World War.21 By 1916 Grierson was writing to provincial governments, saying that as the Survey was ending and an Oriental Institute was to be established in London (the future SOAS), this would be the appropriate time to make gramophone recordings.22 The first recordings were of languages spoken in Chota Nagpur, made by the Bihar and Orissa government, and ‘the scheme embracing the whole of India’ was based on these.23 By April 1924 there were 218 recordings illustrating some 97 languages and dialects.24 As in the case of the Survey in general, Grierson had to use various strategies to get the recordings done. He spurred officials into action by playing on a sense of inter-provincial rivalry, pointing to the successful recordings made by other provincial governments, their value to students and institutions in Britain and Europe, and the interesting nature of the languages themselves.25 He used his own long-standing connection with Bihar to persuade officials there: ‘I feel jealous when I think that its languages are not so fully illustrated in London as those of, say, Burma and C.P’.26 The LSI’s recordings were exhibited in Britain, such as at the Royal Asiatic Society in 1916,27 at a meeting of ‘Allied Orientalists’ in London in September 192028 and at the British Empire exhibition of 1924.29 Grierson referred to these exhibitions and cited press reports when persuading local governments to do the recordings.30 In the case of Bengali Grierson stressed how recordings would contribute to the study of Bengali phonetics in London by experts like S.K. Chatterji, who had just completed his doctoral thesis at the university there, and he also referred to how the ICS commissioners were thinking of using the recordings for the ICS examinations.31 Thus, he linked the 143

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recordings to the international study and teaching of Indian languages in a variety of institutional and other spaces. By invoking the interest of Indian princes,32 British universities and learned societies, Grierson increased the value of these recordings for provincial governments. This was important because the recordings were not commercially viable.33 Indian governments and states cited lack of funds and the expensive charges of the ‘gramophone expert’ for not doing them.34 Some Indian states initially agreed to do the recordings but then withdrew, citing funding problems.35 Grierson also played on intra-European rivalries and a sense of patriotism to get the recordings done. In his letters to governments he referred to the recordings made by Germans of Indian prisoners of war.36 Some German recordings of Indian languages were available in India, as a letter from Banarsi Das Jain of Oriental College, Lahore, to Grierson in 1921 testified.37 In his ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’, Taylor mentions how Germans had made recordings of languages in their former colonial possessions, and adds, ‘what has been done by them can be done by us’.38 Internal cleavages within European orientalists reflected the divisions of the First World War and its aftermath. Grierson refers to how ‘Allied Orientalists’ were to meet in September 1920 in London as a miniature Oriental Congress, excluding Germany and its allies. The records from Bihar were to be exhibited at this Congress.39 One reason Grierson was keen for the Linguistic Survey of Burma to go ahead was to prevent the British being ‘outdistanced in linguistic studies’ by other European countries.40 Thus, the Survey’s recordings were partly motivated by intra-European rivalries in linguistics. A similar sense of rivalry was expressed in the proposal for an Institute of Phonetics at UCL. This stressed the need to maintain London’s pre-eminence in the field against rival institutions, like the phonetics department in the German Colonial Institute in Hamburg, which held the First International Congress of Experimental Phonetics in April 1914. The proposal also refers to rival French institutions.41

The colonial auditory order The LSI’s recordings also contributed to a colonial narrative of power in India. The British monarch’s recorded message to the princes and people of India in Indian languages and Chinese in 1936 harnesses Indian voices and languages to imperial and monarchical purposes during a time when challenges to British rule were well under way.42 144

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Recordings of the earlier proclamation of the king in 1908, ‘the words being spoken by men carefully selected by the Government of India for the purpose’,43 were prescribed for some of the Indian language exams for ICS candidates.44 Grierson helped to provide these recordings to the ICS commissioners.45 The harnessing of sound technology for colonial imperatives in such recordings was in keeping with how the colonial state used the technology of sound in the 1920s and 1930s in radio broadcasting to shore up its authority, although here there was a conflict between the models of centralising radio broadcasting in Delhi and provincial capitals and locally based village broadcasts.46 Grierson was closely involved in discussions with the ICS commissioners on gramophones as teaching aids for ICS probationers learning Indian languages. In these he focused on pronunciation. In his 1907 memorandum on the final ICS exam on Hindustani Grierson described the candidates’ pronunciation as ‘abominable’, particularly when it came to cerebral and dental consonants, aspirated letters and nasal sounds.47 Grierson later suggested accuracy of pronunciation should be stressed for the final ICS examinations in Marathi and Bengali.48 In a ‘Hindustani Conference’ held in April 1912, the question of using a gramophone or ‘talking machine’ to teach Indian languages was on the agenda, and in this context reference was again made to ICS candidates’ failings in pronunciation.49 For Grierson, gramophone recordings were valuable in teaching the ‘characteristic “lilt” or tone of a language’.50 His discussions on the importance of pronunciation resonated with the wider pedagogical culture of sound technology. Thomas Edison (1847–1931), the inventor of the phonograph, had stressed its usefulness for teaching elocution and correct pronunciation.51 Sound recording technology had an impact on elocution teaching in the 1910s and 1920s in the US, and underpinned the pedagogy of teaching ‘correct’ speech.52 Some of the companies that wrote to Grierson stressed their recordings taught ‘correct’ pronunciation to students.53 However, this pedagogy was distinctively inflected in colonial India. Grierson quite literally wanted to boost the authority of colonial civil servants’ voices. As one ICS consultant commented, ‘Diffidence begotten of want of vocabulary and self-consciousness are a handicap’ in the ICS probationers’ speaking of Indian languages.54 Gramophone recordings would overcome this. For Grierson blemishes in civil servants’ pronunciation of Indian languages undermined colonial authority and prestige. He was especially fearful of the English being caricatured; in his 1907 memorandum on the training of ICS officers, Grierson described candidates’ pronunciation as having all the 145

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‘vices seized upon by natives in the caricature of Englishmen on the native stage’.55 He likens the ICS candidate’s ‘shoving in every Persian word he can think of into his Hindustani composition’ to Mr Jabberjee’s effusions in Punch.56 He therefore compares an Indian who is a figure of fun because of his Indianised English with an ICS candidate as a figure of fun because of his anglicised pronunciation of Indian languages. He is anxious not so much of Indian mimicry destabilising Englishness as of Indian mimicry of the English trying to be linguistically Indian highlighting their clumsy Englishness. This fear of mockery is one motivation for the gramophone recordings. Using gramophone recordings in the language training of ICS officers would prevent slippages in the colonial auditory order as well as caricatures of the British. Grierson was also preoccupied with the estranging effects of British mispronunciation on Indian listeners. When stressing the importance of cadence in speaking Indian languages, he describes the case of an English official speaking Bengali: On his arrival in India he may possibly speak the language with perfect verbal correctness and with fair pronunciation; yet, if he addresses the simplest sentence to a villager, he will find it a common experience to receive as a reply, ‘Sāhib, I do not understand English’. The man has no idea of being impertinent, nor is he wanting in intelligence. If he had grasped the fact that he was being addressed in Bengali, he would have known the meaning of every word uttered to him. But he is more or less flustered by the white face of the stranger, and all that his slow mind apprehends is that he has been spoken to in an unfamiliar cadence, – and not only in that of his own language. Without attempting to identify his separate words of his questioner he couples this strange sentence-melody with the white face, and jumps to the conclusion that he is being addressed in English.57 Thus, when the cadence is not right, colonial pronouncements undermine themselves, and the status of the English as imperial outsiders is reinforced. The real cause of the villager’s apparent impertinence is not resentment at colonial rule; rather it is the Englishman’s inadequate command of Indian phonemes. Gramophone recordings will help to make British rule sound right. They would contribute to naturalising colonial rule phonetically, and would prevent Indians seeing the British as strangers in India. 146

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Grierson’s fear of Indian laughter erupting at colonial (mis)pronouncements is expressed in other ways. He describes a case when a woman in the witness box broke down into ‘hysterical giggles’ when she was sworn in and told to say the word pratijñā (affirmation) as if it were pronounced as spelt.58 It is only through correct colonial pronouncements that the hysterical laughter lurking underneath the surface of colonial India can be kept at bay. The theatricality of the colonial law court can then be kept intact, and the protocols for certifying legal truth in speech can be affirmed. The colonial state has to exert control over the status of writing in the bureaucratic modernity of the document Raj,59 but it also has to control the inflexion of the spoken word in its auditory order. For Grierson, then, legality and linguistics intersect at the level of the phoneme and the British must sound right to the Indians. They also must improve their listening skills to do this – hence the importance of gramophone recordings in enabling Englishmen to hear Indian sounds they find difficult to perceive. In this the recordings reflect the importance of surveillance, information gathering and the ‘art of listening in’ on the internal communications of Indian polity and society.60 We have already seen how the law court is a site for Grierson’s split hearing as magistrate and phonetician, and how he stresses he can identify sounds his Indian subordinates in court cannot.61 Discussing Siddheshwar Varma’s Nasalisation in Hindi Literary Works (1935), Grierson suggests he would have laid more stress on local peculiarities because his experience as a magistrate examining witnesses made him sensitive to these.62 Grierson’s listening skills, then, give him a panIndian hearing which Indians themselves lack, and ICS officers should emulate this.

The recordings’ language of command A language of command surfaces in the preparation of the LSI records. Grierson suggested the United Provinces government obtain recordings in Nepal through officers commanding Gurkha regiments there, while Rai Bahadur Hiralal recommended using jail prisoners for aboriginal languages’ recordings in the Central Provinces.63 Commercial companies marketed a sense of command when selling gramophone recordings as teaching aids for learning languages. In emphasising the gramophone’s superiority over the human teacher, they stressed it is ‘always at your service’, the student can control it ‘entirely’, ‘it speaks when, and as often as you want it to’, it is ‘always ready for work’, 147

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and it ‘will repeat words or sentences .  .  . without complaining or losing its temper’. The student can learn to ask an attendant to bring things in ‘Spanish, Chinese, or Teloogoo [sic], wherever you may happen to reside’.64 Another company’s booklet stressed the student’s control of ‘unlimited repetition at will’.65 A language of command, then, was embedded in the extension of sound technology in the teaching of languages. The conference on using gramophones to teach Hindustani listed these advantages of the ‘talking-machine over a living teacher’.66 In the context of the British Raj, there was an additional dimension to this. For some British officials and scholars, the gramophone recordings meant they would no longer depend on Indian munshis and pandits as language teachers. An anxiety about their reliance on these groups had characterised British interactions from the late 18th century onwards.67 The prospect of no longer being dependent on finding Indian teachers may have been behind the enthusiasm expressed for using gramophone records to teach Indian languages to ICS candidates in England.68 As Grierson put it, the recordings filled ‘a void in the teaching of Indian languages’ in Britain ‘which can be filled in no other way’.69 The recordings were also used in India for pedagogical purposes. S.K. Chatterji requested a set of records for Calcutta University,70 and some colonial officials arranged for their recordings to be exhibited at local colleges.71 In Britain Anderson had used recordings to teach Bengali in Cambridge in the 1910s,72 and by 1920 institutions like SOS used recordings to teach African and Indian languages. For one of Grierson’s correspondents, the recordings made it possible to get ‘some idea of the sounds and structure of the Dravidian languages without worrying with their horrible alphabets’73 – that is, they released learners from a dependence on Indian script systems. It is worth noting some Indian musicians welcomed the replacement of Indian teachers by recordings in the field of music.74 While Anand Coomaraswamy criticised the gramophone’s effect on the performance of Indian music and on Indian taste, and its displacement of ‘the vision of a living man giving expression to emotions in a disciplined traditional art language’,75 he also qualified this by arguing the gramophone had a role in the analysis of music for theoretical purposes, and in the study of Indian melodies.76 Indian practitioners in some cultural realms viewed sound recordings as an advantage in their training for similar reasons as the supporters of recordings for language teaching did. The Gramophone Company, which did the Survey’s recordings, also used colonial language to describe its expansion into India, referring 148

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to its Indian recording trips as ‘expeditions’, as if they were exploring a dark continent.77 One company representative likened himself to Marco Polo when he visited India.78 Grierson used this kind of language for the benefit of the provincial governments, often describing the recordings’ exhibitions as an unprecedented recreation of the exotic in the metropolis: the recordings were of ‘wild tribes’, this was the ‘first occasion in England on which any of these languages had been heard spoken by members of the tribes concerned’, ‘the records produced most perfectly difficult aboriginal sounds which .  .  . had never before been heard in Europe’, and they ‘made accessible to savants in Europe sounds which had been heard by only one or two white men in wild districts’.79 Grierson presented the recordings by invoking the (imagined) fresh immediacy of wild exotic sounds in the measured sobriety of the British metropolis. In another sign of its colonial traits, Grierson structured the recordings’ content hierarchically. The records begin with the man in charge of the apparatus reciting in English the speaker’s name, caste, age, village, the location and date of the recording, the name of the language and the subject matter of the disc.80 This hierarchy is further evident in the preference for a ‘native’ who has ‘no theories’ and who ‘reads aloud as natural as possible’ for the recordings.81 One of Grierson’s correspondents cautioned against recording an educated man’s voice, as the more educated the man, the less likely he will have a ‘typical accent and intonation’.82 In contrast, at times Grierson seemed partial to ‘educated’ accents,83 and there was some confusion as to who a typical speaker of a dialect was, which accent was the best to record, and which was ‘pure’, correct or ‘indigenous’.84 Overall, though, the hierarchy at play was that of the unselfconscious ‘native’ speaker at the ground level, the operator of the recording apparatus who introduced the speaker and the recording in English, the colonial officials who arranged for the recordings to take place, and the students and linguists who studied and analysed them in Britain, Europe and North America. At the top of the hierarchy is Grierson himself, whose own voice is not recorded; this again boosts his authority as an acute listener, who can listen to voices without himself being recorded. Some upper-caste Indians also participated in and reproduced the hierarchical narratives of recordings. In a letter to Grierson in 1928, Siddheshwar Varma described his ‘linguistic tour’ in Bhadarwahi, during which he collected material for grammars of Bhalesi and Padari. In his account of gathering material from cowherds and shepherds, he refers to his gramophone as ‘my most successful trap’, and adds, 149

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‘The shepherds were enraptured by this miraculous bādzā, and when I found them in the “fit”, I took blank slips out of my pocket and began to collect pastoral words from these people’.85 Varma evokes the figure of the naïve native who is overawed by the wonders of technology. His description of the gramophone as a ‘successful trap’ recalls Edison’s own characterisation of the phonograph’s ‘foundation principle’ as ‘the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive’.86 Varma’s description extended this vocabulary to his recordings of subaltern groups in India. Edison also referred to how the phonograph reproduced sound waves ‘with all their original characteristics at will, without the presence or consent of the original source’.87 In the case of both the LSI and Varma’s recordings, the actual extent of the reciters’ consent and willingness to participate is unclear and is again suggestive of the hierarchies in play in the recordings.

Techno-modernity In Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, I argue that despite Grierson’s commitment to contemporary Indian languages, the antiquity of India looms large in the Survey. I show how the technomodernity of its recordings paradoxically reinforced India’s antiquity. Here my focus is on how the LSI’s recordings are part of a narrative of techno-modernity in India. Some have seen the gramophone as the ‘acme of Western inventiveness’;88 for others it played a key role in the media technologies defining modernity.89 The discussions on the value of Indian language recordings as a pedagogical tool referred to the teaching of modern European languages through recordings;90 both European and Indian languages were framed within what Edison had called the ‘universal applicability’ of recording technology’s capture of sounds and ‘their reproduction at will’.91 The rapidly globalising scope of this technology was reflected in the international expansion of the Gramophone Company. By 1901 it had offices in Europe, Russia, Latin America, India and Australia.92 In December 1908 it opened a factory in Calcutta, and by 1915 Calcutta was the company’s headquarters for its recording programmes in Asia.93 Its first trademark, the figure of the ‘recording angel’, evokes the company’s sense of the transcendentally global scope of recording technology.94 The gramophone was just one of many small-scale domestic and light industrial machines that arrived in India from the late 19th century onwards. Under the impact of what Arnold has called ‘everyday technology’ in the early 20th century, India’s soundscape changed 150

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dramatically. Its auditory environment was now filled with the noises of traffic, sewing machines, typewriters, milling machines, the clatter and whistles of trains, steamers’ sirens on rivers and the hum of telegraph wires.95 The LSI’s recordings uproot Indian voices from this acoustic environment to relocate them in Europe. In contrast, others evoked India’s soundscape differently. A.H. Fox-Strangways, who toured South India in 1910–11 to record folk music,96 tried to capture music in its natural, spontaneous setting, ‘in street cries, sailors’ chatneys, and women’s work songs’.97 He refused to present ‘complete and finished specimens’ as this would inhibit getting close to the ‘natural instincts of song-makers’ and their creativity.98 In order to produce its recordings, then, the LSI had to dumb down India’s auditory environment, and repress those everyday sounds that, in Paul Carter’s words, constitute the ‘auditory environmental unconscious orchestrating our communications’.99

Musicality The Survey’s recordings followed earlier 20th-century recordings of Indian music, songs and recitations in Indian languages both in London and in the subcontinent.100 Its conservatism in its use of sound technology contrasts with this technology’s innovative effects on Indian music, which led to a range of modifications and creative hybridisations.101 Grierson occasionally used the Gramophone Company’s own recordings for linguistic analysis.102 Banarsi Das sent him the Gramophone Company’s recording of Waris Shah’s Hīr with a transcription and translation.103 However, Grierson stressed that while the LSI recordings included ‘liturgical’ and folk songs, some of which are ‘vivid representations of Indian music’ and the ‘exact expression and lilt’ of singers,104 these were primarily intended as linguistic specimens, and were of little or no value for other purposes.105 The main point of the recordings was to give phoneticians the sounds of languages ‘that cannot be accurately learnt from any written description’.106 He also stressed the Gramophone Company’s commercial recordings of Indian songs were not useful for his ‘purely philological’ purposes.107 While the Bihar and Orissa records included tribal songs and specimens of music, these were not useful for philology, where his main interest lay.108 Denison Ross, the director of the School of Oriental Studies, shared this view; he considered the Gramophone Company’s commercial recordings as unsuitable for display by the school at the British Empire exhibition of 1924.109 151

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Thus, Grierson moved away from sound recording technology’s strong association with music. This association was clear from the technology’s inception; Edison had stressed the phonograph did ‘wonders’ for musicians, and ‘musical sounds came out peculiarly well’,110 and the phonograph could ‘whistle or sing far better than it would talk’.111 When describing his discovery of how the sound waves of human voices might be inscribed on ‘some solid substance’, Edison referred to how ‘when the cylinder carrying the indented paper was turned with great swiftness, it gave off a humming noise from the indentations – a musical, rhythmic sound resembling that of human talk heard indistinctly’.112 Thus, the recording of human voices was in the first instance closely associated with musicality. In the LSI’s recordings, though, musicality had to be kept at a distance to lift Indian voices out of their acoustic environment and concentrate on them alone in a bid to shore up colonial auditory power. Even when songs were recorded, musical pleasure had to be ruled out; the recordings shored up colonialism’s auditory order partly by disciplining the possibilities of aesthetic pleasure. One of Grierson’s letters hints at his low opinion of Indian music – referring to some songs’ recordings, he remarks, ‘such music, it is hardly necessary to state, is not to be measured by the canons of Europe’.113 It is possible Grierson was wary of identifying too closely with Indian musical culture because heterodox figures in India like James and Margaret Cousins and Maud MacCarthy, who were influenced by theosophy, saw Indian music as a site for Indian national regeneration. While Grierson was proactive in asserting Indian claims in the field of linguistics, and espoused a political position close to one form of Indian nationalism, the musical radicalism of such European individuals who had gone ‘native’ may have been a step too far for him because of their unorthodox religious beliefs.114 Grierson identified with one version of India without compromising his deeply held Christian beliefs.115 Thus, while British imperialism in India was also an exercise in sound,116 in the case of the LSI this was carefully circumscribed to exclude or at least contain the disruptive possibilities of other sounds emanating from India’s vast and diverse musical cultures and its new techno-modern landscape.

‘White noise’ However, the LSI’s aim to strengthen colonialism’s auditory order and improve the quality of colonial pronouncements comes apart in 152

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significant ways. The recordings were supposed to overcome the written word’s inadequacy. Initially, though, sound recording technology was conceptualised in terms of writing because the incisions made onto the records and recordings were seen as electrical transcriptions.117 Moreover, the recordings deepened the LSI’s reliance on the written word. Grierson insisted that unless the recordings were accompanied by printed transcriptions, they would be ‘mere museum curiosities’ and ‘useless’ for linguistic study.118 In some instances, the written transcripts took priority over the recordings. Grierson queried one of the Assam government’s recordings, because it did not agree with the accompanying transcript. His view was that where the two differ, the recording and not the transcription was in error. Officials in the Assam Secretariat went over both the recording and transcript with U. Mondon Bareh, who, ‘looking at the transcript, listening to the record, stopping when it outran him, turning back and starting again, . . . pieced it all together’.119 Here the transcript is instrumental in putting together the recording. Thus, while the recordings were instituted because of a lack in colonial linguistic writing and problems with transcription, they brought that writing back into play. They stopped the recordings from becoming ‘useless’. One of Grierson’s correspondents questioned the gramophone’s ability to reproduce sounds accurately. A student at Oriental College Lahore sent Grierson some Panjabi recordings with transcriptions, and asked if a phonetician who did not know Panjabi could assess the recordings in relation to the transcripts ‘to judge how far the sounds are produced accurately by a machine’.120 Here again the transcription has primary value rather than the recording. Grierson was also aware of the limits of sound recording technology. He noted the pronunciation of words or letters was not always clear on the recordings.121 The sound recording technology was also materially fragile. Grierson and his correspondents struggled with the records’ physical deterioration. The Madras government wrote to Grierson to say that the Gramophone Company in Calcutta was not able to manufacture the Madras records to meet further demand because the original matrices had physically deteriorated,122 and new matrices had to be prepared for a number of provinces.123 Moreover, the Gramophone Company had to do recordings before the onset of the monsoon season as humidity affected the recording diaphragms, and the heat of Indian summers could affect the recording apparatus, so there were seasonal constraints on the use of this technology.124 Furthermore, when the Gramophone Company prepared new matrices from the records the Madras government sent them, the original 153

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volume of speech was amplified, resulting in more ‘surface noise’. For listeners ‘the sound of the old record, though weaker, was more natural’.125 In another letter, the superintendent of the Madras Museum reiterated this: the voices on the records were ‘boomy and unnatural’, and had a more ‘metallic’ sound.126 As scholars have pointed out, sound recording technology extended the perception threshold of sound, just as the microscope and telescope extended the range of sight.127 New kinds of sounds were produced, such as crackles, creaks, surface noises, hissing and booming. The phonograph did not filter out sounds as the ear does; instead it registered a new range of acoustic events.128 With the rise of storage media for optical and acoustic data, ‘circa 1900 noise was everywhere’ and all discourse was placed against the ‘primal soup’ of ‘white noise’.129 It is no coincidence that in the first circular letter of the Gramophone Company in November 1901, ‘jabberment’, with its connotations of jabbering and babbling, was listed as its telegraphic address.130 The early 20th century, when the LSI was being conducted, also saw the avant-garde production of acoustic phenomena, from the white noise celebrated by Rilke in his ‘Primal Sound’ (1919) to the introduction of noise into literature and music by Mondrian and the Bruitists.131 Marinetti’s 1933 sintesi radiofoniche (radio syntheses), for example, creates ‘An Acoustical Landscape’ out of three blocks of sounds: a crackling fire, lapping water and a blackbird’s whistle. These sound collages and ‘constructivist montages’132 evoke a very different acoustical landscape from the colonially circumscribed auditory order of the Survey’s recordings, which worked hard not to admit noise. However, the ‘primal soup’ of ‘white noise’ infected its recordings too. Metallic and booming sounds crept in, and interfered with the fidelity of its recordings.

Unnatural voices The criticisms cited earlier about the ‘unnatural’-sounding voices on the Madras government’s new recordings beg the question of what a ‘natural’ voice should sound like on a recording. In the Madras recordings, Grierson agreed that the ‘new louder reproduction . . . is not so natural’.133 The records were supposed to be for phoneticians who study the production of sounds ‘by those to whom they come naturally’.134 However, the LSI’s framework militated against this. As one correspondent pointed out, the choice of the prodigal son as a passage to recite was ‘not quite a spontaneous or ordinary example’.135 Taylor had questioned this set passage because he felt translators tended to 154

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render it ‘too literally’; they followed the language constructions in the passage, ‘thereby disguising the real structure and syntax of their own language’.136 Some correspondents complained the recordings were ‘stilted’,137 and felt that because speakers memorised the passage, they were ‘more forced than natural’.138 In other cases, speakers were dictated the passage sentence by sentence, with the gramophone switched off ‘while the reciter is being told what to recite’.139 This was how some of the Bihar and Orissa records were produced; here the records sometimes accidentally recorded the voice of the dictator too.140 At one point Grierson suggested doing two recordings of the passage, ‘In one the record would reproduce the sounds at the ordinary rate of speaking while in the other it would reproduce them at a much slower rate’. This was to prevent the reciter speaking too fast.141 Here, then, Grierson felt an ‘unnatural’ voice at a slower speed was necessary alongside a recitation at an ordinary rate of speaking. It is also possible the flatness of some of the recordings reflected the constraints of the LSI’s auditory environment, cut off from the surrounding soundscape. The reciters could not but be aware of the artifices of a colonially sponsored space, and this showed in their voices. Something of the way this space had to be commanded into being comes across in the difficulties expressed by governments with regard to gathering speakers together for the recording schedule,142 or the problems encountered when trying to get recordings done in ‘places difficult of access’ – for example, in various states in Central India and Rajputana.143 To adapt a phrase from Paul Carter, the recorded voices evoked not disorderly mobile selves but the orderliness of the technology recording it,144 and we might add, the orderliness of the quasi-official hierarchy managing the recordings. The participants were not active co-creators in the recordings, and this came across in the unnatural timbre of some of their voices.145

Being human The aim of the LSI’s recordings, then, to strengthen the auditory order of the British Raj comes apart in significant ways. However, the recordings also raised more fundamental questions about being human. Edison described how with the phonograph it was ‘just as if the machine itself were talking’.146 Grierson and his correspondents used common parlance when they referred to gramophones as ‘talking-machines’.147 This captured the combination of biological and mechanical functions attributed to the gramophone.148 In the LSI there are other revealing 155

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turns of phrase blurring the human with the mechanical. When discussing the recordings of Indian languages as part of the School of Oriental Studies’ exhibits at the 1924 British Empire exhibition, the school’s secretary referred to setting up a small kiosk for these ‘gramophone recitals’, as if the gramophones were performers in their own right.149 Grierson envisaged students sitting with transcripts before the gramophone while ‘the record orates’.150 The conflation of human performers with the gramophone was evident early on in India. Maharajah Lal and Sons, the oldest HMV dealers in Delhi, dealt in cylindrical rolls and called them churī (bangles). They referred to phonographs as ‘churī kā bājā’ (playing bangles), alluding to the bangles and anklets of Indian dancers.151 In an image in their 1907 catalogue, two Indian dancers with belled anklets emerge from the gramophone to twirl on the rotating disc.152 Some of Grierson’s correspondents measured themselves against the phonograph and were caught up in a mimetic loop with it – for example, Sir Aurel Stein referred to himself as ‘an imperfect phonograph’ when recording recitations,153 while D.C. Phillott was so mesmerised by the gramophone, he repeated the crack in the record he was listening to when reciting its language lessons.154 In the late 19th and early 20th centuries inscriptive devices and techniques complicated notions of reading and writing.155 These gave rise to new senses of the word ‘reading’, where reading was no longer necessarily a script-oriented activity156 – for example, the telegraph was referred to as ‘sound reading’ because of its aural data processing.157 Sound reading spread rapidly in the US, and in Britain it was dominant by the 1880s. To observers at the time, the role of sound in telegraphic communications was striking; every 19th-century book on the telegraph had sections on the wonders of sound reading.158 The gramophone also complicated the notion of reading aloud, since for the first time this was severed from the human subject.159 For Edison the phonograph read itself; the words inscribed by the modulation of sound waves were recoverable without the intrusion of script, sight or human intelligence.160 One of the LSI’s correspondents wrote about how the student could read passages at home with the gramophone, as if the latter were a fellow reader.161 Another referred to how the student could speak to the machine, so that gramophones were listeners too.162 The LSI, then, participated in this representative climate in which machines were given human-like qualities.163 The attribution of humanlike functions to the gramophone was also captured in Grierson’s and others’ use of the term ‘teaching-machine’.164 The discussions of gramophones replacing human teachers stressed the advantages 156

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of the former over the latter, as we have seen.165 Parts of the human body were imagined as reassembled and reproduced in the features of machines – for example, the ear membrane in the telephone and the mouth in the telegraph.166 The gramophone’s horn was a mouth, but given its recording functions, it also doubled up as an ear. Analogies were drawn between the human nervous system, the brain and the memory, and the phonograph and other machines of everyday technology, such as sewing machines and typewriters.167 The brain was viewed as a ‘conscious phonograph’, and the coronal sutures were like the grooves scratched on the wax cylinder by the gramophone’s point.168 Physiologists used images resonant of the lever system of Remington typewriters to depict the brain.169 Psychoanalysis also used metaphors of everyday technology, with Freud likening the analyst to a telephone receiver and the patient to a transmitting mike.170 For Edison, the phonograph articulated language better than humans did, because ‘the original utterance’ was ‘mutilated’ by imperfect lips and mouths, and these ‘mutilations [were] eliminated or corrected by the mechanism of the phonograph’.171 Thus, the human body was disaggregated in relation to recording technology in this period. In particular, the idea of one’s ears being separate from oneself was ‘a distinctly phonographic notion’,172 reinforced by the experience of listening to one’s self for the first time. In a letter to Grierson, the Linguaphone Company saw this as an advantage; the student develops the technique of listening to him- or herself, ‘which is not usually developed when he has a teacher at his side’.173 The sense of different senses or organs working apart from each other is captured by D.C. Phillott when he discusses using a gramophone to teach Hindustani. Referring to his experience of learning Italian using a gramophone he says, I found that it wasn’t the ear that so much required training as the voice. My ear learnt the Italian accent in 3 repetitions of the first lesson but when I started to repeat the lesson aloud with the phone, I found my voice and ear were not in accord.174 For Grierson, the transcriptions of the recordings were needed so that each listener’s ‘eye can follow what his ear receives’.175 Here the transcriptions also held out the possibility of reunifying the senses separated by sound recording technology. However, this was uncertain because the transcripts and the recordings did not always agree.176 157

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Moreover, as we have seen, the LSI was acutely aware of the deficiencies of the written word; what was written down and what was heard were often far apart.

Séances There was another way in which the LSI’s recordings played havoc with the idea of human embodiment and its integrity. Grierson and his correspondents frequently referred to the recordings as ‘séances’.177 Some described the exhibition of the recordings in London in September 1919 as a ‘Gramophone séance’.178 The term ‘séance’ was used to refer not only to the playing of voice recordings whose speakers were not present but also to recording sessions when the speakers were physically present. Taylor uses the term ‘séance’ in the latter sense when he asks Grierson to ‘hold séances with the Chinese clerks and interpreters of the Chinese Legation in London, or with Chinese students who are members of the London University’ in order to determine the tones of Chinese.179 In other cases it is unclear whether the speakers were physically present,180 as in Grierson’s description of Daniel Jones and himself having just had ‘a most interesting séance with a Siamese’ and a Shan speaker.181 In another letter, Taylor applies the term ‘séance’ to the gramophone recording of a spirit invocation by an elderly man who was one of the last speakers of a dialect on the verge of extinction, and whose voice was frail, almost like that of a ghost.182 Here, then, the term ‘séance’ is reinforced by the allusion to the spirit invocation and the death of a language. There is a melancholy and even elegiac strain in the LSI because of its engagement with languages on the point of extinction.183 Some dialects had died out before the Survey began, and here Grierson had to rely solely on previously published sources.184 Languages that are extinct or almost extinct litter the pages of the LSI.185 These include Rabha of the Bodo group, which is ‘fast dying out’, and the speakers of Vayu of the Tibeto-Burman family of languages, described by Hodgson in 1858 as ‘in exceedingly depressed condition, probably passing to gradual extinction’.186 Of the Munda group of languages in Central India, the Birhar dialect is noted as almost extinct, while the Kharia dialect has all the characteristics of a dying language.187 Some dialects of the Dravidian Gondi are also noted as being on the verge of extinction.188 Reflections such as these on dying dialects and languages add a melancholy strain to the Survey. One argument for making the recordings 158

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in the first place was to record dialects that were dying.189 Grierson stressed the urgency of this in a letter to the superintendent of the Burmese Census.190 In this context, then, the term ‘séance’ has an additional resonance. Moreover, the philological reconstruction of sounds and proto-sounds of the past was a way of trying to make the dead speak, or as one linguist has put it, linguistic history is ‘the darkest of the dark arts, the only means to conjure up the ghosts of vanished centuries’.191 The term ‘séance’, therefore, captured different aspects of the LSI’s recordings. It is also suggestive of the state of mind needed to enter the worlds of other languages. At one point Grierson described his own study of Burmese languages as ‘moving in the spirit in their midst’.192 His use of the term ‘séance’ also points to the prominence of spiritualism and séances at that time in Britain, where Grierson resided while the recordings were being done, especially after the First World War with mass bereavement.193 The culture of spiritualism and its séances was entangled with the new sound recording technology because, as the Scientific American wrote in December 1877, the phonograph created the possibility ‘of the voices of the dead being reheard’.194 In 1878 Edison envisaged the phonograph recording the ‘last words of dying persons’.195 The mediascape of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was associated with the conjuring of ghosts, and spiritual mediumship was compared to the use of telephones, the wireless and telegraph.196 Spiritualists and psychical researchers described séances as ‘mental telegraphy’, and Edison, who joined the Theosophical Society in 1877, explored ‘mental telegraphy’ with a spiritualist as late as 1910. The title of leading spiritualist publications like the Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph197 played on this conflation of telegraphy and séances. Radio was also seen as a medium of spirits, its discarnate voices fantasised as the transmission of voices from beyond.198 Occultism and technological media, then, merged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like séances, recordings were depicted as giving voices to ghostly presences and the Survey’s ‘séances’ participated in this climate. One famous series of séances highlighted the connection between linguistics and occultism. In 1900 Elise Müller became a celebrity with the publication of Des Indes à la planète Mars by Théodore Flournoy, professor of psychology at the University of Geneva. This was published in an abridged English version in 1900 as From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia. Flournoy documented Müller’s trances at séances in terms of two ‘cycles’; a ‘Martian cycle’ and a ‘Hindoo romance’ or ‘Oriental 159

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cycle’. The latter was connected with the spiritualist ‘idea of previous existences’ in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent; the former by virtue of her ‘mediumistic faculties’ depicted her entering into ‘relation with the people and affairs of the planet Mars’.199 The plot of the oriental romance is less relevant here than Müller’s (called Hélène Smith by Flournoy in his book) glossolalia, in which she produced samples and fragments of the script and language of ‘Martians’.200 While in a ‘Hindoo’ trance, she produced samples of what appeared to be Sanskrit. Flournoy asked Saussure to examine these specimens, and he attended the séances where Hélène recited a ‘Hindu’ chant. He concluded there were some Sanskrit fragments in her recitation, but the construction, order of words, and forms were ‘suspicious’.201 His view was that by imitation and ‘spinning out some real data’ which she might have encountered in a Sanskrit grammar or text and stored up in what Flournoy called her ‘subliminal memory’,202 she produced ‘Sanscritoid’ fragments.203 Hélène’s séances touched on some crucial issues in linguistics, like what constitutes a language – were her ‘Martian’ and ‘Hindoo’ fragments languages properly speaking, and if so, do they point to a universal language competence?204 Flournoy and others argued the processes underlying the creation of ‘Martian’ were the same as those underlying natural languages.205 For Jakobson, Hélène’s glossolalia showed the need for collaboration between linguistics and psychologists in structural analysis.206 Like the LSI, Flournoy’s text grappled with the problems of transcription, because of Hélène’s ‘special mannerism of strengthening certain syllables and slurring others’, and the ‘delicate shades of accentuation’ impossible to capture in writing. He rendered the ‘Martian’ passages with French translations underneath and explanatory notes,207 rather like the LSI rendered Indian passages. It is worth pointing out that 1 Corinthians 14, of which verses 10 and 11 are on the title page of each of the Survey’s volumes, refers to ‘speaking in tongues’ and therefore to glossolalia. This, too, resonates with the ‘séance’ culture of the LSI’s recordings. The LSI’s representation of its recordings as séances raised another key issue. The question of who was speaking in séances was complex. It was not clear whether the medium, the sitters or the spirit entity was responsible for what was being communicated. This question was also raised by the phenomena of automatic writing associated with spiritualism: in what sense was automatic writing ‘authorship’ as it was conventionally understood?208 In the case of Hélène, there were further complications to the question of agency. Flournoy’s postulation 160

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of multiple personalities in Hélène meant a unitary ‘I’ as the originator of the utterances could not be assumed, and the question of who was speaking was also raised by her glossolalia.209 The subsequent dispute between Flournoy and Hélène over copyright added another dimension to this issue of authorship.210 After examining the transcripts of the sessions, Mireille Cifali has argued it was in fact the male sitters who were ultimately responsible for Hélène’s productions of language. Martian was created by her for Flournoy to ‘mirror his conception of language’; it was ‘the other side of himself’. She invented it in collaboration with those questioning and prompting her to produce what they wanted to hear.211 As we shall see in Chapter 8, the question of authorship in the LSI is a complex one; it is not always clear who is authoring what in the LSI. Similarly, given the prescription of the prodigal son passage to Indian reciters, and the occasions when the passage was dictated to them, it is not clear to what extent Indians were speaking out of their own free will in the recordings. In a way, because Grierson’s own voice is not recorded, he hovers as a discarnate spirit over the recordings, dictating them and speaking through Indians who recited the passage he prescribes. In one sense Indians were mediums conveying Grierson’s voice in the séances of the LSI’s recordings. However, to some extent the LSI’s séance narrative is at odds with British séance culture at the time. The vocabulary of mediumship had sexual overtones, and diverse sexualities were expressed through the vehicle of possession. The linking of arms in the darkened séance room could lead to an erotically charged atmosphere.212 Moreover, there are instances in 19th-century British and American literature where sound devices and acoustic technology were associated with sexual eroticism and sexual deviance.213 There is an erotic subtext to some of Edison’s own writings on the phonograph, as when he refers to how dictation would be facilitated by ‘the application of the mouth of the speaker to the mouth-piece of the phonograph’.214 With the advent of the phonograph, the focus on mouths, lips, ears, tongues and horns sometimes created a symbolic libidinal economy floating free from its pragmatic functions. Occasionally the erotic charge is startling even if seemingly unconscious and comical, as when Frederick Gaisberg, the Gramophone Company employee who played a key role in its sound recordings in India in the first decade of the 20th century, wrote in his The Music Goes Round (1942) of how Indians aspired to buy ‘a large glittering horn to dazzle their neighbours’.215 The LSI’s recordings, on the other hand, are almost puritanically free of any sense of pleasure. 161

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In fact, Grierson campaigned against the circulation of erotic publications in India. In 1925, he approached senior colonial officials about the advertising of imitations and translations of the Kāmasūtra, forwarding an article from the Naval Kishore Press’s magazine Madhurī condemning the harmful effects of these works. In Grierson’s view, while the magazine had adopted a ‘regular Swaraj style’ by this stage, restricting these publications would have its support. His letter was sent on to the Indian government recommending the law regarding obscene publications be enforced in this case.216 He was likewise critical of the ‘lewdness’ of the erotic poem Badmās darpaṇ.217 One of the reasons he championed Tulsi Das as a great poet and cultural hero was he saved Hindustan from the ‘tantric obscenities’ and ‘sex-worship’ of Shaivism and its ‘wanton orgies’.218 The LSI’s séance narrative is conservative in other ways too. Radical egalitarianism characterised 19th- and early 20th-century British spiritualism.219 ‘Plebeian spiritualism’ was one of the cultures of British working class liberalism and socialism from the 1890s onwards, especially in the north of England and the Midlands, in contrast to the respectable middle class spiritualism of London.220 Some spiritualists critiqued British imperial oppression in Ireland and India under the mask of ‘prophetic’ observation, alluding to events such as the 1857 Indian rebellion as signs of millennial transformation.221 In contrast, the recording séances of the LSI were hierarchically ordered and intertwined with the colonial state and its machinery. Moreover, Grierson himself was very much a member of the established Church. As noted earlier, Grierson’s caginess about Indian music makes him a contrasting figure to Margaret and James Cousins. I also suggested that their heterodox musical radicalism may have been a step too far for Grierson because of the unorthodox religious beliefs with which it was entangled. It is worth noting that it was through séances that Margaret and James Cousins first connected with India and the Theosophical Society there,222 so in their case the link between séances, radicalism and religious heterodoxy is strong. The colonial conservatism of the LSI’s séance culture of recordings is also highlighted when we note how the field of sound recording technology was contested between Indians and the British, especially under the impact of the swadeshi movement. Indians like H. Bose, who launched his own brand of records in January 1906, began manufacturing blank cylinders in Calcutta in early 1907. He advertised these as ‘H. Bose’s Swadeshi Records’. For him his records ‘marked an important epoch in the industrial enterprise of India’.223 Some Indian 162

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artists who were recorded by Bose declined to record for the Gramophone Company or other foreign-owned companies because of their swadeshi cultural pride.224 Ballantyne and Burton have stressed racialised and gendered bodies were central to the way imperial power was imagined and exercised; the body was a ‘zone of management, containment, regulation, conformity and resistance as well as of contact’.225 However, the ethnological and disciplinary focus on Indian bodies as discrete entities in colonial India was necessarily in dialectical interplay with their shifting and elusive spectrality, and the intense focus on Indian embodiment raised questions about its mutually constitutive opposite, disembodiment. In some of Kipling’s short stories, India is a denizen of the halfdead and ghosts,226 and even inanimate objects like rickshaws have spectral afterlives.227 In A Passage to India, when Aziz first encounters Mrs Moore he thinks she is a ghost, and there are other allusions to ghosts in the novel – these are part of its preoccupation with India’s eeriness.228 In one of Kipling’s short stories, which both conjures up and dissipates ghosts, he paints a spectral geography of India in which ‘nearly every other Station owns a ghost’.229 More generally, in the Indian context beliefs in incarnation and disembodiment are central to the religious experience of many, while in Britain during this period ghosts were part of popular belief.230 Since Grierson was a committed Christian, he believed in the possibility of incarnation and the reality of the Holy Spirit. Grierson’s own voice was discarnate, relayed through Indian ‘mediums’ who recited the prodigal son passages he set for recordings. Moreover, while these Indian ‘mediums’ were possessed by Grierson’s voice, he was at the same time reliant on them to convey his voice. The representation of the recordings as séances is therefore an apt metaphor for the joint nature of the LSI’s authorship of knowledge in the field of Indian languages and the mutual reliance and endorsement between Indians and Grierson in the emergence of regional languages.231

Conclusion The LSI’s project of gramophone recordings was motivated by Grierson’s anxieties about British officials speaking Indian languages badly. As Richard Steadman-Jones has shown, this anxiety fuelled the work of early 19th-century linguistics like John Gilchrist (1759– 1841).232 Grierson’s fear, though, was a distinctive one of being caricatured, and his aim was to buttress a colonial auditory order. Colonial 163

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pronouncements in both senses of the word had to be correct to safeguard the authority of the Raj and protect it from Indian laughter. While it is important to highlight the distinctive conservatism of the LSI’s recordings and the culture of its séance, ultimately the narrative of mastery framing its recordings unravels in important ways. They are beset by surface noise and metallic sounds which interfere with their fidelity. The organisation of the recordings militates against the naturalness of human speech the LSI wants to capture. Its culture of the séance is also suggestive of an unravelling of the category of the human itself – humans merge into gramophones on the one hand and disembodied presences on the other. As discrete, embodied entities they are difficult to hold on to. Thus, however conservative the culture of the LSI’s recordings was, its narrative of séances engendered a discourse about the dissolution of bodies, their porosity as discrete material entities, and multiple realms of signification and agency which cannot always be easily controlled. This points to the Survey’s openness to the difficulties of delineating individual particulars, whether languages or human individuals, as discrete entities in India.233 Moreover, the recordings were meant to overcome the inadequacy of the written word, but they led back to the written words of the transcripts. In fact, the governing idiom in the LSI is not one of control and mastery but rather its opposite, and Grierson is acutely aware of the Survey’s inadequacies. The following chapters explore this in more detail.

Notes 1 For the reference to the LSI as a ‘Gramophone or Phonetic Survey’, see George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Pt. 1: Introductory, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927, pp. 195–6; European Manuscripts EUR 223/327, L.F. Taylor, ‘Ethnological and Linguistic Research in Burma and South-East Asia’, 10.2.1922, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London, hereafter EUR only. 2 Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, Ch. 2; Pieter A.M. Seuren, Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, p. 90. 3 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 195–6. 4 Linguistic Survey Files, S/1/1/16, Grierson to Dr John Sampson, 30.4.1921, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London, hereafter LS Files. 5 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 195–6. For a complete list of the recordings, see ibid., 421ff. 6 LS Files S/1/1/28, Grierson to Sir Gregory Foster, 12.2.1919. 7 EUR 223/52, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 30.9.1926.

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8 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Dardic or Piśācha Languages (including Kāshmīrī), Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919, p. 260, where Grierson is discussing vowels and epenthesis in Kashmiri. 9 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8: Indo-Aryan Family (North-Western Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Sindhī and Lahndā, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919, p. 22, see also p. 8, on the final short vowel being ‘hardly audible to a European’. 10 EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’, attached to Government of India Finance Department to Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, 9.9.1920. 11 EUR 223/327, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 20.8.1928. 12 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, pp. 144–5. 13 LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 26.3.1918. 14 Ibid., L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 31.5.1920. 15 Ibid., Grierson to Chief Secretary, Government of Burma, 9.10.1920. 16 LS Files S/1/1/16, Grierson to Dr Charles J. Ogden, Corresponding Secretary of American Oriental Society, 25.1.1921. 17 LS Files S/1/4/1, Grierson to Chief Secretary to Government of Assam, 9.10.1920. 18 EUR 223/327, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 27.10.1924. 19 EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’, attached to Government of India Finance Department to Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, 9.9.1920, and EUR 223/309, Grierson to Eleanor Hull, Secretary of Royal Asiatic Society, 11.1.1919. 20 EUR 223/279, Sir George Roos-Keppel to Grierson, 3.2.1917, but it appears lack of funds again hampered this. 21 LS Files S/1/1/20, Grierson to Provost, Trinity College, Dublin, 15.8.1919. 22 LS Files S/1/7/1, Grierson to Secretary to Chief Commissioner, Central Provinces, 28.10.1916, S/1/5/1 Grierson to Burn, 27.10. 1916, and S/1/6/2, Grierson to Barron, 6.11.1920. 23 EUR 223/327, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 9.4.1929. 24 Prabodh B. Pandit, ‘The Linguistic Survey of India: Perspectives on Language Use’, in Sirarpi Ohannessian, Charles A. Ferguson, and Edgar C. Polomé (eds), Language Surveys in Developing Nations, Virginia: Centre for Applied Linguistics, Pandit, 1975, p. 76. 25 For example, see Grierson’s correspondence with the chief commissioner of Panjab, EUR 223/280 from 1916 to 1931. His last letter of 8.9.1931 confirms that most provinces in India and all those in north India had made recordings, and adds that it would be a pity if Panjab with its ‘array of important and interesting dialects should be one of the few Indian provinces not so represented’. 26 LSI Files S/1/16/2, Grierson to Edward Gait, 12.6.1919. 27 EUR 223/274, Grierson to Sir Archdale Earle, 24.10.1916. 28 EUR 223/238, Grierson to Edward Gait, 2.5.1919. 29 EUR 223/317, Secretary, School of Oriental Studies, to Grierson, 24.10. 1922, and Grierson’s response, 7.11.1922. 30 EUR 223/280, Grierson to the Chief Secretary of the Government of Panjab, 1.11.1916, LS Files S/1/7/1, Grierson to Secretary to Chief

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31 32 33 34

35

36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Commissioner, Central Provinces, 28.10.1916 with extract from the Times, 26.10.1916, LS Files S/1/2/2, Grierson to Sir Edward Maclagan, 1.11.1916, and Grierson to Secretary to Government of India, Education Dept., 23.8.1921 & 7.3.1922; see also S/1/1/19 Gramophone company to Grierson, 13.9.1919, on an article in their journal The Voice on the LSI and its recordings. EUR 223/211, Grierson to L.S.S. O’Malley, 15.11.1921. EUR 223/280, Grierson to George Anderson, n.d. EUR 223/278, Grierson to Resident of Kashmir, 21.5.1917. EUR 223/249, Grierson to Secretary to the Government of India, 9.11. 1928, on Kashmir and Rajputana lacking funds, and Sir Frank Noyce, Secretary of the Government of India to Grierson, 13.8 & 16.10.1930, on Kashmir, Rajputana and Baluchistan. See also EUR 223/279, Chief Commissioner of North-West Frontier Province to Grierson, 27.7.1917 & 4.6.1919, and EUR 223/306, A.C. Woolner to Grierson, 1.1.1921. See Grierson’s correspondence with the British resident in Kashmir EUR 223/278 from 1917 to 1924. At first wartime stringency and then India’s war in Afghanistan were given as the reason for deferring the recordings. In 1922 Grierson contacted the resident, saying that the Darbar had issued orders for the recordings to be made, but in December 1924 the resident asserted that the Darbar had no funds for this project. For example, see EUR 223/211, Grierson to Sir Archdale Earle, 28.10.1916, and to the Secretary to the Government of Assam, 10.11.1926, and Grierson to P.O. Lyon, 28.10.1916, where he also refers to recordings of Burmese languages in Munich; EUR 223/249, Grierson to Sir Franck Noyce, Secretary to the Government of India, 3.9.1930. For recordings of Indian POWs in German camps, see Jürgen K. Mahrenholz, ‘Recordings of South Asian Languages and Music in the Lautarchiv of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’, in Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau, and Ravi Ahuja (eds), ‘When the War Began We Heard of Several Kings’: South Asian Prisoners in World War 1 Germany, New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2011, Ch. 6. EUR 223/306, Banarsi Das Jain, Oriental College Lahore to Grierson, 3.8.1921. EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’, attached to Government of India, Finance Department, to Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, 9.9.1920. EUR 223/238 Grierson to Sir Edward Gait, 2.5.1919. EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’, attached to Government of India, Finance Department, to Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, 9.9.1920. LS Files S/1/1/28, ‘Scheme for an Institute of Phonetics’, pp. 1, 6. EUR 223/243, Grierson to the High Commissioner of India, 1.9.1936, sending 25 portfolios of the gramophone recordings for safekeeping, 2 of which contained versions of this message. LS Files S/1/1/19, Gramophone Company to Grierson, 28.10.1916, and S/1/2/2, Grierson to Sir Edward Maclagan, 14.5.1917. EUR 223/228 Instructions to Two-Year Probationers selected in 1923, and Instructions for the Final Examination of One-Year men selected in 1926.

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45 EUR 223/228, Mair to Grierson, 4.7.1922, and Grierson to Mair, 5.7.1922. 46 David Lelyveld, ‘Transmitters and Culture: The Colonial Roots of Indian Broadcasting’, South Asia Research, 1990, 10 (1): 46–7; Joselyn Zivin, ‘The Imagined Reign of the Iron Lecturer: Village Broadcasting in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 1998, 32 (3): 717–38; Vibodh Parthasarathi, ‘Construing a “New Media” Market: Merchandising the Talking Machine c. 1900–1911’, in Bernard Bel, Jan Brouwer, Biswajit Das, Vibodh Parthasarathi, and Guy Poitevin (eds), Media and Mediation, New Delhi: Sage, 2005, p. 238. 47 EUR 223/227, Leather to Grierson, 17.10.1907, with memorandum attached, and Grierson to Leather, 22.10.1907. 48 Ibid., Grierson to D.B. Mair, 26.5.1908. 49 Ibid., ‘Course in Hindustani for Civil Service Probationers. Agenda for April Meeting’. 50 Ibid., James D. Anderson, ‘Phonograph in Use for Bengali’, presented at Hindustani Conference in London, 27.4.1912. 51 Thomas A. Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, The North American Review, May–June 1878, 126 (262): 533; ‘The Perfected Phonograph’, The North American Review, June 1988, 146 (379): 646, 647. 52 Brenton J. Malin, ‘Electrifying Speeches: Emotional Control and the Technological Aesthetic of the Voice in the Early 20th Century US’, Journal of Social History, 2011 (1): 9. 53 LS Files S/1/1/30, ‘Dr. Richard S. Rosenthal’s theory of how foreign languages should be studied. An explanation of his common-sense method of Practical Linguistry. The Language Phone. French, Spanish, German, Italian’, New York: The International College of Languages, p. 4. 54 EUR 223/228, W. Hoey, ‘Memorandum for Conference on the Subject of Hindustani-Teaching’, 26.4.1912. 55 EUR 223/227, Leather to Grierson, 17.10.1907, with memorandum attached. 56 Ibid. For Jabberjee see Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 150–1; Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930, London: Frank Cass, 2000, pp. 93–4. See also LS Files S/1/1/28 on the benefits of the proposed Phonetics Institute at UCL, including officials being able to communicate with ‘native peoples’ without appearing ludicrous. 57 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 195. 58 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of the Bengali and Assamese Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, p. 16 f.n. 59 For which see Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 60 Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 365. 61 EUR 223/332, Grierson to R.L. Turner, 12.7.1926; see Ch. 3, this volume.

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62 EUR 223/335, Grierson to Siddeshwar Varma, 14.10.1929. 63 LS Files S/1/5/1 Grierson to Chatterji, 24.4.1919, and S/1/7/1, Rai Bahadur Hiralal to Secretary to Chief Commissioner, Central Provinces, 4.12.1916. 64 LS Files S/1/1/30, see the booklets sent to Grierson by the International Correspondence Schools, London, and Richard Rosenthal’s Language Phone. 65 Ibid., ‘A List of Rees’ Modern Language Text Books’, London: The Modern Language Press Ltd. 66 EUR 223/227, see, for example, ‘Suggested Use of the Gramophone or Phonograph’. 67 Bayly, Empire and Information, pp. 74–5; Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire and National Culture: India 1770–1880, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 75. 68 LS Files S/1/16/1, Sir Charles Bayley, Secretary to Government of Bihar and Orissa, 8.8.1912; see also S/1/1/33, Grierson to Ross, 21.10.1920, and S/1/1/15, Grierson to Thomas P. Cummings, 31.7.1914, on gramophone recordings replacing munshis; S/1/1/19, Gramophone company to Grierson, 22.9.1919, on how the Gramophone ‘could occupy a very important position to substitute a teacher for pronunciation’, especially given how few ‘Orientals’ there were in London to act as teachers. 69 EUR 223/280, Grierson to Chief Secretary to Government of Panjab, 10.11.1926. 70 EUR 223/226, Grierson to S.K. Chatterji, 4.4.1928 & 14.7.1928. 71 LS Files S/1/7/1, F.S.A. Slocock to Grierson, 4.7.1918. 72 LSI Files S/1/6/2, Grierson to Barron, 6.11.1920, and S/1/1/30 Grierson to Baker, 26.4.1912, on the phonograph being used at Cambridge to teach Bengali. 73 EUR 223/317, Sir Denison Ross to Grierson, 29.9.1927. 74 Gerry Farrell, ‘The Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India’, in Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill (eds), The Place of Music, New York and London: The Guildford Press, 1998, p. 74. 75 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Essays in National Idealism, Madras: G. A. Natesan and Co., c. 1909, p. 212. 76 Ibid.; Amanda Weidman, ‘Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of the Real’, Public Culture, 2003, 15 (3): 471–3. Weidman also discusses the 1981 Tamil short story ‘Vidwan’ by Malan, which explores the replacement of the guru by a robot and the possibility of technology creating music which sounds more like tradition than tradition itself, p. 458. 77 Farrell, ‘Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India’, p. 59. 78 Vibodh Parthasarathi, ‘Construing a “New Media” Market’, p. 170. 79 LS Files S/1/7/1, Grierson to Chief Secretary to Chief Commissioner, Central Provinces, 28.10.1916; S/1/2/2, Grierson to Sir Edward Maclagan, 1.11.1916; S/1/5/1, Grierson to Burn, 27.10.1916, and S/1/1/19 Grierson to Gramophone Company, 21.5.1925. 80 EUR 223/277, Grierson to Philippe Stern, Institut de Phonétique, Université de Paris, 23.7.1929, and EUR 223/303, Grierson to A.A. Bake, 17.3.1931. 81 EUR 223/227, J.D. Anderson, ‘Note on the use of the phonograph in the teaching of Bengali’, attached to files on the ‘Hindustani Conference’

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82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93

94

95

96 97 98 99 100

held on 27 April 1912, where the question of using phonograph recordings to teach Indian languages to Indian civil service candidates was discussed. For this conference see ibid., David Mair to Grierson, 25.3.1912, and for a statement of the conclusions arrived at during the conference, see Mair to Grierson, 8.5.1912. EUR 223/275, Sir John Ramsay to Grierson, 16.3.1917. LS Files S/1/6/2, Grierson to multiple institutions, 8.11.1920 & 10.12.1921. LS Files S/1/13/1, Henderson, Government Museum, Madras, 7.3.1918 & 25.4.1918; S/1/1/30, Grierson to Mr Baker, International Correspondence Schools Ltd. London, 28.4.1912 & 12.6.1912; for issues of which voices to record, and how representative they might be, see EUR 223/275, Sir John Ramsay to Grierson, 16.3.1917, and Grierson to Sir John Ramsay, 23.4.1917. EUR 223/335, Siddheshwar Varma to Grierson, 13.9.1928. Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, p. 527. Ibid., p. 530. Farrell, ‘Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India’, p. 57. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, transl. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. EUR 223/317, Browne to Grierson, n.d., on using Linguaphone methods for teaching Persian, Grierson to Browne, 16.3.1927, on his view that the methods used by the International Correspondence School of Kingsway were better. Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, p. 527. Santosh K. De, Gramophone in India, Calcutta: Uttisthata Press, 1990, p. 8. Michael S. Kinnear, The Gramophone Company’s First Indian Recordings 1899–1908, London: Sangam Books, 1994, pp. 32–3; for the Sealdah factory see Michael S. Kinnear, The Gramophone Company’s Indian Recordings 1908 to 1910, Victoria, Australia: Bajakhana, 2000, pp. 11–23. By the time the company had changed its name to the Gramophone Company Ltd in November 1907 its trademark was His Master’s Voice, and the label name for all the company’s discs was changed to His Master’s Voice in 1915; see Kinnear, First Indian Recordings 1899–1908, pp. 7, 31. For references to the sounds of some of these smaller machines of everyday technology, see David Arnold, Everyday Technology Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013, pp. 50, 51, 56–60, 62, 82, 124, 134, 136, 141–2. Bob van der Linden, Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism and Cross-Cultural Communication, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 7–11. Weidman, ‘Guru and Gramophone’, p. 461. Ibid., citing Fox-Strangways, pp. 461–2. Paul Carter, ‘Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing and Auditory Space’, in Veit Erlmann (ed.), Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004, p. 60. For example, one of Grierson’s correspondents in Dublin praised the clarity and ‘slowness’ of the HMV’s recordings of Tagore; see EUR 223/302,

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101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

119 120 121 122 123

124

Lt. Col. E.G. Hart, Professor of Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Trinity College, Dublin to Grierson, 2.5.1929. Farrell, ‘Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India’, pp. 79, 66; Weidman, ‘Guru and Gramophone’, p. 464; Peter Manuel, ‘Popular Music in India: 1901–86’, Popular Music, 1988, 7: 157, 172, 175. For the company’s recordings of Indian material from 1899 onwards, see Kinnear, First Indian Recordings 1899–1908. EUR 223/306, A.C. Woolner, Oriental College Lahore, to Grierson, 19.5.1921. LS Files S/1/6/2, Grierson to multiple institutions, 8.11.1920; S/1/5/1, Grierson to Burn, 27.10.1916. EUR 223/303, Grierson to A.A. Bake, 4.7.1934, enclosing Grierson’s letter to W.I. Purser, 3.7.1934. LS Files S/1/2/2, Grierson to Sir Edward Maclagan, 1.11.1916; see also S/1/16/1, Grierson to Sir Charles Bayley, 12.9.1912. LS Files S/1/1/19, Grierson to Gramophone Company, 1.11.1916. EUR 223/275, Grierson to Sir John Ramsay, 23.4.1917. EUR 223/317, Sir Denison Ross to Grierson, 18.1.1923, who refers to these songs as not being of ‘the highest class’. Report in The Etude Magazine, November 1887, on Edison’s phonograph. Ibid. Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, pp. 642–3. LS Files S/1/6/2, Grierson to multiple institutions, 8.11.1920. Van der Linden, Music and Empire, pp. 16–19, Ch. 3. See my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, Ch. 6. Van der Linden, Music and Empire, p. 1. Gitelman, Scripts, p. 3; Malin, ‘Electrifying Speeches’, p. 9. EUR 223/274, Grierson to A.W. Botham, 11.4.1917; EUR 223/243, Grierson to Secretary to Indian High Commissioner, 16.9.1936, and EUR 223/309, Grierson to Secretary, Royal Asiatic Society, 6.8.1919. See also LS Files S/1/7/1, Grierson to F.S.A. Slocock 3.1.1917; S/1/9/16, Grierson to Enthoven, 15.9.1920, and S/1/13/1, Grierson to Secretary to Government of Madras, Home (Education) Dept., 10.10.1922. EUR 223/243, Grierson to Secretary, Indian High Commission, 28.10.1931, with Assam Secretariat’s report of 1.1.1930 and Cunningham’s note of 28.10.1930 attached. LS Files S/1/1/16, Grierson to Daniel Jones, 18.5.1922. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 195. EUR 223/285, Government Museum Madras to Grierson, 17.1.1935. EUR 223/243, Grierson to the Indian High Commissioner, 1.3.1935, Indian High Commissioner to Grierson, 6.6.1936, attaching a copy of a letter from the Government of India, 7.5.1936, with attached letters from the governments of Madras, Bombay, Bengal, Burma, Central Provinces, Assam, Bihar and Orissa, and Delhi. See also Grierson to High Commissioner, 14.7.1936. Kinnear, First Indian Recordings 1899–1908, p. 23; De, Gramophone in India, p. 14; Joshi, ‘A Concise History of the Phonograph Industry in India’, p. 148.

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125 EUR 223/243, Superintendent Government Museum, Madras to Indian High Commissioner, 13.6.1935. 126 EUR 223/285, F.H. Graveley, Government Museum Madras, to Grierson 27.5.1935 & 18.12.1935, Gramophone Company Calcutta to Graveley, 15.7.1935. 127 Kittler, Gramophone, p. 42; Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 1985, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 232. 128 Kittler, Gramophone, p. 23. 129 Kittler, Discourse Networks, pp. 219, 288, 218, 183. 130 De, Gramophone in India, p. 8. 131 Kittler, Gramophone, pp. 45–6. 132 Frederico Luisetti, ‘A Vitalist Art: Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s sintesi radiofoniche’, in G. Buelens, Harald Hendrix, and Monica Jansen (eds), The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists and Legacies, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012, Ch. 15. 133 EUR 223/285, Grierson to F.H. Graveley, Government Museum Madras, 11.6.1935. 134 LS Files S/1/9/16, Grierson to Enthoven, 1.11.1916. 135 LS Files S/1/1/33, Grierson to Denison Ross, 21.10.1920. 136 EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’, pp. 5–6. 137 LS Files S/1/1/33, Grierson to Denison Ross, 21.10.1920. 138 EUR 223/275, Sir John Ramsay to Grierson, 16.3.1917. Grierson felt that the best results were obtained when the passage was memorised first and then recited directly into the machine; see EUR 223/306, Grierson to A.C. Woolner, 3.5.1921, and EUR 223/276, Grierson to Col. Luard, 24.4.1917. 139 LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 19.12.1917. 140 EUR 223/276, Grierson to Colonel Luard, 24.4.1917; see also EUR 223/275, Grierson to Sir John Ramsay, 23.4.1917. 141 LS Files S/1/3/2, Grierson to Gramophone company Ltd., 25.3.1920. 142 EUR 223/306, A.C. Woolner to Grierson, 1.1.1921, S/1/13/1, Diwan Bahadur R. Ramachandra Rao Avargal, Home (Education) Dept., Secretary to Government of Madras, to Grierson, 12.6.1919, and S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 9.7.1919. 143 LS Files S/1/1/9, Grierson to Gramophone Company, 24.6.1921; EUR 223/249, Grierson to Secretary to Government of India, 2.5.1921. 144 Carter, ‘Ambiguous Traces’, pp. 55–6. 145 For the alternative of active co-creation, see Michael Gallagher and Jonathan Prior, ‘Sonic Geographies: Exploring Phonographic Methods’, Progress in Human Geography, 2014, 38 (2), p. 274. 146 Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, p. 643. 147 EUR 223/227 ‘Suggested Use of the Gramophone or Phonograph’ and ‘Phonograph in Use for Bengali’; both documents use the term ‘talking-machine’. 148 Gitelman, Scripts, p. 84. 149 EUR 223/317, Secretary, School of Oriental Studies, to Grierson, 24.10.1922. 150 LS Files S/1/9/16, Grierson to Enthoven, 15.9.1920. 151 De, Gramophone in India, p. 3. 152 Farrell, ‘Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India’, p. 79.

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153 EUR 223/317, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 15.7.2016. De, Gramophone in India, p. 3. 154 EUR 223/297, Col. D.C. Phillott to Grierson, 12.5.1921. 155 Gitelman, Scripts, p. 225. 156 Ibid., p. 10. 157 Jay Clayton, ‘The Voice in the Machine. Hazlitt, Hardy, James’, in Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds), Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, New York and London: Routledge, 1997, p. 211. 158 Ibid., p. 218. 159 Gitelman, Scripts, p. 145. 160 Ibid., p. 22. 161 EUR 223/227, ‘Suggested Use of the Gramophone or Phonograph’. 162 EUR 223/317, Browne to Grierson, n.d. 163 Arnold, Everyday Technology, p. 125; Gitelman, Scripts, p. 84. 164 For example, see EUR 223/227, ‘Suggested Use of the Gramophone or Phonograph’ and ‘Phonograph in Use for Bengali’. Both documents use the term ‘teaching-machine’. 165 EUR 223/327, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 20.8.1928. 166 Kittler, Gramophone, pp. 74, 75, 28. 167 Ibid., pp. 30–3, 188, 16, 251–2. 168 Ibid., pp. 33, 38–42. 169 Kittler, Discourse Networks, pp. 251–2. 170 Ibid., pp. 283–4. 171 Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, p. 529. 172 Weidman, ‘Guru and Gramophone’, p. 466. 173 EUR 223/303, Manager Linguaphone Institute, to Grierson, 25.8.1934. 174 EUR 223/297, D.C. Phillott to Grierson, 12.5.1921. 175 EUR 223/243, Grierson to High Commissioner of India, 20.6.1923. 176 LS Files S/1/16/1, Grierson to Macpherson, 5.3.1915. 177 LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 30.5.1919; Taylor to Grierson, 19.7.1919; S/1/7/1, Grierson to F.S.A. Slocock, 30.5.1919, and S/1/16/1, Grierson to Hubback, Government of Bihar and Orissa, 26.9.1919. 178 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 17.7.1919. 179 Ibid., L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 7.7.1919. 180 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 17.7.1919. 181 Ibid., Grierson to Taylor, 14.6.1918. 182 Ibid., Taylor to Grierson, 17.7.1919. 183 Discussed in more detail in Ch. 6. 184 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 77. 185 For examples, see Ibid., pp. 64, 65, 89, 394; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bodo, Nāgā, and Kachin Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, p. 130. 186 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 102; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 1: General Introduction, Specimens of the Tibetan Dialects, the Himalayan Dialects, and the North Assam Group, Calcutta: Superintendent of the Government Press, 1909, p. 382.

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187 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 4: Muṇḍā and Dravidian Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906, pp. 102, 190, 192; see also Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 34. 188 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, pp. 493, 495, 525. 189 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 20.6.1918 & 25.5.1920. 190 LS Files S/1/14/12, Grierson to Morgan Webb, Superintendent of Census Operations Burma, 20.5.1912. 191 Campbell, Historical Linguistics, citing Cola Minis, p. 122. 192 LS Files S/1/14/12, Grierson to Morgan Webb, Superintendent of Census Operations Burma, 27.5.1912. 193 Jenny Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 13–14, 17–19. 194 Cited by Gitelman, Scripts, p. 21. 195 Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, pp. 533–4. 196 Hazelgrove, Spiritualism, p. 21. 197 Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebians 1850– 1910, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, p. 126. 198 Weidman, ‘Guru and Gramophone’, pp. 472–3 f.n. 199 Théodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 14. 200 For an example, see ibid., fig. 1, p. 40. 201 Ibid., pp. 194–7; for his comments see also 315–17, 319–21. 202 Ibid., pp. 192–3. 203 Ibid., pp. 202, 197. 204 Ibid., p. xxxvii. 205 Ibid., p. xxxvi. 206 Ibid. 207 Ibid., pp. 135–6. 208 For some discussions of automatic writing, see Gitelman, Scripts, p. 159; Kittler, Discourse Networks, pp. 226–8, 329–31. 209 Flournoy, Mars to India, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii. 210 Ibid., p. xxxix. 211 Ibid., pp. 269–87. 212 Owen, Darkened Room, pp. 39, 214–16, 218–19, 226–7. 213 Clayton, ‘The Voice in the Machine’; see also Kittler, Gramophone, p. 56. 214 Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, pp. 532–3. 215 Weidman, ‘Guru and Gramophone’, p. 459. 216 EUR 223/258, Grierson to Sir Arthur Hirtzel, 27.8.1925, and Hirtzel’s Response, 2.9.1925. 217 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bihārī and Oṛiyā Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, p. 273. 218 George A. Grierson, The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan, Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1889, pp. xx, 43; ‘Tulasī Dāsa, Poet and Religious Reformer’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, July 1903: 459.

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219 Hazelgrove, Spiritualism, pp. 19–21. 220 Owen, Darkened Room, pp. 20–2; for an examination of plebeian spiritualism, see Barrow, Independent Spirits, Ch. 2 and Ch. 5; for respectable spiritualism in London, see ibid., pp. 124–7. 221 Ibid., pp. 32–6. 222 Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004, p. 349. 223 Kinnear, First Indian Recordings 1899–1908, p. 43. 224 Ibid., p. 42, Kinnear, Indian Recordings 1908 to 1910, pp. 7–8, 15. 225 Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 6, 407. 226 For example, see his short story, ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Juke’, in Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 2009, pp. 97–114. 227 See ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’ in ibid., pp. 71–89. 228 Edward M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, London: Penguin Classics, 1989, p. 137. 229 See Kipling’s ‘My Own True Ghost Story’, in Complete Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling, e-book, e-artnow, 2015. 230 Hazelgrove, Spiritualism, p. 28. 231 For which, see Ch. 8 (this volume), and Ch. 1 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. 232 Richard Steadman-Jones, Colonialism and Grammatical Representation: John Gilchrist and the Analysis of the ‘Hindustani’ Language in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007, p. 13. 233 See Ch. 8 here and Ch. 3 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India.

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6 ARCHIVAL SELF-REFLEXIVITY

This chapter considers the relationships between the Survey, its archive and its knowledge production. The LSI combined a ‘re-archivization’ of previously published works on Indian languages with district-level generation of linguistic data. Its knowledge about India therefore had a composite character. Many figures at the time described the Survey as ‘monumental’. The term captures the Survey well, but it is at odds with the Survey’s archival self-reflexivity, which reflects its hybrid knowledge economy and the distinctive style of its knowledge production.

A bibliographical exercise In many ways, the LSI was a bibliographical exercise. Volume 1 part 1 begins with a section entitled ‘Previous Enquiries into Indian Languages’, which outlines the European work in print accumulated over the previous three centuries on Indian languages.1 In 1890 Grierson envisaged the Survey as a catalogue of past and present works on Indian languages.2 In the Survey’s volumes, each section on individual languages and dialects is followed by a bibliography (called ‘List of Authorities’) of published works. Grierson stressed he compiled these with ‘great care’.3 These bibliographies continued to be consulted long after the LSI’s completion, even for languages which technically did not fall under the Survey, like Tamil and Telugu.4 At the same time, Grierson points to how misconceptions crept into and were perpetuated in this previous body of work: ‘Each writer copied his predecessor, according to his capacity, corrected a few mistakes or not, introduced a few more or not, and proclaimed a new gospel which was not new’.5 He notes, though, that much of this material will ‘be found scattered through the different volumes of the Survey, or in other writings of mine’, adding that these ‘various statements are here combined 175

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into one general view’ in volume 1, part 1.6 Thus, the Survey scatters, re-forms, partially corrects and reconstitutes the vast body of previous publications on Indian languages. It is also a survey of previous works on Indian languages and dialects as well as a philological and linguistic exercise of classification. It creates its own archival hinterland, which it then re-archives, bringing together all these works for the first time within its volumes. Grierson also engages with bibliography as a process. In 1886, he suggested to Richard C. Temple that the Indian Antiquary exchange information with other journals in Europe to compile notices of the ‘Progress of European Scholarship’. These notices became a permanent feature of the Indian Antiquary.7 Grierson also received the Classical and Oriental Language and Literature List from the Library Association, and used its catalogues to access articles on languages and dialects.8 He proposed civil servants should report on the contents of district libraries as part of their departmental examinations.9 For him, then, colonial India was a space for bibliographical networking and exchange as well as a site for data generation. Babu Gauri Kant Roy, Grierson’s assistant in India, sent him books for the LSI from India.10 Grierson also approached the colonial authorities for books.11 In the early 1900s officials in Assam sent him a range of publications, including dictionaries, glossaries, a collection of proverbs, translations of biblical texts, school readers and grammars.12 In 1901 Grierson sent the deputy commissioner in Shillong a list of Khassi books he wanted, which were sent to him in March 1902.13 For Grierson, then, the colonial state was a mechanism not just to transmit specimens and lists for the LSI to collate and revise but also to construct a repository of publications in his own library in Camberley essential for the Survey’s work. The term ‘Survey’, therefore, should extend to the flow of books and publications between India and Britain that played a key role in its production of knowledge.

A composite mode of knowledge production The LSI’s bibliographical and book gathering exercises point to how it redeployed pre-existing published sources and combined these with its generation and collection of fresh linguistic data at the district level in the subcontinent. Its knowledge creation therefore had a composite character. Many of its grammatical sketches were not prepared ab initio by Grierson but were based upon previously published sources.14 Grierson is open about his need to borrow from such sources ‘when 176

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my own materials were wanting’.15 An example of this is the ‘combined grammatical sketch’ of Miri and Dafla, which weaves together three published grammars.16 An instructive example of the LSI’s reworking of published sources is the grammatical sketch of Ormuri. This is based on Ghulam Muhammad Khan’s Qawā‘id-ĕ Bargistā, which was written partly in Urdu and in Pashto, at the request of Major Macaulay, the political agent with the force that invaded Waziristan in 1881. As it was printed in the Persian script, information on the vocalisation of Ormuri words was derived from a list in the Roman script submitted by another colonial official, and supplemented by information from local officials, in turn mediated and managed by the British resident in Waziristan.17 Grierson also contacted the deputy commissioner and other officials to clarify points in Khan’s grammar.18 Here, then, the grammatical sketch blends together diverse sources of information and texts in different languages and scripts, mediated by multiple figures (Khan and at least three other colonial officials) and then redrafted and translated into English by Grierson, who ‘included in it all that Ghulam Muhammad Khan has said, and .  .  . re-arranged the whole to suit English grammatical methods’, recasting it ‘according to the ideas of European grammar’.19 As such, it is indicative of how the Survey assembles and generates knowledge about India’s languages. Some of the Survey’s specimens, rather than being ‘selected on the spot’ as Grierson described,20 reproduce passages from pre-existing printed works. For example, versions of the prodigal son are sometimes taken from published translations of the Bible. For Khas-Kura or Naipaili, Grierson reproduces four specimens: a 1902 British and Foreign Bible Society translation of the prodigal son, another version of the prodigal son prepared for Grierson in Nepal, a short extract from the Bhagavad Bhakti Vilāsīnī, and the introduction to the Khas-Kura version of the Baitāl Pachīsī.21 Specimens from published texts are used for Ahom,22 the Khami dialect of Tibetan,23 Kumauni,24 Thali,25 Marathi,26 Lahnda [Siraiki],27 Urdu,28 the Dakhini dialect29 and Rajasthani dialects. For the latter, Grierson draws upon G. Macalister’s Specimens of the Dialects Spoken in the State of Jeypore (Allahabad, 1898).30 For its samples of Indian languages and dialects, then, the Survey weaves together specimens generated ‘on the spot’ with published sources and it brings together the ground-level creation of data with published information. Grierson also circulated a standard list of words and sentences, based on George Campbell’s list for the Bengal Asiatic Society in 177

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1866. He supplied blank forms for officers to fill up for this list,31 but he compiled some lists either fully or partially from dictionaries and other published sources. For example, the list for a Sindhi dialect is based on the Reverend G. Shirt, Udharam Thavurdas and S.F. Mirza’s A Sindhi-English Dictionary (Karachi, 1879).32 Sometimes Grierson inserts vocabulary from published glossaries into the LSI’s list of words in parentheses, thereby highlighting the way he drew on multiple sources for his data.33 The Survey also cites extensively from official reports and documents, such as the Gazetteers. In the 1880s Grierson was put on the ‘list of Savants to whom works of Archaeological or linguistic interest are supplied under the orders of the Government of India’.34 He was asked to contribute chapters entitled ‘Languages’ and ‘Vernacular Literatures’ for the Imperial Gazetteer, and his personal library contained some 270 volumes of the Gazetteers.35 In 1896 the Government of Bombay sent Grierson 24 volumes of its Gazetteers; despite repeated requests, he did not return these until 1926, because they were ‘in continual use as works of reference and will be so employed till the Survey is concluded’.36 It was only in the late 1920s after all the volumes were published that he asked the India Office to stop supplying him with Gazetteers.37 It is no surprise, then, that there are many references to and citations from the Gazetteers in the LSI’s volumes.38 We have seen how the LSI carved out a separate space for itself from the Census while remaining closely connected to it. There were differences between how the Census and the LSI approached languages, but the Survey’s engagement with the Census is clear from its references to Census reports in the ‘List of Authorities’. Its volumes cite from the 1891 and 1911 Census reports, sometimes extensively.39 The ‘Index of Language Names’, which forms appendix 3 of volume 1, part 1, includes names of languages collected from the Census reports from 1891 to 1921. Grierson acknowledges Sedgwick’s Glossary of Obscure Language Names, which formed an appendix to the 1921 Bombay Census report, in helping him to clear up ‘doubtful’ points.40 A significant part of Indian officials’ correspondence with Grierson in Camberley consisted of them sending their reports and tables to Grierson, some of them at proof stage, with Grierson in return sending notes and rough working lists of the languages in their provinces.41 Both the Gazetteers and the Census reports were sourced by him for broader cultural information as well – for example, about folklore.42 Grierson refers to or cites from other official reports, such as settlement reports,43 statistical accounts,44 administration manuals45 and 178

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quasi-official ethnological works, like Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal.46 In some cases, Grierson extracts grammatical and linguistic information from otherwise obscure official documents, like J.R. Reid’s Report on the Settlement Operations in the District of Azamgarh (Allahabad, 1881), commenting, ‘It is a pity that Mr. Reid’s grammar should be buried in a comparatively inaccessible settlement report’.47 Thus Grierson’s bibliographical exercise includes extracting information from a range of official documents, which is then represented within the LSI’s framework; it is just as much an uncovering exercise as an exercise in generating new data.

The Survey as monumental The LSI’s volumes, then, are a tapestry of references to and citations from the Census publications, Gazetteers, official reports, published grammars and studies of Indian languages. The Survey was also a massive bibliographical and re-archiving exercise. All this is interwoven with its generation and collection of district-level data. Thus, it combines multiple bases of knowledge generation and different streams of information gathering. It is partly because of the Survey’s archival vastness that many learned societies used the term ‘monumental’ to describe it. When the Bangiya Sahitya elected Grierson as an honorary member in 1929, it described the LSI as a ‘monument of scholarship’.48 In 1923 the Bombay Branch of the RAS awarded Grierson the Campbell Memorial Medal for his ‘monumental’ LSI.49 Sir I. Gollancz referred to its ‘monumental character’ when inviting Grierson to give a lecture on the Survey at the British Academy.50 The Asiatic Society of Bengal awarded the Sir William Jones medal to Grierson for the ‘monumental’ Survey in February 1929. In a letter to the resident in Kashmir, Sir Aurel Stein said of the LSI that it ‘will for ever remain one of the greatest monuments of scientific enterprise which stand to the credit of British rule in India’.51 He later congratulated Grierson on his Order of Merit, referring to how he rejoiced that ‘the powers that be whether at Whitehall or Simla or at both have shown themselves possessed of the imagination which so great an event calls for’.52 When Grierson was awarded the Order of Merit in 1928 Sir Denison Ross sent his congratulations from the Academic Board of the School of Oriental Studies as it was then, praising his ‘services to the Empire’ and his completion of the ‘monumental’ Survey.53 A special issue of its Bulletin was presented to Grierson on his 85th birthday.54 The RAS held a lunch to commemorate the Survey’s completion in May 1928,55 179

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while the Organising Committee of the 17th International Congress of Orientalists at the Indian Institute at Oxford passed a resolution in September 1928 congratulating Grierson on completing his ‘monumental’ Survey.56 T.W. Thompson of the Gipsy Lore Society also congratulated him on the ‘monumental’ Survey, as did others writing to him in their individual capacities.57 This term continued to be used to describe the LSI long after it was completed.58 The range of bodies using the term ‘monumental’ for the LSI testifies to how deeply it was institutionalised in Britain when it was completed. Grierson was awarded honorary degrees at both Oxford and Cambridge.59 The East India Association’s secretary congratulated Grierson and invited him to deliver a public lecture on the Survey in 1928.60 This institutionalisation was echoed abroad; in recognition of the LSI, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters elected Grierson as a member in April 1920.61 Distinguished Indians and learned societies in India commemorated the Survey, also using the term ‘monumental’, as did K.V. Subhaiya, the author of A Primer of Dravidian Phonology (1909), and L.V. Ramaswami Aiyar, another distinguished Dravidian linguist.62 Professor Bani Kanta Kakati of Cotton College in Assam described it as a ‘monumental’ achievement ‘which illumins [sic] with a pillar of fire the entire landscape of Indian linguistics’.63 Babu Nagendranath Vasu, the compiler of the Hindī viśvakoṣa (1916–31) and the Banglā viśvakoṣa (1866–1911), also used this term to describe it, while the president of the North Bengal Literary Conference, Devaprasad Sarbadhikary, sent his congratulations too.64 Later the Linguistic Society of India, established in Lahore in 1928 by Indian-origin linguists, honoured Grierson with a commemoration volume.65 There was thus a global aspect to the LSI’s monumentalisation, reflecting its intercontinental resonance.66 The monumental institutionalisation of the LSI considerably enhanced the prestige of Grierson’s name. In Chapter 8, I discuss the significance of Grierson’s name in more detail. Here we can note that the Survey meant a number of learned societies, like the Gipsy Folklore Society, were keen to have him as an honorary member.67 Grierson was an important figure on the Council of SOS, with Sir Denison Ross at one point saying that Grierson’s mere presence at a meeting with the University Grants Committee would ‘strengthen our case’.68 He was also an influential member of the RAS’s Council.69 He was honorary secretary of the RAS for a while; for Lord Reay, his name conferred ‘on the office of Hon. Sec. a distinction which is a great asset to the society’.70 He was vice-president from 1920 to 1924, and was offered 180

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the post of director for 1924–25 but declined because his residence at Camberley made this impractical.71 It was the prestige of his name which led to the invitation to be on the Pali Text Society’s committee even though he had not studied Buddhism.72 After he resigned because of old age, his advice continued to be sought by the secretary on a range of issues.73 For Aurel Stein, Grierson’s name opened up all sorts of career possibilities, or as he put it, ‘it seems to me as if I were your train-bearer accorded an entry into a noble assembly which otherwise might be closed to me’.74 In effect, Grierson was monumentalised alongside the LSI, sometimes literally. As we have seen, in 1932 the Asiatic Society of Bengal commissioned his bust for its gallery of distinguished members, unveiling it at its general meeting in February 1933. The bust commemorated Grierson as the ‘Father of Indian Linguistics of our times’ and the ‘doyen of Indian philology’.75 The National Portrait Gallery included his photograph in their ‘National Record of Distinguished Persons’.76 Grierson became a minor celebrity. The LSI’s completion was reported in the British press, in The Observer,77 the Times and its various supplements,78 the Spectator79 and other papers.80 Journalists took his photograph for newspapers, including the Woman’s Magazine.81 He received letters from autograph hunters and others who wanted his photograph to add to their collection of celebrities’ photos.82 He also received unsolicited begging letters from individuals who had seen his photograph in the press.83

The archive and Grierson’s selfhood The term ‘monumental’ therefore evokes the LSI’s status as an establishment event, which brought together hallowed names like Oxford, Cambridge, the RAS, SOS, Whitehall and Shimla, intersecting at the time of its completion. The monumental nature of the LSI is also evident in the sheer size and extent of its volumes. Readers at the time described it as ‘colossal’ and ‘gigantic’.84 The volumes sit impressively on the open bookshelves of libraries that testify to British imperial expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the Asia and Africa Reading Room of the British Library and the SOAS library in London. Mbembe has called attention to how an archive encompasses the building in which documents are stored; without this architectural aspect, an archive loses its status.85 Turner invoked the LSI by using the image of a building: ‘through the wonderful mass of your work you are constantly influencing and directing the work of all of us who 181

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are ourselves trying here and there to add a brick to the vast edifice of your building’.86 As material objects, the LSI’s volumes suggest a definitive solidity, and their location in the prestigious buildings of major libraries signals their monumental stature. Like the LSI, the size of Grierson’s personal library was also vast. It had 600 feet of bookshelves and contained about 5,000–6,000 volumes.87 At one point, SOS envisaged forming a ‘Sir George Grierson Collection’ of his books in its library, reflecting a readiness to translate Grierson’s name into institutionalised library spaces.88 Grierson’s honorarium upon finishing the Survey, increased by the Government of India from £500 to £2,000,89 reflects this sense of definitive completeness. In 1898 the India Office proposed to pay the honorarium by instalments as the Survey’s individual volumes appeared. Grierson refused, responding ‘it is one whole, and can only be completed at one time’.90 Similarly, in the early 1930s when Grierson came to selling his own library at Camberley, he insisted to prospective buyers that it could be sold only ‘as a whole, en bloc’, not ‘piecemeal’.91 Thus Grierson sometimes evoked both the LSI and his personal library in terms of wholeness. Grierson had in effect merged with the LSI. As he put it after the RAS lunch in May 1928 celebrating its completion, ‘we [his wife and himself] had both been so long busy on the Survey, that familiarity had made it almost a commonplace to us’.92 When Grierson was preparing his correspondence to hand over to the India Office, one of his notes reads, ‘It has often been difficult to decide whether a letter was private or solely dealing with L.S.I. All definitely private communications have been withdrawn, but many of the letters within are of very doubtful classification’.93 Here he points to the porous boundaries between his private self and the public LSI and its archives. Some of Grierson’s interlocutors similarly sank their identities into archives; for some time, Sir Aurel Stein’s address was simply ‘the Stein Collection, British Museum’. In this instance, his archive was his home.94 In some ways, given the complexity of home for Grierson, it was the LSI and its archive which were his home.

The printing of the LSI However, the solidity of the LSI’s volumes as impressive material objects is in some ways an optical illusion. This solidity is belied by the complexity and messiness of their printing. Grierson stressed to the printers, ‘it is absolutely necessary that every word should be perfectly correct’,95 and that it should be ‘an example of accurate and 182

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comely printing’ which would be of credit to the Government Press, especially given its global readership.96 But as early as 1901 Grierson complained the Survey was delayed because of problems with ‘the mechanical execution of the work’ caused by the Government Press using a mixture of founts.97 Grierson revised the proofs for the Dravidian language volume in June 1903 but two years later noted how the setting up of type for this remained poor. A second set of proofs was sent to V. Venkayya, the government epigraphist in Ootacamund, who detected many further mistakes. In January 1906 Grierson was making corrections in the second proofs for this volume, and asked for a further set of proofs. In April 1906, he sent the printers the press order for the volume but had to substitute a new set of pages for one section.98 Grierson encountered similar problems with the proofs for sections in other volumes; in one case, he had to make 100 corrections on one page alone.99 Sometimes new proofs contained errors that the preceding proofs did not have.100 In 1916 Grierson wrote to the secretary to the Government of India, pointing out that he had sent the manuscript of part 1 and part 4 of volume 9 to the press in 1901, and it took them six years to get it into type. Grierson was able to give the press order only in May 1915 for these volumes.101 These problems persisted. In the case of one volume, 21 corrections were needed for the short Greek passage in the preliminary matter alone.102 In September 1925, as the LSI was coming to an end, Grierson returned the proofs of volume 1, part 1 to the superintendent of Government Printing in Calcutta, appending a note on the many mistakes with tone marks, diacritics, mixture of founts, mistakes in Greek letters, broken and dropped letters, and uneven spacing of words and lines. By June 1927 the manuscript had been with the press for three years. The final proofs of volume 1, part 2 had been with the press for four years before it appeared.103 Grierson did not even have ‘certain knowledge’ of when volume 1, part 2 came out.104 By 1928 Grierson had become ‘hardened’ to the delays and confusions in printing, and ‘ceased making complaints’. Even the deputy undersecretary of state for India, Sir Malcolm Seton, thought the delays in printing volume 1, part 2 were ‘inexcusable’.105 There were also issues with the supply of type for some of the scripts in the volumes. In September 1904, the superintendent of the Government Press ordered Persian type from W. Druglin in Leipzig, but by July 1914 the type had not been received. In July 1914 Grierson complained problems in sourcing the type had delayed the printing of the volumes in question by eight years. Druglin claimed the type had 183

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been sent in February 1914, but there was a delay because of a bureaucratic muddle in India regarding their importation.106 The fount was not completely supplied when war broke out, and the war also delayed the printing of other volumes, some of which had been in press for five years by 1915.107 When Grierson approached the secretary to the Government of India about this, he was told it was too expensive and time-consuming to make the Persian type in the Government Press.108 The issue of getting special types also hindered the production of appendix 2 of the Comparative Vocabulary as the press did not stock special punches for the cutting of certain accent letters.109 The press’s type foundry was closed in 1922 so the thousands of special accents for the Comparative Vocabulary had to be cast by hand. In the end, the press sourced type from elsewhere; for example, it obtained Burmese type from the American Baptist Mission Press in Rangoon. Facsimiles of written characters were also used,110 while Grierson got Stephen and Sons of Hertford to set up passages in Siamese type, and they prepared stereotypes of the Siamese portion of volume, 1 part 2 for the Government Press.111 The ‘mechanical execution’ of the LSI’s volumes, then, was messy and problematic. In keeping with the Survey’s global dimensions, the production of the volumes was also transnational; the type for these was sourced from Britain, India and elsewhere. The mechanical problems in the volumes’ production were compounded by issues raised by diacritics. As we have seen, Grierson saw the accuracy of diacritics in the volumes as a sign of the Survey’s and Government Press’s authority, but at one point Grierson made it clear his choice of a diacritic was determined less by scholarly imperatives than the printer’s convenience.112 His correspondence with printers shows how in the making of books as material objects supposedly eloquent of British authority, many compromises were required when it came to diacritics.113 Other correspondents also point to how diacritics bewildered printers.114 These problems of execution were further exacerbated by the Survey’s use of multiple scripts, interlinear translations, different section and chapter headings, and complicated word spacing.115

Archivization Thus, the solidity of the LSI’s volumes is at odds with the considerable messiness of their production. Grierson foregrounded the process of archivizing the LSI’s files as a rough and ready one. He calls attention to the constructed and even arbitrary nature of the Survey’s archive. 184

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In a letter of February 1923 Grierson refers to the problem of forming an archive out of his Survey correspondence because all of it ‘was from its nature, quite fugitive in its character, and consisted largely of demi-official letters’.116 In a later letter to the undersecretary of state in January 1928 Grierson raised queries about archiving the LSI. These include questions as to what constitutes an important file, how to deal with ‘personal correspondence’ with government departments, how to distinguish ephemeral papers from documents with ‘real historical interest’, how to discriminate between a ‘dead’ and a ‘live’ file, and how to deal with files in which correspondence is still pending. Most of the files belonged to an ‘intermediate class’ and so he was unclear as to how to deal with them.117 This question of what the LSI archive should include is also articulated in the correspondence about Grierson’s own library. A number of university libraries and institutions contacted Grierson about purchasing his library, including SOS,118 the Dyal Singh Library in Lahore,119 the University of Rangoon,120 Presidency College Calcutta,121 the Maharajah of Darbhanga’s Library,122 Nagpur University,123 the Rajaram College Library at Kolhapur,124 the State Library in Hyderabad125 and the Imperial Library at Delhi.126 Charles Lanman wrote to the librarian of Congress in Washington about the Congress Library acquiring his books.127 The LSI’s preoccupation with bibliographies and archives as processes therefore extends to the question of Grierson’s own library, which also has an ambiguous status. On the one hand, it was his own property to dispose of at will, but on the other hand it was also part of the Survey’s archive, because he built his library up in tandem with the latter and many of its volumes were acquired as part of his work for the Survey. This again complicated the question of where the boundaries of the LSI’s archive lay. Thus, rather than being an archive as an accomplished feat, Grierson presents the LSI as an archive always in the process of making. This archival self-reflexivity is at odds with the sense of completeness evoked by the solidity of its volumes as material objects, especially as Grierson also stressed that the files he sent to the India Office were only ‘small proportions of the whole’.128 Grierson cannot resolve the question of how to categorise the archive’s contents, partly because its files were necessarily of ‘doubtful classification’. Most of the correspondence is ‘demi-official’ and belongs to an intermediate category. This reflects the semi-official status of the LSI itself and Grierson’s own loose connection with the colonial state. As we have seen, the printed volumes were not produced by the Government Press alone. 185

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Other presses in India and in Britain contributed by supplying type. On the level of its actual printing, too, the LSI is intermediate and semi-official. Grierson’s use of the term ‘intermediate’ to describe the Survey’s files is revealing in other respects. Like many archives, these files are not published but are available in a constrained public domain to which access is limited. In that sense, all archival space is an intermediate space. However, the term ‘intermediate’ is additionally apt here because the Survey was an intercontinental circulatory network of correspondence, reciprocally interacting with a culture of knowledge, learning and debate which it shaped in distinctive ways.129 As one of the LSI’s critics noted, the bulk of the Survey had to be conducted by correspondence.130 It is not surprising therefore that in a letter of 18 January 1922 Grierson refers to himself as a ‘friendly post office’.131 The term ‘LSI’, then, also signifies a transnational and intercontinental epistolary culture, akin to a series of reading and discussion groups, ongoing seminar discussions, paper presentations, commentaries and reading lists. Indian interlocutors also played an important role in this epistolary culture.132 Grierson’s role as an intermediary and facilitator, negotiating with and between individuals, and his labour in making the Survey a hub for global correspondence on India as a linguistic region further deepen the sense of its archive as ‘intermediate’, existing in between and across clearly demarcated spheres, institutions and continents. Here again Grierson’s character as a go-between comes to the fore – as a mediator, he was a ‘nomadic expert’ who was simultaneously local, regional and global. He crossed classical territorial formations by juggling with possibilities and constraints, and functioned through the creation and use of networks.133

Temporality As we have seen, Grierson points to the difficulty of distinguishing between a ‘dead’ and a ‘live’ file. He makes this point in another letter of 18 July 1928, when he stresses winding up the LSI will not close the correspondence associated with it. This is partly because of the planned Linguistic Survey of Burma, for which he is an adviser, and the ongoing correspondence with Indian governments about the gramophone recordings. In addition, there was ongoing correspondence ‘with scholars and other enquirers in various parts of the world’ because he is ‘known as the Superintendent of the Linguistic Survey, and on this ground enquiries are frequently made to me’. This 186

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correspondence is a ‘direct consequence’ of the Survey.134 Thus, it is unclear when the LSI ended as a project, which also had implications for its archivization. The nature of the LSI also meant it was difficult for Grierson to gauge the amount of time needed for the Survey: a single language could take a month or a day to write up, and he could not predict whether a specimen would take a few minutes or two to three days to deal with.135 He also did not know how many languages he would have to deal with.136 The India Office agreed with Grierson it was difficult to prescribe a completion date, given the nature of the undertaking.137 The LSI’s clerk in England was released from his duties on 31 December 1928, and the ‘office’ was closed by that date, but Grierson continued to receive a reduced allowance for the Survey until 31 December 1932 in order to employ a typist, after which he conducted the correspondence himself. In 1932, Grierson asked if he was still the LSI’s superintendent, and if he could continue to use official letter headed papers. The India Office replied in the affirmative.138 In the same year, he also wrote to the Civil Secretariat of the United Provinces to say he was still occupied with correspondence concerning the LSI ‘that may have started from some fact that was recorded ten years ago in the Survey’.139 As we have seen, the LSI encompasses ‘spin-offs’ which began with it but then acquired a life of their own, such as Turner’s Dictionary, which came out between 1966 and 1971. This also makes it difficult to date the LSI’s ending unequivocally. Susan van Zyl has commented archives are solid places of material storage and accumulation but they are also unstable sites open to being recast in the future to come.140 This is particularly pertinent to the LSI, given its importance to language activists and the nation state in postcolonial South Asia.141 Grierson’s references to his continuing correspondence making it difficult to fix when the LSI will end is also an opening out of the archive for a future to come. The LSI’s archival open-endedness is evident from other letters. On 12 May 1928, the India Office stressed that while there were no rules about the destruction of files, ‘if there is any doubt whether a paper may be useful to students hereafter or not it should be retained’.142 In fact, when sending a list of ‘dead’ files to the India Office, Grierson notes how some of the ‘live’ files he was working on were once classed as ‘dead’ by him but had to be reopened.143 Grierson therefore calls attention to the difficulties of definitively closing off the LSI’s archive in the very process of constructing it. Thus, the very nature of the Survey militated against its authoritative closure and a smooth chronology for the delivery of its volumes. As we 187

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have seen, Turner’s Dictionary came out of the LSI, and in one sense, it was not until 1971, when this was published, that the Survey ended. Sometimes the manuscripts of earlier volumes ‘had to be reopened, and some had to be altered and added to’ as new material came to light. Hence it was sometimes decided not to print off a volume as soon as the type was set up, because of the changes that might have to be made as the Survey progressed. For example, in 1903 the volume dealing with Bengali had been stereotyped some years before, but Grierson had to make alterations and additions necessitated by facts discovered afterwards about the Indo-Chinese languages of East Assam.144 The initial scheme of volumes could not be adhered to and some volumes had to be issued in separate parts. Grierson admitted this was ‘an inconvenient arrangement, but was the only one possible, for the scheme of volumes was arranged before I could estimate .  .  . the number of pages each would contain, and the volumes were not prepared in order of number’. Hence, for example, volume 5 appeared before volume 1,145 and the numbering of the volumes is out of sequence with the linear chronology of the dates of publication. The first volume to be published is volume 3, part 3 in 1903, and the last volume to be published is the introductory volume 1 in 1928. This lack of synchronisation between the numbered sequence of the volumes and the linear chronology of the calendar creates a jumbled archival temporality, and this too is indicative of how the LSI is open to future recastings.

Conclusion Mbembe speaks of archives as montages of fragments that create an illusion of totality and continuity. However, as an archive the LSI calls attention to itself as a montage of fragments of intermediate and doubtful classification and eschews creating an illusion of totality. Moreover, its archivization follows on from rather than predates its published volumes. On two occasions R.C. Temple wrote to Grierson about how he had to ‘boil down’ his folklore material to fill the volumes he was working on for publication as well as the material ‘out of a box of ms. documents – hundreds of them – hidden and list [sic] in the attic of a farm house’ for his book The Tragedy of the Worcester (1939).146 In contrast, it is only when the LSI office was being wound up in 1928 and its last volume published that the Survey’s archivization began in earnest. Its archive consists mainly of correspondence which could have no place in the results of the LSI in published form. Its published

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volumes, then, did not emerge from an unpublished archive; rather they generated the unpublished archive. In a sense, rather than ‘boiling down’ files, the LSI’s volumes cooked them up. As discrete material objects, the published volumes blur into the messiness, arbitrariness and vastness of the archive they gave birth to. On 23 June 1928 Grierson wrote to the India Office about how the LSI’s archivization raised questions he wanted to discuss in the afternoon after his investiture at Buckingham Palace on the same day.147 The convergence of these two events on the same day, being presented to the British monarch for his investiture and then going to the India Office to discuss the problems of archivization, reflects the complex nature of colonial linguistics in the Survey. The final seal of recognition from the apex of the British institutional pyramid took place on the same day that the unruliness of the LSI’s archive was institutionalised. The Survey’s power lies in this institutionalised twinning of this climactic seal of approval and its intermediacy and provisionality. The LSI’s monumentalisation testifies to the intimate connection between its solidity and its fragility, and its archival unruliness is consonant with its epistemological style and mode of knowledge production, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1 George A. Grierson, ‘Previous Enquiries into Indian Languages’, in Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Pt. 1: Introductory, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927, pp. 1–17. 2 Linguistic Survey Files, S/1/2/1, Grierson to Hewett, 15.1.1890, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London; hereafter LS Files. 3 LS Files S/1/1/22, Grierson to Pater W. Schmidt, 27.4.1902. 4 B.P. Mahapatra, ‘The Written Languages of India’, in B.P. Mahapatra and G.D. McConnell (eds), The Written Languages of the World: A Survey of the Degree and Modes of Use, Vol. 2, Pt. 1: Constitutional Languages, Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1989, pp. 507, 548. 5 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 16. 6 Ibid., p. 6 f.n. 7 European Manuscripts, EUR 223/299, Richard Temple to Grierson, 25.6.1886 & 12.6.1886, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London, hereafter EUR only. 8 LS Files S/1/1/16, Grierson to Secretary, Library Association, 13.12.1921. 9 LS Files S/1/14/6, Grierson to H.A. Rose, 7.8.1902. 10 LS Files S/1/2/4, Grierson to Babu Gauri Kant Roy, 6.3.1903, Roy to Grierson, 17.12.1903 & 17.3.1904, and Grierson to Roy, 19.12.1907. 11 LS Files S/1/3/1, Grierson to Bengal Secretariat, 4.10.1903.

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12 LS Files S/1/4/1, see the correspondence between Grierson and colonial officials, such as T.H. Corkery, F.J. Monahan and P.C. Lyon in Assam from January 1901 until March 1913. 13 LS Files S/1/4/9, Grierson to Deputy Commissioner, Shillong, 4.12.1901, and Capt. D. Herbert to Grierson, 21.3.1902. 14 For example, see the sketches for Khamti in George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 2: Mōn-Khmēr and Siamese-Chinese Families (Including Khassi and Tai), Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1904; the sketches of Khambu, Bahing, Vayu and some Nepali dialects in George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 1: General Introduction, Specimens of the Tibetan Dialects, the Himalayan Dialects, and the North Assam Group, Calcutta: Superintendent of the Government Press, 1909; Khyang and Siyin in George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 3: Specimens of the Kuki-Chin and Burma Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1904; for Brahui in George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 4: Muṇḍā and Dravidian Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906; Sindhi, Siraiki Sindhi, Hindki, Lahnda [i.e. Siraiki], and Tinauli in George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8: Indo-Aryan Family (North-Western Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Sindhī and Lahndā, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919; Rambani, Kashtawari, Dras Brokpa, Khowar, Burushaski, Torwali and Bashgal in George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Dardic or Piśācha Languages (including Kāshmīrī), Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919; Bhagati, Kiuthali, Siraji, Gadi, Mandeali, Kuauni and Gujuri in George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 4: Specimens of the Pahārī languages and Gujurī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1916; and Yudgha, Shigni, Pashto and Baluchi in George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 10: Specimens of Languages of the Eranian Family, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1921. 15 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 559. 16 These are Jack F. Needham, Outline Grammar of the Shaíyâng Miri Language as Spoken by the Miris of That Clan Residing in the Neighbourhood of Sadiya, Shillong: Assam Secretariat Press, 1886; Robert C. Hamilton, An Outline Grammar of the Dafla Language as Spoken by the Tribes Immediately South of the Apa Tanang Country, Shillong: Assam Secretariat Printing Office, 1900, William Robinson, ‘Notes on the Languages Spoken by the Various Tribes Inhabiting the Valley of Assam and Its Mountain Confines’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1849, 17 (1). 17 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, pp. 253, 124. 18 LS Files S/1/6/11, Grierson to Sir John Donald, 20.3.1916 & 3.1.1917, and S/1/12/4, Grierson to Deputy Commissioner of Bannu, North Western Frontier (NWF), India, 27.4.1902. 19 LS Files S/1/6/11, Grierson to Sir John Donald, 3.1.1917. 20 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 17.

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21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30

31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38

39

40 41

Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 56. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 2, p. 105. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 138. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 158. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 387. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 7: Indo-Aryan Family (Southern Group), Specimens of the Marāṭhī Language, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1905, pp. 76–7. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, pp. 441, 442–8. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Western Hindī and Pañjābī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1916, pp. 103, 111, 138, 147–62. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 207–11. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Rājasthānī and Gujarātī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1908, pp. 169–72, 174–7, 183, 191–4, 196. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 17, 19. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 172. Other examples include the word lists for Rambani and Kashtawari in Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, the Lahnda of the Salt Range and Lari in Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, Malayalam in Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, Banjogi in Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, and Mishmi and Spiti in Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, p. 62, where he adds within parentheses words from John Butler’s ‘Vocabularies of Naga Hill Tribes’, Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1873, 43: Part I, Appendix. EUR 223/300, Lieutenant Col. E. Hay to Grierson, 21.4.1887. EUR 223/260, J.S. Cotton to Grierson, 25.4.1904, India Office to Grierson, 23.6.1903, Grierson’s Note on Sir A. Goodley’s Letter of 5.3.1901, and EUR 223/306, Secretary, Dyal Singh Library, Lahore, 15.10.1931, with attached ‘Notes on the contents of Sir George Grierson’s Library’. LS Files S/1/9/16, Grierson to A.R. King, Assistant Secretary to Government of Bombay, Educational Dept., Bombay, 29.4.1902. EUR 223/258, Grierson to Registrar and Superintendent of Records, India Office, 19.3.1926. For some examples, see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 2, p. 59; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, pp. 56, 72, 116, 380–1; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 602; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 449; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 67–68, 86, 90, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 44, 98, 279, 437, 323. For some examples, see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 66; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 2, p. 63; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, pp. 3, 69, 265; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, p. 20; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 14; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 6, p. 231; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 447; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, pp. 452–3, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 11, p. 153. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 425. For officials sending their reports to Grierson, LS Files S/1/9/15, Col. M.J. Meade, Resident at Baroda, to Grierson, 21.11.1902; S/1/14/3, R.N.

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42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Reid, Undersecretary to Government of Bengal, General Dept., in Charge of Census, to Grierson, 15.3.1913, Office of Superintendent of Census Operations, Bengal to Grierson, 10.11.1922; S/1/16/1, P.C. Tallents to Grierson, 26.9.1922; S/1/14/7, R.W. Johnson to Grierson, 10.1.1913, W.V. Grigson to Grierson, 7.11.1922; S/1/14/4, B.C. Allen to Grierson, 17.12.1901, Office of Superintendent of Census Operations, Assam, 7.10.1912 & 27.12.1922; S/1/14/6, Deputy Superintendent, Census Operations, to Grierson, 11.2.1902, H.A. Rose to Grierson, 22.10.1902, Pandit Hari Kishan Kaul, Superintendent Census Operations Panjab to Grierson, 12.3.1913, and Shaikh Abdul Majid, Officiating Superintendent, Census Operations, Panjab, to Grierson, 24.5.1923. For Grierson sending his notes and proofs of the LSI to colonial officials, see S/1/14/5, Grierson to Superintendent of Census Operations, North-West Provinces, 25.3.1901; S/1/14/6, Grierson to Superintendent of Census, Panjab, 25.3. 1901; S/1/14/7, Grierson to Superintendent Census Operations, Central Provinces, 25.3.1901, Grierson to Superintendent of Census Operations, Central Provinces, 14.11.1901; S/1/14/8, Grierson to Superintendent of Census Operations, Berar, 25.3.1901; S/1/14/10, Grierson to Superintendent Census Operations, Rajputana, 25.3.1901, and S/1/14/11, Grierson to Superintendent of Census Operations, Central India, 25.3.1901. LS Files S/1/9/10, Grierson to A.H.A. Simcox, 5.5.1921. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 148. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, p. 347. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 84, where he cites at length from the Manual of Administration of Madras Presidency. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 198. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bihārī and Oṛiyā Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, p. 248. EUR 223/222, Haraprasad Shastri, President of Bangiya Sahitya Parishad Mandir, to Grierson, 17.6.1929. EUR 223/312, Secretary, Bombay Branch, RAS, to Grierson, 15.11.1923. EUR 223/217, Sir I. Gollancz to Grierson, 26.11.1925 & 3.12.1928. The medal was presented to Grierson in July 1928. EUR 223/324, Sir Aurel Stein to Col. A. G. Bannerman, Resident in Kashmir, 24.8.1919. EUR 223/273, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 16.6.1928. EUR 223/316, Sir Denison Ross to Grierson, 11.6.1928. EUR 223/240, Grierson to F.W. Thomas, 30.7.1932, pp. 265, 27; see ‘Indian and Iranian Studies Presented to Grierson on his Eighty-Fifth Birthday, January 7th, 1936’, Bulletin of SOS, 8, 2, (1936). EUR 223/310, Sir E.D. Maclagan, President RAS, 17.2.1928, and EUR 223/301, A. Cowley, Bodleian Library, Oxford to Grierson, 28.5.1928. EUR 223/302, Secretary, Seventeenth International Congress of Orientalists, Indian Institute, Oxford, 11.1.1929. EUR 223/273, T.W. Thompson, Gypsy Lore Society, to Grierson, 5.6.1928, and EUR 223/226, S.K. Chatterji to Grierson, 14.8.1921. For example, Prabodh B. Pandit, ‘The Linguistic Survey of India: Perspectives on Language Use’, in Sirarpi Ohannessian, Charles A. Ferguson, and

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59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Edgar C. Polomé (eds), Language Surveys in Developing Nations, Virginia: Centre for Applied Linguistics, 1975, p. 79; Jyotirinda D. Gupta, Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, p. 32, Mahapatra, Written Languages, p. 667. EUR 223/259, Grierson to Undersecretary of State for India, 2.7.1929, and EUR 223/302, P. Giles, Cambridge to Grierson, 9.10.1920. EUR 223/220, F.H. Brown to Grierson, 23.2.1928. EUR 223/302, Secretary of Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 10.4.1920. EUR 223/285, K.V. Subhaiya to Grierson, 16.11.1910, and L.V. Ramaswmi Aiyar to Grierson, 17.12.1928. EUR 223/254, Prof. Bani Kanta Kakati, Cotton College, Assam, to Grierson, 19.1.1932. EUR 223/273, Devaprasad Sarbadhikary, President, North Bengal Literary Conference, to Grierson, 1.8.1928. EUR 223/293, Mahamahopadhyaya Rai Bahadur Gaurishankar H. Ojha to Grierson, 8.11.1928, and EUR 223/335, Siddheshwar Varma to Lady Grierson, 27.5.1932. I discuss the intercontinental aspect of the LSI in more detail ahead. EUR 223/241, Grierson to D.E. Yate, Honorary Secretary, Gipsy Lore Society, 17.10.1939. EUR 223/317, Sir Denison Ross to Grierson, 20.3.1924. EUR 223/309, Miss Hughes, RAS, to Grierson, 10.10.1917. Ibid., Lord Reay to Grierson, 28.10.1918. EUR 223/310, F.W. Thomas to Grierson, 4.3.1924, and Grierson to Thomas, 6.3.1924. EUR 223/295, ‘Report of the Pali Text Society for 1917’, Mrs Rhys Davids, Honorary Secretary to Grierson, 27.12.1922. EUR 223/295, Mrs Rhys Davis to Grierson, 27.7.1933 & 20.10.1937. EUR 223/324, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 6.11.1929. EUR 223/210, ‘Extract from address of Sir John Anderson, Governor of Bengal, patron of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in the Annual Meeting of the Society on 6th February, 1933’ and ‘Presidential Announcement. Sir William Jones Medal, Annual Meeting’, 4.2.1929. EUR 223/302, National Portrait Gallery, St. Martin’s Place, to Grierson, 24.3.1930. EUR 223/220, F.H. Brown to Grierson, 26.2.1928. EUR 223/240, F.H. Brown to Grierson, 12.1.1936; EUR 223/273, Maud Frizell to Grierson, 9.5.1928, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 9.5.1928, and EUR 223/301, Grierson to Times Literary Supplement, 26.4.1928. EUR 223/207, J.D. Anderson to Grierson, 16.5.1920. EUR 223/273, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 16.6.1928, on the report in the Weekly Pioneer. EUR 223/302, Editor of Photopress to Grierson, 9.5.1928, and EUR 223/301, Colin Applestone to Grierson, 16.10.1928, on the 10.1928 issue of Woman’s Magazine. EUR 223/307, Runwar Bhairow Singh Gudawat to Grierson, 14.3.1933; EUR 223/304, Jewish Post to Grierson, 27.2.1935, Dr R. N. Sardesai, The Oriental Book Agency of Poona, to Grierson, 22.6.1937; EUR

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83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

223/302, C. Bramley to Grierson, 9.4.1930, and E. Stanley Jones to Grierson, 16.7.1930. EUR 223/301, Colin Applestone to Grierson, 16.10.1928. EUR 223/273, Constance Pinney to Grierson, 12.5.1928, and EUR 223/210, Van Manen to Grierson, 30.7.1932. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Sale (eds), Refiguring the Archive, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, p. 19. EUR 223/333, R.L. Turner to Grierson, 17.3.1931; see also Christopher Shackle, From Wuch to Southern Lahnda: A Century of Siraiki Studies in English, Multan: Bazm-e Saqaft, 1983, p. 32, on the LSI as an ‘imperial architectural monument’, and p. 38, on Grierson as a ‘master builder’. EUR 223/243, Grierson to Indian High Commission, 13.1.1931, and EUR 223/303, Grierson to Kegan Paul, 6.12.1932. EUR 223/333, R.L. Turner, 2.5.1931. EUR 223/258, India Office to Grierson, 27.9.1928. EUR 223/272, Grierson to Hewett, 7.2.1898. EUR 223/205, Grierson to Gaganath Jha, 2.9.1931; EUR 223/212, Grierson to Principal, Presidency College Calcutta, 29.9.1931; EUR 223/221, A Brookes, Registrar, University of Rangoon, to Grierson, 12.8.1931; EUR 223/271, Grierson to Charles Lanman, 31.3.1931, and EUR 223/333, R.L. Turner to Grierson, 17.3.1931. EUR 223/301, 30.5.1928. LS Files S/1/1/15, Handwritten note at beginning of file. EUR 223/323, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 5.8.1916. LS Files S/1/2/8, Grierson to Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 5.1.1927. Ibid., 12.4.1926. LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to Hewett, 10.9.1901. LS Files S/1/13/3, Grierson to V. Venkayya. Government Epigraphist, Ootacamund, 2.4.1906. LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to Hewett, 6.12.1901. Ibid., Grierson to Hewett, 29.7.1902, and Grierson to A. Williams, 13.11. 1902 & 8.12.1902. LS Files S/1/2/2, Grierson to Sir Edward Maclagan, 17.12.1916. LS Files S/1/2/8, Grierson to Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 16.6.1925. EUR 223/258, Grierson to Undersecretary of State, 19.1.1928. Ibid., Grierson to Undersecretary of State, 11.12.1928. Ibid., Sir Malcolm Seton to Grierson, 20.9.1928. LS Files S/1/1/24, Grierson to W. Drugulin, Leipzig, 13.9.1904, and Druglin to Grierson, 21.7.1914. LS Files S/1/1/8, Grierson to Sten Konow, 24.11.1915. LS Files S/1/2/2, L.C. Porter, Secretary Government of India, Education Dept., to Grierson, 17.6.1914. LS Files S/1/2/8, Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 20.10.1925. Ibid., Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, to Grierson, 25.3. 1926.

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111 Ibid., Grierson to Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 22.5. 1926. 112 LS Files S/1/1/16, Grierson to Danton, 20.4.1921. 113 LS Files S/1/1/34, Correspondence with Stephen Austin and sons, Hertford, regarding diacritics for Hatim’s Tales. 114 LS Files S/1/1/7, Sten Konow, ‘Note on the Transliteration of the Nāgari Alphabet’. 115 LS Files S/1/1/31, Grierson to E.E. Bate, 19.4.1915. 116 EUR 223/327, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 23.2.1924. 117 EUR 223/258, Grierson to India Office, 4.5.1928 & 30.7.1928, and India Office to Grierson, 12.5.1928. 118 EUR 223/333, R.L. Turner to Grierson, 22.3.1921, 2.5.1931, 9.6.1931, & 7.8.1931. 119 EUR 223/306, Secretary, Dyal Singh Library, Lahore, 15.10.1931. 120 EUR 223/221, A Brookes, Registrar, University of Rangoon, to Grierson, 12.8.1931. 121 EUR 223/212, Principal, Presidency College Calcutta to Grierson, 3.9. 1931. 122 EUR 223/205, Gaganath Jha to Grierson, 12.8.1931. 123 EUR 223/225, K.P. Pandya, Assistant Registrar, Nagpur University, to Grierson, 4.9.1931. 124 EUR 223/254, K.G. Kundangor, Rajaram College, 18.10.1931. 125 EUR 223/246, Grierson to the Nizam’s Government State Library, 8.12. 1931. 126 EUR 223/333, Grierson to R.L. Turner, 24.3.1921. 127 EUR 223/271, Charles Lanman to Grierson, 29.1.1931. 128 EUR 223/258, Grierson to India Office, 26.9.1928. 129 For these strands in the LSI’s correspondence, see Ch. 8. 130 EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’. 131 EUR 223/265, Grierson to K.P. Jayaswal, 27.1.1920. 132 For which, see Ch. 8 (this volume) and Ch. 1 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. 133 For this characterisation of the figure of the mediator and go-between, see Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo (eds), The Brokered World: Go-betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, Washington: Science History Publications, 2009, p. xix. 134 EUR 223/258, Grierson to Undersecretary of State, 18.7.1928. 135 EUR 223/257, Statement by Grierson, 24.1.1902, and Grierson to Revenue Secretary, 5.5.1903. 136 EUR 223/272, Grierson to Hewett, 7.2.1898. 137 EUR 223/257, India Office to Grierson, 18.2.1902. 138 EUR 223/259, Grierson to India Office, 13.12.1932, and India Office to Grierson, 23.12.1932. 139 EUR 223/334, Grierson to Civil Secretariat, UP, 28.6.1932. 140 Susan van Zyl, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Archive: Derrida’s Archive Fever’, in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Sale (eds), Refiguring the Archive, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, p. 53.

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141 See Ch. 1 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. 142 EUR 223/258, India Office to Grierson, 12.5.1928. 143 Ibid., Grierson to India Office, 5.9.1928. 144 LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to Deputy Secretary of Government of India, Home Dept., 30.3.1903. 145 EUR 223/220, Grierson to F.H. Brown, 30.11.1917. 146 EUR 223/329, Sir Richard Temple to Grierson, 6.10.1929 & 30.1.1930. 147 EUR 223/258, Grierson to India Office, 23.6.1928.

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7 UNCERTAIN KNOWLEDGE IN THE SURVEY

Just as Grierson foregrounds the LSI’s archivization as a rough and ready process, so he is clear about the Survey’s production of knowledge as messy and provisional. This chapter examines the distinctiveness of the LSI’s idiom of knowledge production in more detail. The Survey repeatedly foregrounds its shortcomings; an openness to the provisional and uncertain nature of its knowledge is a key aspect of the presentation of its findings. The Survey does not fit the conventional view of colonial surveys as exhibiting a language of command and deploying fixed categories reductively. In part, this is because it acknowledges the ever-changing nature of language itself, which makes any conclusively clear-cut formulations about it difficult.

The Survey’s inadequacies The LSI’s volumes repeatedly call attention to the uncertain and provisional nature of its knowledge production. Grierson notes that because of insufficient or imperfect material at his disposal his remarks on some dialects or languages ‘must be taken with some reserve’, ‘with every reserve’ or ‘with considerable reserve’.1 This language of reserve is used in relation to many dialects.2 Grierson also refers to the insufficiency of the LSI’s information and analyses. The terms he uses here are ‘imperfect’,3 ‘scanty’,4 ‘incomplete’,5 ‘untrustworthy’,6 ‘inaccurate’,7 ‘insufficient’,8 ‘limited’,9 ‘unsatisfactory’10 and ‘corrupt’.11 Grierson therefore has a strong sense of the LSI’s inadequacies. This partly stems from the problems he encountered in gathering data. This included not receiving specimens and specimens not being obtainable.12 Some were sent without any interlinear transliteration, with the translator misunderstanding the passages of the set text;13 in one instance all three specimens of a dialect were incorrect, so all were 197

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given ‘in full so that they may be used to control each other’.14 The prodigal son specimen for Shina was distorted by the author’s usage of unusual conjunctions because he saw them as a mark of sophistication.15 Grierson addresses this issue of specimens being ‘doctored up’ in volume 1, part 1 when he refers to how some Indian contributors polished specimens of languages and dialects they thought ‘uncouth’.16 Grierson also suspected fraudulent specimens in some cases.17 There were other problems. The returns could be ‘fragmentary’, some officials were ‘lazy’18 and specimens could end abruptly in mid-sentence because there were no speakers who could provide a complete text.19 Some officials also applied a scanty knowledge of philology and comparative grammar to specimens, resulting in ‘absurd’ conjectures.20 It is also not clear how effective Grierson’s instructions to district officials were. Some officials drafted their own set of instructions for their provinces, which Grierson praised for their clarity, adding that they ‘filled me with hope’; this suggests his own instructions needed to be supplemented or clarified.21 The complex numbering system for each specimen was not user-friendly for officials.22 In addition, officials experienced issues when collecting specimens of tribal languages; as F.J. Needham, the political officer of the Mishui expedition put it euphemistically, his dealings with the tribes concerned ‘were not consistent with my entering into a friendly discourse with them regarding their language’.23 Some tribes were reported to be ‘ashamed’ of their language and returned the name of another more prestigious one instead.24 Other officials described their attempts to get specimens from hill tribes as ‘abortive’.25 Grierson commented on how some ‘tribes are difficult of approach, and it requires a special gift to draw from them accurate information as to the dialects they use’.26 There were also logistical problems created by physical distance, as when speakers of specific dialects resided in remoter parts of a province. In some cases, nomadic groups residing in a district when the original returns had been compiled were no longer to be found there when it came to double-checking the specimens.27 In some of the returns to the LSI the number of speakers is crossed out and reinserted after being recalculated, uncertainties are expressed in the columns of tabulated data, different views within the local administration as to the names of dialects are aired, and explicit references are made about the roughness of the estimates of speakers. For example, some of the names in the returns for Bengal (North-Western Provinces and Oudh) and Saharanpur district are crossed out and new names are inserted by hand. The classification of ‘the language of the 198

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vagrant Banjaras’ is described as ‘entirely provisional’ and the enumeration of speakers is referred to as ‘mere guesses’.28 Thus, Grierson’s sense of the LSI’s inadequacies partly stemmed from issues of data collection. He is also explicit about the gaps in the LSI’s knowledge. In one instance, Grierson lists a dialect as a heading and says he is ‘unable to give any information regarding this form of the language’.29 In another case he declares, ‘we know nothing whatever about this dialect’ except what its name means, and he says of the language of one tribe ‘nothing is known about their language’.30 In a note on ‘Western Pahari Languages’ he comments under one set of dialects, ‘No doubt many, but no information about them’.31 The Survey therefore explicitly marks its own gaps. In addition, Grierson often strikes a cautious note. He describes his translation of the prodigal son version of Toto as ‘tentative’ because the specimen had no accompanying interlinear translation, and was ‘much abbreviated’ and therefore difficult to interpret.32 Elsewhere he expresses uncertainty regarding the meaning of phrases,33 verb conjugations which he has not been able to check,34 the meaning of words that are not to be found in any dictionary,35 words which ‘cannot with certainty be identified’,36 his own possible mistakes in interpreting passages37 and his ‘corrections’ as being themselves tentative.38 He does not venture to touch ‘doubtful cases’ in word lists, of which ‘there are many’.39 Indeed, Grierson’s general approach to language is cautious; he collected and recorded ‘facts regarding different languages for something like twenty years before I ventured to put forth serious theories’.40 Grierson, then, does not present the Survey in terms of a confident colonial or epistemological mastery. Instead, expressions of doubt and uncertainty characterise it. As we have seen in Chapter 4, Grierson calls attention to the uncertainties of transliteration in the LSI. Because the linguistic knowledge of India was always in a state of flux and development, Grierson is clear when he is not in a position to make assertions on the basis of current knowledge; for example, Padri cannot be described ‘accurately till we know much more about it’,41 and ‘I am not yet in a position to say’ whether Khandeshi should be classed with Gujarati or Rajasthani.42 When it came to Burmese languages, his classification for the 1901 Census was provisional, and ‘very probably, with further knowledge, the classification will have to be again altered, but that is inherent in the state of affairs’.43 For Grierson, a limited state of knowledge means that languages and dialects cannot always be satisfactorily classified, and some questions about them have to be left open.44 Volume 3, part 1 asserts that it is ‘impossible to classify 199

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the Tibeto-Burman dialects satisfactorily’.45 One section of volume 3, part 3 is called ‘Ungrouped Languages’; here a lack of materials means Grierson is unsure how to classify these languages. He tried to fit Mro into the Lui group but failed to do so; placing it in a group of unclassed languages was therefore a ‘frank confession of the facts’.46 The classification of Burushaski had to be left open as it was still sub judice.47 In the case of mixed and/or border dialects, which can be classified equally well in either of two ways, classification is made simply for the sake of convenience.48 Sometimes the classification is not philological. The North Assam branch of languages is ‘a rather haphazard collection of languages grouped on geographical rather than on philological principles’. The only conclusion as to its classification is a negative one; though connected to Tibeto-Himalayan and Assam-Burmese languages, they cannot be classed with either.49 When Grierson sent the last chapter on the Naga languages to press he remained aware of his ‘incapacity’ to write on them and he classified them ‘doubtfully’.50 Elsewhere Grierson describes his provisional groupings as ‘wrong’, and when it came to some dialects he had ‘rushed in where angels feared to tread’. When dealing with Dravidian languages he approached them ‘very unwillingly, and in much fear and trembling’.51 Such statements articulate a strong sense of the provisional nature of the Survey’s knowledge. Marks of incertitude and an openness to the provisional fleck Grierson’s correspondence. In his letters, Grierson had debates about basic terms with his correspondents – for example, about the terms ‘Indo-Germanic’ and ‘Indo-Aryan’ with Peter Giles, who contributed to the Cambridge History of India (1922) and wrote many articles on language-related topics for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.52 As late as 1925 Grierson and Turner assigned the term ‘Indo-Aryan’ ‘absolutely different meanings’. There are other crucial differences between them which emerge as the debate continued in their letters.53 There are discussions with correspondents about how to define transitive and intransitive causal verbs in Urdu,54 the agent case and transitive nominative case in Shina,55 and basic disagreements about defining the subjunctive and whether Indian languages did have a subjunctive case.56 This strain of debate in the LSI’s epistolary culture shows how some key linguistic issues were open and unresolved, and this is reflected in the Survey’s presentation of its findings. Grierson also stresses that it is not possible to lay down hard and fast rules about word development because ‘in a living language, we find, as contemporaries, words in all stages of development’.57 For him, the very nature of language renders knowledge about some 200

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aspects of it provisional. He sometimes referred to the Survey as placing still incomplete evidence into the hands of scholars who might be able to articulate more adequate theories on securer grounds.58 Because knowledge of Indian languages was always an ongoing process, at times Grierson had to revise his own views. As he said to one of his correspondents, ‘as my knowledge is growing and developing every day .  .  . you might accept something of mine which further enquiry has shown to be wrong’.59 Elsewhere he asserts that ‘In the kind of work I am doing my knowledge increases every day’.60 For this reason his views were liable to change from his earlier published accounts.61 Hence, too, Grierson welcomed corrections and additions to the volumes, such as the note on Panjabi dialects by Banarsi Das.62 He also corrected his own earlier mistakes, as in his Indexes of Languages.63 Volume 1 part 1 contains addenda which incorporate corrections and additions. This includes specimens for Tirahi, which were not available at the time volume 8 went to press, new information regarding Dardic languages, a corrected version of the prodigal son in the Chattisgarhi dialect from Pandit Lochan Prasad Kavya-vinod, and a corrected ‘Standard List of Words and Sentences’ in Oriya by Babu Monmohan Chakravarti as well as a note on its grammar, which he would have liked to have substituted for the grammatical account and word list of Oriya in volume 5, part 2.64 There are also corrected word lists for Tangkhul, Chang and Sema.65 This openness to corrections which are inserted into the first volume again signals Grierson’s sense of the Survey’s provisional nature. Grierson also noted the appearance of new material, alerting the reader to the shortcomings of the LSI here – for example, in respect to Shina, for which Grierson gives the reader a new section on the language based on more recent material. He also notes that as this volume was going through the press, T. Grahame Bailey’s grammar of the language was published in 1924, but it was too late for him to use this for the LSI.66 Indeed one of the problems with the LSI was that as it progressed, its manuscripts ‘over and over again had to be reopened, and some had to be altered and added to’ when new material came to light.67 Thus, while the LSI may have been seen as monumental it was always a monument in the making rather than a finished edifice, and this is indicated in Grierson’s conception of it. Moreover, Grierson’s caution increased rather than diminished as the Survey came to an end. Writing in 1920 to Sten Konow, he stressed his arguments were never unassailable, and that the current state of knowledge meant no 201

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theory regarding Indian languages was ever certain; in fact, ‘the more I study them, the more convinced I am that I know very little about them’.68 Grierson also pointed out that sometimes linguists make guesses. When it came to the origin of the Kadus, at present ‘we are all more or less in the dark, and must confine ourselves to guessing’.69 Taylor saw his own attempts at classifying Burmese languages and dialects as ‘full of guesses and bold statements’.70 Grahame Bailey echoed Grierson’s expressions of doubt, saying, We must both be true scholars – men of open mind. I must be ready to discover that I am wrong and so must every scholar. I must be ready to recast everything if necessary. . . . The ultimate truth may turn out to be somewhat different from what we expect.71 The nature of linguistic work meant self-questioning was part of the course for these colonial linguists, or as Morgenstierne said, ‘the knotty problems of Indo-Aryan philology’ were such that he was ‘always questioning my own opinions afresh in the light of evidence’.72 For his part, Sten Konow asserted, ‘the more I study the subject, the more I find how profoundly dissatisfying is my work, and how much more I ought to know’.73 The LSI is therefore characterised by expressions of doubt, inadequacy and the provisional nature of its knowledge. Grierson admitted to superficial knowledge, being an amateur in some cases, making mistakes and being ‘in a fog’ when it came to some languages.74 The Survey’s authority is in fact rooted in this open avowal of its doubts and the provisional nature of its results; it is this, rather than expressions of mastery, which grounds its authority. As Grierson declared at one point, dissatisfaction with one’s work ‘is the universal experience of everyone who has to write a scientific work’.75 For him, the Survey’s rigour is not compromised by these expressions of doubt and inadequacy – they are part of it. Tentativeness and caution are part of the mode of knowledge production in the field.

Enumeration Arjun Appadurai has shown how numbers and quantification played a key role in the exercise of bureaucratic power in British India and in the colonial imagination. The colonial state produced a ‘vast ocean of numbers’ about land, fields, crops, forests, castes and tribes. They 202

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were a crucial part of the illusion of bureaucratic control and created a sense of a controllable indigenous reality.76 However, Grierson is out of step with this facet of the colonial imagination. The LSI’s relationship to the enumeration of speakers in the Censuses was complex. Its numbers were based on the 1891 Census because the former began its operations in 1894 and the work to enumerate speakers ‘all over again on the basis of a later Census’ was too great.77 At the same time, the figures in volume 1, part 1 had to agree with the 1921 Census, ‘allowing for the necessary adjustments and for the growth of population’ up to that point.78 Hence volume 1 presents tables comparing the LSI’s figures with the 1921 Census,79 but the volumes tend to move between the figures of the 1891, 1901, 1911 and 1921 Censuses.80 In at least one case, Grierson uses the Survey’s estimates and both the 1891 and the 1901 Census to build up a composite picture of the number of speakers.81 Thus, the presentation of numbers of speakers of Indian languages and dialects is often improvised. The LSI’s volumes make rough calculations when it comes to enumeration partly because the Census tended to deal with languages rather than dialects. Even H.H. Risley, writing in 1901, felt that the ‘statistical part’ of the Census on languages is ‘the least important as it can in no case be more than approximate’.82 The LSI, on the other hand, was an ‘exhaustive conspectus of all the dialects of each language examined’.83 When it came to enumerating the speakers of Baluchi in Sind, for example, as the Census did not divide the speakers according to dialects Grierson had to extrapolate from the figures.84 In some cases, Grierson explains the differences between the LSI and Census figures in terms of the former having to estimate the numbers of speakers of a language in non-British territories, such as Iranian Baluchistan, which of course the Census did not cover.85 Grierson also found that the number of speakers of a language and the number of members of the tribe who speak it did not always agree.86 In some cases figures could not be compared because of a steep increase in population, caused by immigration, as in the case of the Chenab canal colony.87 Grierson also presents figures which he believes to be ‘incorrect’, without explaining why.88 Similarly, he makes judgements as to which Census figures are more correct, presenting these decisions in provisional terms without always spelling out his reasons.89 Occasionally comparative tables for numbers of speakers are given with no interpretative or concluding comment; these convey the sense of a dutiful performance as it is not clear what these tables are meant to do other than to display figures.90 At times Grierson is almost casual 203

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in presenting figures, giving statistical information with no sources cited,91 or describing himself as being ‘inclined to put down’ figures.92 Although he has separate figures for Sindhi Jatki and Lahnda Jatki in Baluchistan, he amalgamates the two ‘for the sake of statistics’.93 When some members of a tribe speak one dialect, and others another, after admitting that it is not possible to decide how many of the speakers should be assigned to each, he puts down the whole total as belonging to one of them for the sake of convenience. He also adds some speakers of Kol to the total of Mundari speakers for reasons of ‘convenience’.94 Grierson often uses the word ‘approximate’ to describe his figures, and the reasons given for this include Census returns not covering all parts of a territory, lack of figures for dialects, the difficulties of forming accurate estimates of speakers when it comes to ‘vagrant tribes’, and the uncertain borders between languages.95 In keeping with the LSI’s openness to uncertainty, he is explicit about sets of figures that cannot be relied upon, describing them as ‘rough’, ‘untrustworthy’ and to be used with ‘great reserve’. He points to the lack of statistical information and the impossibility of making ‘exact’ statements with regard to speakers of some dialects.96 Where there is a large increase in the number of speakers in a language or dialect, Grierson is unable to decide whether the increase is ‘real or only apparent’.97 ‘Secret languages’ by their very nature presented difficulties when it came to enumeration of speakers.98 In the case of a lingua franca, it is ‘impossible to give more than an approximate number of the speakers’; all Grierson can do is ‘put together’ the ‘best estimate’.99 A good example of these adjustments and problems with statistical information about speakers pertains to Panjabi speakers. Grierson noted the difference of 310,744 speakers between the 1891 Census and the LSI’s figures here. This is because Round numbers are employed as much as possible in the Survey, partly due to the fact that many of the Survey figures are independent estimates made by local officials some seven or eight years after the Census had been taken, and partly to the inclusion, in the Survey figures, of small items which, in the Census tables, are grouped under other languages. In border tracts where one language merges into another, classification necessarily depends much on personal equation, which must be allowed for in dealing with statistics of this kind.100

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Here, then, Grierson outlines the factors contributing to the makeshift nature of the LSI’s enumeration. Moreover, the 1891 Census did not enumerate the speakers of languages like Panjabi in Kashmir, Rajputana and Central India, so Grierson could not rely on it to estimate Panjabi speakers outside Panjab. The 1901 Census did not distinguish between Lahnda/Siraiki and Panjabi, whose totals bore the proportion of 3 and 17 to each other in Grierson’s estimate. Grierson assumes that this proportion is also true for the 1891 Census, and deducts from its figures at that proportion to arrive at the number of speakers of Lahnda.101 Similar calculations are made for Bangaru and Ghebi,102 and for the speakers of Maithili outside the Maithili tract. Here Grierson performs various calculations, which he qualifies as not ‘borne out by local experience’, but he offers the figures as having a ‘better foundation than any other assertion which can be made on the point, and [I] give them for what they are worth’.103 In fact, it is not clear how committed Grierson is to the enumeration of speakers. His attitude seems half-hearted. The ‘Classified List of Indian Languages as shown in The Linguistic Survey of India and in the Census of 1921’, which forms appendix 1 in volume 1, part 1, makes explicit the uncertainties, adjustments and approximations in speakers’ numbers. The notes and comments refer to ‘admittedly rough estimates’, the unavailability of figures altogether, where the Census’s classification is followed for the sake of convenience, and where figures differ because of differences in how languages and dialects have been classified.104 One reason for this half-heartedness stems from the fact that there is no generally accepted criterion for distinguishing between a dialect and a language. As a result, the enumeration of languages and their speakers can vary, as is clear from the Indian Census, which in 1961 listed 1,642 languages, in 1971 221 languages and in 1981 106 languages. The distinction between major and minor languages can also be arbitrary.105 Moreover, the philological importance of a language is not connected to the number of its speakers. This is the case with Ormuri, where Grierson writes that it might seem like a ‘waste of time to give an account of the language of so small and insignificant a tribe’, but its language raises ‘most interesting philological and ethnological questions’.106 A related point had been made earlier by one worker in the Survey, who distinguished between the dialects that were numerically important in their district and those that were philologically important.107 Similarly, the dialect of the Dangs of Karauli

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and Jaipur is ‘a rude dialect between Braj Bhasha and Jaipuri, but like many of these rude dialects, it unlocks some curious secrets’.108 ‘Rudeness’ does not preclude philological value. Finally, as we have seen, the LSI had to confront various instances of language death. In such cases, the death of a language was irreparable and made the language invaluable even though its speakers no longer existed. Here having no numbers at all magnified the value of the language that had vanished. Thus, the philological importance of a language could not be quantified, and this may also have been a factor in Grierson’s half-hearted enthusiasm for enumerating speakers.

Conclusion When proposing the LSB, Morgan Webb described the relevant LSI volumes as ‘neither complete, nor correct, nor up-to-date’. In response, Grierson stated, ‘no one is more aware of the incompleteness of the Survey of the Tibeto-Burman languages of India Proper than I am myself’.109 Webb’s view resonates with Grierson’s own characterisation of the Survey in its entirety. The LSI’s power and authority lie in its idiom of doubt, shortcomings and uncertainty because this is part of its rigour. Its idiom reflects the nature of its work in a complex linguistic environment with problematic and inadequate material and a huge range of collaborators, many of them linguistically untrained. It also reflects its affiliation to a disciplinary field where knowledge was in a state of flux and development, with new material coming to light and fresh discoveries being made. Hence it is the Survey’s acknowledgement of its shortcomings and provisionality which bolsters its authority rather than any expressed sense of the mastery of India as a linguistic region. The next chapter examines one more aspect of the Survey which does not fit with the idea of colonial surveys as expressing a language of command or deploying oppressively reductive categories.

Notes 1 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 4: Specimens of the Pahārī languages and Gujurī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1916, p. 458; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 4: Muṇḍā and Dravidian Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906, p. 343, Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, pp. 458, 903. 2 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Pt. 1: Introductory, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927,

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3

4 5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

p. 89 on the Gond languages; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 1: General Introduction, Specimens of the Tibetan Dialects, the Himalayan Dialects, and the North Assam Group, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1909, p. 573 on Aka, p. 503 on Chaudangi; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bodo, Nāgā, and Kachin Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, 3, p. 236 on Rongma or Unzi, p. 329 on the Eastern Naga Group; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 3: Specimens of the Kuki-Chin and Burma Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1904, p. 109 on Zahao, p. 207 on Langrong. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 11: Gipsy Languages, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, p. 8; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 10: Specimens of Languages of the Eranian Family, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1921, p. 509; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 15; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Dardic or Piśācha Languages (including Kāshmīrī), Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919, pp. 70, 89; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 530; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, pp. 62, 223. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 505; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, p. 255; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 69. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 6; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, pp. 174, 510, 516; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 185; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, pp. 62, 223. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 227, 518; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 2: Mōn-Khmēr and Siamese-Chinese Families (Including Khassi and Tai), Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1904, p. 167; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, pp. 149, 386. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 6; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 174; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 3. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 458; Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of the Bengali and Assamese Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, p. 147; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 233; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, pp. 191, 373, 428. 11: 1; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, p. 8. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 340, 363, 369, 371. For other references to ‘corrupt’ material see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, pp. 145, 348, 386, 429; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, pp. 343, 529, 555. Linguistic Survey Files, S/1/2/5, See Grierson’s note on specimens still due, Asia and Africa Collection, British Library, hereafter LS Files. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Western Hindī and Pañjābī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1916, p. 105. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 387. European Manuscripts, EUR 223/283, D.L. Lorimer to Grierson, 23.9. 1925, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London, hereafter EUR only.

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16 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 197. 17 LS Files S/1/14/7, Grierson to R.V. Russell, Provincial Superintendent of Census Operations, Central Provinces, 30.12.1901, regarding the specimen of Nahali. 18 Ibid., Grierson to Superintendent Census Operations, Central Provinces, 25.3.1901, Superintendent Census Operations to Grierson, 13.12.1901. 19 LS Files S/1/13/4, R.H. Campbell, Agent to Governor, Vizagapatm District, to Grierson, 23.9.1903 & 23.11.1903, and Grierson to R.H. Campbell, 22.12.1903. 20 LS Files S/1/9/16, Poona Office of DPI, 17.2.1903 attaching note from A.H.A. Simcox, 22.1.1903. 21 LS Files S/1/9/10, A.H.A. Simcox to Grierson, attaching ‘Instructions for compiling translations in various dialects according to the requirements of the philological survey of India’, 21.10.1901; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 3: The Bhīl Languages, including Khāndēśí, Banjārī or Labhānī, Bahrūpiā, & c., Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1907, ‘Introductory Note’. 22 LS Files S/1/2/3, Grierson to Waddell, 25.9.1899. 23 LS Files S/1/4/7, Copy of extract from Report on Mishmi expedition, on Mishmi lang, by T.J. Needham, political officer, Simla. For other references to ‘unfriendly’ tribes when trying to get linguistic information, see S/1/4/10, Capt. A.E. Woods, Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, to Grierson, 6/13.7.1900. 24 LS Files S/1/4/14, J.H. Hutton to Grierson, 23.6.1922, on how the Loi were ‘rather ashamed of having any language other than Meithi and anyone who does not know them extremely well is not likely to find out much’. 25 LS Files S/1/4/4, A.H. Cumming to Grierson, 14.7.1900. 26 LS Files S/1/9/16, Grierson to Chief Secretary to Government of Bombay, 17.12.1900. 27 LS Files S/1/7/3, Deputy Commissioner Chhindwara to Grierson, 1.9.1899, on some of the dialects in Chhindwara; S/1/12/2, Gurdon to Grierson, 1.1.1901, on informants being reluctant to come to Chitral, and S/1/9/12, District Deputy Collector Belgaum to Collector Belgaum District, 7.11.1899. 28 LS Files S/1/5/3, Collector of Saharanpur to Grierson, 23.7.1896, attaching form filled out for the Linguistic Survey by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. 29 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 223. 30 Ibid., p. 70; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 462; see also Grierson, LSI, Vol. 2, p. 79, where there are no specimens for Phakial, so no information is provided. 31 LS Files S/1/14/2, Grierson to Edward Gait, 28.2.1911. 32 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 250. 33 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 3, pp. 302–3. 34 Ibid., p. 275. 35 Ibid., p. 272. 36 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 187. 37 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, pp. 206–7. 38 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, p. 356. 39 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, pp. 241, 330, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 2, p. 169.

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40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

LS Files S/1/3/1, Grierson to Gordon, 29.11.1905. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 903. LS Files S/1/14/1, Grierson to H.H. Risley, 12.3.1902. Ibid., Grierson to Edward Gait, 20.5.1912, and Grierson to J.T. Marten, 8.4.1920 & 29.12.1921. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, pp. 29–30, on the difficulties of classifying the ‘Kafir’ group; see the discussion of Bhil dialects and the origins of the tribes in Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 3, pp. 9–10, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 145, on how ‘extremely difficult’ it is to classify the Manjhi dialect. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 10, 467. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, p. 383, and EUR 223/327, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 29.8.1922. LS Files S/1/1/22, Grierson to Pater W. Schmidt, 15.2.1924. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Rājasthānī and Gujarātī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1908, p. 147; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 363, 450, 529; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8: Indo-Aryan Family (North-Western Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Sindhī and Lahndā, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1919, p. 142; George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 7: Indo-Aryan Family (Southern Group), Specimens of the Marāṭhī Language, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1905, p. 335; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, p. 419. In his correspondence similar points are made about mixed dialects: for example, LS Files S/1/14/7, Grierson to R.V. Russell, 24.2.1902 on Chhindwara Kumbhari; EUR 223/306, Grierson to A.C. Woolner, 3.3.1921, and LS Files S/1/14/7, Grierson to R.V. Russell, 24.2.1902 & 6.4.1902. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 60. LS Files S/1/14/3, Grierson to Edward Gait, Gait, 30.5.1900. LS Files S/1/14/1, Grierson to H.H. Risley, 8.11.1900, referring to the hill languages in Bombay province; S/1/13/3, Grierson to V. Venkayya, 22.10.1905, on Grierson’s nervousness about Dravidian languages. EUR 223/237, Grierson to Hugh Chisholm, 10.11.1905 & 11.2.1905. EUR 223/332, R.L. Turner to Grierson, 12.11.1924 & 15.10.1927, and Grierson to Turner, 17.6.1926 & 16.10.1927 for the details of this disagreement. EUR 223/316, T. Grahame Bailey to Grierson, 29.11.1932, 1.12.1932 & 29.12.1932, Grierson to Bailey, 14.3.1933, and EUR 223/283, D.L. Lorimer to Grierson, 25.11.1927. EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 3.4.1922. See the extensive exchange with E.A. Sonnenschein in LS Files S/1/1/35, discussed in Ch. 4 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. EUR 223/332, Grierson to R.L. Turner, 15.11.1926. Grierson adds ‘To take one stage of development as the parent of a general rule, and to look upon living words not in that stage as exceptions, is to sin against the first great rule laid down by Atkinson and Burgmann, that the existence of a single unexplained exception to a general rule proves that the rule is not general and is faulty’.

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58 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 6 on Dardic languages; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 195. 59 LS Files S/1/14/3, Grierson to Edward Gait, 30.3.1902. 60 LS Files S/1/14/6, Grierson to Superintendent of Census Operations, Panjab, 14.3.1901. 61 EUR 223/304, Grierson to Dean of Elphin, 10.3.1936, on how Giles’s remarks on the dialects of NWF in the Encyclopaedia Britannica were based on what Grierson wrote in 1906 but published in 1927; EUR 223/289, Grierson to Georg Morgenstierne, 12.1.1925, on how his views on Dardic languages’ origins changed since the relevant volume on these was published. 62 EUR 223/306, Grierson to A.C. Woolner, 3.3.1921. 63 LS Files S/1/14/1, Grierson to H.H. Risley, 30.7.1902. 64 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 265–6, 247, 235. 65 Ibid., pp. 370, 216–20, 210–16. 66 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 328; see also LS Files S/1/1/11, Grierson to R. Kilgour, 11.2.1927, where he comments on Lorimer’s materials as being much better than those in LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2. 67 LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to Deputy Secretary of Government of India, Home Dept., 30.3.1903. 68 EUR 223/226, Grierson to S.K. Chatterji, 19.11.1920. 69 EUR 223/327, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 9.3.1923, referring to L.F. Taylor’s, ‘The Kadus’, Journal of Burma Research Society, 1922, 12 (1); 50–4. See also George A. Grierson, ‘Kadu and Its Relatives’, Bulletin of School of Oriental Studies, 1921, 2: 39–42. 70 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 6.12.1920. 71 EUR 223/317, T. Grahame Bailey to Grierson, 21.11.1927. 72 LS Files S/1/14/12, Grierson to Morgan Webb, 20.5.1912, EUR 223/289, Georg Morgenstierne to Grierson, 22.4.1935, LS Files S/1/14/11, and Grierson to C.E. Luard, Superintendent of Census Operations, Central India, 13.9.1901, where Grierson speaks of being ‘in a fog’ about Bhili. 73 EUR 223/226, S.K. Chatterji to Grierson, 1.1.1920. 74 EUR 223/306, Grierson to A.C. Woolner, 20.4.1922, and LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 6.12.1920, on being an amateur in indo-Chinese languages; EUR 223/289, Grierson to Georg Morgenstierne, 24.6.1930, referring to mistakes he made with regard to Torwali. 75 EUR 223/226, Grierson to S.K. Chatterji, 2.2.1921. 76 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, Ch. 6. 77 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 25. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., pp. 26–7, Appendix 1 pp. 390–411, Appendix 1A pp. 411–17, Appendix 4b pp. 418–9. 80 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 10: Specimens of Languages of the Eranian Family, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1921, pp. 413–4, uses the 1911 Census for Balochi, while Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, uses the 1901 Census figures for Eastern Pahari. 81 Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 148, referring to Korwa. 82 LS Files S/1/14/1, H.H. Risley to Grierson, 24.3.1901.

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83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104 105

106 107 108 109

Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, p. 25. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, pp. 413–4. Ibid., pp. 328, 333. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 2, p. 79. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 280. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 19 on speakers of Khas-Kura in British India. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 4, p. 1 on the 1901 Census figures being ‘more nearly’ representative for Eastern Pahari than the 1891 Census figures, which are ‘certainly incorrect’. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 3, pp. 108–9, on the estimates of the Bhil languages in the state of Baroda. For some examples, see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 50, 53, 70, 71, 78, 87, 90, 183, 188, 191, 195, 200, 203, 258, 273, 288. Ibid., p. 1. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 138. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 7, p. 296, referring to the Kumbhars of Chhindwara, some of whom speak Bundeli, others Marathi; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 82, where Grierson puts the 4,400 speakers down under Bundeli. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 10 on Pashto; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 176 on the Bawarias and 185 on the Habura tribe and p. 1 on the blurred lines between Rajasthani and Western Hindi, and Rajasthani and Sindhi; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 457 on 306, 241 inhabitants of Ganjam and Vizagapatam not returning their language. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 1, 32, 448; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 2, p. 2; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 3, pp. 16, 61; Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 106, 198, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, pp. 451, 411, 329, 73. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 4, p. 409 on the increase in the speakers of Japlaiguri, p. 229 on the increase in the numbers of Gadaba speakers. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 389–419. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 43 on literary ‘Hindostani’. Ibid., pp. 613–4. Ibid. Ibid., p. 68, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 468. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bihārī and Oṛiyā Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, pp. 14–15. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, pp. 389–419. Jyotirindra Dasgupta, ‘Language policy and National Development in India’, in Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly (eds), Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 24, 26. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 124. LS Files S/1/5/3, Note by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, 20.7.1896. LS Files S/1/14/5, Grierson to Burns, 6.4.1902. LS Files S/1/13/2, Grierson to Morgan Webb, 20.6.1917.

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8 NAMES AND AUTHORSHIP 1

There are other aspects of the LSI which do not conform to the idea of colonial surveys as expressing a language of command or as fixing Indian realities through the deployment of reductive categories. In this chapter I show how Grierson is at odds with colonial attempts to stabilise Indian names, and how his own name is destabilised through the Survey. The discreteness of Grierson’s name as an author becomes problematic, and it is drawn into an orbit of Indian names, with which it begins to share some characteristics. This reflects not just his own complex subject position but also the way joint authorship characterises the LSI’s production of knowledge and some of Grierson’s other key texts.

Indian names as aliases Colonialism raised the question of what constituted an individual in India because its systems of categorisation (e.g., in the Census) counted Indians as members of pre-existing caste and religious groups. As individuals, Indians were entirely subsumed into these groups. On the other hand, under surveillance and through legal disciplinary processes Indians had to be disaggregated into identifiable individuals as separate, discrete entities. Here the problems transliteration created for the fixing of Indian proper names preoccupied some officials, because proper names are meant to identify individuals, but if Indian names are transliterated inconsistently it becomes difficult to know whether different individuals are being referred to or the same individual is being referenced. Thus, colonial officials standardising the names of individual Indians in Roman script turned on the larger issue of the consistent identifiability and differentiation of Indian individuals from each other. 212

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I have discussed colonial projects to fix Indian names elsewhere.2 I showed how these in effect perpetuated the instabilities of Indian proper names while trying to ‘fix’ them. Moreover, although proper names are supposedly untranslatable (one does not translate Pierre or Peter as ‘rock’3), some colonial officials de-individuated Indians by translating their proper names. In his A Dissertation on the Proper Names of Panjâbîs (1883), R.C. Temple has a table called ‘Names of Hindus’, in which he translates Indian proper names twice over – first as a literal translation, then in an ‘applied’ translation.4 Moreover, this table is divided into sections, listing the objects from which Indian proper names are derived. The first group refers to names derived ‘from common objects in daily and domestic life’.5 So Indian proper names are translated thrice – first literally, secondly nonliterally and thirdly, as derived from common nouns for objects. For Temple, then, Indian names are not proper at all; they are common and this makes it hard to use them to identify Indian individuals. To a certain extent, this reflects how for colonial projects like the Census, Indian individuals are counted only to de-individuate them by subsuming them entirely under the categories of caste and religious community.

Joint authorship There is no discussion in colonial scholarship that I have come across which discusses translating English names in the same way as Indian names can be translated; English names, and the reified individuality they point to, remain secure from translation. However, this is not the case with Grierson’s name and the individuality it signifies. His name behaves like Indian names, and the LSI is a site in which Grierson’s name acquires Indian-like characteristics in terms of it becoming unstable and difficult to fix clearly. First, Grierson’s name is translated into India, in the establishment of a bazaar named Griersonganj in his honour in Madhubhani, where he was subdivisional officer for a time.6 This name has now been shortened by locals to ‘Grierganj’, so it has been further Indianised because the Indian suffix now constitutes half of the name.7 Grierson’s hybridised name and its mark as a place on the Indian map are eloquent of his complex subject position and fluctuating Indianness. It also indicates how his name has been drawn into an orbit of Indian names. Secondly, for the Survey some names bear a migratory status in their very constitution, as with ‘Gipsy’ forenames. Grierson was asked by 213

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one correspondent to supply the etymologies of some of these. He passed the query on to an authority on Romani, who describes how these names got ‘mutilated and modified under the influence of popular Etomology [sic]’. The latter admits, however, that ‘there remains a residue, which I am afraid I cannot trace’.8 We have seen how Grierson’s own name gets modified by popular etymology as it migrates to India. He also had a problematic if productive subject position, straddling the terms ‘Britain’, ‘India’ and ‘Ireland’, and so he had a cosmopolitan migratory status while being colonial at the same time.9 Furthermore, there is an element in Grierson’s name which cannot be fixed, which is his middle name, ‘Abraham’. It is not clear whether this is a residue of Jewish ancestry. It is worth noting, though, that when putting up his personal library of 5,000 to 6,000 volumes for sale, Grierson was not prepared to sell the volumes on Hebrew literature.10 In addition, in 1935 the Jewish Post, whose aim was to promote goodwill between Jewish and non-Jewish communities, contacted Grierson. They wanted a message of support and a photograph from Grierson.11 It is unclear from this whether the Post assumed Grierson had some Jewish links in his ancestry. However, as superintendent of the LSI, Grierson was viewed as a person who bridged languages, communities and cultures. In this context, the hint of possible Jewishness is suggestive of a diasporic and cosmopolitan connectivity that transcends national boundaries, and this is borne out by his name. There is a residue to his name which, as in Romani names, cannot be clearly traced. Thirdly, when Grierson passed on the query about Romani names to his correspondent, the latter commented in his reply, ‘The Gipsy is nothing, if not self-advertising in dress and manners and this applies also to the funny names which he often takes’.12 In a way, Grierson’s own name was ‘self-advertising’. It had to resonate because, as we have seen, he was reliant on the goodwill of the Indian and provincial governments, and that of officers who collected information for the Survey on top of their other duties when no separate provision had been made for it. One of Grierson’s collaborators, Hoernle, mentioned in 1886 how Grierson exerted ‘personal influence to get information’. He added, ‘The people will promise you anything to help me. But they desert me, as soon as your back is turned’.13 We have also seen in 1899 Grierson moved to England, where for 25 of his 30 years as superintendent he oversaw the LSI from Camberley. Geographical distance contributed to and required the efficacy of his name for the Survey to work. The complexity of Grierson’s name also comes to the fore in the context of authorship. We have seen how the LSI’s proposal was 214

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supported by key figures because Grierson had already made a name for himself in the field of Indian language scholarship. At one level, the name ‘Grierson’ functioned as an authorial name in conventional ways. In his essay ‘What Is an Author?’ Foucault argues the author’s proper name serves as a means of classification. It groups together texts and differentiates them from other texts and points to certain groupings of discourse, their circulation and their status within a society.14 Grierson performs these roles in explicit ways. For example, he played a key role in sending copies of the Survey’s gramophone records to major libraries on the European continent and the British Isles,15 and took a leading part in the circulation of the LSI’s volumes and its institutionalisation in the Western academy.16 Grierson also belonged to an organisation called the Society of Authors,17 and he occasionally stressed his authorial agency in relation to the LSI. In a letter to the editor of the Times, dated 8 October 1919, he asserts with regard to the Survey, ‘every line has been written, and every figure calculated, by me, personally’.18 Thus, he activated his name in the press as an author in relation to the Survey’s volumes and asserted his authorial sovereignty over these. However, Grierson’s name does not operate in a uniform manner in relation to the LSI and his status as an author is complex. The Survey both deepened and complicated Grierson’s status as an author. His role was an amalgamation of author, superintendent and editor, and his name mediated and generated several other authors’ names. This is illustrated by his changing relationship to the Survey’s volumes. Volume 3, part 1 was prepared by Sten Konow of Christiana, Norway, but the material and notes were compiled by Professor Conrady of Leipzig, who transferred this work to Konow before ‘he had thrown the results into a connected form’.19 So in this volume authorship is a team effort. Grierson insists, though, he is responsible for all the statements contained in the volume, even though Konow ‘has been allowed complete liberty for displaying individuality of treatment, and the volumes prepared by him are entirely his work’.20 This terminology of throwing results into a connected form, and of editing, preparing and individualising the treatment of information, suggests how the authorial function is not universal or constant in the authoring of the LSI’s knowledge. Grierson’s note to volume 11 tells us that this volume was also prepared by Konow. Grierson went over the manuscript and ‘here and there added a few remarks over my signature’; again, as ‘general editor’ he is responsible for all the statements in this volume.21 In volume 9, part 3, the sections dealing with 215

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Bhil and Khandeshi were prepared by Konow (pp. 1–253) but edited by Grierson, with the rest of the volume prepared by Grierson.22 In addition, other parts of the Survey’s volumes came ‘directly from his [Konow’s] pen’, including sections in volume 3, parts 2 and 3, volume 4 and volume 7.23 When Konow sent Grierson his curriculum vitae in support of his application to be retained on half-pay in the Survey, Konow listed these volumes under his authored works.24 The Survey, then, is marked by joint authorship. The dispersal of authorial functions extended to proofreading the volumes. Grierson sent proofs of some parts of the LSI volumes to missionaries to correct.25 V. Venkayya, the government epigraphist at Madras, checked the proofs for volume 4. Sections of other volumes were sent to others to proofread.26 Konow also sent sections he prepared to others for proofreading.27 Examples include the Oriya section of the LSI, checked and corrected by Babu Madhu Sudan Rao, the headmaster of the Cuttack Training School, and Babu Ramanath Das, deputy inspector of schools in Balasore.28 Mahamahopadhyeya Pandit corrected the proofs for Bengali with his colleague Babu Syama Charan Ganguli, while the Diwan of Cooch Behar State also corrected proofs.29 Grierson sent the draft grammar and proofs for Kumauni to Pandit Ganga Dat Upreti, the author of Proverbs and Folklore of Kumaun and Garhwal (1894).30 John Sampson, the eminent scholar of Romani, substantially corrected and rewrote the list of Romani words for the Comparative Vocabulary.31 Grierson’s list and specimens of Assamese were checked by Captain Philip R. Gurdon and others.32 Moreover, the reciprocally binding relationships of an exchange of learning and materials generated by the LSI’s joint authorship created a further chain of authors. The Gujarati sections of the LSI were proofread and corrected by G.P. Taylor, whom Grierson encouraged to bring out a 2nd edition of his Gujarātī Grammar. Taylor sought Grierson’s permission to use some of the prodigal son versions from the LSI in his revised grammar.33 Similarly, Reverend A.H. Francke of the Moravian mission corrected the proofs of the Tibetan section of volume 3, and in an indication of how the collaborative effort of the Survey could pay dividends to contributors, he used the payment for his proofreading towards a subvention for the publication of his A History of Western Tibet (1907).34 The correspondence between Francke and Grierson is another example of how reciprocal obligations developed as a result of the LSI’s teamwork over a period of time. Earlier Francke had sent Grierson a manuscript of his Ladakhi grammar, which Grierson recommended for publication to the Indian 216

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government. Grierson checked the proofs in 1901, altering its terminology to suit English conventions where these differed from German ones.35 Joint authorship not only fed into the LSI’s composition but also generated a chain of authorship in reciprocal interaction with it. Grierson described the LSI as a ‘thousand-men job’.36 This apt description applied to every stage of the LSI, from generating specimens to co-authoring and proofreading volumes. A good example of how this collaborative effort was manifested textually is in the specimen from Attock. This came from a tehsildar via the deputy commissioner and had the Ghebi text in the Persian script, an Urdu translation in shikasta in parallel columns, Grierson’s transcription into the Roman script, English words typed under each Ghebi word, and a ‘free’ translation under each verse. Grierson also made queries in the margins of the text for the commissioner to respond to.37 As the specimen moved between individuals and across scripts and languages, it was marked by diverse hands, and by a dialogical process of query and responses. In this process, Grierson moved in and out as superintendent, author, editor, compiler and scholar. Thus, Grierson’s authorship is not uniform or constant in the creation of the LSI’s volumes. As we have seen, these volumes incorporated published material as well, so as one of his correspondents said, the LSI was also an editorial feat.38 Throwing into connected form the Survey’s knowledge brings about, and relies on, the dispersal of authorial functions among multiple figures.39 In fact, the striking feature of Grierson’s career as an author is the preponderance of jointly authored works he put his name to. Here I concentrate on just some of these works. Grierson’s edition of The Lay of Alha (1923) is an example of a jointly produced work in which it is difficult to say where one author’s contribution ends and another begins. The Lay reproduces five cantos fully translated and two partially translated by ICS officer William Waterfield, seven extracts by Grierson based on Sir Charles Elliott’s papers, and nine abstracts done entirely by Grierson. Waterfield’s original translations appeared in the Calcutta Review of 1875–76.40 His Indian Ballads were published earlier in 1868,41 and in 1913 this was reprinted in India by the Panini office, Bahadurganj, Allahabad.42 Grierson may be referring to this text when he mentions to Philip Waterfield how his father’s poems were published in India ‘without your authority’.43 Thus, The Lay emerges from the joint efforts of William and his son Philip Waterfield, who sent Grierson his father’s papers, Sir Charles 217

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Elliott and Grierson. It incorporates previously printed versions and unpublished manuscript material.44 The songs are recreated in the style of English border ballads, which gives an idea ‘of the rough and somewhat antique’ Bundeli Hindi dialect of the original.45 Grierson sent drafts of the edition to Philip Waterfield for his comments.46 The preface is by the latter, who was guided in this by Grierson.47 Grierson’s introduction reproduces a long citation from the elder Waterfield’s original preface,48 followed by his own discussion. In fact, Waterfield had written two introductions, and Grierson had in his possession a copy of both. He consolidated them into one, using Waterfield’s ‘words as much as possible’.49 Here, then, joint authorship includes rewriting other authors’ input. It brings together separately authored portions of texts with a redrafting of some of them, and it is not possible to ascertain where one author’s voice ends and another’s begins. Grierson was anxious to keep his own abstracts ‘discreetly in the background’ so as ‘not to overwhelm’ Waterfield’s translations. He stressed this to publishers: ‘I am very anxious that my additions should not overshadow Mr. Waterfield’s verses’.50 For him, joint authorship was a careful balancing act, in which authors facilitated rather than dominated each other. This is also represented visually in the published edition, with Waterfield’s versions reproduced in larger type than the abstracts in order to ‘elucidate [his] admirable version, and . . . draw attention to the merits of the bardic literature’ of Rajputana.51 However, Grierson decided on the final title of the edition. It was also at Grierson’s suggestion that the diacritics over the vowels in ‘Ālhā’ and ‘Rājpūt’ were omitted on the title page as they look ‘learned, and might frighten people’.52 Thus, joint authorship included fluctuations in authorial agency, from staying in the background to deciding on the title of the work and expanding the text. Finally, other names and projects are brought into play with The Lay. Grierson had published portions of the Kanauji recension of the poem in the Indian Antiquary (vol. 14) which had an edition of the text and a translation of one version as current in Bihar at the time. Volume 9, part 1 of the Survey had a section on the songs of Alha and Udal, where Grierson discusses James Tod’s and Waterfield’s work. Here Grierson reproduces two extracts from the cycle given to him by Vincent Smith.53 Later Grierson mentions The Lay in his correspondence with Sir James Frazer, in which he refers to the text for some parallels to customs and rituals in the latter’s Folklore in the Old Testament (1919).54 In some ways The Lay is also a textual response to Crooke’s edition of Tod’s Rajasthan (1920, 3 vols), in which there is 218

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an account of one of the episodes in the story of Alha and Udal. Here Grierson refers to the many popular editions of this tale in Indian bazaars, as well as to Waterfield’s version in the Calcutta Review.55 For Grierson, then, joint authorship also involved mapping out a network of intertextuality to activate the book in a culture of comparative readings. The Lay is therefore a collaborative project which brings together work by diverse figures. As such, it dovetails with the nature of the cycle itself – Elliott’s manuscript of the poem relied on three to four minstrels producing a complete set from their ‘joint memories’.56 As a joint inter-generational oral text, it is recreated in a jointly produced print version. Authority over the text is diverse, diffuse and shifting, and Grierson’s labour slips and slides between different levels of intervention. He is a textual mediator in a chain of transmissions, which cross over from oral recitation into print culture, and he blurs the roles between authoring, translating, editing, abstracting, transliterating and recreating. Grierson also networks The Lay with that other massive collaborative project, the LSI, and he brings it into play with works such as Frazer’s Folklore in the Old Testament and Crooke’s edition of Tod. In the end, The Lay is a coalescence of voices in a web of intertextuality with previous versions and other works, rather than a neatly authored and discrete text. In some ways, Grierson’s name even became synonymous with collaborative authorship. Sir Aurel Stein was convinced that Grierson’s name alone would secure the publication of jointly authored works.57 When L.F. Taylor sent Grierson notes on tones, Grierson was prepared to ‘arrange what you have sent into an article’. For his part, Taylor said if his ‘notes are to be published, I would rather that the article should emanate from yourself’.58 Using the language of ‘emanations’ here signals how in this scenario authors are not singular originators of knowledge but rather vessels for its flow. At one point Aurel Stein uses similar language. He refers to the books in Grierson’s library as ‘preserving spiritual emanations .  .  . from the wonderful work that was being done by you among them’.59 The use of the term ‘emanations’ also resonates with the séance culture of the LSI recordings, suggesting as it does incorporeal presences and arcane lines of influence. Séance culture raised questions about authorial agency, as we have seen. The Survey’s metaphor of the séance therefore also captures the fluid epistemological and enunciative space of its joint authorship, and like séances, the Survey is a collective performance in which power, authority and authorship move across different figures. 219

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However, the Survey’s joint authorship did produce some tensions. In 1929 Grahame Bailey outlined his contributions to the LSI’s volumes. His tone conveys an aggrieved sense of his name not being as prominently associated with the LSI as Grierson’s was: I suppose there was no one anywhere who looked forward with such keenness to the appearance of each volume of the Survey as I did . . . except you and Konow of course, though I can hardly think that your interest was greater than mine. And I suppose that after you two there was no one who had so much to do with the preliminaries. In the last volume (the one which has recently arrived) six of the lists are taken from either my books or from material which I sent direct to you, and in the case of 12 to 15 (including the six) I have had the pleasure of having had some part in the list. Looking at the Survey as a whole, I was counting up the other day, and find I have helped to supply the material for about 30 of the dialects. This excludes Panjabi and Ṣiṇā dialects in connection with which only passing references are made to anything I may have written.60 There are also instances where joint authorship did not bear fruit, as when Grierson tried to recruit August Conrady as an author for the Himalayan Tibeto-Burmese languages.61 When Conrady failed to complete the manuscript, Grierson suggested he deal with the 15 or 16 dialects he had notes for and return the other papers.62 In 1903 Grierson wrote increasingly frantic letters to Conrady requesting the return of the papers, because the Survey’s progress ‘was stopped for want of them’.63 Here, then, Conrady did not achieve the status of joint author, although he is acknowledged as a contributor in volume 3, part 1 and part 3. Thus, the LSI bears witness to the wreckages of joint authorship as well as its successes.

Indian names and joint authorship Another important strand in the LSI’s culture of learning is joint authorship with Indians. In general, the knowledge of India as a linguistic region produced in the colonial period involved relationships of cooperation, exchange and pedagogy between Indians and the British. Many of the Indian linguists who ran the Linguistic Society of India, founded in 1928 at the 5th Oriental Conference in Lahore, had 220

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studied at the School of Oriental Studies or elsewhere in Britain.64 Some key Indian linguists, such as Siddheswar Varma and B.D. Jain, had been Turner’s pupils, who also examined V.S. Ghate’s Cambridge thesis and supervised other Indian students on Indian languages and linguistics.65 S.K. Chatterji had been Daniel Jones’s student in London, while Daniel Jones himself went on a lecturing tour in India, during which he discussed phonetics with Indian scholars and students.66 Grierson was asked to examine the theses of Indian students in Britain, such as Baburam Saksena’s ‘Evolution of Awadhi’ and Sudhakar Jha’s edition of an unpublished Maithili manuscript in 1931 and 1933 respectively.67 He turned down the invitation to examine Banarsi Das’s PhD thesis because of illness.68 Grierson discussed Indian languages and linguistics with Indian correspondents in his letters,69 and kept abreast of publications in the field by Indians, discussing these with their authors (see ahead). Some of these authors, many of them distinguished, like D.R. Bhandarkar and A. Coomarswamy, sent their work to Grierson for his comments.70 His comments on S.K. Chatterji’s work were detailed, reflecting their long-standing relationship as colleagues in the field. Chatterji also read and commented on Grierson’s own publications.71 Grierson forwarded some of Chatterji’s publications to other scholars in the field.72 He also interacted with a number of other Indian students who were doing higher degrees in Britain.73 As one of the LSI’s critics noted, the bulk of the Survey had to be conducted by correspondence.74 This correspondence shows how the collection and transmission of specimens were undertaken by a wide range of institutionally affiliated Indian informants, including headmasters, college principals, assistant masters, deputy and assistant deputy educational inspectors, district magistrates, political assistants, extra assistant commissioners, secretaries to district boards, assistant surgeons, assistant settlement officers and other lower functionaries of the colonial state, such as mamlatdars.75 Deputy inspectors of schools also played a key role in some of Grierson’s other works, like the Seven Grammars of the Bihárí Language (1883–87).76 However, Indians also played a key role in the LSI’s transcontinental epistolary culture beyond gathering information for the Survey. First, Indian authors sent their articles and books to Grierson, thereby actively participating in the Survey’s broader circulatory culture of learning. These ranged from works on dialects,77 philological texts,78 language readers79 and dictionaries80 to papers on topics like Indian cultural and literary history, such as secularism and Hindu polities,81 commentaries on poets,82 histories of Indian literature,83 volumes of 221

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poems,84 literary editions,85 editions of dramas and plays,86 treatises on aesthetics,87 folk literature and the epics,88 ethnography and sociology,89 historiography in Indian languages,90 histories of ancient India (including ‘Greater India’),91 works on Hindu, Jain or Buddhist sects92 and religious and spiritual works (including devotional songs) with a Hindu or Jain tenor and outlook.93 Thus Indian authors sent a rich and wide range of works to Grierson. Not all the exchanges were Indiacentric; some of the correspondents addressed wider areas of comparison, as in the case of a paper on ‘Indian parallels to King Lear’s questions’.94 Grierson often reciprocated by sending Indians copies of his own publications, and he sometimes initiated the exchange of works by sending his Indian correspondents a copy of one of his own articles or books first.95 Secondly, Grierson shaped the work of Indians for publication, or facilitating its publication in journals. This was the case with Shyam Sundar Das’s work on Tulsi Das, and his Hindi book Bhāṣā vijñān.96 Bhandarkar revised one of his essays in the light of Grierson’s comments on its draft.97 Grierson encouraged Mata Prasad Gupta to translate his paper on ‘the chronology of the works of Tulsidas’ into English to make it more available to European scholars, and he approached the editor of a British journal to try to get this published.98 Grierson also played a role in getting Babu Dinesh Chandra Sen’s translation of his 2nd edition of Banga bhāṣā o sahityā published.99 Another example of an Indian scholar who engaged with Grierson’s work, in this case his ‘Gleanings from the Bhakta-Mala’ (JRAS, 1909) and some of his essays for Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1908–26), was Alkondavilli Govinchandra. The correspondence between the two involved exchanging their work on Vaishnavism and Bhagavata, and included discussing how key terms should be translated. Grierson shaped Govindchandra’s articles for publication in the JRAS, going over the proofs himself. Grierson also intervened with the printers Stephen Austin regarding the cost of printing Govinchandra’s manuscript, and it was at Govinchandra’s suggestion that Richard C. Temple approached Grierson for an article for the Indian Antiquary on ‘the universal religion’.100 Thus, Grierson and his Indian correspondents helped to shape each other’s publications and authorial profiles. Some Indian scholars valued Grierson’s help in boosting the reception of their work outside India, seeing it as a way of overcoming their uneven reception in India itself. Grierson recommended one of Sita Ram’s articles to the Journal of the German Oriental Society. Ram’s response (‘I shall now have the pleasure of seeing my note 222

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read by European scholars. My countrymen would either pass it over as worthless or indulge in vituperation’) suggests that he welcomed the chance of a wider readership, seeing it as counteracting a possible negative reception by Indian readers.101 Another of Grierson’s Indian correspondents felt his attempts to translate ‘Dravidian religious literature’ had suffered because of lack of encouragement and sympathy in India, and hence the patronage of scholars like Grierson was valuable in arranging its publication in Europe.102 When seeking Grierson’s help in getting his work noticed, Dinesh Chandra Sen expressed his frustration that scholars of ‘vernacular’ literature were undervalued in India.103 For these Indian scholars at least, the opportunity to have their work circulated abroad via Grierson was one they welcomed. Thirdly, Grierson publicised works by Indians by arranging reviews or notices in journals or by reviewing them himself.104 This was reciprocated; Grierson used his Indian contacts among the Hindi literati to get The Lay of Alha reviewed in Indian periodicals and newspapers.105 He also advised Indian authors on which libraries in Britain and the continent to send their books to, and recommended books by Indians to the Library at SOS with extensive comments on each.106 Grierson, then, facilitated the intercontinental flow and reception of scholarship by Indians through reviews in British and European periodicals, translations and the shaping of their articles and books in Britain and elsewhere. Indian voices were lodged in the global academic sphere of Indology of which the LSI was such an important part. In return, Grierson’s reputation and some of his own works benefited from Indians’ reviews and increased circulation. Works by Indians were also embedded in the printed knowledge order of the LSI’s volumes. The list of authorities for languages or dialects included texts by Indians in English or in Indian languages. The authorities for Gujarati include eight works by Indians in English, ranging from Gungadhur’s Grammar of the Guzerati Language (Bombay, 1840) to J. B. Mehta’s The Student’s English and Gujarati Dictionary (Bombay 1901). The bibliography also lists grammars, glossaries and dictionaries written in Gujarati, mostly by Indians.107 Another representative example of a bibliography which includes grammars, dictionaries, manuals and other texts by Indians in English and in the language being surveyed is the list of authorities for Panjabi.108 In the case of Marathi, of 19 grammars and readers cited, 11 are by Indians, and of 18 dictionaries, 11 are also by Indians.109 For Bengali, 32 dictionaries by Indians are listed.110 The list of authorities for other major languages, such as Telugu, ‘Canarese’ (i.e., Kannada) 223

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and Tamil, follows suit.111 The bibliographies for lesser-known languages and dialects like Bhojpuri, Oriya and Maithili are similar, as is that for Assamese.112 Many of the prodigal son passages in the volumes also acknowledge Indians.113 Thus, Indians and their work feature heavily in the LSI’s culture of learning and its transcontinental epistolary culture of textual circulation and exchange. Grierson helped some of his Indian correspondents to become authors, who in turned bolstered his own status as an expert on Indian languages and dialects. In fact, Grierson wanted to safeguard the proper names of Indians against the colonial tendency to undermine them through translation. As I have suggested earlier and elsewhere,114 colonial officials tried to fix Indian names but found it difficult to do so; these names behaved in ways which defied the attempt to systematise them in transliteration and translation. Grierson also engages with the slippage between Indian proper and common names in translation. He points out that in Hindi (as in other Indian languages) proper names are not marked with capital letters and have a meaning translatable as a common noun. When reading a book or narrative, the context tells a reader whether the word is a proper name. However, when a passage is taken from a book without a guiding context, this is not always clear. Hence in the Hindi exams set by the University of Cambridge’s local examination syndicate, Grierson suggests when setting unseen extracts a line should be prefaced mentioning all proper names.115 Here Grierson wanted to forestall any slippages between the proper names of Indians as authors and common nouns. Grierson was also adamant the ‘full, orthodox, spelling of the name’ of Indian authors should be given with diacritics in the ICS exams;116 in the context of authorship Indian names need to be properly highlighted and marked. There are other ways in which Grierson focuses on Indian names as authors. Wellisch has outlined four fields of application for script conversions. One of these is library and bibliographic control.117 The Romanisation of an author’s name in Western library catalogues has to fulfil three conditions: the Romanisation has to be standardised; its Romanised form has to be unambiguously reversible; and the place of Romanised documents and texts in an alphabetically arranged sequence must be uniquely predictable. As Wellisch shows, all these conditions are hard to fulfil in the case of non-European names. There are too many variant forms in the Roman script of non-European names and many of the latter cannot be reduced to standardised forms in the Western style. In 1964 the Indian librarian S.R. Ranganathan pointed to the ‘inherent futility of Western attempts to cast the names of Asian and 224

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African authors in the mould of European names by means of elaborate cataloging rules originally designed only for Western names’.118 The unique identification of an author is central to Western cataloguing theory and practice, but the principle of given name(s)-surname for European names can break down when applied to African and Asian names, which are structured differently. It is not always possible to decide what constitutes the ‘main’ part of a person’s name in some naming systems. When an arbitrary Romanisation is added to ‘an artificially contrived rendering of an author’s name, the result is often impossible to retrieve by anyone except the cataloger or bibliographer who concocted that form’.119 In 1952 UNESCO established a committee under the chairmanship of S.R. Raganathan to deal with the cataloguing of Asian names. Its report was never published, but it stated that some personal names, like Bengali ones, ‘behave like fifth columnists’ in catalogues; rather than ‘being an instrument of support for identification of the works concerned, the pattern and structure of the names subverts [sic] all efforts to bring all related works together’.120 In some ways, Grierson foregrounds Indian names as fifth columnists in Western catalogues, and he highlights their resistance to being seamlessly integrated into Western codes of cataloguing. In letters in 1919 between Grierson, the assistant librarian at Harvard, and Professor Lanman, Grierson discusses the transliteration of the proper names of Indian authors into the Roman script. T. F. Currier, the assistant librarian, attached a memorandum on ‘International Catalogue Rules’ to a letter he wrote to Lanman. The memorandum states, ‘the object of international uniformity in cataloguing is to facilitate the pooling of information about books and to hasten the day when the student of one country can draw upon the book resources of all countries’. Currier adds, As regards Sanskrit and the languages of modern India, the situation is altered by the great number of alphabets in use today making it impracticable, especially when printing is concerned, to use the native characters .  .  . [However] the use of a transliteration composed of Roman characters is general in India itself. These facts make it decidedly preferable to use for Indian books the transliterated form in international cataloguing.121 The issue here for the librarian was how to put the names of Indian authors into circulation in the transnational Roman script. Grierson 225

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responded, ‘I still see difficulties as to how some names written in the Nāgarī or allied alphabets are, for catalogue purposes, to be transliterated’. He gives the example of the name ‘Rama-krsna’, which can be pronounced and sometimes spelt in different ways. He adds, ‘Provision must also be made . . . for Sanskrit titles or degree names. . . . In India these form part of the bearer’s name. But, as a man progresses in knowledge, he gets higher titles which are substituted for the former ones’. Thus, different names may represent the same author. Grierson also refers to the problem of the same Indian name being written in different South Asian scripts. In such cases, the Roman transliteration of a name from the Persian script may differ from the transliteration of the same name from other scripts.122 In the context of authorship, then, Grierson points to how Indian names resist Western protocols of cataloguing. At one point, questions are raised about whether Grierson’s knighthood title should be incorporated into his name as an author on the title page of Hatim’s Tales. Grierson argued that his knighthood meant he had been ‘renamed’ and so this should be on the title page, along with Sir Aurel Stein’s own ‘rename’.123 The question of Sanskrit titles or degree names when it came to Indian proper names in catalogues therefore also applied to Grierson’s own name and ‘renaming’ within the British system of honorific titles. In the realm of authorship, then, Grierson wants to prevent any slippages between Indian proper names and common nouns, but he also stresses it is not easy to make Indian names discrete or fix them in ways which delimit them in catalogues. This points to the importance of joint authorship with Indians in which his name and Indian names combined with and leaked into each other, while remaining identifiable in this leakage. Indians were important collaborators, interlocutors and team workers in Grierson’s production of knowledge on India’s languages. Here we can return to the striking feature of Grierson’s authorial career – namely, the preponderance of jointly authored works he put his name to. His collaborative works with Indians are particularly telling and I will discuss just two of these. The first is A Grammar of the Chhattisgarhi Dialect of Eastern Hindi. Originally Written in Hindi by Hira Lal Kavyopadhyaya, Headmaster of the Anglo-Vernacular School, Dhamtari and translated by Sir George A. Grierson, of the Bengal Civil Service. Revised and Enlarged by Pandit Lochan Prasad Kavya-Vinod under the Supervision of Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, of the Provincial Civil Service, Central Provinces and Berar (1921). The title appears in this form on the title page, and as such, it is eloquent of joint authorship. The history of this text’s 226

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emergence is also revealing. Grierson’s translation of Hira Lal’s grammar was published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1890. When reading volume 6 of the Survey, Pandit L.P. Pandeya came across Hira Lal’s name and ‘bestirred himself’ to get more information about the Chattisgarhi dialect.124 In 1917 he wrote to Grierson after Hira Lal’s death, suggesting an enlarged 2nd edition of the grammar. Grierson asked the chief secretary of the Central Provinces (CP) government to examine the manuscript with a view to reprinting the grammar. The CP government proposed that Pandit Lochan Prasad revise it under Rai Bahadur Hira Lal’s guidance.125 Thus, the text passed through four pairs of hands, each time taking on a different shape as it did so. It also came into being through the intervention of a 5th person, Pandit L.P. Pandeya, in part sparked off by one of the LSI volumes which listed the original edition, testifying to how the LSI as a collaborative project generated further collaborations. The radically collaborative nature of this work is evident from the inability to identify any single author for any one part of the text. The introduction lists works on and in the Chhattisgarhi dialect, the last of which is ‘Chhattisgarhi Words and Phrases’. The introduction then adds, ‘of most of which the writer is the author, the last one being written by Mr. C. U. Wills, ICS’.126 However, it is difficult to identify who ‘the writer’ and ‘the author’ refer to, as no name is appended to the introduction. In his correspondence, Grierson is clear he is a translator and editor only, and Pandit Lochan Prasad made many improvements in matters of detail.127 But there is no way of knowing which part of the source text has been translated by Grierson, which has been revised by Pandit Lochan Prasad and what, if any, parts of the text have been produced by Rai Bahadur Hira Lal. Here, then, the dispersal of authorial and translational functions produces a radically collaborative text in which these names amalgamate. The title of the second text, as it appears on the title page, is: Hatim’s Tales. Kashmiri Stories and Songs. Recorded with the Assistance of Pandit Govind Kaul. By Sir Aurel Stein, K.C.I.E, and Edited with a Translation, Linguistic Analysis, Vocabulary, Indexes, ETC. by Sir George A. Grierson, K.C.I.E. With a Note on the Folklore of the Tales by W. Crooke, C.I.E. Once again, this evokes the joint authoring of Indian knowledge. The manuscript of this work which Grierson sent to A.A. Macdonell for the Oxford Indian Institute collection reflects this. It consisted of a bound book containing Stein’s transcript of the tales, Pandit Govind Kaul’s first rough copy of the tales with an interlinear Sanskrit translation, a set of papers prepared for Grierson under Stein’s instructions by 227

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Pandit Kasi Rama, and a bound book of Pandit Govind Kaul’s finished copy of the tales with an idiomatic Sanskrit translation.128 With regard to authorship, the published text is interesting in a number of ways. First, the text is dedicated to the memory of Pandit Govind Kaul, but this name changes in different parts of the text. In the section by Sir Aurel Stein, it is Govind Kaul, and for Grierson, it is Govinda Kaula and sometimes simply his initials, GK. Secondly, there are five names in the title of the book, each placed in different attitudes of ownership towards the text. Three of the names are preceded with ‘by’, and the first is put into the possessive form. But the tales themselves do not have any named authors. Here, then, joint authorship involves the transmutation of oral tales that by their very nature cannot have an author (Hatim is the reciter of the tales, not their author) into the joint product and possession of collaborative authors. Naming, as Anssi Paasi argues, means a withdrawal from a troubling anonymity and a settled position in a culture’s identity matrix.129 Here joint naming suggests a distinctive aspect of the identity matrix of British India, which I will come back to. The authors’ names are woven into the titles of both the books discussed earlier. The inscription of these proper names within the titles, instead of being separated from them, points to how collaborative authorship is interwoven as part of the very fabric of the text. As in the case of A Grammar of the Chhattisgarhi Dialect, Hatim’s Tales is linked to and makes possible other collaboratively authored projects. Stein refers to how Grierson wanted Govind Kaul’s help for completing and editing Pandit Isvara Kaul’s dictionary of Kashmiri and adds, ‘So I rejoiced when, before my departure from Lahore, this collaboration of the best Kashmirian scholar of his time with the leading authority in the field of Indian linguistic research had been satisfactorily arranged for’.130 Once again, a collaboration is networked with other collaborations in the production of knowledge on India’s languages. One specimen passage in the LSI articulates the kaleidoscopic nature of the LSI’s joint authorship with Indian authors alongside the Indianisation of Grierson’s own name. In volume 6 the prodigal son specimen for Awadhi by Pandit Sudhakara Dwivedi is composed in the dialect and metre used by Malik Muhammad Jaisi in his epic poem the Padmāvatī (c. 1540).131 The final chaupai is worth citing in its literal translation: Lost son-of story pleasing; Friend Grierson-of orders getting. Language pure as has-sung Muhammad the-Padumāvati-in, (brother), 228

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That after Sudhākar wrote; Friend Grierson as taught-me. I Pandits-to entreaties make; Omissions add I fall-at-(your)-feet.132 Here Dwivedi evokes the connections between Grierson and pandits. Grierson is a friend, an official who gives orders, and a teacher, and Dwivedi relates to other pandits in terms of entreaty and deference. Different kinds of power are negotiated but none is completely triumphant. These relationships are all in play simultaneously, and are embedded in a passage about the reunification of a family through the return of the prodigal son, resulting in a joyous union, itself reminiscent of the prospects of union in Padmāvatī as a mystical poem.133 The specimen brings together literary, cultural and religious traditions exemplified by both the prodigal son and Padmāvatī, rewritten as an amalgamation of texts within the temporal framework of an indigenous calendar. Moreover, the specimen is presented in multiple scripts. Union, therefore, works on multiple levels, but it does not erase difference; rather it preserves it in a coalescence of texts, languages, scripts and relationships between different individuals.134 In keeping with the prodigal son’s allegorical message of a son who has come back to life again, the Padmāvatī and the prodigal son rejuvenate each other in the LSI. Thus, the prodigal son and Padmāvatī merge to create a third Awadhi text in a triangular collaboration between Dwivedi, Grierson and Jaisi. Dwivedi also regionalises Grierson within a specific literary, linguistic and cultural tradition and therefore brings to fruition those seeds of an Indian identity in Grierson evident from time to time in his mental shuttling to and from India. As an act of translation and transliteration, this passage gives the name ‘Grierson’ another lease of life in the Indian incarnation of ‘Griarasana’ through a collaboration with a pandit and a time-hallowed Indian poet. Finally, the composition of this passage alludes to Grierson’s and Dwivedi’s larger collaboration – namely, their co-edited The Padumāwati of Malik Muhammad Jaisi (Calcutta, 1896–1911). As in other cases of joint authorship in the Survey, this jointly produced passage in volume 6 is part of a chain of joint authorship in Grierson’s oeuvre.

The property of joint authorship In ‘What Is an Author?’ Foucault discusses how the individualisation of the author parallels the establishment of a system of ownership 229

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and strict copyright rules. As he puts it, the author ‘was accepted into the social order of property which governs our culture’.135 Shackle has referred to how fixing revenue settlements produced observations on language, as in the case of Edward O’Brien’s Report of Muzzafargarh.136 In his A Manual of the Land Revenue Systems and Land Tenures of British India (1882), Baden-Powell linked the multiplicity of Indian revenue systems to the subcontinent as a Babel of tongues. The diversity of Indian land revenue systems, he says, ‘is made more prominent by the almost endless variety of local nomenclature’ and ‘the Babel of tongues and dialects’.137 He stresses that the proprietary rights recognised by the British are far from absolute. Instead, there are ‘series of proprietary strata’ or ‘various shades of proprietary right’.138 Also, although he is at pains to point out that precolonial India had no idea of property in ‘our sense of the word’ (mainly because, in his view, an ‘Eastern sovereign’ owned the land without defining what ownership was), it turns out that in British India, ‘all landed property, not freed from payment, is hypothecated to the State as security for its revenue’.139 The difference between colonial regimes of property and precolonial ones is not watertight and is one of degrees, rather than of kind. Thus, property is a shaky and contested concept in colonial Indian scholarship, and this is sometimes linked to India as a Babelian space. This is reflected in the LSI and Grierson’s oeuvre, in which there are shades of proprietary rights in relation to jointly produced texts rather than an outright and singular authorship which exclusively owns a discrete text. Trautmann has discussed how the idea of copyright perplexed authors such as Mamadi Venkayya; it was alien to the manuscript world and scriptorium in which he was embedded. Its introduction by the College of Fort St George Press in the realm of publication disorientated Indian men of learning.140 Ulrike Stark has discussed the complexities and limitations of copyright in colonial India, noting how alien the Western notion of protecting literary property was to north Indian authors, many of whom failed to respond to the 1867 Act with regard to the registration of copyright.141 After 1947, some of the states of the Indian Union experimented with copyright in innovative ways when it came to some writers whose works were deemed to be of broad cultural value and significance. Tamil Nadu acquired the copyright of Sri C. Subramania Bharati’s work to make it available to the public at as cheap a cost as possible. This was the first time a state had acquired a writer’s copyright and put his works in the public domain. Here the mode of ownership had to reflect the broad 230

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cultural value of the works in question.142 Interestingly, Grierson was not sure who owned the LSI’s copyright. When Dhirendra Varma approached him about his planned book on the dialects of Hindi, in which he hoped to use folk stories produced as specimens in the LSI, Grierson could only presume the copyright rested with the Indian government, but he did not know for certain.143

Conclusion As we have seen, in the case of Hélène’s séances Flournoy postulated she had multiple personalities, making it difficult to posit a unitary ‘I’ as the originator of her utterances.144 Grierson’s complex and triply hyphenated subject position also means it is difficult to posit his selfhood in terms of a unitary ‘I’. As I argued, from the perspective of the séance culture of the Survey’s recordings Indians are the mediums through which Grierson speaks.145 On another level, in keeping with the slipperiness of the role and figure of the medium, it is Indians and the languages they speak whose voices dominate the Survey, and so Grierson is also a medium for their voices. He is, as it were, possessed by Indian languages and their voices, and was in fact seen by some reviewers as almost embodying them.146 In a way, Grierson is Saleem Sinai’s ancestor in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, in whose head ‘voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Lucknow Urdu to the Southern slurrings of Tamil’,147 and like Saleem Sinai, he is also sometimes close to disintegration. Moreover, Grierson’s own name became a coalescence of authoring names, and he was drawn into the orbit of a different kind of authorship from the conventional European one of singular authors who own the texts they write. The LSI and many of the key texts in Grierson’s oeuvre are characterised by joint authorship, in which the functions of an author are shared by multiple persons, both ‘British’ and ‘Indian’. There is also another possible factor here. Richards has characterised the British Empire as a data-intensive empire, in which the fantasy of a unified archive holding together the vast and various parts of the empire was a powerful one. By the late 19th century, the fiction of the archival subject who attained comprehensive knowledge broke down under the pressure of information.148 In some ways, joint authorship and collaborative texts with Indian writers, as in Grierson’s case, are a response to this breakdown. Collaborative subjects need to be fashioned to manage and collectively author the intensive data that the British Empire in India produced. 231

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Chris Bayly has argued that both European and indigenous discourses played a role in the construction of modern India, and that Indians’ self-presentations as informants were incorporated into official debates and ideologies.149 Discussing Ram Gharib Chaube’s interaction with William Crooke, Sadhana Naithani makes a strong case for the categories of British and Indian as being ‘not ultimately separable in the knowledge this generated’.150 However, there is a key difference between William Crooke and other colonial scholarofficials who minimally acknowledged their Indian ‘assistants’ and Grierson.151 The depth of Grierson’s indebtedness is clear from his explicit acknowledgements of both Indian and European individuals, attached to many of the specimen passages reproduced in the LSI, and scattered throughout the volumes. The ‘List of Authorities’ for each dialect and language in the volumes also refers to many works by Indians, as we have seen. In the Survey and key texts of Grierson’s oeuvre, joint authorship characterises its production of knowledge and Grierson is embedded alongside Indian authors in an order of property in which there are shades of proprietary right rather than exclusive rights to texts. Because of this joint authorship it is not clear where the name ‘Grierson’ ends and other Indian names begin. Grierson’s name was also Indianised and marked on the map of the subcontinent as a bazaar called ‘Griersonganj’. As a space of exchange, the Indian bazaar, as opposed to the ordered colonial space of the British civil station, is a fitting monument to the fluid, flexible but alternatively structured economy of knowledge production that characterises the LSI. In some ways, ‘Griersonganj’ could be the subtitle of the LSI itself. While ‘ganj’ refers to a market, it also means an emporium, storehouse and mine, and the Survey continues to be a storehouse and emporium of linguistic data about India and it continues to be mined to this day. There is another aspect to the blurred boundaries between Grierson and Indian names in the joint production of the LSI’s India. Some key Indian nationalist leaders were committed to joint authorship. The preface to Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909) stresses its joint production and collaborative authorship.152 In the English translation, Gandhi asserts, ‘I am quite aware of the many imperfections in the original. The English rendering, besides sharing these, must naturally exaggerate them, owing to my inability to convey the exact meaning of the original’.153 Elsewhere I have argued Gandhi calls attention to his lack of mastery in the linguistic realm.154 There are therefore overlaps between Gandhi’s mode of authorship and his narrative of a lack of mastery and inadequacy in the linguistic realm and Grierson’s own 232

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style of authorship and his focus on the LSI’s inadequacies and shortcomings. Irrespective of whether one can be labelled ‘colonial’ and the other ‘nationalist’, both deployed similar kinds of authorship and had a strong sense of their inadequacies when it came to producing texts and knowledge about India in the realm of language. Gandhi also went out of his way to claim that he is not being original – rather the views he expressed are ‘mine, and yet not mine’.155 One of Grierson’s correspondents sees him as not doing ‘original work’ but as ‘putting all your own knowledge & soul into dishing up other men’s ill digested stuff’. The same correspondent refers to Grierson’s ‘self-effacing unselfishness [as] a perpetual revelation to us’.156 Humility and self-effacement are key features of Gandhi’s thought and work – he ends his Autobiography with the desire to ‘reduce myself to zero’.157 Inevitably, this also created its own kind of egotism (and even narcissism), and in Grierson, too, we have a similar combination of humility and in his case, colonial egotism. Nonetheless, given its narrative of doubts and inadequacy and its strong sense of its own provisional status, in many ways the LSI has a prevailing ethos of humility. At least on one level, Grierson was humbled by India and he was not afraid to show it.

Notes 1 This chapter is a substantially revised version of parts of my essay ‘What’s in a (Proper) Name? Particulars, Individuals and Authorship in the Linguistic Survey of India and Colonial Scholarship’, in Daud Ali and Indra Sengupta (eds), Knowledge Production, Pedagogy and Institutions in Colonial India, New York: Palgrave, 2011, pp. 19–39. 2 Ibid. 3 Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, in Joseph F. Graham (ed.), Difference in Translation, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 172. 4 For example, see the entry for ‘Âgâ’ in Richard C. Temple, A Dissertation on the Proper Names of Panjâbîs, with Special Reference to the Proper Names of Villagers in the Eastern Panjâb, Bombay: Education Society Press, London: Trübner and Co., Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1883, p. 149. 5 Ibid. 6 EUR 223/231, Grierson to W. Egerton, 22.1.1908, and Grierson to Pandit Bhava Nātha Miśra, Dharbanga 25.7.1925. It was damaged by an earthquake but rebuilt by the government; see ibid., Maharajadhiraja of Darbhanga to Grierson, 1.5.1934, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London; hereafter EUR only. 7 I owe this information to Wendy Singer. 8 Linguistic Survey Files S/1/2/2, Dr Gaster to Grierson, 18.6.1918, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London, hereafter LS Files. For an early article in which Grierson and his wife grappled with the

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23

24 25

modifications of Romani names and words, see their ‘An English-Gipsy Index’, Indian Antiquary, 1886, 15: 14–19. See Ch. 3. EUR 223/303, Grierson to Kegan Paul, 6.12.1932. EUR 223/304, Jewish Post to Grierson, 7.2.1935. LS Files S/1/2/2, Dr Gaster to Grierson, 18.6.1918. EUR 223/299, Hoernle to Grierson, 23.3.1886. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (eds), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1977, pp. 113–8. LS Files S/1/1/20, Grierson to the Vice Chancellors of Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh and the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, 6.8.1919, informing them of the gramophone records produced on the languages of the Central Provinces, and Grierson to the librarians of the University Library Cambridge, Bodleian Library Oxford, Trinity College Dublin; and the Institut de France, 25.8.1921, on his dispatch of 29 gramophone records ‘illustrating the languages spoken in the province of Bihar and Orissa’. See also S/1/1/19 Grierson to the librarians of the Royal Asiatic Society, School of Oriental Studies, British Museum, Bodleian, University Library Cambridge, India Office, Trinity College Dublin, Edinburgh University Library, and Institut de France, 11.1.1921, on the gramophone records of extracts from the ‘Sacred Edict’ and the ‘Great Learning’ in Pekin, Mandarin and Cantonese, and S/1/6/2, Grierson to Chief Commissioner of Delhi, 16.12.1919, recommending the sending of duplicate records to a number of libraries in Britain and France. For the intercontinental distribution of the LSI’s volumes, see Ch. 2 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. EUR 223/324, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 18.6.1919. LS Files S/1/1/15, Grierson to the editor of the Times, 10.10.1919. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 1: General Introduction, Specimens of the Tibetan Dialects, the Himalayan Dialects, and the North Assam Group, Calcutta: Superintendent of the Government Press, 1909, ‘Introductory Note’. Ibid. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 11: Gipsy Languages, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1922, ‘Introductory Note’. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 3: The Bhīl Languages, including Khāndēśí, Banjārī or Labhānī, Bahrūpiā, & c., Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1907, ‘Introductory Note’. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Pt. 1: Introductory, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927, p. 199; LS Files S/1/1/8, Sten Konow to Grierson, 29.3.1924, where Konow itemises his authorship of volumes and sections of the LSI. LS Files S/1/1/7, Sten Konow to Grierson, 8.12.1905. LS Files S/1/2/1, Grierson to Hewett, 10.9.1901. For missionaries checking proofs, see S/1/4/5, John Grunning, Deputy Commissioner, Nowong to Grierson, 14.12.1899, on the Mikir specimens being proofread by the

234

NAMES AND AUTHORSHIP

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

American Baptist missionary, Reverend P.E. Moore, who also revised the parable passage, and J. Emerson, Deputy Commissioner, Nowong, to Grierson, 10.9.1901 on Grierson’s subsequent enquiries being sent to Moore’s successor, Reverend Carwell, after Moore moved back to the US; S/1/4/11, H.A.C. Colquhoun to Grierson, 16.9.1901, on Reverend W. Pettigrew correcting the proofs for Tangkhul and some other languages. LS Files S/1/14/3, Grierson to Edward Gait, 27.5.1900. LS Files S/1/1/7, Sten Konow to Grierson, 20.3.1908. LS Files S/1/3/6, Grierson to Magistrate-Collector of Balasore, 8.2.1901, and R.W. Carlyle to Grierson, 13.3.1901. LS Files S/1/3/11, Mahamahopadhyeya Pandit to Grierson, 10.1 1900, and S/1/3/12, Rai Calica Doss Dutt, Dewan of Cooch Behar State, to Grierson, 13.6.1900, returning proof sheets. LS Files S/1/5/1, Grierson to Burn, 15.6.1913. LS Files S/1/1/16, John Sampson to Grierson, 28.4.1921 & 4.5.1921. LS Files S/1/4/4, Grierson to Capt. Philip R. Gurdon, 7.2.1901, and S/1/4/6, A.K. Gurney to Grierson, 7.2.1901. LS Files S/1/9/3, G.P. Taylor to Grierson, 12.6.1903 & 21.1.1908. LS Files S/1/12/3, Grierson to Reverend H. Francke, 11.9.1905, Reverend H. Francke to Grierson, 12.10.1905, and Secretary Moravian Missions to Grierson, 28.11.1905; S/1/1/27, Grierson to Reverend C.J. Klesel on payment being made to the secretary of the Moravian Mission as a partial subvention towards the publication of Francke’s work. For Francke’s corrections and comments see S/1/12/3, Francke to Grierson, 17.6.1906. LS Files S/1/12/3, see the correspondence between Reverend H. Francke and Grierson from 3.1.1900 to 31.1.1901. EUR 223/328, Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 13.9.1932. LS Files S/1/6/16, Grierson to Deputy Commissioner Jhelum, 15.1.1912. EUR 223/207, J.D. Anderson to Grierson, 16.6.1920. The ‘Introductory Note’ to Grierson, LSI, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, refers to Professor Conrady’s role in this way: ‘After he had analysed part of the materials, but before he had thrown the results into a connected form, he was compelled to abandon the task by a call to other duties’. George A. Grierson, The Lay of Alha: A Saga of Rajput Chivalry as Sung by Minstrels of Northern India, Partly Translated in English Ballad Metre by the Late William Waterfield of the Bengal Civil Service, Oxford: H. Milford, 1923, p. 10. EUR 223/337, Philip Waterfield to Grierson, 11.2.1914. Ibid., Grierson to Clarendon Press, 15.10.1920. Ibid., Grierson to Philip Waterfield, 24.10.1921. Grierson, Lay, p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. EUR 223/337, Philip Waterfield to Grierson, 11.8.1922. Ibid., Grierson to Philip Waterfield, 26.7.1922, and Philip Waterfield to Grierson, 11.8.1922. Grierson, Lay, pp. 11–13. EUR 223/337, Grierson to Philip Waterfield, 12.06.1922.

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NAMES AND AUTHORSHIP

50 Ibid., Grierson to Philip Waterfield, 30.8.1922, and Grierson to Johnson, Clarendon Press, 7.10.1922. 51 Grierson, Lay, p. 24. 52 EUR 223/337, Grierson to Philip Waterfield, 6.12.1922. 53 George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Western Hindī and Pañjābī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1916, pp. 495–501. 54 LS Files S/1/1/16, Grierson to Sir James G. Frazer, 5.7.1924. 55 EUR 223/337, Grierson to Chapman, Clarendon Press, 26.8.1920. 56 Grierson, Lay, p. 10. 57 EUR 223/324, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 20.5.1923. 58 LS Files S/1/13/2, L.F. Taylor to Grierson, 7.7.1919, and Grierson to L.F. Taylor, 9.8.1919. The article is ‘On the Representation of Tones in Oriental Languages’, JRAS, 1920, pp. 453–79. 59 EUR 223/324, Sir Aurel Stein to Grierson, 8.6.1933. 60 LS Files S/1/1/12, T. Grahame Bailey to Grierson, 28.4.1929. 61 LS Files S/1/1/14, Grierson to Dr August Conrady, 17.4.1901 & 15.5.1901. 62 Ibid., Grierson to Conrady, 1.10.1902, 1.11.1902 & 10.11.1902. 63 Ibid., Grierson to Conrady, 29.3.1903 & 12.4.1903. 64 EUR 223/329, R.C. Temple to Grierson, 30.1.1930. 65 EUR 223/332, R.L. Turner to Grierson, 2.6.1926 & 14.12.1927, and EUR 223/330, Prof. F.W. Thomas to Grierson, 31.10.1918. For some other Indian students supervised by Turner, see EUR 223/333, R.L. Turner to Grierson, 17.10.1931. 66 EUR 223/289, Grierson to Georg Morgenstierne, 18.5.1925, and EUR 223/263, Daniel Jones to Grierson, 19.9.1923. 67 EUR 223/333, R.L. Turner to Grierson, 30.7.1931, Grierson to R.L. Turner, 19.12.1933, and EUR 223/303, Academic Registrar, University of London, to Grierson, 15.12.1933, asking Grierson to examine Jha’s thesis ‘An Edition of the Unpublished Maithili MS., The Padavali of Govindasa with phonological and grammatical analysis’. 68 EUR 223/332, Grierson to R.L. Turner, 11.5.1926. 69 EUR 223/298, Grierson to P.D. Gune, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 4.5.1920. 70 EUR 223/306, A.C. Woolner to Grierson, 10.2.1921, sending Banarsi Das’s Ardhamagadhi reader to Grierson at Das’s request; EUR 223/233, Grierson’s lengthy correspondence with Babu Jagannath Das on his commentary on Bihārī satsaī from 6.8.1926 to 20.12.1926; EUR 223/213, Grierson to D.R. Bhandarkar, 2.2.1911, for Grierson’s comments on two articles Bhandarkar sent him; EUR 223/206, Grierson to Ananda Coomarswamy, 9.2.1937. 71 See EUR 223/226 for the extensive discussions between S.K. Chatterji and Grierson on many aspects of both Chatterji’s and Grierson’s work from 23.11.1919 to 3.3.1935, and EUR 223/301, S.K. Chatterji to Grierson, 24.2.1920, for Chatterji’s comments on one of Grierson’s papers. For more on Chatterji’s relations with Grierson, see Ch. 1 of Nation and Region. 72 EUR 223/330, E.H. Hull to Prof. F.W. Thomas, 26.9.1921, and EUR 223/264, Grierson to Prof. Hermann Jacobi, 15.6.1927.

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NAMES AND AUTHORSHIP

73 EUR 223/304, Surya Kanta to Grierson, 25.6.1936; EUR 223/303, A.N. Basu to Grierson, 3.1.1931; and EUR 223/302, F.W. Thomas to Grierson, 24.6.1930. 74 EUR 223/221, L.F. Taylor, ‘Note on the Proposed Linguistic Survey of Burma’. 75 LS Files S/1/12/2, Abdul Hakim, Political Assistant, Chitral, to Grierson, 8.6.1901, with a list of dialects in Chitrali villages; see also EUR 223/289, Grierson to Georg Morgenstierne on this list, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 10, p. 480, acknowledging Abdul Hakim Khan. LS Files S/1/9/12, Collector, Belgaum District to Grierson, 19.7.1901, with a list of dialects supplemented by a further list from Hanmant Govind Joshi, Assistant Master, Sirdar’s High School, Belgaum; LS Files S/1/9/11, DPI, Poona to Collector of Satara, with specimens for Grierson prepared by Educational Inspector Satara, n.d.; LS Files S/1/9/16, A.C. Logan, Collector, Broach, to Undersecretary of Government, Revenue Dept., Bombay. 24.4.1902, with specimens prepared by Head Master, Broach High School; DPI’s Poona Office to Collector of Broach, 9.10.1902 & 7.11.1901 with specimens from Deputy Educational Inspector Broach and Assistant Deputy Educational Inspector Kaira; DPI Poona Office to Grierson, with specimens from G.B. Brahme, Assistant Deputy, Khandesh and Head Master, Dhulia Training School, 23.12.1902 & 17.2.1903. See also S/1/7/3, Deputy Commissioner Chhindwara to Grierson, 30.4.1898 forwarding specimens from Gopal Rao Dougre, Extra Assistant Commissioner of the district; Collector of Ahmedabad to Grierson, 9.6.1902, with specimens from Head Master of Ahmedabad High School; Collector of Ahmedabad to Grierson, 1.7.1902, with specimens from Deputy Educational Inspector, Ahmedabad Sub-Division; Collector of Ahmedabad to Grierson, 21.10.1902, with specimens from Principal, Training College, Ahmedabad; and Collector of Ahmedabad to Grierson, 23.1.1903, with specimens from Second Assistant Deputy Educational Inspector, Ahmedabad; and Collector of Ahmedabad to Grierson, 28.2.1903, with specimens from Third Assistant Educational Inspector, Ahmedabad. See also Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 3, p. 197, acknowledging Babu Krishna Kisor Acharji, secretary to Midnapore District Board for the Siyalgiri version of the prodigal son, Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 453–4, 552–3, acknowledging Assistant Surgeon L.N. Chowdhuri for two specimens, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, p. 301, acknowledging information received from Pandit Rama-ballabh Misra, assistant settlement officer, Champaran. See also LS Files S/1/9/8, Collector of Khandesh to Grierson, 28.5.1902, with information supplied from mamlatdars in the district. 76 George A. Grierson, Seven Grammars of the Dialects and Subdialects of the Bihárí Language, Spoken in the Province of Bihár, in the Eastern Portion of the North-Western Provinces, and in the Northern Portion of the Central Provinces, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1883–87, p. 3. 77 EUR 223/334, Grierson to Udai Narain Tiwari, 31.3.1936, on the latter’s article on Bhojpuri; EUR 223/335, Siddheswar Varma to Grierson, 9.1.1937, sending him one of his books. 78 EUR 223/254, Grierson to L.V. Ramaswamy Aiyar, 17.11.1931, acknowledging the receipt of two of Aiyar’s papers on Dravidian philology.

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NAMES AND AUTHORSHIP

79 EUR 223/269, Pandit Salegram Kaul to Grierson, 8.7.1908, sending Grierson his Kashmiri reader. 80 EUR 223/214, M.K. Vellodi, Secretary to Government of Orissa, 11.8.1938, sending Gidugu V. Ramamurti’s, Sora-English Dictionary, Madras: Office of the Superintendent, Government Press, 1938. 81 EUR 223/285, V.R. Ramchandra Dikshitar to Grierson, 14.1.1926, sending his paper ‘Is Artha-Sastra Secular?’; EUR 223/265, Grierson to K.P. Jayaswal, 24.12.1925, thanking Jayaswal for his book Hindū Polity. 82 EUR 223/231, Pandit Chetnath Jha to Grierson, 9.4.1918, with his commentary on Bhringadūtam by poet Gangananda Jha. 83 EUR 223/254, Prof. Taraporewala to Grierson, 15.1.1934, sending Grierson his Selections from Classical Gujarati Literature and Elements of the Science of Literature. 84 EUR 223/222, S.M. Chatterjee, Lecturer, Calcutta University, 27.7.1937, sending his volume of poems ‘Flowers’; EUR 223/233, Babu Jagannath Das to Grierson, 29.5.1927, sending Grierson his poem ‘The Gaṅgāvataran’; EUR 223/254, Grierson to Babu Damodar Sahay Singh, 3.11.1931, acknowledging receipt of Singh’s poems. 85 EUR 223/334, Rama Shankar Prasad to Grierson, 3.3.1929, on Prasad’s edition of Bihari Lal’s Satsai. 86 EUR 223/215, Grierson to Edward Gait, 17.9.1917, on receiving Pandit Chetnath Jha’s edition of Pārijāta-Haraṇa. 87 EUR 223/254, Seth Arjun Das Kedia, Benares to Grierson, n.d., sending his treatise on figures of speech. 88 EUR223/223, Grierson to Registrar, Calcutta University, 8.3.1921, thanking the registrar for Rai Sahib Dineshchandra Sen’s two works on folk literature of Bengal and the Bengali Rāmāyaṇa. 89 EUR 223/222, Tamonash Chaudhury Das Gupta to Grierson, 4.3.1930, sending his volumes on Aspects of Bengali Society. 90 EUR 223/231, Grierson to Maharajah of Darbhanga, 20.10.1921, on a copy of the Śrīkhaṇḍavalākulavinōda as a historical work which deals so closely with ‘my old province’. 91 EUR 223/222, Grierson to Bimala Charan Law, 6.10.1922, acknowledging his book on Ksatriya Clans in Buddhist India, 23.11.1934, his book on ancient Indian tribes; Swami Sadananda Giri to Grierson, 17.6.1937, sending a copy of his Bengali work in ‘Rites and Ceremonies in Greater India’. 92 EUR 223/222, Grierson to Babu Hemchandra Raychaudhuri, 14.3 1921, thanking him for his Materials for the Study of the Early History of the Vaishnava Sect, Grierson to Bimala Churn Law, 22.7.1930, thanking him for his ‘Study on the Mahāvastu’, & 8.3.1932, thanking him for his ‘Buddhistic Studies’; EUR 223/222, Secretary Jain Swetambar Terapanthi Sabha to Grierson, 14.5.1934, sending ‘A Short History of the Jain Swetambar Terapanthi Sect’. 93 EUR 223/334, Srimat Sthirananda to Grierson, 11.6.1929, sending a copy of the ‘Purna-Jyotih’ composed by His Holiness Srimat Swami Purnanandaji Maharaj of Rikhikesh and the Editor, The Kalyan: An Illustrated Hindi Monthly of Devotion, Knowledge and Universal Religion, 14.3.1930, sending the special issue on the Gita to Grierson; EUR 223/222, Grierson

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94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106

107 108 109 110

to The Secretary, Bangiya Sabitya Parishad Mandir, 4.5.1922, acknowledging receiving Nagendranath Gupta’s edition of Vidapati. EUR 223/303, Grierson to Prof. Zachariae, 19.7.1932, thanking him for his papers on ‘Indian Parallels to King Lear’s questions’. See Ch. 1 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. EUR 223/317, Grierson to Denison Ross, 14.3.1927, on translating Das’s article ‘Gōsvāmī Tulasīdās’ for the Bulletin, & 18.8.1924, on translating portions of Bhāshā Vijñān; see also A. Murray Browne to Grierson, 20.5.1926, on these translations for the Bulletin. EUR 223/213, D.R. Bhandarkar to Grierson, 22.3.1911, on revising his paper ‘Foreign Elements in the Hindu Population’ in the light of Grierson’s comments for the Indian Antiquary. EUR 223/334, Grierson to Mata Prasad Gupta, 28.3.1933, and EUR 223/316, Grierson to A. Murray Browne, 9.3.1933. EUR 223/318, Grierson to Babu Dinesh Chandra Sen, 15.11.1901, and Sen to Grierson, 6.2.1902. EUR 223/291, Grierson to A. Govindacharya, 15.09.1909, 24.10.1909, 12.2.1910, 28.2.1910, 11.3.1910 & 29.3.1901, and Govindacharya to Grierson, 9.2 1910. See also Ch. 6 of my Nation and Region. EUR 223/308, Sita Ram to Grierson, 14.4.1914. EUR 223/291, Narasimmiyengar to Grierson, 20.7.1911. EUR 223/318, Babu Dinesh Chandra Sen to Grierson, 5.5.1921. EUR 223/233, Babu Jagannath Das to Grierson, 29.5.1927, on Grierson’s review of ‘The Behari Ratnakar’; EUR 223/337, Grierson to Dewhurst, 21.7.1924, asking Miss Browne to send Dewhurst a review copy for the Bulletin of SOS of a book by Pandit Padmasimha Sarman; EUR 223/318, Grierson to Babu Dinesh Chandra Sen, 15.11.1901, 13.12.1911 & 24.11.1924, on Sen’s work being noticed in the TLS, JRAS and the Bulletin of SOS; EUR 223/310, Grierson to Sykes, 19.1.1925, on getting Pandit Kokileswar Sastri’s Introduction to Adwaita Philosophy reviewed in the JRAS. EUR 223/292, Grierson to Babu Shyam Sundar Das, 15.5.1923, and Das to Grierson, 16.9.1923. EUR 223/233, Grierson to Babu Jagannath Das on a list of libraries for Das’s books to be sent to; EUR 223/317, Grierson to Denison Ross, 13.7.1925, recommending Braj Ratan Das’s Bhāṣā Bhūṣaṇ, Ramchandra Shukla’s Nagari Pracharini Sabha’s edition of Padmāwat, and the chapbook Muraqqa Latāif to the SOS library. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Rājasthānī and Gujarātī, pp. 334–7. Grierson, LSI, Vol. 9, Pt. 1, pp. 618–24. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 7: Indo-Aryan Family (Southern Group), Specimens of the Marāṭhī Language, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1905, pp. 17–19. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of the Bengali and Assamese Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent, Government Press, 1903, pp. 24–5.

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111 For Telugu see George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 4: Muṇḍā and Dravidian Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906, pp. 582–3, ‘Canarese’ pp. 367–8 and Tamil pp. 302–7. 112 For example, see the list of authorities for Bhojpuri and its variants in George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bihārī and Oṛiyā Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, pp. 47–8, for Oriya 374–5, Maithili 17–19; for Assamese see Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 1, pp. 397–8. 113 For some representative examples, see George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 3: Specimens of the Kuki-Chin and Burma Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1904, pp. 69–70, 220–3, 231–2, 240–3, 250–2, 278–9, 288–90, and Grierson, LSI, Vol. 5, Pt. 2, pp. 202–4, 214–22, 230–2, 266–7, 271–2, 291–5, 316–18, 320–1, 406–13, 424–33. All the other volumes also contain instances of this. 114 See my ‘What’s in a (Proper) Name?’. 115 EUR 223/282, Grierson to W.N. Williams, General Secretary, University of Cambridge, Local Examinations Syndicate, 2.2.1925, attaching a note on the examinations. 116 EUR 223/227, Grierson to Bonar, 8.5.1908. 117 Hans H. Wellisch, The Conversion of Scripts: Its Nature, History and Utilization, New York: John Wiley & Sons 1978, p. 314. 118 Ibid., pp. 370–3. 119 Ibid., p. 427. 120 Ibid. 121 LS Files S/1/1/15, T. F. Currier to C. R. Lanman, 1.1.1919. 122 Ibid., Grierson to C. R. Lanman, 13.9.1919. See also his earlier letter to Lanman, 4.3.1919, in the same file. 123 EUR 223/324, Grierson to Sir Aurel Stein, 20.12.1922. 124 LS Files S/1/7/4, Pandit L.P. Pandeya, Chhattisgarh, to Grierson, 2.7.1917. 125 Ibid., Grierson to Pandit Pandeya, 1.1.1921 & 28.12.1922, and Pandit Pandeya to Grierson 1.7.1921 & 2.12.1922. 126 Hira Lal Kavyopadhyaya, George A. Grierson, Pandit Lochan Prasad Kavya-Vinod and Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, A Grammar of the Chhattisgarhi Dialect of Eastern Hindi: Originally Written in Hindi by Hira Lal Kavyopadhyaya, Headmaster of the Anglo-Vernacular School, Dhamtari and translated by Sir George A. Grierson, of the Bengal Civil Service, Revised and Enlarged by Pandit Lochan Prasad Kavya-Vinod under the Supervision of Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, of the Provincial Civil Service, Central Provinces and Berar, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, published under the orders of the Local Government Central Provinces and Berar, 1921, p. viii. 127 LS Files S/1/7/1, see the correspondence between Grierson and Pandit L.P. Pandeya from 2.7.1917 to 1.1.1921. 128 LS Files S/1/1/16, Grierson to Macdonell, 28.11.1923. 129 Anssi Paasi, ‘Contested Territories, Boundaries and Regional Identities’, in Tuomas Forsberg (ed.), Contested Territory: Border Disputes at the

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130

131 132 133 134 135 136 137

138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151

Edge of the Former Soviet Union, Aldershot, England: Edward Elgar, 1995, pp. 42–61, 48. Sir Aurel Stein, Hatim’s Tales: Kashmiri Stories and Songs, Recorded With the Assistance of Pandit Govind Kaul, Edited With a Translation, Linguistic Analysis, Vocabulary, Indexes, ETC. by Sir George A. Grierson, K.C.I.E, With a Note on the Folklore of the Tales by W. Crooke, C.I.E., p. xxv. For a discussion of Grierson’s work on Kashmiri, see Ch. 1 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 6: Indo-Aryan Family (Mediate Group), Specimens of the Eastern Hindī Language, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1908, pp. 30–8. Ibid., pp. 37–8. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid. Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, pp. 124–5. Christopher Shackle, From Wuch to Southern Lahnda: A Century of Siraiki Studies in English, Multan: Bazm-e Saqaft, 1983, p. 15. Baden 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, p. 43. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 90. Thomas R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras, New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006, pp. 146–7. Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008, pp. 86–90. A.R. Venkatachalapathy, ‘Subramania Bharati: The Bard and the Battle for Copyright’, King’s India Institute, King’s College London, 26.5.2015. LS Files S/1/5/2, Grierson to Dhirendra Varma, 25.5.1925. See Ch. 5 and Théodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 163. See Ch. 5. EUR 223/302, Grierson to Louis H. Gray, 13.7.1928. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, London: Picador, 1982, p. 169. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire, London/New York: Verso, 1993, p. 22. Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 361–2, 370. Sadhana Naithani, In Quest of Indian Folktales: Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009, p. 58. For the lack of recognition Chaube received from William Crooke, see Shahid Amin (ed.), A Concise Encyclopaedia of North Indian Peasant Life, Being a Compilation from the Writings of William Crooke, J.R. Reid, G.A. Grierson, New Delhi: Manohar, 2005, pp. 33–4.

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152 Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 5–11. 153 Ibid., p. 6. 154 Javed Majeed, ‘Gandhi, “Truth” and Translatability’, Modern Asian Studies, May 2006, 40 (2): 303–2. 155 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, pp. 10, 6. 156 EUR 223/283, Emily Lorimer to Grierson, 10.7.1924. 157 Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1927–1929, London: Penguin Books, 1982, transl. Mahadev Desai, p. 454.

242

CONCLUSION The Survey as a colonial project

As Sumit Sarkar has pointed out, the period between the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and independence in 1947 saw the greatest transition in India’s history.1 This was also the period when the LSI was conducted and completed. The end of 1927 marked a new surge in the national movement.2 In this year the Survey’s introductory volume was published, to be followed in 1928 by its Comparative Vocabulary. Unsurprisingly, then, it bears traces of the shift from British imperial confidence in the 1880s in its paternalistic benevolence, when Grierson served as an official in India, to the challenges the Raj faced in the mass nationalism of the early 20th century. We have seen how Grierson articulates colonial categories of thought, and how he tries to shore up British paternalism through his focus on folklore, his stress on literary cultivation, which dovetails with an idealised image of rural India, and his attempt to strengthen a colonial auditory order through the Survey’s gramophone recordings. However, as we have also seen the LSI was only loosely connected with the colonial state, and it was drafted outside India by Grierson in his retirement. His designation of ‘Special Duty’ is indicative of a degree of flexibility outside the strict parameters of official service. Rather than an office in a colonial department, his study in his residential home was the mainstay of the LSI for much of the time it was conducted. The boundaries between the official, the semi-official and the personal in the Survey shifted continually, and Grierson negotiated its location in the multiple interfaces between these domains and in the interstices between colonial departments in India and his study in Camberley. The LSI’s multiple locations and its semi-detached relationship with the colonial state determined Grierson’s modus vivendi. The Survey generated an extensive intercontinental epistolary culture, a virtual 243

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debating club and seminar group, around the question of language in India. The term ‘Survey’ encompasses this epistolary culture, as well its survey of previously published work in its compiled bibliographies. It drew on these works, ranging from grammars to official reports, and wove together excerpts from these with its generation of ground-level data. While using previous publications and re-archiving them, it also generated a field of new publications, some of which, like Turner’s Dictionary, were initially part of the LSI and then became separately authored works. As a ‘thousand-men job’ led by one man, the LSI was also a vast network of relationships, engineered by Grierson outside the strict confines of the colonial state yet brought together in print in volumes published by that state. Grierson was an author, editor, patron, superintendent and (in his own words) a ‘friendly post office’. He was a knowledge broker and go-between. This is reflected in the joint authorship and improvisation that characterise the LSI’s mode of knowledge production and the key works in his oeuvre, in which Indians and European authors co-operate to produce knowledge about India as a linguistic region. Indians were important collaborators and participants in the Survey, and they helped to create the monumental knowledge of India as a linguistic region which is embodied in the Survey. In particular, the extensive dialogical interactions between them and Grierson shaped ideas about regional languages in India. This is the subject of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey, which also shows how the Survey and some of Grierson’s other texts contributed to the way in which Indian nationalists appropriated and reshaped languages, making them religiously charged ideological symbols of particular versions of the subcontinent. In this context, Grierson’s approach to Hindi and Urdu was pivotal in his imagining of India.3 Here we can note that the LSI’s mode of knowledge production sits uneasily with drawing hard boundaries between European orientalists and colonised Indians. While it is anyway problematic to apply Said’s thesis on orientalism to India,4 in the Survey it is hard to detect the kinds of systematic distinctions drawn by European orientalists in the Middle East between a monolithic Occident and an equally monolithic Orient.5 The LSI also reflected cleavages within Europe. Intra-European rivalries were one of the main motivations for its gramophone recordings, and in its transliteration exercises the Roman script became iconic less of European unity and more of its internal differences, as we have seen. Divisions among the ranks of European 244

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orientalists as a result of the First World War are evident in Grierson’s letters up to the 1920s. Orientalists in Britain, France, Scandinavia and Holland were not prepared to have any dealings with scholars from the defeated powers.6 Those from neutral countries who attended the congresses of both groups were treated as ‘suspect’.7 In 1919 the LSI’s gramophone recordings were exhibited at what Grierson called a meeting of ‘Allied Orientalists’ in London.8 The distribution list for these recordings was compiled during the war, so (in Grierson’s words) there was ‘no question’ of sending a set to any German institution; it was not until 1930 that Grierson felt able to do so when approached by a German institution.9 While Sten Konow may have been correct in asserting that Grierson never shared ‘the hate which has been so prominent on both sides during and after the war’,10 Konow’s own nomination as an honorary member of the RAS was jeopardised by his efforts to reconcile these two groups of orientalists, and so Grierson had to support his nomination.11 Even before the war, in the 1890s some felt that orientalists with German names, even if naturalised in Britain, were barred from posts in academe.12 While by 1929 International Congresses of Orientalists were reconvened, thereby re-establishing ‘cordial relations’ between the two camps of orientalists,13 these postwar divisions among European orientalists as reflected in the LSI indicate how the category of ‘Europe’ was never a stable unity for it. The lack of any sharp distinction between the colonial British and colonised Indians in the LSI is also exemplified by Grierson’s own subject position. Like all go-betweens he was a cross-border figure, in his case mainly because of his triply hyphenated identity as AngloIndian-Irish. He was not at home in any of these terms while being a partial participant in all three. He was also in two places at once. He may have been physically absent from India in Camberley, but he was preoccupied with India to such an extent that in some ways he inhabited India while he was in Camberley; without this double habitation he would not have been able to bring the LSI to a close. Grierson’s in-between position gave him a privileged mobility and an epistemological manoeuvrability which enabled the LSI to take place. This is especially clear in his interventions in the field of grammatical representation, which I discuss in Nation and Region, in which we begin to see the lineaments of what Pollock and others have called a ‘world philology’ emerge.14 At the same time, illness marks Grierson’s complicated colonial subjectivity. This, too, does not fit the watertight categories of empowered colonial orientalists and disempowered Indian subjects. As Richard Steadman-Jones has argued, while colonial linguistics led 245

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to the appropriation of languages, it also involved ambivalence and anxiety because learning other languages made one vulnerable.15 Grierson exposed himself not just to one Indian language or dialect but to hundreds. The Survey was entangled with a narrative of his illness and failing eyesight, which while disabling also made the Survey possible. Grierson had to be humbled by India to undertake the powerful act of producing the LSI. Irrespective of how we may interpret Grierson’s illness and dimmed eyesight, it is clear in the volumes and in his letters that the LSI’s epistemological authority lay in its openness to the provisional nature of its findings, its idiom of doubt and approximation, and its frequently articulated sense of its own shortcomings and inadequacies. Its sense of rigour stemmed from this, not from colonial mastery, and it was not rooted in the oppression of clear-cut definitions and a language of colonial command. In the final analysis, the Survey works with uncertainty rather than closing it off, and joint authorship and improvisation characterised its mode of knowledge production. Its knowledge production reflects the nature of its work in a complex linguistic environment with sometimes inadequate material and a wide range of collaborators, most of whom were not trained linguists, and its affiliation to a disciplinary field where knowledge was in a state of flux and development, with new material emerging and fresh discoveries being made. Paul De Man has remarked on our experience of ‘cosiness’ and familiarity when we shelter in a language we call our own, but he points out that translation reveals alienation is at its strongest in relation to our ‘own’ language.16 On one level, the feminisation of Indian languages as mothers, outlined by scholars such as Sumathi Ramaswamy and Lisa Mitchell, suggests this attempt at making languages familiar, sheltering and nurturing, although, as they point out, there were other elements present in this feminisation too.17 However, the LSI brings us face to face with our lack of control and agency over language. In this context, it is worth reflecting on Grierson’s edition of Lallā-Vākyāni or the Wise Sayings of Lal Ded (1920), edited jointly with Lionel Barnett. On the face of it, it seems odd that Grierson as a hard-bitten linguist should be so drawn to the dangerously eccentric ‘mystic poetess of ancient Kashmir’. His edition of Lal Ded contains many insights into the ‘inmost recesses’ of her subjectivity, and the question of home, homelessness and selfhood. As such, it is indicative of the importance of these issues to Grierson and alerts us to the distinctive nature of his own subjectivity in relation to the LSI. 246

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As I suggested in Chapter 3, Kashmiri Shaivism was a fitting analogue for the combination of conservativism and radicalism, and vulnerability and power in Grierson’s cross-border selfhood. Shaivism inscribed a heterodox self within an orthodox social order, and this process is in play in Grierson’s own self-inscription into a conservative colonial order which cannot completely contain his heterodoxy. Lal Ded’s selfhood is also a cross-border one, and her ecstatic frenzy and semi-nakedness are only partially contained, stabilised and rendered respectable within Kashmiriyat.18 Grierson’s edition comments in detail on the production of sounds, both obstructed and unobstructed, and the role of breath as alluded to in her verses.19 It is as though Lallā-Vākyāni is a retrospective commentary on the question of sounds and their elusiveness in the LSI’s gramophone recordings and its transcriptions. Grierson also reflects on the question of Lal Ded’s multiple names; her own verses point to the arbitrary nature of names and ‘legends cluster’ around her name.20 As we have seen, Grierson grapples with the status of proper names, and his own name is far from straightforward. Like her name, his name also acquired an aura. Moreover, in keeping with the Survey and Grierson’s mode of authorship, Lallā-Vākyāni is a joint edition, in which the questions of ownership and originality extend to the status of Lal Ded’s sayings and even her own bodily self. The edition brings together Grierson, Barnett, Pandit Mukunda Rama Sastri, who took down the songs recited to him by another Brahmin, Dharma-dasa Darwesh (whose name is a cross-border one), Aurel Stein (in whose collection at the Oxford Indian Institute were two Sanskrit manuscript translations of some of the songs which are incorporated into the edition) and the elusive and yet powerfully present Lal Ded herself. There is even a sense in Lal Ded’s poems that at some level she does not exist as an individuated entity, she owns nothing (including herself), and yet at the same time she ‘owns’ the sayings, which we cannot be entirely sure she uttered. Lallā-Vākyāni therefore articulates in a much more intensely existential way the questions which both are thrown up by and animate the Survey’s production of knowledge, its joint authorship and its grappling with individuation. Overall, Grierson’s identification with Lal Ded indicates a strong awareness of the mysteries of language and the delusional qualities of our sense of agency over it. Juxtaposing the jointly produced Lallā-Vākyāni with the jointly authored LSI suggests that in the end Grierson does not so much possess Indian languages, rather he is possessed by them. In some ways, Grierson prefigures the obsessive Saleem Sinai in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, who hears 247

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voices in a range of Indian languages, and in whose head languages ‘rioted’,21 and like Saleem, Grierson has multiple ancestries and an in-between position which is both an opportunity and a liability.

Notes 1 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947, Delhi: Macmillan India, 1983, p. 1. 2 Ibid., p. 237. 3 See Ch. 5–7 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey. 4 Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans in British India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, pp. 18–21. 5 Edward Said, Orientalism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 3 and passim. 6 European Manuscripts, EUR 223/270, Sten Konow to Grierson, 20.5.1920, 23.6.1920, 7.8.1920, 8.1.1921, 10.1.1927 & 20.1.1927, and Grierson to Sten Konow, 21.7.1920, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London, hereafter EUR only. 7 Ibid., Sten Konow to Grierson, 14.7.1920. 8 EUR 223/238, Grierson to Edward Gait, 2.5.1919. 9 EUR 223/243, Grierson to Secretary, Indian High Commission, 11.2.1930. 10 EUR 223/270, Sten Konow to Grierson, 20.1.1927. 11 EUR 223/310, F.W. Thomas to Grierson, 13.10.1927. 12 EUR 223/336, G. Bühler to Grierson, 9.2.1894. 13 EUR 223/270, Sten Konow to Grierson, 20.1.1927. 14 See Ch. 4 of my Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, and Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang (eds), World Philology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 15 Richard Steadman-Jones, Colonialism and Grammatical Representation: John Gilchrist and the Analysis of the ‘Hindustani’ Language in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Oxford: The Philological Society, Blackwell Publishers, 2007, p. 13. 16 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986, p. 84. 17 Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 18 For which, see Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir, London: Hurst & Company, 2004, pp. 18–19. 19 G.A. Grierson and Lionel D. Barnett, Lallā-Vākyāni or the Wise Sayings of Lal Ded, London: RAS, 1920, pp. 37 (song 15), 39 (song 17), 53 (song 33), 73 (song 55), 75 (song 56), 112–13 (song 101). 20 Ibid., pp. 1, 2–3, 30 (song 8), 37 (song 15). 21 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, London: Picador, 1982, p. 167.

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Manuscript sources European Manuscripts, EUR 223 Grierson Collection, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London. India Office Records, IOR P. 2058, Major Pitcher and Mr. Grierson’s Inquiry into Emigration, August 1883, British Library, London. Linguistic Survey of India, S/1 Correspondence, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London. Linguistic Survey of India, S/2 Gramophone Recordings, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, London.

Primary printed sources Barnett, Lionel D. See G.A. Grierson, Lallā-Vākyāni. Crooke, W. See G.A. Grierson, Hatim’s Tales. Dvivedi, Sudhakara. See G.A. Grierson, Padumāwati. Grierson, George A., ‘A Further Folk-Lore Parallel’, Indian Antiquary, 1879, 8: 288–9. Grierson, George A., ‘A Plea for the People’s Tongue’, The Calcutta Review, 1880, 71, 1880: 151–68. Grierson, George A., Seven Grammars of the Dialects and Subdialects of the Bihárí Language Spoken in the Province of Bihár, in the Eastern Portion of the North-Western Provinces, and in the Northern Portion of the Central Provinces, 8 parts, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1883–87. Grierson, George A., Bihār Peasant Life, Being a Discursive Catalogue of the Surroundings of the People of That Province, with Many Illustrations from Photographs Taken by the Author, Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Press and London: Trübner and Co., 1885. Grierson, George A., ‘Some Bhojpūrī Folk Songs’, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, 1886, 18 (2): 206–67. Grierson, George A., The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan, Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1889.

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Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of the Bengali and Assamese Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 5: Indo-Aryan Family (Eastern Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bihārī and Oṛiyā Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Bodo, Nāgā, and Kachin Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903. Grierson, George A., ‘Tulasī Dāsa, Poet and Religious Reformer’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1903, 35 (3): 447–66. Grierson, George A., The Bible in India, Anarkali, Lahore: Punjab Bible Society, c. 1904. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 6: Indo-Aryan Family (Mediate Group), Specimens of the Eastern Hindī Language, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1904. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 2: Mōn-Khmēr and SiameseChinese Families (Including Khassi and Tai), Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1904. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 3: Specimens of the Kuki-Chin and Burma Groups, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1904. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 7: Indo-Aryan Family (Southern Group), Specimens of the Marāṭhī Language, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1905. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 4: Muṇḍā and Dravidian Languages, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 3: The Bhīl Languages, including Khāndēśí, Banjārī or Labhānī, Bahrūpiā, & c., Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1907. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 2: Specimens of the Rājasthānī and Gujarātī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1908. Grierson, George A., ‘A Folk-Tale Parallel’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1909, 41 (2): 448–9. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family, Pt. 1: General Introduction, Specimens of the Tibetan Dialects, the Himalayan Dialects, and the North Assam Group, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1909. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 4: Specimens of the Pahārī languages and Gujurī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1916.

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Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 9: Indo-Aryan Family (Central Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Western Hindī and Pañjābī, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1916. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8: Indo-Aryan Family (North-Western Group), Pt. 1: Specimens of Sindhī and Lahndā, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1919. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 8, Pt. 2: Specimens of the Dardic or Piśācha Languages (including Kāshmīrī), Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1919. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 10: Specimens of Languages of the Eranian Family, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1921. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 11: Gipsy Languages, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1922. Grierson, George A., The Lay of Alha: A Saga of Rajput Chivalry as Sung by Minstrels of Northern India, Partly Translated in English Ballad Metre by the Late William Waterfield of the Bengal Civil Service, Oxford: H. Milford, 1923. Grierson, George A., ‘On the Tirahi Language’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1925, 25 (3): 405–16. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Pt. 1: Introductory, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927. Grierson, George A., Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 1, Pt. 2: Comparative Vocabulary, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1928. Grierson, George A., Torwali: An Account of a Dardic Language of the Swat Kohistan, Based on the Materials Collected in Torwal with a Note on Torwal and Its People and a Map, London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1929. Grierson, George A. and Lionel D. Barnett, Lallā-Vākyāni or the Wise Sayings of Lal Ded, London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1920. Grierson, George A. and Mahamahopadhydya Sudhakara Dvivedi, The Padumāwati of Malik Muhammad Jaisi, Calcutta: Bibliotecha Indica, 1896–1911. Grierson, George A. and Mrs Grierson (first name not given), ‘An EnglishGipsy Index: Compiled by Mrs. Grierson: With an Introductory Note by G.A. Grierson’, Indian Antiquary, 1886, 15: 14–19. Grierson, George A., Pandit Govind Kaul, Aurel Stein, and W. Crooke, Hatim’s Tales: Kashmiri Stories and Songs, Recorded With the Assistance of Pandit Govind Kaul, Edited With a Translation, Linguistic Analysis, Vocabulary, Indexes, ETC. by Sir George A. Grierson, K.C.I.E, With a Note on the Folklore of the Tales by W. Crooke, C.I.E., London: John Murray, 1923. Grierson, George A., Hira Lal Kavyopadhyaya, Pandit Lochan Prasad Kavya, and Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, A Grammar of the Chhattisgarhi Dialect of Eastern Hindi: Originally Written in Hindi by Hira Lal Kavyopadhyaya, Headmaster of the Anglo-Vernacular School, Dhamtari and Translated by

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Sir George A. Grierson, of the Bengal Civil Service, Revised and Enlarged by Pandit Lochan Prasad Kavya-Vinod Under the Supervision of Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, of the Provincial Civil Service, Central Provinces and Berar, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, published under the orders of the Local Government Central Provinces and Berar, 1921. Kaul, Pandit Govind. See G.A. Grierson, Hatim’s Tales. Kavya, Pandit Lochan Prasad. See G.A. Grierson, A Grammar of the Chhattisgarhi Dialect. Kavyopadhyaya, Hira Lal. See G.A. Grierson, A Grammar of the Chhattisgarhi Dialect. Lal, Rai Bahadur Hira. See G.A. Grierson, A Grammar of the Chhattisgarhi Dialect. Stein, Aurel. See G.A. Grierson, Hatim’s Tales.

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260

INDEX

adventure narrative 27–31 Adventures of Dunsterforce, The (1920) 30 Ahom cosmogony 26 Ali, Abdullah Yusuf 51 American Dictionary of the English Language, An (1828) 34 Anderson, J.D. 9 Anglo-Indian returnees 94 Anglo-Irish 10, 25, 70, 89–93, 95, 96, 98; aristocracy 90; elite 89 Anglo-Irish-Indian 96 anthropology 21–4, 78, 79 Appadurai, Arjun 202 archival self-reflexivity 175–96 archive 175–96; see also colonial archives archivization 184–6, 189 Arnold, David 150 Aryans: languages 8, 60, 79; racialisation of 93–4 Asiatic Society of Bengal 21, 51, 86, 120 Assamese 110 Atkinson, Robert 91 autosuggestion 86–7 Austric languages 8 Babel 116, 229 Bagri dialect of Rajasthani 127 Bailey, Grahame 28, 128, 202, 220 Baktiari Phonology 97 Bangalore Auxiliary Bible Society 113 Banglā viśvakoṣa 180

Bareh, U. Mondon 153 Bashgali Dictionary (1913) 3 Bayly, Christopher vi, 91, 232 Bengali languages 8, 33, 35 Bengali literature 32 Bengali script 110 Bentinck, A.H.W. 3 Bhils 79 Bhojpuri 224 Bible in India 86, 113, 115, 116 Bible in India, The (c. 1904) 86, 113, 116 Bible translations 113, 114–16 bibliographies 117, 119, 175, 185, 224, 244 Bihār Peasant Life (1885) 5, 29, 83 Biometric Study on the Tribes of North-Western Himalayan Region, A (1976) 22 Bloch, Jules 8 Bodo group 110 Bolshevism 38 Bombay Census report 59 Brief Sketch of Bengali Phonetics, A (1921) 120 British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) 113, 115, 120 British Raj 24, 81, 148, 155 British readership 31–2 Browne, Thomas 116 Buner dialect 34 Burma Census report 61 Burmano-Buddhist narrative 70 Butler, Harcourt 62

261

INDEX

Calcutta Auxiliary Bible Society 113 Calcutta Review 39, 217, 219 Cambridge History of India (1922) 200 Campbell, George 2, 78 Carey, William 114 caricature 145–6 Carter, Paul 151, 155 Chamberlayne, John 113 Chandra, L. Dani 120 Chatterjee, M.M. 39 Chatterji, S.K. 8, 22, 118, 120–1, 143, 148, 221 Christianity 112–16 Christian Morals (1716) 116 Cifali, Mireille 161 civilisation, notions of 18 Collis, Maurice 28 Colloquial Sinhalese Reader in Phonetic Transcription, A (1919) 120 colonial archives 176, 185, 187; bibliographical exercise 175–6; colonial libraries 176, 181, 182, 185; Grierson’s selfhood 181–2; colonial knowledge production 176–9; survey, monumental 179–81; print in India 188 colonial auditory order 144–7, 152 colonial categories 17–41; of thought 17–49 colonial English 31–4, 81–4, 89, 97 colonial enumeration 35, 36, 38, 57, 59, 60, 122, 199, 202–6; colonial statistics 57, 59, 204 colonial knowledge 12, 29, 57, 97, 197–211 colonial state 25, 50, 52; linguistic survey and 50–77 colonial ‘whiteness’ 94 Comparative and Etymological Dictionary of the Nepali Language (1931) 52 Comparative Dictionary of the Bihārī Language (1885, 1889) 6 Comparative Dictionary of the IndoAryan Languages, A (1966–71) 3–4 Comparative Grammar (1856, 1875) 78

Comparative Vocabulary, linguistic survey 1, 3, 142, 184, 243 Conrady, August 220 Cook, Scott B. 93 Coué, Émile 86, 87 Cowell, E.B. 6 ‘criminal’ dialects 18, 32 criminal tribes 17–19 Crooke, William 5, 25 cross-border figure, Grierson 87–97 Cust, Robert Needham 6 Das, Banarsi 120, 151, 201 Davies, H.R. 61 De Man, Paul 246 Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (1872) 81 Devanagari 125 dialectal variations 37 Dictionary of Pahari Dialects, A (1909) 3 Discovery of India (1946) 38 Dissertation on the Proper Names of Panjâbîs, A (1883) 213 document Raj 20, 147 Dunsterville, Lionel C. 30 Dwivedi, Sudhakara 228 Edison, Thomas 145, 150 Emigration Report, 1883 20, 31 English-knowing population 31 English Language (1862) 35 English language patriotism 31–4; see also colonial English Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) 113 ethnolinguistics 21–8, 78–81, 97, 243; colonial hybridity 31, 88; race 10, 21–7, 28, 39, 78, 79, 80, 81, 89, 94, 97, 214, 243 Ethnological Survey 53 ethnology 21–7, 62, 66, 78–81, 97 Ethnology of India (1866) 78 Etruscan Researches (1874) 80 eyesight 78–106 Fernandez, Thomas C.N. 127 Finn, Margot 97 First World War 27, 93, 144, 245

262

INDEX

Flournoy, Théodore 159–61 folklore 2, 21–7, 90, 178, 180, 188, 216, 218, 219, 227, 243 Folklore in the Old Testament (1919) 219 Folklore Survey 26 Foucault, Michel 215, 229 Fox-Strangways, A.H. 151 Frazer, James 218 Friend Pereira, J.E. 9 Fritz, John Friedrich 113 Gaisberg, Frederick 161 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 37, 87, 118, 232–3 Ganguli, Syamacharan 35 Gazetteer of Upper Burma 64 Gilchrist, John 163 Gipsy Languages (1922) 10 ‘Gipsy’ languages 18 ‘Gipsy’ names 84 Government of India Act 1919 40 Govinchandra, Alkondavilli 222 Grammar of the Kūi Language, A (1909) 9 gramophone recordings 11, 17, 52, 53, 56, 63, 64, 68, 99, 120, 130, 141–74, 186, 243–5, 247; language of command in 147–50 gramophone séances 158–9 Grierson, Charles Thornton Primrose 90 Grierson, George Abraham 1–12, 17–40, 50–70, 78–99, 107–30, 141–64, 175–89, 197–206, 212–33, 243–8 Guha, B.S. 22 Gurdon, P.R. 9 Gurmukhi 108, 109 Hall, Ernest H. 52 Hand-Book for the Mavchi and Pavra Dialects (1902) 3 Handbook to the Kaithi Character (1899), 127 heroism, colonial notions of 30, 85 Hewett, J.P. 5, 31, 54 Hibernicisation 93 Hindi 5, 7, 33, 36–7, 59, 60, 94, 96

Hindi Folk Songs (1936) 88 Hindi-Urdu conflict 119 Hindī viśvakoṣa 180 Hindostani 113 Hind Swaraj (1909) 232 Hindustani 36, 37, 60 History of the City of Dublin, A (1854–9) 90 History of Western Tibet, A (1907) 216 Hodson, T.C. 22 Hoernle, A.F. Rudolph 6 home language 112 Hull, Eleanor 90 Hunter, Mark 40 illness 78–106 Imperial Oriental Press 27 Ina of Wessex 33 Index of Language Names 178 Index of Languages 3 Index of Languages and Dialects 59 Indian Antiquary 176, 218 Indian Babel 116, 229 Indian Civil Service (ICS) 20, 26, 54, 91, 94 Indian dialects 31–8 Indian linguists 220, 221 Indian names: as aliases 212–13; and joint authorship 220–9 Indo-Aryan philology 202 Indo-Chinese languages 1 Indo-Chinese racial stocks 81 Indo-European race 79 International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) 120–9 Jaisi, Malik Muhammad 228 joint authorship 12, 212–20, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232, 244, 246, 247; bardic literature 218; Chhattisgarhi Dialect 226; copyright in colonial India 230; and Indian names 220–9; Jaisi 228; Kashmiri stories 227; language names 58, 178; Linguistic Society of India 220; Padmavati 228, 229; pandits in colonial India 148, 229; property of 228–31 Jones, Daniel 120, 221

263

INDEX

Jones, William 20 Joshi, H.G. 53 Joshi, Tika Ram 3 Kaithi 109, 110 Kāshmīrī Dictionary 4, 82, 108 Kashmiri Shaivism 99, 247 Kemal, Mustafa 118 Ketelaer, John Joshua 113–14 Khan, Ghulam Muhammad 177 knowledge production, composite mode 176–9 Knowles, J. 113 Konow, Sten 3, 9, 54, 80, 82, 83, 94, 125, 202 Lahnda dialects 32, 59, 204 Lal Ded 83, 246–7 Landa script 109 Language Hunting in the Karakoram (1939) 29 language recordings 150; Edison 150; Gramophone Company 150; white noise 141–64; séances 141–64; see also gramophone recordings Languages of the North-Western Frontier (1899) 1 Latham, R.G. 35 Latifi, A. 34 laughter 147 Lay of Alha, The (1923) 217 legal anthropology 26 Lepsius, Richard 112 lexicography 27 linguistic data 11, 175, 176 linguistic fieldwork 29, 30, 69 linguistic minorities 118–9 Linguistic Society of India 180, 220 Linguistic Survey of Burma 6, 10, 50, 53, 60–9, 81, 120, 144, 186 Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) 1, 4, 10, 57, 62, 64, 70, 98, 112, 120–9, 150, 205, 207; aims 5–10; bibliographical exercise 175–6; and Census 56–60; chronology and significance of 1–4; finances 52–3; inter-provincial and European rivalries 143–4;

knowledge production in 176–9; as monumental 179–81; printing of 182–4; transcription in 123–4; transliteration in 123–4 Linguistic Survey of India and the Census of 1911, The (1919) 57 ‘literatim’ transliteration 124 Lorimer, D.L. 29, 38–9, 86–7, 91, 95, 97 Lorimer, Emily 29, 38–9, 86–7, 91–4, 95, 97, 128 Macalister, G. 113, 177 Madras Auxiliary Bible Society 113 Magahi dialect 108, 114 Mahapatra, B.P. 1 Maithili Sahitya Parishad Darbhanga 112 Manen, Van 21, 83 mapping of languages 36 Marathi 8, 223 Marten, J.T. 66 Masica, Colin 37 Mazumdar, S.K. 22 Midnight’s Children 231, 247 Mitchell, Lisa 246 modernity’s script 116–18 Modern Languages of the East Indies (1878) 5 Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan, The (1889) 6 Modi script 111 Monier-Williams, Monier 112 mother-tongue 112 muharrirs 20–1 Müller, Elise 159–61 Müller, Max 6, 79, 80, 112 Multani Stories (1917) 123 musicality 151–2 Music Goes Round, The (1942) 161 Nagari 109, 226 Nagas 82 Nasalisation in Hindi Literary Works (1935) 147 ‘National importance of Oriental learning’ 27 Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India 150

264

INDEX

native character 17–19 Needham, F.J. 198 Nehru, Jawaharlal 37, 38 North India Bible Society 113 O’Brien, Edward 230 official status, of Grierson 51–2 Origin of the Aryans, The (c. 1889) 78 Oriya 32, 127, 224 Overend, Thomas George 91 Paasi, Anssi 228 Padumāwati of Malik Muhammad Jaisi, The (1896–1911) 229 Panjab Auxiliary Bible Society 113 Panjabi 31, 59, 108, 204, 223 Perera, H.S. 120 Persian script 108 Perso-Arabic scripts 112 ‘personal equation’ 122–3 petitions 20–1 Phillott, D.C. 156, 157 phonetics 9, 88, 120; see also International Phonetic Alphabet phonetic transcription 124 phonographs 156–7 plebeian spiritualism 162 Powell, F. York 90 Primer of Dravidian Phonology, A (1909) 180 princes 17–19 prodigal son 2, 26, 31, 34, 52, 61, 63, 96, 107, 108, 110, 115, 126, 127, 154, 161, 163, 177, 198, 199, 201, 216, 224, 228, 229 Proverbs and Folklore of Kumaun and Garhwal (1894) 216 Psalms of David 114 psychoanalysis 157 race in colonial India 21–8, 39, 78–81, 89, 94, 97; anthropometry 22, 79, 80; criminal tribes 17, 18, 32; ethnology 21–7, 62, 66, 78, 79, 80, 81, 97 Ramaswamy, Sumathi 112, 246 Ranganathan, S.R. 224 re-archivization 175

Risley, H.H. 22, 56, 57, 79, 80, 203 Romanisation 108, 110, 225; and British imperialism 110–12; and Christianity 112–16 Roman script 11, 107–11, 116–19, 123–30, 177, 212, 217, 224, 225, 227, 244; instability of 124–9 Roos-Keppel, George 143 Ross, Denison 151 Rost, Reinhold 6 Sanskrit 6, 32, 126, 247 Sanskritisation 32–3 Schleicher, August 96 Schmidt, Peter 8 Schmidt, W. 18 School of Oriental Studies 9, 27, 113 Scottish dialect 89 scripts 110 séances 158–63 Sedgwick, L.G. 59 self-effacement 85 self-reflexivity 175–96 semi-phonetic system 124 Sen, Dinesh Chandra 223 Serindia (1921) 30 Seven Grammars of the Dialects and Subdialects of the Bihárí Language (1883–87) 5, 221 Shackle, Christopher 230 shibboleth 114 Siamese 17 Siddiqi, Majid 20 Simcox, A.H.A. 9, 56 Simon Report 39 Skemp, F.W. 123 Smith, Hélène see Müller, Elise Sonnenschein, E.A. 88 sounds recordings, aims of 141–74 special duty, Grierson 53–6, 243 Specimen Translations in Various Indian Languages (1897) 115 spectacles 110 Standing Committee of Grammatical Reform 88 Steadman-Jones, Richard 245 Stein, Aurel 29, 30, 39, 82, 142, 156, 179, 181, 182, 219, 226, 227, 228, 247

265

INDEX

Stokes, Whitley 91, 92 Subhaiya, K.V. 180 subliminal memory 160 survey’s inadequacies 197–202 Sylloge (1715) 113 Tantrism 162 Taylor, G.P. 3 Taylor, Isaac 78, 80 Taylor, L.F. 6, 61–9, 70, 81, 142, 154, 158, 219 Teacher’s Word Book (1921) 31 teaching-machine 156 techno-modernity 150–1 Tedesco, Paul 8 Temple, Richard C. 5, 25, 121, 176, 188, 213 temporality 186–8 Thomas, F.W. 124, 125 Thompson, T.W. 180 Thorndike, Edward L. 31 Tibetan languages 31 Tibeto-Burman dialects 18 Tibeto-Burmese languages 62, 220 Torwali: An Account of a Dardic language of the Swat Kohistan (1929) 30 Tragedy of the Worcester, The (1939) 188 transcontinental epistolary culture 224 transcription 109, 110, 112, 120, 121, 123–5, 128, 129, 142 transliteration 11, 99, 107–13, 116–25, 128–30, 142, 197, 199, 212, 224–6, 229, 244; alphabet 108–12, 117–19, 124–7, 224–6; baptist missionaries 114; Indian scripts 108, 110, 112, 125, 126, 127, 130; International Phonetics 112, 120; modern scripts 116–18; Roman script 107, 108, 110–11, 116–19, 123–30, 177, 212, 217,

224, 225, 244; Serampore 113, 114; systems of 118–21 Trautmann, Thomas R. 96, 98, 230 Trevelyan, C.E. 118 Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891–92) 23 Turner, R.L. 3, 38, 39, 52, 188, 244; see also A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages (1966–71) uncertain knowledge: in survey 197–211 Union of Britain and India (UBI) 40 unnatural voices 154–5 Upreti, Ganga Dat 216 Urdu 37; manual 34 Varley, J. 3 Varma, S. 3, 147 vernacular languages: systematic survey of 5 Waterfield, William 217, 218 Webb, Morgan 60–3 Webster, Noah 34 Wellisch, Hans H. 117 Western Pahari Languages 199 White, Samuel 28 white noise 141–74 wild tribes 53 Wilkins, David 113 Wilson, James 34 Wise Sayings of Lal Ded (1920) 246 Written Languages of India, The (1989) 1 Yates, J.A. 120 Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph 159 Young Grammarians 5, 141 Yün-nan: The Link between India and Yangtze (1909) 61

266