‘A State of Affairs which is Essentially Indefinite’: The Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1927)

Abstract

Historians of colonial India have argued that cartography was central to colonial power in India; maps came to define the British empire's authority in the subcontinent. The effectiveness of imperial geography made India a concrete entity for both British colonialists and Indian nationalists, for whom India came to be a single and coherent geographical entity whose boundaries coincided with those of the subcontinent. This article argues that the geographical imagining of India in the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1927) was in conflict with these colonial and nationalist mappings of India. It complicated the notion of India as a single, coherent, self-referential geography, and in doing so it centralised India in a global linguistic geography. Its cartographical exercises were at odds with the colonial state's investment in a particular geographical image of India, and with the canonical nationalist geographical imagining of India as a multilingual entity as expressed in the Report of the State Reorganization Commission of 1955.

Key words:

• Grierson
• Linguistic Survey of India
• British colonialism and languages
• Indian nationalism and languages
• mapping languages
• literary geography
• cartographic sensibility

Note on Contributor

Javed Majeed is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at King's College, London. He is currently writing a monograph on Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India. His previous publications include Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity (2007, Indian edition 2014), Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics, and Postcolonialism (2009), and James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism (1992).

Notes

1. These expressions of friendship are explored further in my monograph under preparation.

2. For reasons of space, I am not able to discuss this further here.

3. See the 1955 Report of the State Reorganization Commission, Government of India Press.

4. I do not have the space in this article to address Grierson's connection with this Society.