Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India

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

• 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