Trautmann - Dravidians and Aryans in British India

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian

Historiographia Linguistica xxxi�:�1 (2004), 33–58.

issn 0302–5160 / e-issn 1569–9781�©John Benjamins Publishing Company

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in British India

A tale of two cities*

Thomas R. TrautmannUniversity of Michigan

1. IntroductionAryan and Dravidian, the keywords of my title, have ancient antecedents in

Sanskrit, but in their current meanings they are modern constructs that wereinvented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. To examine their genesis andmutual influence I began, not in my usual way, with a trip to the library, but asmy students are teaching me to, with a keyword search on the Internet. Theoutcome was quite revealing.

For Dravidian I found a modest number of books listed on the AmericanBook Exchange, most of them about Dravidian languages and linguistics, a few

*�This essay is an attempt to sketch a large terrain, that of a project on ‘Languages andNations’ I have been engaged in for several years, concerning language analysis in earlyBritish India, and the ways in which it is an emergent product of interactions between twotraditions of language study, European and Indian. What can here only be sketched is put ingreater detail in my book, Aryans and British India (Trautmann 1997), chiefly about Indo-European and the Calcutta Orientalists, and a book manuscript in progress, chiefly about theDravidian proof and the Orientalists of Madras, in which many of these matters are morefully explored and referenced than they can be in the short space of an article. The framingof the essay around the keywords Aryan and Dravidian was due to the conference for whichit was first written, “�‘Arier’ und ‘Draviden’: Genese und Wechselwirkung zweier interkultur-eller Deutungsmuster und ihre Relevanz für die Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung Südasiens”,held at the Franckesche Stiftungen, Halle, 4–5 October 1999. It was published, in German, in“Arier” und “Draviden”: Konstructionen der Vergangenheit als Grundlage für Selbst- undFremdwahrnehmungen Südasiens ed. by Michael Bergunder & Rahul Peter Das (Halle/Saale:Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2002). I have made a few alterations in the originalEnglish version. I am grateful to Kevin Tuite of the Université de Montréal and an anony-mous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions, and to the editor for his sage andthoughtful editorial help.

34 Thomas R. Trautmann

about the Dravidian political movement in Tamil Nadu, and one or two worksof anthropology, all of them about South India and Sri Lanka. Western knowl-edge of the Dravidian, in short, is largely confined to scholarly books on India.A keyword search for Aryan, by contrast, found a larger number of books, mostof them falling into two very distinct types: scholarly works about India (mostlylinguistics) on the one hand, and, on the other, works propagating or analyzingthe politics of racial hatred in the West, from 19th century beginnings throughthe Nazis to groups such as Aryan Nation which, unfortunately, flourish todayin my own country. Though the scope of the Dravidian concept is largelyconfined to the study of South Asia, it is a striking aspect of the Aryan conceptthat it belongs to two quite different narratives, in which it has quite differentmeanings and functions. I will call these narratives “the story of knowledge”and “the story of ethnic politics”, by which I mean especially the story of thepolitics of racial hatred.

The story of knowledge has to do with the discovery of the Indo-Europeanfamily of languages, adumbrated by Sir William Jones before the Asiatic Societyat Calcutta in 1786 (Jones 1786), anticipated by many and put on a sound basis

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by Franz Bopp beginning with his famous Conjugationssystem (Bopp 1816).

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Jones’ pronouncement on Indo-European figures in histories of linguistics as anepochal moment leading to the formation of Comparative Philology. The Indo-European concept was a real breakthrough of scientific linguistics, linkinglanguages widely separated in space, forming two blocs, an eastern one ofPersian and Indic languages and a western, European bloc, separated from oneanother by Semitic and Turkic languages. The Indo-European concept wasanything but obvious — the idea, that is, that the two blocs of languages, sodistant from one another, are nevertheless related to one another. Its discoveryby Jones and others not only created a new science of language but it radicallyreordered existing ideas about the relations among different nations or races ofpeoples. Moreover it created new knowledge of such interrelationships in thedeep past of which the surviving ancient literatures, such as those in Latin,Greek or Sanskrit, preserved no distinct memory; and for peoples who had nowritten literatures, such as the American Indians (cf. Tooker 2002), it became

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a new key to ethnological history. The discovery of the Dravidian languagefamily was less spectacular in its geographical reach, but similar in its attendingcircumstances. In these and other cases philology made durable additions toknowledge that remain in force among the experts to this day.

The story of ethnic politics is the more powerful and urgent narrative aboutthe appropriation and political deployment of the new ethnological ideas,

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 35

especially in the West, but also in South Asia. The story of politics is not, ofcourse, separable from the story of knowledge and the two are connected inways that need to be examined and explained. The shadow of the death campsof Nazi period Germany darkens the aspect of the scientific breakthroughrepresented by Indo-Europeanist comparative philology, to which Germanscholars made such brilliant contributions. Thus one of the greatest scientificaccomplishments of the modern world is linked with the event which definesfor us the ultimate of human evil. Both narratives are sometimes merged intoa story of guilty knowledge; sometimes the story gets framed as a specificallyGerman story (Poliakov 1974), at other times (Said 1978) in a quite different

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direction as a Foucauldian story of Orientalist knowledge produced and taintedby colonial power.

In spite of all that has been written about them, our understanding both ofthe formation of modern knowledge about Indo-European and Dravidian, andof the rise of modern ethnic politics in the West and in South Asia, are far fromcomplete. Much remains to be clarified about the relation of the story ofOrientalist knowledge and that of ethnic politics, and much harm comes fromconcluding too quickly, finding early causes for late consequences by evacuatinglapsed time between distant horizons, under the strongly directional light andshadow thrown from one theoretical perspective or another. We need to allowthe evidence itself to speak more loudly.

Without pretending to be able to complete the work that needs doing, it ismy hope to contribute through the investigation of the genesis of the modernAryan and Dravidian concepts in British India — work which I have begun ina book, Aryans and British India (Trautmann 1997), and which continues in a

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book in progress on the discovery of the Dravidian language family. My reasonsfor concentrating on the British Orientalists to the exclusion of those of otherEuropean nations are not national at all, in any sense. I think that the story ofknowledge is really about an intellectual encounter of Europe as a whole andIndia as a whole; it is a story of civilizations brought into close connection bycolonial rule. The British Orientalists are interesting as an aspect of thatEuropean encounter; an aspect, moreover, which has been forgotten andneglected. For a couple of decades Calcutta enjoyed a virtual monopoly asproducer of a new, British-Indian Orientalism based on knowledge of Sanskritthat was avidly consumed in Europe, creating indeed a mania for India andSanskrit. The monopoly of Calcutta ended when the means of learning Sanskritwere brought to Europe, first by Alexander Hamilton at Paris, and then in theGermanies, as the British enthusiasm waned; at length the British-Indian


contribution came to be forgotten by the British themselves. Indeed I aminterested in the story because it has been lost, overshadowed by German andFrench accomplishments in and enthusiasm for Orientalist scholarship. Only byrecovering this story can we hope to complete the stories of knowledge and ofethnic politics and address the problem of their interrelation, the problem ofguilty knowledge.

And yet, before Comparative Philology became a German science in Britisheyes there had been several important British contributions to linguisticethnology, results that quite overturned prevailing views and revolutionized thedeep history of the globe. The discovery that the languages of India and Persiawere related to those of Europe, is only the most well known. The discovery thatthe language of the Roma or Gypsies of Europe was not in fact Egyptian, as thename they have been given implies, but Indo-European and more specificallyIndo-Aryan, was likewise against expectation. The discovery of the Malayo-Polynesian language family, uniting languages from Madagascar to the EasterIslands, was astonishing in its terrestrial reach. The discovery that the Dravidianlanguages of South India are historically related inter se, but not derived fromSanskrit in spite of many Sanskritic loans, as I shall explain shortly, went againstthe grain of received beliefs, both among Indians and Europeans. In all theseinstances the historical relations newly uncovered by comparison of languageshad left no imprint in the collective memories or written documents of thepeoples in question, so that the new discoveries amounted to a revolution inethnological knowledge.

Sir William Jones (1746–1794), William Marsden (1754–1836), John

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Leyden (1775–1811) and Francis Whyte Ellis (1777–1819) were involved in

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these discoveries, and all of them were employees of the East India Company.Jones was a celebrity in his own day and remains well known for his role in thedevelopment of the Indo-European concept. He also made important identifi-cations of words in the Romani or Gypsy language with Sanskrit (Jones 1786).

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Marsden’s early paper comparing the Gypsy language with Hindustani makeshim one of the co-discoverers of its Indian origins, and he also published thefirst demonstration of the Malayo-Polynesian family (Marsden 1781, 1785).

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Marsden felt that his own accomplishments had been thrown into the shade byJones’ celebrity, and that he was better appreciated on the Continent, wheresome of his philological works were translated, than at home (Marsden

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1834: 1); how right he was may be seen from his entry in the Dictionary ofNational Biography, where he is identified as an Orientalist and numismatist,and his striking achievements concerning Malayo-Polynesian and the Gypsy


language are not even mentioned. John Leyden was a linguist of extraordinaryfacility, whose ambition to overtake the reputation of Jones was cut short by anearly death, by fever, on an expedition to Java; he and Ellis were distant friends.Ellis, whose shy brilliance demanded the highest standards of himself, pub-lished little beyond the Dravidian proof. He had made a vow not to publish tillhe was a well-ripened scholar of 40 years, and then died of accidental poison-ing at age 41 or 42.

In the course of the 19th century British people themselves forgot thecontributions of their countrymen. They came to think of enthusiasm forIndian antiquities a puzzling attribute of Continentals, and of ComparativePhilology as a German science, looking upon Friedrich Max Müller as itscelebrity scholar and translator into English.

2. Orientalism in British IndiaColonial power has played a large role in the production of linguistic

ethnology in British India, from Jones and the founding of the Asiatic Societyto Sir George Grierson (1851–1941) and the Linguistic Survey of India. B.S.Cohn’s justly famous article sums it up in its title: “The Command of Languageand the Language of Command” (Cohn 1985), which tracks the sudden

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explosion of dictionaries and grammars in early colonial Calcutta.I have myself made the argument that the onset of intense British interest

in acquiring mastery of the Indian languages followed the transition from amerchant operation on the Indian coast to an colonial government ruling overthe agrarian interior (Trautmann 1997). The transition occurred first at

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Calcutta, then at Madras and last at Bombay, following military victories thatextended British rule inland (the battle of Plassey in 1757, the defeat of TipuSultan in 1799, and the defeat of the Marathas in 1819), and it is easy to showthat government support for the writing of grammars and dictionaries followsthis temporal profile. Orientalist societies were founded at each of the threecapitals of British India, and institutions for the teaching of Oriental languagesto the newly arrived civil service recruits. Except for the Literary Society ofBombay, founded before the Maratha conquest (1804), the creation of thesescholarly and educational institutions followed the transition at each city froma purely mercantile to an imperial function, with the acquisition of politicalpower over the agrarian interior. There is no mistaking the cause-effect relationof colonialism and the formation of bilingual dictionaries and grammars of theIndian languages.

Edward Said’s argument about colonial power and orientalism, an extension


of Foucault’s mutual entailment of power and knowledge, is not about India orlanguage directly, but in a somewhat similar way to Cohn makes the impera-tives, self-delusions and projections of colonial power the causative agents ofOrientalism (Said 1978). Said’s widely-read work was effective in bringing

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power back to center stage of the examination of Orientalism, at the same timeas it declined to engage with the actual content of Orientalist scholarship — aless than satisfactory aspect of this very successful polemic work. Orientalists’reactions to Said have taken the form of arguing that there is a surplus beyondcolonial utility in the works of Orientalist scholarship that is left unexplained.This counter-argument has seemed to me a kind of special pleading that refusesthe main point, the massive involvement of colonial power in these forms ofknowledge. What has so struck me about the early British Orientalists is thatevery one of them is a frank supporter of empire in India, at a time when therewere still vocal critics of empire in England.

That said, and while the argument of the surplus does seems feeble beforethe fact of power, there is another surplus in the case that neither the Saidianargument nor its critics consider. Any argument must bracket out a great dealof reality to make its problem manageable, an infinity in fact, and what of thatbracketed-out infinity that increasingly impresses itself upon my attention is thelinguistic theories and projects the British and the Indians brought to thecreation of new knowledge about the Indian languages and the Indian people.Many scholars recently have begun the exploration of the production of thisknowledge as a form of dialogue or a conversation, not a dialogue betweenequals to be sure but nevertheless one with mutual inputs and diverse outputs(e.g., Halbfass 1988, Irschick 1994). Fewer and fewer scholars are any longer


satisfied with a notion of Orientalism as a Western imposition upon the East,without the agency of those it imposes upon. Investigating the interchanges ofEuropean scholars and Indian pandits seems clearly the way forward.

This way forward, the way that many people seem to be taking just nowmore or less spontaneously, has the tendency of turning what had been pro-posed as a question of colonial knowledge into one of dialogues (conversations,arguments, quarrels) between hitherto distant forms of knowledge attaching todistinct intellectual traditions and yielding plural outcomes. In this form,colonialism remains a cause, but it is a material cause, of the new learning,whose efficient causes lie elsewhere.

In what follows, then, I shall attempt a sketch of the inputs, British andIndian, which went into the discovery of the Indo-European and the Dravidianlanguage families in British India.


3. European and Indian ideas of languageAll the revolutionary new outcomes for the deep history of the world I have

mentioned — the Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian and Dravidian languagefamilies and the identification of the language of the Roma with Indo-European— began from an apparently simple method, the comparison of vocabularylists. To be sure, even in the 18th century the eliciting of historical relationsamong languages did not rest on word-lists alone, and scholars understood thatthe comparison of words had to be followed to the comparison of “the roots ofverbs and in the forms of grammar” as Jones said, which were thought to be thedeeper levels of language than the lexicon. Nevertheless word-lists wereeverywhere the starting-point of the study of genealogical relations amonglanguages, and there was a profusion of them, being applied, moreover, all overthe world by Europeans and Euro-Americans in the 18th century and beyond,such as the project of Catherine of Russia, for the Russian empire (published inPallas 1786–1789), and of Thomas Jefferson to recover the history of the

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American Indians through comparison of their languages (Jefferson c.1782), aswell as abundant examples from India. Leibniz composed a list, published earlyin the 18th century, which seems to have been a source for many of these oftenclosely similar lists (Leibniz 1718; Gulya l974, Aarsleff 1982).


The simple-seeming vocabulary list had in fact a rather complex theorybehind it which, briefly, is as follows. Every language must have at its core theprimitive vocabulary proper to that language, for there are some things forwhich every language must have words in its earliest formation. This essentialcore must include words for numbers, kinship relations, parts of the body,kinds of food, and so forth — words being understood as the names of classesof things existing in the world in this realist, pre-Saussurian conception. It isthis core that the standard vocabulary questionnaire attempts to capture. Wordsborrowed from foreign languages, under this conception, will be words of artand science, that is, more complex and advanced conceptions that may developonly with the progress of civilization and inhabiting, therefore, the outerreaches of the lexicon. This theory sets up oppositions between core andperiphery, simple and complex conceptions, native and borrowed words. Thevocabulary list, therefore, which is the main tool of the emerging new science,captures the primitive core vocabulary and jettisons, for purposes of historicalstudy, the ‘higher’ and often borrowed terms of art and science. It is themachinery by which that primitive core is identified and, in the all-importantinitial analytic move, is disengaged from the outer, later, foreign and learnedaccretions. The simple-seeming word list embodies a work of far-reaching


abstraction by which the ancient core of a living language is disengaged from itsperiphery and made into a new object for the study of genealogical relationsamong other such abstracted core languages.

18th-century European ideas about the origin of language and its develop-ment are contained within the short, Biblical chronology of the world, whichamong English speakers was thought to have begun with the creation in 4004B.C., or rather with the more recent Confusion of Tongues at the Tower ofBabel which occurred in about 2300 B.C. (discussed in Trautmann 1992). They

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are further configured by the Genesis narrative of the descent of Noah, intowhat the anthropologists call a segmentary lineage of nations, which is thesubstratum of the segmentary lineage of languages. To hold to the project ofuncovering relations among nations through the comparison of vocabulary listsis to hold that languages have similarities among themselves in proportion tothe closeness of their derivation.

It is this conception and the project which flows from it that Europeans tookaround the world in the 17th and 18th centuries. This is the ‘surplus input’ thatthe colonial studies approach brackets out of the equation, and that makes theknowledge production of European colonialism so very different from that ofthe ancient Romans and Greeks, especially as concerns the study of foreignlanguages. It is this project that Europe brings to the world it turns into itscolonies; but it is a project formed ages earlier and formed around, not the Greekbut rather the Biblical conceptions of the history of languages and nations.

In a sense, the colonial expansion of Europe acted less as an efficient thanas a material means, a kind of technology magnifying and making moreeffective the purposes of its user. It now seems to me that the reason theseprojects come to fruition in the transition from a mercantile to an colonialenterprise in British India is that the transition brought a new stratum of well-educated, often university-educated, civil servants and officers to British Indiathat had been lacking in the mercantile phase. Thus while much of the newinterest in India’s languages was directly inspired by the needs of government,a distinct component of it was directed to broadly philosophical or theoreticalprojects whose origin lies beyond immediate colonial utility. Certain character-istic forms of colonial knowledge, then, follow from programs that had beendeveloped in Europe much before the imperial expansion of Europe. Themethod of the comparison of vocabulary lists, fashioned at home, was able torewrite the history of the world because European imperial power made non-Europe accessible to European scholarship.


In much of the world colonized by Europeans, indigenous knowledge oflanguage was made to function largely as mere data in relation to the organizingstructures of European theory. But in India the British and other Europeansencountered a highly sophisticated and much longer tradition of languagetheory in its own right, centering on the analysis of Sanskrit. This tradition,originating in the Vedic period to serve the need for linguistic control of thesacrificial liturgy, achieved precocious maturity in the work of Pa »nini and hissuccessors, Katyayana and Patañjali, who lived perhaps between the fourth andthe second centuries B.C. The project of the ‘science of grammar’ (Vyakara »na)was to reduce the whole of the Sanskrit language, in both its liturgical and itsspoken registers, to two things: a list of roots or ‘elements’ (dhatus) and a set oftransformational rules which, when applied to the dhatus, would generate theentirety of the language. The rules of transformation were expressed in the formof highly abbreviated prose, called sutras, which because they sacrifice intelligi-bility to brevity and rigor seem like anticipations of computer programs.

For the analysis of the Prakrit languages that descended from Sanskrit theVyakara »na tradition developed second-order transformational rules to accountfor the words of Prakrit by showing their derivation from the Sanskrit dhatus.These Sanskrit derivatives took two forms, those that were unchanged exceptfor the addition of a Prakrit termination (called tatsamas) and those which hadundergone internal modification (called tadbhavas). But the Prakrits contain aresidue of unexplainable words whose relation to the dhatus of Sanskrit cannotbe shown; this residuum of unexplainable words consisted mainly of ‘country’words (desya), that is regionalisms, and also purely local (gramya) or foreign(antardesya) words.

The works of Vyakara »na do not provide the easy access to Sanskrit and theother languages of India that the British sought in the colonial project ofacquiring command of the Indian languages, or in the more theoretically-driveninterest in Sanskrit itself; indeed they are so difficult as to discourage all but thosewho are prepared to dedicate years to their study. Nevertheless many of theiranalytical principals are conveyed in watered-down versions of Sanskrit gram-mar for schoolroom use that were available to the British in Calcutta. On theother hand, the science of phonology (Pratisakhya), which Vyakara »na presup-poses and which was already highly developed at the time Pa »nini composed histext, is rendered very accessible through the scripts in which Sanskrit is written,since these scripts are deeply shaped by phonological analysis.

Most writing systems today are descendants of the ancient Semitic script,including the one in which this paper is written; so is the Brahmi script, most


scholars believe, from which modern scripts of India derive (Bühler 1898). But

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in creating a system of writing the Indians, thanks to the acuteness of theirphonological analysis, made profound changes in it, doubling the number ofletters to achieve a close correspondence between the sounds of Sanskrit and thesigns of the writing system, and changing the arbitrary alphabetical order thatafflicts all the other descendants of the ancient Semitic script with a highlyrational order reflecting that phonological analysis. In this way the very learningof the alphabetical order of the script for Sanskrit is a lesson in phonology. Thiseffect was also conveyed by other scripts derived from Brahmi, such as theDravidian language Tamil, to which the same alphabetical order applies butwith omissions of sounds not found in Tamil and the addition of a few Tamilsounds not found in Sanskrit. By these means Brahmi-derived scripts weredevised for Tibetan, Burmese, Thai, Cambodian and other languages, carryingwith them a lesson in Pratisakhya.

One immediate consequence of British exposure to Sanskrit, then, was inthe area of phonology, which was rather quickly absorbed into Europeanlinguistic study. Jones, whose access to Pa »nini was very limited, published apaper on phonology for the first volume of Asiatick Researches, the journal ofthe Asiatic Society, called “On the orthography of Asiatick words in Romanletters”, the purpose of which was to devise a romanization that would renderSanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and other Asian languages in a single system, whosepurpose was to make synoptic comparison possible and in doing so to serve theproject of linguistic ethnology (Jones 1787). This article marks the beginnings

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of a search for a uniform scientific phonological transcription for distantlanguages among Europeans. The Jonsean system of transliteration — “vowelsas in Italian, consonants as in English”, plus diacritic marks — was much usedby missionary grammars in India and Africa. The scheme builds, really, onPratisakhya analysis of Sanskrit and we may say that through Jones’ article andits successors in Europe Indian phonology was extended and universalized, forthe ultimate outcome of the exercise is the formation of a universal phonologi-cal notation. By this means, and through the study of Sanskrit in Europe byscholars of Indology and Comparative Philology, Indian philological analysiswas absorbed into Western phonology and generalized to the rest of the world’slanguages. The same may be said of many features of Vyakara »na analysis.

This, then, is a sketch of two traditions of linguistic analysis brought intointimacy by the colonial nexus. Now we turn to the tale of two cities of BritishIndia.


4. The story of CalcuttaThe story of Jones and his famous pronouncement about what we call

Indo-European at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta has been told many times bymany writers, myself included. Prevailing views of Jones depict him as a hero oflinguistic science, breaking through to a modern conception of languagehistory, and this is true enough. But in addition to Jones the pioneer of scienceI found another Jones, who was hidden in plain sight, overlooked by previouswriters. This Jones is captured in a colossal statue in the center of St. Paul’sCathedral, London, showing Jones in a toga and bearing his translation of theInstitutes of Manu. On the pedestal there is a scene from the Puranic story ofthe churning of the milk ocean by the gods and demons, the whole design ofwhich expresses Jones’ project of finding independent confirmation of the truthof the Bible narrative of the flood in Sanskrit literature. For a brief momentJones made Hinduism safe for Anglicans, and an answer to the skepticism ofVoltaire. This combination of scholarly reason and Anglican religion providesthe logic that drives Jones’ work (Trautmann 1997:37–61; 74–80; for a different

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interpretation, see Lincoln 1999, chap. 11).

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When we reexamine the famous passage about Indo-European languages inthis rational-Anglican light, it remains a notable scientific achievement butshows more continuity with prevailing notions. Here is the text:

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure;more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisite-ly refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both inthe roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have beenproduced by accident; so strong indeed, than no philologer could examinethem all three, without believing them to have sprung from some commonsource, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though notquite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, thoughblended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; andthe old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place fordiscussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia. (Jones

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1786:422–423)

The astonishing modernity of the statement, uniting Sanskrit with Greek, Latin,Gothic, Celtic and Persian and deriving them from a common language whichno longer exists, is quite real; but as I have shown elsewhere (Trautmann

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1997:37–40), when we restore the passage to its context, the president’sanniversary discourses to the Asiatic Society, which formed a set, we see that theoverall project is an ethnological one, of deriving the nations of Asia from the


three sons of Noah, namely, Shem, Ham and Japhet. The branching, segmen-tary, tree-like structure of what I wish to call the Mosaic ethnology derived fromthe book of Genesis provides the organizing principal behind Jones’ formula-tion of the Indo-European concept. What he is saying is that the Indians,Greeks, Romans, Goths, Celts and Persians were descended from one and thesame son of Noah. In his system, and consistent with his Muslim interlocutors,the Indians (and therefore their linguistic relatives) were sons of Ham, thoughother scholars favored Japhet as the Biblical substrate of the Indo-European orAryan ethnos.

Application of the Mosaic ethnology to Sanskrit yielded the surprising andunexpected conclusion that the English and the Indians were distant cousins —the ‘Aryan brethren’ theme of Max Müller. It also led to some of the very non-modern errors in Jones’ scheme, such as the inclusion, in this Hamitic precur-sor of the Indo-European conception, of the Egyptians, the Chinese and theIncas among others, and the exclusion of the Slavs. The Hamites, for Jones,were the authors of civilization and of ancient paganism, the Japhetites ofnomadism, including Slavs, Central Asians and the nomadic Indians of Ameri-ca, while the Semites were the preservers of true religion.

For his pandits the surprising and perhaps unpalatable parts would be boththe derivation of eternal Sanskrit from an ancestral language, and the coming ofthe Sanskrit-speakers from outside India. Jones argued that straight linesleading from a central homeland to the early Hamite civilizations would notcross if the center were placed in Iran — the near neighborhood, that is, of thePlain of Shinar where the Tower was built. Jones also felt that, although nine-tenths of the vocabulary of ‘Hindavi’ of North India derived from Sanskrit, theresidue was perhaps the remains of a pre-Sanskritic language.

In the generation that followed, Calcutta Orientalism was under the lead ofthe brilliant Sanskritist Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765–1837), and with the

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establishment of the College of Fort William the languages of all of India wereto be taught to newly-hatched civil servants, making Calcutta the panopticalcenter of vision for the new Orientalist study of Indian languages. The effect ofthose developments was to build up, under the influence of the Vyakara »nadoctrine of eternal, universal Sanskrit, an Orientalist doctrine of the linguisticunity of India. Thus in Colebrooke’s important paper on the Prakrits, heidentifies the ten ‘polished’ languages of modern India with ten Prakrits derivedfrom Sanskrit, aligned with the five Gau »das and five Dravi »das of north andsouth India, respectively (Colebrooke 1801). And William Carey’s (1761–1834)


grammar of Telugu, published at Calcutta in 1814, (wrongly) asserts that


Telugu (actually a Dravidian language), though mixed with desya words, isderived from Sanskrit (Carey 1814). What this amounts to is an Orientalist

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reading of the pandits’ doctrine of universal Sanskrit, the linguistic unity of theworld, so to say, accepting this doctrine as true, but true only within India —the doctrine, in other words, of the linguistic unity of India.

It is worth adding to this brief sketch of the new Orientalism of Calcutta,that the Indo-European doctrine which was its greatest achievement wouldhave been discovered — indeed was discovered — without the conjuncture ofpersons and institutions and conversations which made it possible. FatherGaston Laurent Coeurdoux (1691–1779) of the Jesuits, for example, largely had

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done so in a letter to the Académie des Belles Lettres, though his work remainedunpublished until after Jones had made Calcutta famous for Orientalistknowledge (Coeurdoux c.1768), and, true to the principal that success hasmany fathers, virtually every nation of Europe has a candidate for the discovererof Indo-European. The Indo-European discovery is the inevitable outcome ofthe project of linguistic ethnology that Europeans had taken around the world.At the same time this inevitability is missing in the ancient Greek encounterswith India for whom, one would imagine, a close relation of their own languagewith those of the Persians and the Indians would have been more immediatelyapparent, as it was to Jones and Coeurdoux; and the orientation of Vyakra »nawas not such as to direct the attention of Indians toward highly theorizedcomparisons of Sanskrit and Greek. What both lacked, perhaps, is the Mosaicethnology as an organizing frame. Muslim writers on Indian antiquities didshare this Mosaic frame with Christian writers from Europe, but interest inlanguages did not take quite the same form, and issue in a project of linguisticethnology by means of word lists.

5. The story of MadrasMuch of the story of Indo-European is, as I have said, hidden in plain view,

and can be gotten from the published sources, especially the works of SirWilliam Jones. What has kept it hidden, as I see it, is that Jones has been seen asbelonging either to the story of linguistic science or of Indology, for both ofwhich the central place of Biblical ideas in his project are an embarrassment. Intruth, the Biblically-inspired genealogical trees that assisted Jones to his findingare still very much in use in historical linguistics; in fact they are central. Thecensoring of this aspect of Jones’ project tells us that histories of linguistics findit difficult to come to grips with this continuing Biblical content, which isexcluded by a scientific definition of the linguistic object of such works.


The story of Madras is much more difficult to recover, for quite differentreasons, among them the untimely death of the principal, Francis Whyte Ellis,and the scattering of his papers. I have, however, found a substantial amount ofhis correspondence in the British Library and the National Library of Scotland,a few personal papers in the Bodleian Library and large amounts of material inthe unpublished colonial record preserved at the Tamil Nadu State Archives inChennai (Madras) and the Oriental and India Office Collections of the BritishLibrary in London. From these sources it is possible to build up a quite detailedpicture of the school of Orientalism Ellis briefly presided over at Madras.

The colonial record especially gives us a clear view of the College of Fort St.George which Ellis designed and supervised (as senior member of the Board ofSuperintendence) and at least a glimpse of its Indian personnel. One comes tosee that Ellis is not working alone but is the leader of a circle that includes themembers of the Board, especially its young secretary Alexander DuncanCampbell (1798–1857) and the headmasters of the College, who supervised the

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work of the language teachers assigned to the junior civil servants: ChidambaraVariar (Tamil), Pattabhiraman Shastri (Sanskrit and Telugu) and UdaiyagiriVenkatanarayan (English). Another crucial member of the circle was Sanka-raya or Shankara Shastri, who served at different times as Ellis’s sherishtedar orchief of Indian staff in his capacity as Collector of Madras, and in the Collegeas head English master. Ellis and Sankaraya knew Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu,and must have worked closely together. One result of their collaboration waspublished: the so-called Treatise of Mirasi Right, which was a Tamil text ofSankaraya’s on the settlement of Tondaimandalam by Vellalar warrior-cultivators, translated and commented upon by Ellis, with accompanyinginscriptions, showing the ancient disposition of property rights in the Madrasarea. This was not written for publication, but as a report to the Board ofRevenue which had asked collectors to investigate traditional land tenures intheir districts; but it was regarded as so very important that the MadrasGovernment published it (Ellis 1818).

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A second reason for the obscurity of the Madras story is that the evidentauthority of Robert Caldwell’s (1814–1891) 1856 comparative grammar of

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Dravidian made it a standard work, which eclipsed the memory of Ellis and hiscircle (Caldwell 1856). Caldwell does mention Ellis in his preface but gives only

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minimal credit, and tended to consider his own work as lying in the moremodern, German-led school of comparative philology, and not in the traditionof British-Indian Orientalism.


The Dravidian proof is found in an Introduction by Ellis to the Telugugrammar of A.D. Campbell, published by the College Press for the use of itsstudents (Ellis 1816). The proof generalizes and extends arguments developed

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by Campbell from his pandits and in contradiction of Carey’s statement thatTelugu derives from Sanskrit (Campbell 1816). Campbell argued specifically

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that the desya portion of the vocabulary of Telugu is its core, containing wordsfor numbers, kinship terms and the like, which therefore constitutes theindigenous core, and that the core is not Sanskrit-derived.

Ellis generalized this finding to the other South Indian languages (he doesnot use the name Dravidian), showing, through parallel lists of dhatus forTamil, Telugu and Kannada which had been prepared for him by the teachersof the College, that not only do the desya or non-Sanskrit words of the threelanguages answer to cognate words in the other languages, but also that somewords in one of the South Indian languages are traceable to a root that ispreserved only in other of the languages, with the implication that the wholeanalysis of a single South Indian language would require comparative study —the project, indeed, that Robert Caldwell eventually carried out, forty yearslater. In this simple, elegant way Ellis proves both that the languages of theSouth are not descended from Sanskrit, though they have many, many Sanskrit-derived words in them, and that they are closely related to one another. Furtheron in the proof he extends these findings to Malayalam, Tulu, Codagu and,quite astonishingly and correctly, to Malto, a Dravidian language enclave in theGanges Valley (he calls it Rajshahi, after the name of the district where it isfound). He also correctly notes the influence of the South Indian languages onSinhala and Marathi. Every one of these findings remain valid nearly twocenturies later. It was an impressive achievement.

It was an achievement that emerged through conversations between Britishand Indian scholars in Madras. Because the authority-claims of the newOrientalism rested ultimately on access to the pandit’s knowledge, Campbell, inhis argument against Carey, presented it as the view of the pandits — the view,that is, that the desya words constitute the pure Telugu speech — much asCarey had cited his pandit in delivering his argument for the Sanskritic deriva-tion of Telugu. Campbell’s argument amounts to saying that the non-Sanskriticcharacter of Telugu was a view which is found within the Vyakara »na tradition;there are grounds for saying so, but clearly there developed in that tradition nogeneral view of the Dravidian languages in their relations to one another.Likewise the Dravidian doctrine was a completely new view of India for


Europeans. Unpublished draft manuscripts in the Bodleian Library show howEllis went about trying to integrate it with existing knowledge. Doubtlessbecause Jones had already identified Indo-European with the Hamites, and theJaphetites with nomadic peoples, Ellis tried to develop word correspondenceslinking Tamil with Arabic, Hebrew and Chaldean, implicitly identifying themwith Shem, the remaining son of Noah. Putting it in our terms, he attempted toshow that the Dravidian languages were a branch of the Semitic family. He wasin error, but his error had a rationale that was a good one for the time.

The Dravidian proof rested on the prior analysis of the languages inquestion by Vyakara »na methods, into Sanskritic (tatsama, tadbhava) and non-Sanskritic (desya, principally) components, and the analysis of the South Indianlanguages into alphabetized lists of dhatus, to which are applied the Westernidea of the core vocabulary. The knowledge which emerged was unprecedentedin either intellectual tradition.

We see in the Dravidian proof a direct challenge to Calcutta’s monopoly ofthe new Orientalist knowledge. Ellis was a committed practitioner of the newOrientalism invented at Calcutta. He had joined the Asiatic Society andcontributed an important paper to it; and he used the Jonesean romanizationof Indian languages in all his writing. But by many signs we can divine that hethought Calcutta did not understand the South, and sense his ambition to makeMadras the center of an Orientalism of South India as a corrective to erroneouscharacterizations of the South broadcast from Calcutta. This is seen especiallyin the design of the College, the curriculum of which favored study of theDravidian languages and Sanskrit, and the culture of the pandit, quite againstthe existing language policy, essentially the Mughal dispensation, favoringPersian and Hindustani, and the culture of the munshi, taught in a madrassah.The publication of Campbell’s Telugu grammar amounted to a declaration ofindependence from Calcutta, which had published Carey’s grammar of Telugujust two years previous (Carey 1814), and which Campbell’s grammar eclipsed.

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Close examination of the surviving records shows that Ellis had arrived atthe essentials of the Dravidian idea well before the College was created (1812),and indeed that its curriculum was shaped by it.

6. Provisional conclusions toward work in progressTo conclude. What is learned about the significance of the modern con-

struction of the keywords ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’ when we look at the questionfrom the vantage of British India? I argue that several things are learned, andthat the British-Indian aspect of these histories is essential to the full elucidation


of the issues. I discuss them under two heads: (1) the construction of thesynonymic couple, the ‘modern, Western’; and (2) the relation of Orientalismto the politics of racial hatred.

6.1 The ‘modern, Western’The British-Indian episode has been largely lost from the story of knowl-

edge in which the Aryan or Indo-European and the Dravidian concepts areemplotted. There is a double kind of forgetting here, on both sides of thecolonial relation: forgetting of the British contributions to Orientalism prior tothe German ascendancy, and forgetting of Indian contributions, throughOrientalism, to what we oddly call the “modern, Western”. The phrase ofRoger-Pol Droit, in the title of his book, The Oblivion of India (L’Oubli del’Inde) could be applied here (Droit 1989), with a slight change: the forgetting

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I draw attention to is that of British-Indian Orientalism, a hybrid knowledge-formation that we have lost sight of because it is hidden in plain sight, havingbecome part of modern, Western knowledge. It is not a question of twocontributions, a British one and an Indian one, but of an emergent mixedknowledge that is the product of the conjuncture and which, because of itscomposite character, refuses the identity of the modern with the Western.

The forgotten contributions of British Orientalists such as Colebrooke,Marsden, Leyden and Ellis can be demonstrated readily enough, and thememory of Jones has never been lost. The case has been made and I need notrecapitulate what I have said on the subject.

But that India has participated in the construction of modernity is some-how counter to modernist thinking itself, for which India, as an exemplaryinstance of the non-West, is under the sign of tradition, in opposition to theWest, a kind of museum of Europe’s past, an earlier stage the West has gonethrough and emerged from into the modern. Louis Dumont’s many importantcontributions to Indian sociology, to take a leading instance, were framed inexactly this way, so that the study of India elucidated the ‘modern, Western’through contrast with it (Dumont 1966). Thus the paired adjectives ‘modern,

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Western’ are to be read as synonyms. Westernization is modernization and viceversa. India is construed as its opposite, steeped in religion, in wisdom quitepossibly, but not a source of modernity.

And yet there are decided Indian inputs into modernity, hidden in plainsight. One of them is in our so-called Arabic numerals based on place notationand the use of zero which, as the Arabs acknowledged, certainly had its originin India, a contribution of inestimable importance. Another has to do with


phonological analysis based on the Indian alphabetical order with its rationalseries of vowels a, a, i, ı, u, u, etc. followed by the consonants, grouped by placeof articulation from the back to the front of the mouth: k, kh, g, gh, n; c, ch, j,jh, n; »t, »th, »d, »dh, »n; t, th, d, dh, n; p, ph, b, bh, m; and so forth. The numberseries and the alphabetical order embed within their structures impressiveintellectual accomplishments and illustrate two areas of special achievement inthe ancient Indian sciences — mathematics and linguistics.

The Indian numerical series (1, 2, 3 … 10, 11, 12, 13 … 20, 21…) has sincebecome universal. The alphabetical series had a more limited reach in the past,though it provided a basis for phonological analysis through the Brahmi-derived scripts of Tibet, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, andcontributed to the ordering of the rhyming dictionaries in China and, probably,script reform in Japan and Korea. In Europe, a modernized phonologicalanalysis becomes apparent at about the time that Europeans are acquiring theirfirst knowledge of Sanskrit, gaining an acuity that leads eventually to theInternational Phonetic Alphabet. One has the feeling that India was the sourceof a lesson in phonology, via Jones’ article on the romanization of Asianlanguages and the Sanskrit study of some of the European linguists. This is aforgotten story, which the European Sanskritists have not done enough torecover. It will be known well enough to readers of Allen’s Phonetics in AncientIndia (Allen 1953), but India is practically unknown in a recent survey on

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alphabets (Drucker 1995). This condition of amnesia is emblematic of a larger

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state of affairs. India — that is to say, the tradition of phonological and gram-matical analysis associated with Sanskrit — had, I believe, major inputs into theformation of modern linguistics, that are barely known by a few specialiststoday. It is to the modern Paninians that we must look for the rectification ofthis ‘forgetting of India’.

The story of the modern (linguistic) concepts of Aryan and Dravidian, then,are not complete without the forgotten story of British-Indian Orientalistscholarship, but the story of the ‘modern, Western’ is not complete without theinclusion of India. The contrast of Europe to India as of modernity to traditionis no longer as self-evident as it seemed to Louis Dumont, in whose work it wasfoundational; as a knowledge-regime the modern is an object of fusion of mixedorigins and even less bounded and localized than the Western which is itssupposed synonym.


6.2 Orientalism and the politics of racial hatredThese are ways in which the investigation of Orientalism in British India

will enrich and change the story-of-knowledge side of the Aryan and Dravidianconcepts. I close with a few words on what the effects of including British Indiamay be on the story of ethnic politics and the issue of tainted knowledge.

I begin with a quotation from a Sanskritist who was also a physicist and thearchitect, so to say, of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. He describedthat bomb, which had been intended for Germany but was dropped on Japantowards the close of World War II, with words taken from the Bhagavad Gita�:“brighter than a thousand suns”. He turned again to religious language, albeitof another kind, when he tried to come to grips with the moral issues of thebomb. Some time after Hiroshima and Nagasaki became the first and, it is to behoped, the last targets of nuclear bombing he said, in a speech on “Physics inthe contemporary world” delivered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on25 November 1947, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor,no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and thisis a knowledge which they cannot lose” (Oppenheimer 1947). The deep moral

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unease Oppenheimer speaks of, this having known sin, attaches to the physicistthrough the body of knowledge from which the bomb was made; the content ofthis knowledge is still true, but it has become guilty knowledge by the uses towhich it has been put.

How do the Orientalists stand in matters of this kind, in their making of themodern ideas of the Aryan and Dravidian? Given the large literature on racismand its causes one would have thought this would have been a well-coveredfield. It is surprising to find that the investigation has scarcely begun, and thatthere is much to be explained about the genealogies of the ideas of racial hatepolitics and their relation to Orientalist scholarship. Here the perspective fromBritish India offers a beginning, but much remains to be done, and the doing ofit will require persons with the skills of Orientalist scholarship.

My own sense of the problem, then, as viewed from the limited perspectiveof British India, is as follows. The words ‘race’ and ‘nation’ came to mean quitedifferent things at the end of the 19th century than what they had meant at itsbeginning. In the language of Sir William Jones, for example, race and nationare used more or less interchangeably, but subsequently they became quitedifferent concepts, the idea of race becoming biologized or somatized, so to say,whose signs were to be read from the body; at the same time, the idea of nationwas becoming politicized under the influence of the doctrine of popularsovereignty, of which it the nation was reconceptualized as the ground. Before


that parting of ways between race and nation, or rather the problematizing oftheir relation, they were freely interchanged. Moreover, complexion did nothave the same fixed character as an unchanging sign of race that it subsequentlyacquired. It did not trouble Jones, for example, to conclude that the ancientIndians, Romans and Greeks were co-descendants of Ham, son of Noah (seeTrautmann 1997:42–52). Complexion was among many thinkers of the time

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conceived as by no means immutable, so that James Cowles Prichard 1786–

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1848), to take another example, held that the white race had developed in a fewthousand years from a dark Adam and Eve (Prichard 1813). Till the mid-19th

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century, English discussions of race had assumed an easy correspondencebetween language and the bodily signs of race, and it was the classifications oflanguages by Orientalists and philologists that guided the classification of races,and not the study of complexion and other bodily features.

All this changed about the middle of the 19th century. Coinciding more orless with a deepened chronology for human history and the advent of Darwin-ian evolutionism there was the rise of what Nancy Stepan has called “racescience”, which appeared as a new key to history, newly biologized and insistingon the superior power of the bodily signs of race over the linguistic ones(Stepan 1982). What seems a commonplace today was then the newest ofdiscoveries, that race and language do not necessarily go together, that theirrelation is not a necessary one and needs at every point to be examined as aproblem rather than assumed as a given (Trautmann 1997, chap. 6). What was

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afoot was a new authority-claim on behalf of physical anthropology andprehistoric archeology as against the dominance of Orientalism and compara-tive philology in the classification of races.

The disjuncture of language and race, and the rise of race science, enableda new project for the redefinition of whiteness, the project of creating a newconception of the white race, a pure white race, to which the Aryan name wasattached, formed of a pure white subset of Indo-European and located in aEuropean or Central Asian homeland. The Comte de Gobineau, writing in the1850s, was the great theoretician of what might be called “the racial theory ofworld history,” in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Gobineau 1853–

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1855). In this vastly influential work, he posited that race is the fundamentalcause of world history, in the sense that the white race is the author of allcivilizations, and the admixture of the white race with others is the cause of thedecline of civilizations. Everywhere this deleterious admixture has occurred,excepting only the Germanic peoples, who are the last remnant of pure white-ness; but because of the mixture of races in the other, fallen civilizations, the


historical relations among languages gives a very misleading picture of thehistorical relations among races, which is the true motor of history. Thephilological record, then — in which Gobineau was well-read — must yield tothe record of race, the true motor of history.

We can trace the same movement clearly not in British India but in Britainitself, in a surprising complaint against the ‘tyranny of Sanskrit’. The phrase isthat of Isaac Taylor (1829–1901), in his book on the Aryans, and the object of

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his attack is Friedrich Max Müller, synecdoche for Sanskrit and, in turn, for theIndo-European doctrine. Max Müller (1823–1900) had said that although no

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authority would have been strong enough to convince the English soldier thatthe same blood was flowing in his veins as in the veins of the dark Bengalese,language comparison offered a proof so convincing that no English jury wouldreject it (Müller 1855:29). Isaac Taylor, who held the role of interpreter for the

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British reading public of the best current work by Continental theorists of racesuch as the French anthropologists Paul Broca (1824–1880) and Paul Topinard(1830–1911), and the Germans Theodor Pösche (1826–1899) and Karl Penka(1847–1912), is only one of several who attacked this famous pronouncement.Max Müller repented of having so thoroughly identified race and language, andproposed an amicable divorce between philology and race science (see Traut-

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mann 1997, chap. 6).Freed from the tutelage of philology, race science opened a space for the

development of a narrowed and intensified concept of whiteness in the serviceof a thoroughly racialized vision of politics. Max Müller, who was one of thefirst to apply the Aryan name to the Indo-European concept, identified thisracial-linguistic entity as racially white, and was instrumental in the formationof the racial theory of Indian civilization. But there is a great deal of furthercultural work that had to be accomplished to cover the distance to Hitler.Virulent anti-Semitism, for one thing, becomes the focus of the new politics ofracial hatred, while Max Müller had regarded the Aryans and the Semites as thetwin civilizing forces in the world. And Hitler’s contempt for Slavs and Gypsies,who speak Indo-European languages, required the formation of an Aryanconcept that was narrowly racialized and detached from the Indo-Europeanlanguage family as such, essentially the conception of Gobineau. Ending the‘tyranny of Sanskrit’ was race science’s contribution to the politics of racialhatred that is with us still.

The Orientalists, then, were not the architects of this racial bomb. But intheir own way the Orientalists, too, have known sin. Their sin has taken theform of an accommodation to the rising tide of race science thought in the


latter half of the 19th century, and an emerging idea of racial pure whiteness. AsI have argued elsewhere, that accommodation took the form of what I want tocall “the racial theory of Indian civilization”, according to which the definingmoment for India’s formation, the ‘big bang’ so to say, was the clash of incom-ing, white, civilized Sanskrit-speaking Aryans with indigenous, dark, savageDravidian-speaking Indians and their unification through the caste system withits curious intersection of economic exchange and sexual segregation. I havetried to show in some detail how very much maltreatment of the Rigvedic textit has required to sustain that view, and how surprisingly established it remainstoday, even after the discovery of the Indus Civilization, which shows at the veryleast that the indigenous inhabitants of India whom the invaders callingthemselves Arya made war upon were by no means savages but the literatebuilders of great cities (Trautmann 1997, chap. 7).

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What was established by the Orientalists in the latter half of the 19thcentury as the master narrative of the origin of Indian civilization from a clashof light and dark races is no more than the back projection of Western notionsof the supposedly instinctive race feelings of whites toward blacks underpinningthe world of racial segregation following the abolition of slavery. It is noaccident that discussions of the origin of caste from the period cite the parallelof the Jim Crow segregation in the American South after the Civil War, and inSouth Africa, as evidence of an inhering natural racial antipathy of whites forblacks that in that era were thought to be a constant of history. The racial theoryof Indian civilization can now be seen for the time-bound construct that it is,and the time has long since come to abolish it. Those in the tradition ofOrientalist scholarship have tools for this task that no one else possesses, andthey have, as well, an obligation to do so.

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SUMMARY

British India was an especially fruitful site for the development of historical linguistics.Four major, unanticipated discoveries were especially associated with the East IndiaCompany: those of Indo-European, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian and the Indo-Aryannature of Romani. It is argued that they came about in British India because the Europeantradition of language analysis met and combined with aspects of the highly sophisticatedIndian language analysis. The discoveries of Indo-European and Dravidian, the subject ofthis article, were connected with the British-Indian cities of Calcutta and Madras, respective-ly, and the conditions under which they came about are examined. The production of newknowledge in British India is generally viewed through the lens of post-colonial theory, andis seen as having been driven by the needs of colonial governance. This essay sketches out adifferent way of looking at aspects of colonial knowledge that fall outside the colonial utilityframework. It views these discoveries and their consequences as emergent products of twodistinct traditions of language study which the British and the Indians brought to the colonialconnection. If this is so, it follows that some aspects of modernism tacitly absorb Indianknowledge, specifically Indian language analysis. Indian phonology, among other things, isan example of this process.

RÉSUMÉ

L’Inde britannique fut un lieu fort propice pour ce qui est de l’évolution de la linguisti-que historique. On associe quatre grandes découvertes inattendues à la Compagnie des IndesOrientales: celle de l’Indo-Européen, celle du Dravidien, celle du Malayo-Polynésien et cellede l’appartenance du Romani aux langues Indo-Aryennes. On soutient ici que ces découver-tes se sont faites dans l’Inde britannique parce que la tradition européenne de l’analyse dulangage est entré en contact avec la tradition indienne, fort avancée, d’analyse linguistique,se combinant avec certains aspects de cette dernière. La découverte de l’indo-européen et dudravidien, ce dont traite cet article, était liée aux villes anglo-indiennes de Calcutta (pourl’indo-europeéen) et Madras (pour le draviden), et on examinera les conditions danslesquelles se firent ces découvertes. Le plus souvent on a examiné la production de nouveauxsavoirs dans l’Inde britannique à la lumière des théories du post-colonialisme, les besoinsd’un gouvernement colonial étant dans cette optique la force motrice derrière cetteproduction.Cet article propose une façon de voir tout autre d’aspects de la science colonialequi se trouvaient hors du cadre de l’utilité coloniale. On y voit ces découvertes et sesconséquences en tant que produits naissants de deux traditions distinctes de l’étude dulangage qu’apportèrent chacun Britanniques et Indiens au lien colonial. Si tel est le cas, ils’ensuit que certains aspects du modernisme ont discrètement acquis des connaissancesindiennes: plus précisément, l’analyse linguistique indienne. La phonologie indienne, entreautres choses, est un exemple de ce processus.


ZUSAMMENFASSUNG

In der britischen Kolonialzeit war Indien ein besonders günstiger Platz für die Entwick-lung der historischen Sprachwissenschaft. Besonders die Ostindien-Kompanie wird mit vierEntdeckungen in Zusammenhang gebracht, die des Indoeuropäischen, des Drawidischen, desMalayo-Polinesischen und die der Zugehörigkeit des Romani zur indoarischen Gruppe. Mannimmt an, daß dies mit dem Zusammentreffen europäischer Traditionen und der hoch-entwickelten indischen Sprachanalyse zu tun hat. Die Entdeckung des Indoeuropäischen unddes Drawidischen, mit der sich der vorliegende Artikel befaßt, steht, wie gezeigt wird, inZusammenhang mit den Kolonialstädten Kalkutta und Madras. Das neugewonnene Wissenwird dabei allerdings durch die Brille der nachkolonialen Zeit und als Folge administrativerBedürfnisse der Kolonialmacht gewertet. In dem Beitrag wird jedoch eine anderer Blickweisevorgeschlagen, abseits von kolonialem Nützlichkeitsdenken. Die sprachwissenschaftlichenEntdeckungen und ihre Folgen werden als Resultat zweier unterschiedlicher Traditionengesehen, der britischen und der indischen, Traditionen, die in und durch die Kolonisierungaufeinander trafen. Wenn dem so ist, dann erklärt sich hieraus auch zu einem Gutteil dasStillschweigen, welches heutzutage immer noch das indische Wissen, speziell die Sprach-analyse umgibt. Die indische Lautlehre bietet hierfür ein deutliches Exempel.

Author’s address:

Thomas R. TrautmannDepartment of HistoryUniversity of MichiganAnn Arbor, MI 48109U.S.A.

e-mail: [email protected]

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mailto:e-mail:[email protected]

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Trautmann - Dravidians and Aryans in British India