10393.Ch01.Pdf

10393.Ch01.Pdf

© 2006 UC Regents Buy this book University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2006 by Thomas R. Trautmann Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trautmann, Thomas R. Languages and nations : conversations in colonial South India / Thomas R. Trautmann. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13, 978-0-520-24455-9 (cloth : alk. paper), isbn-10, 0-520-24455-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. India—Study and teaching—India—History— 19th century. 2. Dravidian philology—History— 19th century. 3. Orientalism—History—19th century. 4. Indologists—India—Madras— History—19th century. 5. Ellis, Francis Whyte, d. 1819. I. Title. ds435.8.t73 2006 410—dc22 2005018465 Manufactured in the United States of America 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10987654321 This book is printed on Natures Book, containing 50% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). chapter 1 Explosion in the Grammar Factory In the European thought of the eighteenth century, languages and nations were understood to be parallel, in that the histories of both were viewed as governed by genealogical relations and linked; therefore, the genea- logical relations among languages could serve to extend the reach of his- torical memory concerning the relations among nations and to repair it where it was defective. Language history in this sense became a new tool for ethnology on a universal scale, producing original and unexpected groupings of kindred languages that have in many cases endured to the present. To supply this new ethnological project with the raw material on which it operated required the production of grammars and dic- tionaries virtually without limit and covering the entire world—an explo- sion in the grammar factory that continues to this day. Several of these new and still-valid groupings are associated with British India: the Indo-European language family, which is the best known and the pattern for all the others; the Malayo-Polynesian language fam- ily; the Indo-Aryan origins of the Romani language; and the Dravidian language family. Of these four cases, the emergence of the concept of a Dravidian language family has the richest archive, available in hitherto unexamined colonial records of Madras. The first published proof of the Dravidian language family appeared in British-Indian Madras in 1816, the product of a circle of scholars associated with the College of Fort St. George. In this book I examine the languages-and-nations project that the British brought with them to India in the light of the Dravidian proof, 1 2 Explosion in the Grammar Factory and vice versa; that is, this book moves on two planes, using each to il- luminate the other. The premise of the book is that the exceptional pro- ductiveness of British India as a terrain for the languages-and-nations project of Europe had to do with the exceptional development of lan- guage analysis in India since the times of P1âini and earlier. The conjunc- ture of these two traditions of language analysis in British India can be examined at close quarters through the Dravidian proof. The first two chapters concern, respectively, the European and Indian traditions of language analysis. In the remaining chapters the discussion turns to Madras and the Dravidian proof. In the present chapter I exam- ine well-known material, including the formation of the Indo-European concept, but from a new direction, and interpret it in a way that departs considerably from the received view. I begin with the idea of what I call locational technologies, the more inclusive set that includes the languages- and-nations project and its genealogical scheme of locating particulars in relation to one another. technologies of location The propensity to exaggerate the originality of one’s thoughts is a fail- ing that is perhaps most acute among those who do not work in teams as the laborers in the vineyards of the natural and social sciences do. Hu- manities scholars, given to the solitary mode of production, most often work in caves or in studies—like St. Jerome who, as translator of the Bible into Latin, an immensely successful book, is something of a patron saint of scholars. We have two images of St. Jerome. In one he is shown living in a rough cave, with ink and paper at hand, smiting his breast with a stone, saying to himself, as I imagine it, “I must finish my book!” The scholar in agony is paired with another image, of which Albrecht Dürer has made so appealing a rendering, that of the great scholar in his study, a tame lion at his feet, sunlight streaming through the window: the scholar happy in his work. I think of these two opposed images, of scholarly agony and pleasure, as St. Jerome before and after tenure. In both, the scholar is—not counting the lion—utterly alone. For historians and others writing in solitude (I include myself), it is all too easy to be seduced by the pleasing notion of one’s own original- ity, lured by its inherent sweetness and egged on by romantic ideas of individual work of literary genius and the individual scientific break- through. Through the distorting optic of an exaggerated sense of indi- vidual originality, the social and the historical pass out of view, and a Explosion in the Grammar Factory 3 single self occupies the center of the field of vision. It takes special effort to remember that every intellectual project derives its meaning in rela- tion to larger, collective projects that long preceded and will long out- live the individual, and that the text written by an individual contains within it many voices of a continuing conversation. When we open out the field of vision to its widest extent, the individual work becomes a speck in a larger intellectual project that is the work of many hands across many nations and centuries, It is in relation to this wider field that the efforts of individuals are rendered significant and lasting. One such project of the longue durée is the charting of the heavens, a project that has been underway since the times of the ancient Sumeri- ans, perhaps longer, and which we have every reason to think will con- tinue in process as long as there is a human race to carry it on. Astron- omy above all seems to have a unitary history that combines the work of countless individuals of many nations over a very long time. John Play- fair, speaking at the end of the eighteenth century, put it nicely when he said that the successive developments in the observation of the heavens and the reasoning about them comprise “an experiment on the human race, which has been made but once” (Playfair 1790:136). It is this com- pelling sense of singularity that puts astronomy at the heart of ideas about science as a progressive accumulation of knowledge that is universal. Another such project is astronomy’s inverse, the mapping of the earth’s surface. Yet others are the construction of a unitary chronology of the past, and the classification of nations and languages—the topic of this book. We may call all of these locational projects because they define representational spaces and represent entities as locations within those spaces. The space of each of these locational projects of the longue durée is defined by what, for want of a better word, I will call a technology of location. The star chart is a good example. It defines its space by divid- ing the sky as seen from earth with lines of declination and right ascen- sion. Within that space one determines the placing of each heavenly body in terms of degrees (or hours), minutes, and seconds. Those units bear witness to the Mesopotamian origins of this locational project: 360 de- grees in the whole circle of the sky (or 24 hours), 60 minutes in a degree, 60 seconds in a minute, in the base 60 numbering system of the Sume- rians. Every star in the heavens has its position fixed by a pair of num- bers. The star Aldebaran, for example, is at right ascension 4 h. 30 m., declination 16º19'. The relation between any pair of stars is a derivative of their positions within this space. 4 Explosion in the Grammar Factory The star chart, like the other locational projects, arose in the deep past and is very much in use today. This long-term intellectual venture, car- ried forward by the incremental contributions of innumerable individu- als over many centuries and across many different countries and cultures, this vast and largely anonymous collective effort, is, like the others, a part of the living core of modernity. Yet precisely because it is so very central it is practically invisible. No deep rupture, no Kuhnian paradigm shift, has cast it aside. Not even the famous shift from an earth-centered, Ptolemaic conception of the planetary system to a sun-centered, Coper- nican one has upset the structure of the star chart. The space of the star chart first developed as a fiction that, though false, turns out to be highly useful: the useful fiction that the sky is the interior of a titanic sphere, on the surface of which the stars are hung. This imag- ined sphere was then marked off into sectors by a rectilinear grid as a lo- cational technique to fix the heavenly bodies in place for study. Or per- haps, in the beautiful metaphor of an ancient Sumerian poem, the sky is the tablet of lapis lazuli upon which the goddess Nidaba inscribes cuneiform signs, the stars, which tell the destinies of human beings down below.1 For the study of the earth, this imagined celestial sphere was projected back onto the real sphere, or spheroid, of the earth, for which it is both useful and a reasonably true representation.

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