The Colonial State and Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, 2022
There is an unmistakable aura of power about the philologist.-edward said, Orientalism introducti... more There is an unmistakable aura of power about the philologist.-edward said, Orientalism introduction british colonial knowledge about indian society has been well-studied for its Orientalizing effects. The encyclopaedic, classificatory, and divisional imperatives of the colonial project generated an 'essentializing and exoticizing gaze' that inscribed new forms of social distinction onto the bodies of indian subjects. 1 yet, the administrative and enumerative endeavours that have been identified as the primary mechanism of colonial scholarshipcum-governance are not monolithic, but instead are the product of the amalgamation of competing and often conflicting orientations towards indian society espoused by scholars and civil servants. One of the most ambitious cadastral projects of the late colonial period was the Linguistic Survey of India (1894-1928, hereafter referred to as LSI), edited and compiled by the irish philologist, ethnologist, and civil servant George abraham Grierson (1851-1941). The LSI arose from a well-established evolutionary paradigm of colonial scholarship about india, but is itself a complex and contradictory text that at times reinforces and at other times attempts to de-naturalize the received discourses about indian cultural, racial, and linguistic inferiority. This is a consequence of both the intertextual and multiply authored nature of the survey, 2 as well as Grierson's own, often progressive, intellectual orientations to his topic of study that sought to challenge understandings of indian social life that were overly static, hierarchical, and essentializing. The contradictory aspects of the LSI arise most clearly in Grierson's approaches to the relationship of language to race and in his discussion of
This article examines the bedrock of rural governance in India—the village assembly, or gram sabh... more This article examines the bedrock of rural governance in India—the village assembly, or gram sabha—and the deliberative process whereby citizens are designated as “below the poverty line” (BPL). I examine one gram sabha in Himachal Pradesh wherein BPL status was eradicated altogether, leaving hundreds of people ineligible for a vast array of state aid programs. I argue that this outcome relied on an interactional achievement whereby state actors (bureaucrats and elected representatives) rendered village residents into a collectivized agent while erasing their own role and responsibility from the proceedings. These semiotic processes of collectivization and erasure underlie what I call “stateless agency.” I trace three linguistic resources that cultivate stateless agency: (i) causative verbs that distribute agency across multiple grammatically encoded participant roles; (ii) code switches from the local language, Kangri, into a register of English‐infused Hindi that invokes what I call the “bureaucratic voice”; and (iii) metapragmatic statements that explicitly attribute agency to other speaker(s). This investigation builds on studies of grammar and political agency (Duranti 1990; 1994) and bureaucratic agency (Hull 2003; 2012) by demonstrating how linguistic resources mediate the paradoxical erasure of state actors from bureaucratic and democratic practice, with often drastic consequences for rural livelihoods.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2018
Abstract: The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), edited and compiled by George Abraham Grierson, w... more Abstract: The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), edited and compiled by George Abraham Grierson, was the first systematic effort by the British colonial government to document the spoken languages and dialects of India. While Grierson advocated an approach to philology that dismissed the affinity of language to race, the LSI mobilizes a complex, intertextual set of racializing discourses that form the ideological ground upon which representations of language were constructed and naturalized. I analyze a sub-set of the LSI’s volumes in order to demonstrate how Grierson’s linguistic descriptions and categorizations racialize minority languages and their speakers as corrupt, impure, and uncivilized. I highlight how semiotic processes in the text construct speakers as possessing essential “ethnic” characteristics that are seen as indexical of naturalized linguistic differences. I argue that metapragmatic statements within descriptions of languages and dialects are made possible by ethnological discourses that ultimately reinforce an indexical relationship between language and race. This analysis of the survey sheds light on the centrality of language in colonial constructions of social difference in India, as well as the continued importance of language as a tool for legitimating claims for political recognition in postcolonial India. Keywords: language surveys, language ideologies, racialization, British colonialism, India
The Colonial State and Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, 2022
There is an unmistakable aura of power about the philologist.-edward said, Orientalism introducti... more There is an unmistakable aura of power about the philologist.-edward said, Orientalism introduction british colonial knowledge about indian society has been well-studied for its Orientalizing effects. The encyclopaedic, classificatory, and divisional imperatives of the colonial project generated an 'essentializing and exoticizing gaze' that inscribed new forms of social distinction onto the bodies of indian subjects. 1 yet, the administrative and enumerative endeavours that have been identified as the primary mechanism of colonial scholarshipcum-governance are not monolithic, but instead are the product of the amalgamation of competing and often conflicting orientations towards indian society espoused by scholars and civil servants. One of the most ambitious cadastral projects of the late colonial period was the Linguistic Survey of India (1894-1928, hereafter referred to as LSI), edited and compiled by the irish philologist, ethnologist, and civil servant George abraham Grierson (1851-1941). The LSI arose from a well-established evolutionary paradigm of colonial scholarship about india, but is itself a complex and contradictory text that at times reinforces and at other times attempts to de-naturalize the received discourses about indian cultural, racial, and linguistic inferiority. This is a consequence of both the intertextual and multiply authored nature of the survey, 2 as well as Grierson's own, often progressive, intellectual orientations to his topic of study that sought to challenge understandings of indian social life that were overly static, hierarchical, and essentializing. The contradictory aspects of the LSI arise most clearly in Grierson's approaches to the relationship of language to race and in his discussion of
This article examines the bedrock of rural governance in India—the village assembly, or gram sabh... more This article examines the bedrock of rural governance in India—the village assembly, or gram sabha—and the deliberative process whereby citizens are designated as “below the poverty line” (BPL). I examine one gram sabha in Himachal Pradesh wherein BPL status was eradicated altogether, leaving hundreds of people ineligible for a vast array of state aid programs. I argue that this outcome relied on an interactional achievement whereby state actors (bureaucrats and elected representatives) rendered village residents into a collectivized agent while erasing their own role and responsibility from the proceedings. These semiotic processes of collectivization and erasure underlie what I call “stateless agency.” I trace three linguistic resources that cultivate stateless agency: (i) causative verbs that distribute agency across multiple grammatically encoded participant roles; (ii) code switches from the local language, Kangri, into a register of English‐infused Hindi that invokes what I call the “bureaucratic voice”; and (iii) metapragmatic statements that explicitly attribute agency to other speaker(s). This investigation builds on studies of grammar and political agency (Duranti 1990; 1994) and bureaucratic agency (Hull 2003; 2012) by demonstrating how linguistic resources mediate the paradoxical erasure of state actors from bureaucratic and democratic practice, with often drastic consequences for rural livelihoods.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2018
Abstract: The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), edited and compiled by George Abraham Grierson, w... more Abstract: The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), edited and compiled by George Abraham Grierson, was the first systematic effort by the British colonial government to document the spoken languages and dialects of India. While Grierson advocated an approach to philology that dismissed the affinity of language to race, the LSI mobilizes a complex, intertextual set of racializing discourses that form the ideological ground upon which representations of language were constructed and naturalized. I analyze a sub-set of the LSI’s volumes in order to demonstrate how Grierson’s linguistic descriptions and categorizations racialize minority languages and their speakers as corrupt, impure, and uncivilized. I highlight how semiotic processes in the text construct speakers as possessing essential “ethnic” characteristics that are seen as indexical of naturalized linguistic differences. I argue that metapragmatic statements within descriptions of languages and dialects are made possible by ethnological discourses that ultimately reinforce an indexical relationship between language and race. This analysis of the survey sheds light on the centrality of language in colonial constructions of social difference in India, as well as the continued importance of language as a tool for legitimating claims for political recognition in postcolonial India. Keywords: language surveys, language ideologies, racialization, British colonialism, India
Uploads
Papers by Hannah Carlan
Keywords: language surveys, language ideologies, racialization, British
colonialism, India
Keywords: language surveys, language ideologies, racialization, British
colonialism, India