Discovering Aryan Dravidain in British India

<TARGET "tra" DOCINFO AUTHOR "Thomas R.
Trautmann"TITLE "Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India"SUBJECT "Historiographia Linguistica 31:1 (2004)"KEYWORDS ""SIZE HEIGHT "240"WIDTH "160"VOFFSET "2">
Discovering Aryan and Dravidian

in British India
A tale of two cities*
Thomas R. Trautmann
University of Michigan
1. Introduction
Aryan and Dravidian, the keywords of my title, have ancient antecedents in
Sanskrit, but in their current meanings they are modern constructs that were
invented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. To examine their genesis and
mutual influence I began, not in my usual way, with a trip to the library, but as
my students are teaching me to, with a keyword search on the Internet. The
outcome was quite revealing.
For Dravidian I found a modest number of books listed on the American
Book 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 and
Nations’ I have been engaged in for several years, concerning language analysis in early
British India, and the ways in which it is an emergent product of interactions between two
traditions of language study, European and Indian. What can here only be sketched is put in
greater 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 the
Dravidian proof and the Orientalists of Madras, in which many of these matters are more
fully explored and referenced than they can be in the short space of an article. The framing
of the essay around the keywords Aryan and Dravidian was due to the conference for which
it 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- und
Fremdwahrnehmungen Südasiens ed. by Michael Bergunder & Rahul Peter Das (Halle/Saale:
Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2002). I have made a few alterations in the original
English 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 and
thoughtful editorial help.
Historiographia Linguistica xxxi:1 (2004), 33–58.

issn 0302–5160 / e-issn 1569–9781© John Benjamins Publishing Company
<LINK "tra-r33">
"tra-r23">
"tra-r5">
34 Thomas R. Trautmann
about the Dravidian political movement in Tamil Nadu, and one or two works
of 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, most
of them falling into two very distinct types: scholarly works about India (mostly
linguistics) on the one hand, and, on the other, works propagating or analyzing
the politics of racial hatred in the West, from 19th century beginnings through
the Nazis to groups such as Aryan Nation which, unfortunately, flourish today
in my own country. Though the scope of the Dravidian concept is largely
confined to the study of South Asia, it is a striking aspect of the Aryan concept
that it belongs to two quite different narratives, in which it has quite different
meanings 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 the
politics of racial hatred.
The story of knowledge has to do with the discovery of the Indo-European
family of languages, adumbrated by Sir William Jones before the Asiatic Society
at Calcutta in 1786 (Jones 1786), anticipated by many and put on a sound basis
by Franz Bopp beginning with his famous Conjugationssystem (Bopp 1816).
Jones’ pronouncement on Indo-European figures in histories of linguistics as an
epochal moment leading to the formation of Comparative Philology. The Indo-
European concept was a real breakthrough of scientific linguistics, linking
languages widely separated in space, forming two blocs, an eastern one of
Persian and Indic languages and a western, European bloc, separated from one
another by Semitic and Turkic languages. The Indo-European concept was
anything but obvious — the idea, that is, that the two blocs of languages, so
distant from one another, are nevertheless related to one another. Its discovery
by Jones and others not only created a new science of language but it radically
reordered existing ideas about the relations among different nations or races of
peoples. Moreover it created new knowledge of such interrelationships in the
deep past of which the surviving ancient literatures, such as those in Latin,
Greek or Sanskrit, preserved no distinct memory; and for peoples who had no
written literatures, such as the American Indians (cf. Tooker 2002), it became
a new key to ethnological history. The discovery of the Dravidian language
family was less spectacular in its geographical reach, but similar in its attending
circumstances. In these and other cases philology made durable additions to
knowledge that remain in force among the experts to this day.
The story of ethnic politics is the more powerful and urgent narrative about
the appropriation and political deployment of the new ethnological ideas,
<LINK "tra-r34">
"tra-r31">
Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 35
especially in the West, but also in South Asia. The story of politics is not, of
course, separable from the story of knowledge and the two are connected in
ways that need to be examined and explained. The shadow of the death camps
of Nazi period Germany darkens the aspect of the scientific breakthrough
represented by Indo-Europeanist comparative philology, to which German
scholars made such brilliant contributions. Thus one of the greatest scientific
accomplishments of the modern world is linked with the event which defines
for us the ultimate of human evil. Both narratives are sometimes merged into
a story of guilty knowledge; sometimes the story gets framed as a specifically
German story (Poliakov 1974), at other times (Said 1978) in a quite different
direction as a Foucauldian story of Orientalist knowledge produced and tainted
by colonial power.
In spite of all that has been written about them, our understanding both of
the formation of modern knowledge about Indo-European and Dravidian, and
of the rise of modern ethnic politics in the West and in South Asia, are far from
complete. Much remains to be clarified about the relation of the story of
Orientalist knowledge and that of ethnic politics, and much harm comes from
concluding too quickly, finding early causes for late consequences by evacuating
lapsed time between distant horizons, under the strongly directional light and
shadow thrown from one theoretical perspective or another. We need to allow
the evidence itself to speak more loudly.
Without pretending to be able to complete the work that needs doing, it is
my hope to contribute through the investigation of the genesis of the modern
Aryan and Dravidian concepts in British India — work which I have begun in
a book, Aryans and British India (Trautmann 1997), and which continues in a
book in progress on the discovery of the Dravidian language family. My reasons
for concentrating on the British Orientalists to the exclusion of those of other
European nations are not national at all, in any sense. I think that the story of
knowledge is really about an intellectual encounter of Europe as a whole and
India as a whole; it is a story of civilizations brought into close connection by
colonial rule. The British Orientalists are interesting as an aspect of that
European encounter; an aspect, moreover, which has been forgotten and
neglected. For a couple of decades Calcutta enjoyed a virtual monopoly as
producer of a new, British-Indian Orientalism based on knowledge of Sanskrit
that was avidly consumed in Europe, creating indeed a mania for India and
Sanskrit. The monopoly of Calcutta ended when the means of learning Sanskrit
were brought to Europe, first by Alexander Hamilton at Paris, and then in the
Germanies, as the British enthusiasm waned; at length the British-Indian
<LINK "tra-r26">
"tra-r17">
"tra-r23">
contribution came to be forgotten by the British themselves. Indeed I am

interested in the story because it has been lost, overshadowed by German and
French accomplishments in and enthusiasm for Orientalist scholarship. Only by
recovering this story can we hope to complete the stories of knowledge and of
ethnic politics and address the problem of their interrelation, the problem of
guilty knowledge.
And yet, before Comparative Philology became a German science in British
eyes there had been several important British contributions to linguistic
ethnology, results that quite overturned prevailing views and revolutionized the
deep history of the globe. The discovery that the languages of India and Persia
were related to those of Europe, is only the most well known. The discovery that
the language of the Roma or Gypsies of Europe was not in fact Egyptian, as the
name they have been given implies, but Indo-European and more specifically
Indo-Aryan, was likewise against expectation. The discovery of the Malayo-
Polynesian language family, uniting languages from Madagascar to the Easter
Islands, was astonishing in its terrestrial reach. The discovery that the Dravidian
languages of South India are historically related inter se, but not derived from
Sanskrit in spite of many Sanskritic loans, as I shall explain shortly, went against
the grain of received beliefs, both among Indians and Europeans. In all these
instances the historical relations newly uncovered by comparison of languages
had left no imprint in the collective memories or written documents of the
peoples in question, so that the new discoveries amounted to a revolution in
ethnological knowledge.
Sir William Jones (1746–1794), William Marsden (1754–1836), John
Leyden (1775–1811) and Francis Whyte Ellis (1777–1819) were involved in
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 the
development of the Indo-European concept. He also made important identifi-
cations of words in the Romani or Gypsy language with Sanskrit (Jones 1786).
Marsden’s early paper comparing the Gypsy language with Hindustani makes
him one of the co-discoverers of its Indian origins, and he also published the
first demonstration of the Malayo-Polynesian family (Marsden 1781, 1785).
Marsden felt that his own accomplishments had been thrown into the shade by
Jones’ celebrity, and that he was better appreciated on the Continent, where
some of his philological works were translated, than at home (Marsden
1834: 1); how right he was may be seen from his entry in the Dictionary of
National Biography, where he is identified as an Orientalist and numismatist,
and his striking achievements concerning Malayo-Polynesian and the Gypsy
<LINK "tra-r34">
"tra-r11">
language are not even mentioned. John Leyden was a linguist of extraordinary
facility, whose ambition to overtake the reputation of Jones was cut short by an
early 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 till
he 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 the
contributions of their countrymen. They came to think of enthusiasm for
Indian antiquities a puzzling attribute of Continentals, and of Comparative
Philology as a German science, looking upon Friedrich Max Müller as its
celebrity scholar and translator into English.
2. Orientalism in British India

Colonial power has played a large role in the production of linguistic
ethnology in British India, from Jones and the founding of the Asiatic Society
to 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 Language
and the Language of Command” (Cohn 1985), which tracks the sudden
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 a
merchant operation on the Indian coast to an colonial government ruling over
the agrarian interior (Trautmann 1997). The transition occurred first at
Calcutta, then at Madras and last at Bombay, following military victories that
extended British rule inland (the battle of Plassey in 1757, the defeat of Tipu
Sultan in 1799, and the defeat of the Marathas in 1819), and it is easy to show
that government support for the writing of grammars and dictionaries follows
this temporal profile. Orientalist societies were founded at each of the three
capitals of British India, and institutions for the teaching of Oriental languages
to the newly arrived civil service recruits. Except for the Literary Society of
Bombay, founded before the Maratha conquest (1804), the creation of these
scholarly and educational institutions followed the transition at each city from
a purely mercantile to an imperial function, with the acquisition of political
power over the agrarian interior. There is no mistaking the cause-effect relation
of colonialism and the formation of bilingual dictionaries and grammars of the
Indian languages.
Edward Said’s argument about colonial power and orientalism, an extension
<LINK "tra-r21">
"tra-r31">
"tra-r20">
of Foucault’s mutual entailment of power and knowledge, is not about India or

language directly, but in a somewhat similar way to Cohn makes the impera-
tives, self-delusions and projections of colonial power the causative agents of
Orientalism (Said 1978). Said’s widely-read work was effective in bringing
power back to center stage of the examination of Orientalism, at the same time
as it declined to engage with the actual content of Orientalist scholarship — a
less than satisfactory aspect of this very successful polemic work. Orientalists’
reactions to Said have taken the form of arguing that there is a surplus beyond
colonial utility in the works of Orientalist scholarship that is left unexplained.
This counter-argument has seemed to me a kind of special pleading that refuses
the main point, the massive involvement of colonial power in these forms of
knowledge. What has so struck me about the early British Orientalists is that
every one of them is a frank supporter of empire in India, at a time when there
were still vocal critics of empire in England.
That said, and while the argument of the surplus does seems feeble before
the fact of power, there is another surplus in the case that neither the Saidian
argument nor its critics consider. Any argument must bracket out a great deal
of reality to make its problem manageable, an infinity in fact, and what of that
bracketed-out infinity that increasingly impresses itself upon my attention is the
linguistic theories and projects the British and the Indians brought to the
creation of new knowledge about the Indian languages and the Indian people.
Many scholars recently have begun the exploration of the production of this
knowledge as a form of dialogue or a conversation, not a dialogue between
equals 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 of
European scholars and Indian pandits seems clearly the way forward.
This way forward, the way that many people seem to be taking just now
more 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 to
distinct 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 and
Indian, which went into the discovery of the Indo-European and the Dravidian
language families in British India.
<LINK "tra-r24">
"tra-r29">
"tra-r1">
3. European and Indian ideas of language

All the revolutionary new outcomes for the deep history of the world I have
mentioned — the Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian and Dravidian language
families and the identification of the language of the Roma with Indo-European
— began from an apparently simple method, the comparison of vocabulary
lists. To be sure, even in the 18th century the eliciting of historical relations
among languages did not rest on word-lists alone, and scholars understood that
the comparison of words had to be followed to the comparison of “the roots of
verbs and in the forms of grammar” as Jones said, which were thought to be the
deeper levels of language than the lexicon. Nevertheless word-lists were
everywhere the starting-point of the study of genealogical relations among
languages, and there was a profusion of them, being applied, moreover, all over
the 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 in
Pallas 1786–1789), and of Thomas Jefferson to recover the history of the
American Indians through comparison of their languages (Jefferson c.1782), as
well as abundant examples from India. Leibniz composed a list, published early
in the 18th century, which seems to have been a source for many of these often
closely similar lists (Leibniz 1718; Gulya l974, Aarsleff 1982).
The simple-seeming vocabulary list had in fact a rather complex theory
behind it which, briefly, is as follows. Every language must have at its core the
primitive vocabulary proper to that language, for there are some things for
which every language must have words in its earliest formation. This essential
core must include words for numbers, kinship relations, parts of the body,
kinds of food, and so forth — words being understood as the names of classes
of things existing in the world in this realist, pre-Saussurian conception. It is
this core that the standard vocabulary questionnaire attempts to capture. Words
borrowed from foreign languages, under this conception, will be words of art
and science, that is, more complex and advanced conceptions that may develop
only with the progress of civilization and inhabiting, therefore, the outer
reaches of the lexicon. This theory sets up oppositions between core and
periphery, simple and complex conceptions, native and borrowed words. The
vocabulary list, therefore, which is the main tool of the emerging new science,
captures the primitive core vocabulary and jettisons, for purposes of historical
study, the ‘higher’ and often borrowed terms of art and science. It is the
machinery by which that primitive core is identified and, in the all-important
initial analytic move, is disengaged from the outer, later, foreign and learned
accretions. The simple-seeming word list embodies a work of far-reaching
<LINK "tra-r34">
abstraction by which the ancient core of a living language is disengaged from its
periphery and made into a new object for the study of genealogical relations
among 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, which
among English speakers was thought to have begun with the creation in 4004
B. C., or rather with the more recent Confusion of Tongues at the Tower of
Babel which occurred in about 2300 B. C. (discussed in Trautmann 1992). They
are further configured by the Genesis narrative of the descent of Noah, into
what the anthropologists call a segmentary lineage of nations, which is the
substratum of the segmentary lineage of languages. To hold to the project of
uncovering relations among nations through the comparison of vocabulary lists
is to hold that languages have similarities among themselves in proportion to
the closeness of their derivation.
It is this conception and the project which flows from it that Europeans took
around the world in the 17th and 18th centuries. This is the ‘surplus input’ that
the colonial studies approach brackets out of the equation, and that makes the
knowledge production of European colonialism so very different from that of
the ancient Romans and Greeks, especially as concerns the study of foreign
languages. It is this project that Europe brings to the world it turns into its
colonies; but it is a project formed ages earlier and formed around, not the Greek
but rather the Biblical conceptions of the history of languages and nations.
In a sense, the colonial expansion of Europe acted less as an efficient than
as a material means, a kind of technology magnifying and making more
effective the purposes of its user. It now seems to me that the reason these
projects come to fruition in the transition from a mercantile to an colonial
enterprise in British India is that the transition brought a new stratum of well-
educated, often university-educated, civil servants and officers to British India
that had been lacking in the mercantile phase. Thus while much of the new
interest in India’s languages was directly inspired by the needs of government,
a distinct component of it was directed to broadly philosophical or theoretical
projects whose origin lies beyond immediate colonial utility. Certain character-
istic forms of colonial knowledge, then, follow from programs that had been
developed in Europe much before the imperial expansion of Europe. The
method of the comparison of vocabulary lists, fashioned at home, was able to
rewrite 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 of

language was made to function largely as mere data in relation to the organizing
structures of European theory. But in India the British and other Europeans
encountered a highly sophisticated and much longer tradition of language
theory 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 the
sacrificial liturgy, achieved precocious maturity in the work of Pānini » and his
successors, Kātyāyana and Patañjali, who lived perhaps between the fourth and
the second centuries B. C. The project of the ‘science of grammar’ (Vyākarana) »
was to reduce the whole of the Sanskrit language, in both its liturgical and its
spoken registers, to two things: a list of roots or ‘elements’ (dhātus) and a set of
transformational rules which, when applied to the dhātus, would generate the
entirety of the language. The rules of transformation were expressed in the form
of highly abbreviated prose, called sūtras, 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 the
Vyākarana » tradition developed second-order transformational rules to account
for the words of Prakrit by showing their derivation from the Sanskrit dhātus.
These Sanskrit derivatives took two forms, those that were unchanged except
for the addition of a Prakrit termination (called tatsamas) and those which had
undergone internal modification (called tadbhavas). But the Prakrits contain a
residue of unexplainable words whose relation to the dhatus of Sanskrit cannot
be shown; this residuum of unexplainable words consisted mainly of ‘country’
words (deśya), that is regionalisms, and also purely local (grāmya) or foreign
(antardeśya) words.
The works of Vyākarana » do not provide the easy access to Sanskrit and the
other languages of India that the British sought in the colonial project of
acquiring command of the Indian languages, or in the more theoretically-driven
interest in Sanskrit itself; indeed they are so difficult as to discourage all but those
who are prepared to dedicate years to their study. Nevertheless many of their
analytical principals are conveyed in watered-down versions of Sanskrit gram-
mar for schoolroom use that were available to the British in Calcutta. On the
other hand, the science of phonology (Prātiśākhya), which Vyākarana » presup-
poses and which was already highly developed at the time Pānini » composed his
text, 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
<LINK "tra-r23">
"tra-r4">
scholars believe, from which modern scripts of India derive (Bühler 1898). But
in creating a system of writing the Indians, thanks to the acuteness of their
phonological analysis, made profound changes in it, doubling the number of
letters to achieve a close correspondence between the sounds of Sanskrit and the
signs of the writing system, and changing the arbitrary alphabetical order that
afflicts all the other descendants of the ancient Semitic script with a highly
rational order reflecting that phonological analysis. In this way the very learning
of the alphabetical order of the script for Sanskrit is a lesson in phonology. This
effect was also conveyed by other scripts derived from Brahmi, such as the
Dravidian language Tamil, to which the same alphabetical order applies but
with omissions of sounds not found in Tamil and the addition of a few Tamil
sounds not found in Sanskrit. By these means Brahmi-derived scripts were
devised for Tibetan, Burmese, Thai, Cambodian and other languages, carrying
with them a lesson in Prātiśākhya.
One immediate consequence of British exposure to Sanskrit, then, was in
the area of phonology, which was rather quickly absorbed into European
»
linguistic study. Jones, whose access to Pānini was very limited, published a
paper on phonology for the first volume of Asiatick Researches, the journal of
the Asiatic Society, called “On the orthography of Asiatick words in Roman
letters”, the purpose of which was to devise a romanization that would render
Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and other Asian languages in a single system, whose
purpose was to make synoptic comparison possible and in doing so to serve the
project of linguistic ethnology (Jones 1787). This article marks the beginnings
of a search for a uniform scientific phonological transcription for distant
languages among Europeans. The Jonsean system of transliteration — “vowels
as in Italian, consonants as in English”, plus diacritic marks — was much used
by missionary grammars in India and Africa. The scheme builds, really, on
Prātiśākhya analysis of Sanskrit and we may say that through Jones’ article and
its successors in Europe Indian phonology was extended and universalized, for
the 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 by
scholars of Indology and Comparative Philology, Indian philological analysis
was absorbed into Western phonology and generalized to the rest of the world’s
languages. The same may be said of many features of Vyākarana » analysis.
This, then, is a sketch of two traditions of linguistic analysis brought into
intimacy by the colonial nexus. Now we turn to the tale of two cities of British
India.
<LINK "tra-r34">
"tra-r25">
"tra-r23">
4. The story of Calcutta

The story of Jones and his famous pronouncement about what we call
Indo-European at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta has been told many times by
many writers, myself included. Prevailing views of Jones depict him as a hero of
linguistic science, breaking through to a modern conception of language
history, and this is true enough. But in addition to Jones the pioneer of science
I found another Jones, who was hidden in plain sight, overlooked by previous
writers. This Jones is captured in a colossal statue in the center of St. Paul’s
Cathedral, London, showing Jones in a toga and bearing his translation of the
Institutes of Manu. On the pedestal there is a scene from the Puranic story of
the churning of the milk ocean by the gods and demons, the whole design of
which expresses Jones’ project of finding independent confirmation of the truth
of the Bible narrative of the flood in Sanskrit literature. For a brief moment
Jones made Hinduism safe for Anglicans, and an answer to the skepticism of
Voltaire. This combination of scholarly reason and Anglican religion provides
the logic that drives Jones’ work (Trautmann 1997: 37–61; 74–80; for a different
interpretation, see Lincoln 1999, chap. 11).
When we reexamine the famous passage about Indo-European languages in
this rational-Anglican light, it remains a notable scientific achievement but
shows 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 in
the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been
produced by accident; so strong indeed, than no philologer could examine
them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common
source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not
quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though
blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and
the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for
discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia. (Jones
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 which
no longer exists, is quite real; but as I have shown elsewhere (Trautmann
1997: 37–40), when we restore the passage to its context, the president’s
anniversary discourses to the Asiatic Society, which formed a set, we see that the
overall project is an ethnological one, of deriving the nations of Asia from the
<LINK "tra-r12">
"tra-r9">
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 from
the 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 the
same son of Noah. In his system, and consistent with his Muslim interlocutors,
the Indians (and therefore their linguistic relatives) were sons of Ham, though
other scholars favored Japhet as the Biblical substrate of the Indo-European or
Aryan ethnos.
Application of the Mosaic ethnology to Sanskrit yielded the surprising and
unexpected 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 the
Incas among others, and the exclusion of the Slavs. The Hamites, for Jones,
were the authors of civilization and of ancient paganism, the Japhetites of
nomadism, 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 both
the derivation of eternal Sanskrit from an ancestral language, and the coming of
the Sanskrit-speakers from outside India. Jones argued that straight lines
leading from a central homeland to the early Hamite civilizations would not
cross if the center were placed in Iran — the near neighborhood, that is, of the
Plain 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, the
residue was perhaps the remains of a pre-Sanskritic language.
In the generation that followed, Calcutta Orientalism was under the lead of
the brilliant Sanskritist Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765–1837), and with the
establishment of the College of Fort William the languages of all of India were
to be taught to newly-hatched civil servants, making Calcutta the panoptical
center of vision for the new Orientalist study of Indian languages. The effect of
those developments was to build up, under the influence of the Vyākarana »
doctrine of eternal, universal Sanskrit, an Orientalist doctrine of the linguistic
unity of India. Thus in Colebrooke’s important paper on the Prakrits, he
identifies the ten ‘polished’ languages of modern India with ten Prakrits derived
from Sanskrit, aligned with the five Gaudas » and five Drāvidas» of north and
south India, respectively (Colebrooke 1801). And William Carey’s (1761–1834)
grammar of Telugu, published at Calcutta in 1814, (wrongly) asserts that
<LINK "tra-r10">
"tra-r9">
Telugu (actually a Dravidian language), though mixed with deśya words, is

derived from Sanskrit (Carey 1814). What this amounts to is an Orientalist
reading of the pandits’ doctrine of universal Sanskrit, the linguistic unity of the
world, 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 would
have been discovered — indeed was discovered — without the conjuncture of
persons and institutions and conversations which made it possible. Father
Gaston Laurent Coeurdoux (1691–1779) of the Jesuits, for example, largely had
done so in a letter to the Académie des Belles Lettres, though his work remained
unpublished until after Jones had made Calcutta famous for Orientalist
knowledge (Coeurdoux c.1768), and, true to the principal that success has
many fathers, virtually every nation of Europe has a candidate for the discoverer
of Indo-European. The Indo-European discovery is the inevitable outcome of
the project of linguistic ethnology that Europeans had taken around the world.
At the same time this inevitability is missing in the ancient Greek encounters
with India for whom, one would imagine, a close relation of their own language
with those of the Persians and the Indians would have been more immediately
apparent, as it was to Jones and Coeurdoux; and the orientation of Vyākrana »
was not such as to direct the attention of Indians toward highly theorized
comparisons of Sanskrit and Greek. What both lacked, perhaps, is the Mosaic
ethnology as an organizing frame. Muslim writers on Indian antiquities did
share this Mosaic frame with Christian writers from Europe, but interest in
languages did not take quite the same form, and issue in a project of linguistic
ethnology by means of word lists.
5. The story of Madras

Much 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 Sir
William Jones. What has kept it hidden, as I see it, is that Jones has been seen as
belonging either to the story of linguistic science or of Indology, for both of
which the central place of Biblical ideas in his project are an embarrassment. In
truth, the Biblically-inspired genealogical trees that assisted Jones to his finding
are still very much in use in historical linguistics; in fact they are central. The
censoring of this aspect of Jones’ project tells us that histories of linguistics find
it difficult to come to grips with this continuing Biblical content, which is
excluded by a scientific definition of the linguistic object of such works.
<LINK "tra-r17">
"tra-r8">
"tra-r7">
The story of Madras is much more difficult to recover, for quite different
reasons, among them the untimely death of the principal, Francis Whyte Ellis,
and the scattering of his papers. I have, however, found a substantial amount of
his correspondence in the British Library and the National Library of Scotland,
a few personal papers in the Bodleian Library and large amounts of material in
the unpublished colonial record preserved at the Tamil Nadu State Archives in
Chennai (Madras) and the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British
Library in London. From these sources it is possible to build up a quite detailed
picture 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 of
Superintendence) and at least a glimpse of its Indian personnel. One comes to
see that Ellis is not working alone but is the leader of a circle that includes the
members of the Board, especially its young secretary Alexander Duncan
Campbell (1798–1857) and the headmasters of the College, who supervised the
work of the language teachers assigned to the junior civil servants: Chidambara
Variar (Tamil), Pattabhiraman Shastri (Sanskrit and Telugu) and Udaiyagiri
Venkatanarayan (English). Another crucial member of the circle was Sanka-
raya or Shankara Shastri, who served at different times as Ellis’s sherishtedar or
chief of Indian staff in his capacity as Collector of Madras, and in the College
as head English master. Ellis and Sankaraya knew Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu,
and must have worked closely together. One result of their collaboration was
published: the so-called Treatise of Mirasi Right, which was a Tamil text of
Sankaraya’s on the settlement of Tondaimandalam by Vellalar warrior-
cultivators, translated and commented upon by Ellis, with accompanying
inscriptions, showing the ancient disposition of property rights in the Madras
area. This was not written for publication, but as a report to the Board of
Revenue which had asked collectors to investigate traditional land tenures in
their districts; but it was regarded as so very important that the Madras
Government published it (Ellis 1818).
A second reason for the obscurity of the Madras story is that the evident
authority of Robert Caldwell’s (1814–1891) 1856 comparative grammar of
Dravidian made it a standard work, which eclipsed the memory of Ellis and his
circle (Caldwell 1856). Caldwell does mention Ellis in his preface but gives only
minimal credit, and tended to consider his own work as lying in the more
modern, German-led school of comparative philology, and not in the tradition
of British-Indian Orientalism.
<LINK "tra-r17">
"tra-r8">
The Dravidian proof is found in an Introduction by Ellis to the Telugu

grammar of A. D. Campbell, published by the College Press for the use of its
students (Ellis 1816). The proof generalizes and extends arguments developed
by Campbell from his pandits and in contradiction of Carey’s statement that
Telugu derives from Sanskrit (Campbell 1816). Campbell argued specifically
that the deśya portion of the vocabulary of Telugu is its core, containing words
for numbers, kinship terms and the like, which therefore constitutes the
indigenous core, and that the core is not Sanskrit-derived.
Ellis generalized this finding to the other South Indian languages (he does
not use the name Dravidian), showing, through parallel lists of dhātus for
Tamil, Telugu and Kannada which had been prepared for him by the teachers
of the College, that not only do the deśya or non-Sanskrit words of the three
languages answer to cognate words in the other languages, but also that some
words in one of the South Indian languages are traceable to a root that is
preserved only in other of the languages, with the implication that the whole
analysis of a single South Indian language would require comparative study —
the project, indeed, that Robert Caldwell eventually carried out, forty years
later. In this simple, elegant way Ellis proves both that the languages of the
South are not descended from Sanskrit, though they have many, many Sanskrit-
derived words in them, and that they are closely related to one another. Further
on in the proof he extends these findings to Malayalam, Tulu, Codagu and,
quite astonishingly and correctly, to Malto, a Dravidian language enclave in the
Ganges Valley (he calls it Rajshahi, after the name of the district where it is
found). He also correctly notes the influence of the South Indian languages on
Sinhala and Marathi. Every one of these findings remain valid nearly two
centuries later. It was an impressive achievement.
It was an achievement that emerged through conversations between British
and Indian scholars in Madras. Because the authority-claims of the new
Orientalism rested ultimately on access to the pandit’s knowledge, Campbell, in
his argument against Carey, presented it as the view of the pandits — the view,
that is, that the deśya words constitute the pure Telugu speech — much as
Carey had cited his pandit in delivering his argument for the Sanskritic deriva-
tion of Telugu. Campbell’s argument amounts to saying that the non-Sanskritic
character of Telugu was a view which is found within the Vyākarana » tradition;
there are grounds for saying so, but clearly there developed in that tradition no
general view of the Dravidian languages in their relations to one another.
Likewise the Dravidian doctrine was a completely new view of India for
<LINK "tra-r9">
Europeans. Unpublished draft manuscripts in the Bodleian Library show how

Ellis went about trying to integrate it with existing knowledge. Doubtless
because Jones had already identified Indo-European with the Hamites, and the
Japhetites with nomadic peoples, Ellis tried to develop word correspondences
linking Tamil with Arabic, Hebrew and Chaldean, implicitly identifying them
with Shem, the remaining son of Noah. Putting it in our terms, he attempted to
show that the Dravidian languages were a branch of the Semitic family. He was
in 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 in
question by Vyākarana » methods, into Sanskritic (tatsama, tadbhava) and non-
Sanskritic (deśya, principally) components, and the analysis of the South Indian
languages into alphabetized lists of dhātus, to which are applied the Western
idea of the core vocabulary. The knowledge which emerged was unprecedented
in either intellectual tradition.
We see in the Dravidian proof a direct challenge to Calcutta’s monopoly of
the new Orientalist knowledge. Ellis was a committed practitioner of the new
Orientalism invented at Calcutta. He had joined the Asiatic Society and
contributed an important paper to it; and he used the Jonesean romanization
of Indian languages in all his writing. But by many signs we can divine that he
thought Calcutta did not understand the South, and sense his ambition to make
Madras the center of an Orientalism of South India as a corrective to erroneous
characterizations of the South broadcast from Calcutta. This is seen especially
in the design of the College, the curriculum of which favored study of the
Dravidian languages and Sanskrit, and the culture of the pandit, quite against
the existing language policy, essentially the Mughal dispensation, favoring
Persian and Hindustani, and the culture of the munshi, taught in a madrassah.
The publication of Campbell’s Telugu grammar amounted to a declaration of
independence from Calcutta, which had published Carey’s grammar of Telugu
just two years previous (Carey 1814), and which Campbell’s grammar eclipsed.
Close examination of the surviving records shows that Ellis had arrived at
the 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 progress

To conclude. What is learned about the significance of the modern con-
struction of the keywords ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’ when we look at the question
from the vantage of British India? I argue that several things are learned, and
that the British-Indian aspect of these histories is essential to the full elucidation
<LINK "tra-r16">
"tra-r13">
of the issues. I discuss them under two heads: (1) the construction of the
synonymic couple, the ‘modern, Western’; and (2) the relation of Orientalism
to 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 are
emplotted. There is a double kind of forgetting here, on both sides of the
colonial relation: forgetting of the British contributions to Orientalism prior to
the German ascendancy, and forgetting of Indian contributions, through
Orientalism, to what we oddly call the “modern, Western”. The phrase of
Roger-Pol Droit, in the title of his book, The Oblivion of India (L’Oubli de
l’Inde) could be applied here (Droit 1989), with a slight change: the forgetting
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, having
become part of modern, Western knowledge. It is not a question of two
contributions, a British one and an Indian one, but of an emergent mixed
knowledge that is the product of the conjuncture and which, because of its
composite 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 the
memory of Jones has never been lost. The case has been made and I need not
recapitulate 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 exemplary
instance of the non-West, is under the sign of tradition, in opposition to the
West, a kind of museum of Europe’s past, an earlier stage the West has gone
through and emerged from into the modern. Louis Dumont’s many important
contributions to Indian sociology, to take a leading instance, were framed in
exactly this way, so that the study of India elucidated the ‘modern, Western’
through contrast with it (Dumont 1966). Thus the paired adjectives ‘modern,
Western’ are to be read as synonyms. Westernization is modernization and vice
versa. India is construed as its opposite, steeped in religion, in wisdom quite
possibly, but not a source of modernity.
And yet there are decided Indian inputs into modernity, hidden in plain
sight. One of them is in our so-called Arabic numerals based on place notation
and the use of zero which, as the Arabs acknowledged, certainly had its origin
in India, a contribution of inestimable importance. Another has to do with
<LINK "tra-r14">
"tra-r2">
phonological analysis based on the Indian alphabetical order with its rational
series of vowels a, ā, i, ı̄, u, ū, etc. followed by the consonants, grouped by place
of articulation from the back to the front of the mouth: k, kh, g, gh, ṅ; c, ch, j,
jh, n; t» , t» h, d,
» dh,
» n;
» t, th, d, dh, n; p, ph, b, bh, m; and so forth. The number
series and the alphabetical order embed within their structures impressive
intellectual accomplishments and illustrate two areas of special achievement in
the ancient Indian sciences — mathematics and linguistics.
The Indian numerical series (1, 2, 3 … 10, 11, 12, 13 … 20, 21…) has since
become 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, and
contributed to the ordering of the rhyming dictionaries in China and, probably,
script reform in Japan and Korea. In Europe, a modernized phonological
analysis becomes apparent at about the time that Europeans are acquiring their
first knowledge of Sanskrit, gaining an acuity that leads eventually to the
International Phonetic Alphabet. One has the feeling that India was the source
of a lesson in phonology, via Jones’ article on the romanization of Asian
languages and the Sanskrit study of some of the European linguists. This is a
forgotten story, which the European Sanskritists have not done enough to
recover. It will be known well enough to readers of Allen’s Phonetics in Ancient
India (Allen 1953), but India is practically unknown in a recent survey on
alphabets (Drucker 1995). This condition of amnesia is emblematic of a larger
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 the
formation of modern linguistics, that are barely known by a few specialists
today. It is to the modern Paninians that we must look for the rectification of
this ‘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 Orientalist
scholarship, but the story of the ‘modern, Western’ is not complete without the
inclusion of India. The contrast of Europe to India as of modernity to tradition
is no longer as self-evident as it seemed to Louis Dumont, in whose work it was
foundational; as a knowledge-regime the modern is an object of fusion of mixed
origins and even less bounded and localized than the Western which is its
supposed synonym.
<LINK "tra-r28">
6.2 Orientalism and the politics of racial hatred

These are ways in which the investigation of Orientalism in British India
will enrich and change the story-of-knowledge side of the Aryan and Dravidian
concepts. I close with a few words on what the effects of including British India
may 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 the
architect, so to say, of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. He described
that bomb, which had been intended for Germany but was dropped on Japan
towards the close of World War II, with words taken from the Bhagavad Gita:
“brighter than a thousand suns”. He turned again to religious language, albeit
of another kind, when he tried to come to grips with the moral issues of the
bomb. Some time after Hiroshima and Nagasaki became the first and, it is to be
hoped, the last targets of nuclear bombing he said, in a speech on “Physics in
the contemporary world” delivered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on
25 November 1947, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor,
no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this
is a knowledge which they cannot lose” (Oppenheimer 1947). The deep moral
unease Oppenheimer speaks of, this having known sin, attaches to the physicist
through the body of knowledge from which the bomb was made; the content of
this knowledge is still true, but it has become guilty knowledge by the uses to
which it has been put.
How do the Orientalists stand in matters of this kind, in their making of the
modern ideas of the Aryan and Dravidian? Given the large literature on racism
and its causes one would have thought this would have been a well-covered
field. It is surprising to find that the investigation has scarcely begun, and that
there is much to be explained about the genealogies of the ideas of racial hate
politics and their relation to Orientalist scholarship. Here the perspective from
British India offers a beginning, but much remains to be done, and the doing of
it will require persons with the skills of Orientalist scholarship.
My own sense of the problem, then, as viewed from the limited perspective
of British India, is as follows. The words ‘race’ and ‘nation’ came to mean quite
different things at the end of the 19th century than what they had meant at its
beginning. In the language of Sir William Jones, for example, race and nation
are used more or less interchangeably, but subsequently they became quite
different 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 nation
was becoming politicized under the influence of the doctrine of popular
sovereignty, of which it the nation was reconceptualized as the ground. Before
<LINK "tra-r18">
"tra-r30">
"tra-r34">
that parting of ways between race and nation, or rather the problematizing of
their relation, they were freely interchanged. Moreover, complexion did not
have the same fixed character as an unchanging sign of race that it subsequently
acquired. It did not trouble Jones, for example, to conclude that the ancient
Indians, Romans and Greeks were co-descendants of Ham, son of Noah (see
Trautmann 1997: 42–52). Complexion was among many thinkers of the time
conceived as by no means immutable, so that James Cowles Prichard 1786–
1848), to take another example, held that the white race had developed in a few
thousand years from a dark Adam and Eve (Prichard 1813). Till the mid-19th
century, English discussions of race had assumed an easy correspondence
between language and the bodily signs of race, and it was the classifications of
languages 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 or
less with a deepened chronology for human history and the advent of Darwin-
ian evolutionism there was the rise of what Nancy Stepan has called “race
science”, which appeared as a new key to history, newly biologized and insisting
on the superior power of the bodily signs of race over the linguistic ones
(Stepan 1982). What seems a commonplace today was then the newest of
discoveries, that race and language do not necessarily go together, that their
relation is not a necessary one and needs at every point to be examined as a
problem rather than assumed as a given (Trautmann 1997, chap. 6). What was
afoot was a new authority-claim on behalf of physical anthropology and
prehistoric 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, enabled
a new project for the redefinition of whiteness, the project of creating a new
conception of the white race, a pure white race, to which the Aryan name was
attached, formed of a pure white subset of Indo-European and located in a
European or Central Asian homeland. The Comte de Gobineau, writing in the
1850s, was the great theoretician of what might be called “the racial theory of
world history,” in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Gobineau 1853–
1855). In this vastly influential work, he posited that race is the fundamental
cause of world history, in the sense that the white race is the author of all
civilizations, and the admixture of the white race with others is the cause of the
decline 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
<LINK "tra-r34">
"tra-r32">
"tra-r27">
historical relations among languages gives a very misleading picture of the

historical relations among races, which is the true motor of history. The
philological record, then — in which Gobineau was well-read — must yield to
the record of race, the true motor of history.
We can trace the same movement clearly not in British India but in Britain
itself, in a surprising complaint against the ‘tyranny of Sanskrit’. The phrase is
that of Isaac Taylor (1829–1901), in his book on the Aryans, and the object of
his attack is Friedrich Max Müller, synecdoche for Sanskrit and, in turn, for the
Indo-European doctrine. Max Müller (1823–1900) had said that although no
authority would have been strong enough to convince the English soldier that
the 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 would
reject it (Müller 1855: 29). Isaac Taylor, who held the role of interpreter for the
British reading public of the best current work by Continental theorists of race
such 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, and
proposed an amicable divorce between philology and race science (see Traut-
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 service
of a thoroughly racialized vision of politics. Max Müller, who was one of the
first to apply the Aryan name to the Indo-European concept, identified this
racial-linguistic entity as racially white, and was instrumental in the formation
of the racial theory of Indian civilization. But there is a great deal of further
cultural 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 of
racial hatred, while Max Müller had regarded the Aryans and the Semites as the
twin civilizing forces in the world. And Hitler’s contempt for Slavs and Gypsies,
who speak Indo-European languages, required the formation of an Aryan
concept that was narrowly racialized and detached from the Indo-European
language family as such, essentially the conception of Gobineau. Ending the
‘tyranny of Sanskrit’ was race science’s contribution to the politics of racial
hatred that is with us still.
The Orientalists, then, were not the architects of this racial bomb. But in
their own way the Orientalists, too, have known sin. Their sin has taken the
form of an accommodation to the rising tide of race science thought in the
<LINK "tra-r34">
<DEST "tra-r1">
"tra-r2">
"tra-r3">
"tra-r4">
latter half of the 19th century, and an emerging idea of racial pure whiteness. As
I have argued elsewhere, that accommodation took the form of what I want to
call “the racial theory of Indian civilization”, according to which the defining
moment for India’s formation, the ‘big bang’ so to say, was the clash of incom-
ing, white, civilized Sanskrit-speaking Aryans with indigenous, dark, savage
Dravidian-speaking Indians and their unification through the caste system with
its curious intersection of economic exchange and sexual segregation. I have
tried to show in some detail how very much maltreatment of the Rigvedic text
it has required to sustain that view, and how surprisingly established it remains
today, even after the discovery of the Indus Civilization, which shows at the very
least that the indigenous inhabitants of India whom the invaders calling
themselves Arya made war upon were by no means savages but the literate
builders of great cities (Trautmann 1997, chap. 7).
What was established by the Orientalists in the latter half of the 19th
century as the master narrative of the origin of Indian civilization from a clash
of light and dark races is no more than the back projection of Western notions
of the supposedly instinctive race feelings of whites toward blacks underpinning
the world of racial segregation following the abolition of slavery. It is no
accident that discussions of the origin of caste from the period cite the parallel
of the Jim Crow segregation in the American South after the Civil War, and in
South Africa, as evidence of an inhering natural racial antipathy of whites for
blacks that in that era were thought to be a constant of history. The racial theory
of 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 of
Orientalist scholarship have tools for this task that no one else possesses, and
they have, as well, an obligation to do so.
REFERENCES
Aarsleff, Hans. 1982. From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the study of language and intellectual
history. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Allen, W. S[idney]. 1953. Phonetics in Ancient India. London: Oxford University Press.
Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe. 1808[1784–1793]. “Le Premier fleuve de l’Inde, le
Gange, selon les anciens, expliqué par le Gange, selon les modernes”. Mémoires de
littérature, tirés des registers de l’Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
49.512–646; Supplément au mémoire qui précède, 647–712. [The Supplément publishes
correspondence of Père Coeurdoux with the Académie des Inscriptions of about 1768.]
Bühler, Georg. 1962 [1898]. Indian Palaeography. Calcutta: Firma Mukhopadhyaya.
<DEST "tra-r23">
"tra-r5">
"tra-r6">
"tra-r7">
"tra-r8">
"tra-r9">
"tra-r10">
"tra-r11">
"tra-r12">
"tra-r13">
"tra-r14">
"tra-r15">
"tra-r16">
"tra-r17">
"tra-r18">
"tra-r19">
"tra-r20">
"tra-r21">
"tra-r22">
Bopp, Franz. 1816. Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit
jenem der griechischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache. Frankfurt/Main: Andre-
äische Buchhandlung.
Breckenridge, Carol A. & Peter van der Veer, eds. 1993. Orientalism and the Postcolonial
Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Caldwell, Robert. 1856. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of
Languages. London: Harrison.
Campbell, Alexander D. 1816. A Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, commonly termed the
Gentoo, peculiar to the Hindoos inhabiting the North Eastern provinces of the Indian
Peninsula. Madras: College Press of Fort St. George.
Carey, William. 1814. A Grammar of the Telingana Language. Serampore: Mission Press.
Coeurdoux, Gaston-Laurent, S. J. 1808 [c.1768]. “Réponse au mémoire de M. l’Abbé
Barthélemy”. Published in Anquetil-Duperon 1808.647–667.
Cohn, Bernard S. 1985. “The Command of Language and the Language of Command”.
Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian history and society ed. by Ranajit Guha,
276–329. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Colebrooke, Henry Thomas. 1801. “On the Sanscrit and Pracrit Languages”. Asiatick
Researches 7.199–231.
Droit, Roger-Pol. 1989. L’Oublie de l’Inde: Une amnésie philosphique. Paris: Presses Univer-
sitaires de France.
Drucker, Johanna. 1995. The Alphabetic Labyrinth: Letters in history and imagination.
London: Thames & Hudson.
Du Ponceau, Peter Stephen. 1838. Mémoire sur le système grammatical des langues de quelques
nations indiennes de l’Amerique du nord. Paris: A. Pihan de la Forest.
Dumont, Louis 1970 [1966]. Homo hierarchicus. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Ellis, Francis Whyte n.d. The Ellis papers. MS in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Ellis, Francis Whyte. 1816. “Note to the Introduction”. Campbell 1816.1–20.
Ellis, Francis Whyte. 1818. Replies to Seventeen Questions Proposed by the Goverment of Fort
St. George Relative to Mirasi Right, with two appendices elucidatory of the subject.
Madras: Government Gazette Office. (Repr. in Three Treatises on Mirasi Right ed. by
C. P. Brown, with remarks made by the Hon’ble the Court of Directors. Madras:
D. P. L. C. Connor, 1852.)
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, comte de. 1853–1855. Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. 4
vols. Paris: Firmin Didot Frères.
Gulya, János. 1974. “Some 18th Century Antecedents of Nineteenth Century Linguistics: The
discovery of Finno-Ugrian”. Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and
paradigms ed. by Dell Hymes, 258–276. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Halbfass, Wilhelm. 1988 [1981]. India and Europe: An essay in understanding. Albany, N. Y.:
State University of New York Press. [Transl. of Indien und Europa: Perspektiven ihrer
geistigen Begegnung.]
Irschick, Eugene F. 1994. Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895.
Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Jefferson, Thomas c.1782. Notes on the State of Virginia. N.p: n. pub.
Jones, William. 1787 [1786]. “On the Hindus: The third anniversary discourse”. Asiatick
researches 1.415–431.
<DEST "tra-r34">
"tra-r24">
"tra-r25">
"tra-r26">
"tra-r27">
"tra-r28">
"tra-r29">
"tra-r30">
"tra-r31">
"tra-r32">
"tra-r33">
Jones, William. 1787. “A Dissertation on the Orthography of Asiatick Words in Roman

Letters”. Asiatick researches 1.1–56.
Jones, William. 1799. The works of Sir William Jones. Ed. by Anna Maria Jones. 6 vols.
London: G. G. & J. Robinson, and R. H. Evans.
Jones, William. 1807. The works of Sir William Jones. 13 vols., ed. Anna Maria Jones. London:
John Stockdale & John Walker.
Leibniz, Georg.Wilhelm. 1718. “Lebnitii desiderata circa linguas populorum, ad Dn. Podesta,
Interpretem Caesareum transmissa”. Otium Hanoverum ed. by Joachim Friederich
Feller, 49–54. Leipzig: J. C. Marinus.
Lincoln, Bruce. 1999. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, ideology, and scholarship. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Marsden, William. 1782 [1781]. “Remarks on the Sumatran Languages, by Mr. Marsden. In
a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. President of the Royal Society”. Archaeologia: or,
Miscellaneous tracts relating to antiquity. London: Society of Antiquaries.
Marsden, William. 1785. “Observations on the language of the people commonly called
Gypsies. In a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. F. R. S. From Mr. Marsden, F. R. S.”.
Archaeologia 7.383–386.
Marsden, William. 1834. Miscellaneous works of William Marsden, F. R. S. London: Published
for the Author by Parbury, Allen & Co.
Müller, F[riedrich] Max. 1855 [1854]. The Languages of the Seat of War in the East, with a
survey of the three families of language, Semitic, Arian, and Turanian. 2nd ed. London:
Williams and Norgate. [Original title: Suggestions for the assistance of officers in learning
the languages of the seat of war in the East.]
Oppenheimer, J. Robert. 1947. “Physics in the Contemporary World: Speech delivered at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology”. Cited in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations
p. 1055. Boston: Little, Brown.
Pallas, Peter Simon, ed.. 1786–1789. Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa. 2 vols.
St. Petersburg: Carl Schnoor.
Prichard, John Cowles. 1973 [1813]. Researches into the Physical History of Man. Repr. with
an Introduction by George W. Stocking, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.
Stepan, Nancy. 1982. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960. London: Macmillan.
Taylor, Isaac c.1889. The Origin of the Aryan: An account of the prehistoric ethnology and
civilisation of Europe. London: Walter Scott.
Tooker, Elisabeth. 2002. “Classifying North American Indian languages before 1850”.
Anthropology, History, and American Indians: Essays in honor of William Curtis Stur-
tevant ed. William L. Merrill & Ives Goddard (= Smithsonian Contributions to Anthro-
pology, 44), 173–178. Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Trautmann, Thomas R. 1981. Dravidian Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trautmann, Thomas R. 1992. “The Revolution in Ethnological Time: The Marett Memorial
Lecture 1991”. Man n.s. 27.379–397.
Trautmann, Thomas R. 1997. Aryans and British India. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University
of California Press. (Indian ed., New Delhi: Vistaar Publications/Sage.)
Trautmann, Thomas R. 1999. “Hullabaloo about Telugu”. South Asia Research 19.1.53–70.
SUMMARY
British India was an especially fruitful site for the development of historical linguistics.
Four major, unanticipated discoveries were especially associated with the East India
Company: those of Indo-European, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian and the Indo-Aryan
nature of Romani. It is argued that they came about in British India because the European
tradition of language analysis met and combined with aspects of the highly sophisticated
Indian language analysis. The discoveries of Indo-European and Dravidian, the subject of
this 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 new
knowledge in British India is generally viewed through the lens of post-colonial theory, and
is seen as having been driven by the needs of colonial governance. This essay sketches out a
different way of looking at aspects of colonial knowledge that fall outside the colonial utility
framework. It views these discoveries and their consequences as emergent products of two
distinct traditions of language study which the British and the Indians brought to the colonial
connection. If this is so, it follows that some aspects of modernism tacitly absorb Indian
knowledge, specifically Indian language analysis. Indian phonology, among other things, is
an 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 Indes
Orientales: celle de l’Indo-Européen, celle du Dravidien, celle du Malayo-Polynésien et celle
de 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 du
langage 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 du
dravidien, ce dont traite cet article, était liée aux villes anglo-indiennes de Calcutta (pour
l’indo-europeéen) et Madras (pour le draviden), et on examinera les conditions dans
lesquelles se firent ces découvertes. Le plus souvent on a examiné la production de nouveaux
savoirs dans l’Inde britannique à la lumière des théories du post-colonialisme, les besoins
d’un gouvernement colonial étant dans cette optique la force motrice derrière cette
production.Cet article propose une façon de voir tout autre d’aspects de la science coloniale
qui se trouvaient hors du cadre de l’utilité coloniale. On y voit ces découvertes et ses
conséquences en tant que produits naissants de deux traditions distinctes de l’étude du
langage qu’apportèrent chacun Britanniques et Indiens au lien colonial. Si tel est le cas, il
s’ensuit que certains aspects du modernisme ont discrètement acquis des connaissances
indiennes: plus précisément, l’analyse linguistique indienne. La phonologie indienne, entre
autres choses, est un exemple de ce processus.
</TARGET "tra">
ZUSAMMENFASSUNG
In der britischen Kolonialzeit war Indien ein besonders günstiger Platz für die Entwick-
lung der historischen Sprachwissenschaft. Besonders die Ostindien-Kompanie wird mit vier
Entdeckungen in Zusammenhang gebracht, die des Indoeuropäischen, des Drawidischen, des
Malayo-Polinesischen und die der Zugehörigkeit des Romani zur indoarischen Gruppe. Man
nimmt an, daß dies mit dem Zusammentreffen europäischer Traditionen und der hoch-
entwickelten indischen Sprachanalyse zu tun hat. Die Entdeckung des Indoeuropäischen und
des Drawidischen, mit der sich der vorliegende Artikel befaßt, steht, wie gezeigt wird, in
Zusammenhang mit den Kolonialstädten Kalkutta und Madras. Das neugewonnene Wissen
wird dabei allerdings durch die Brille der nachkolonialen Zeit und als Folge administrativer
Bedürfnisse der Kolonialmacht gewertet. In dem Beitrag wird jedoch eine anderer Blickweise
vorgeschlagen, abseits von kolonialem Nützlichkeitsdenken. Die sprachwissenschaftlichen
Entdeckungen und ihre Folgen werden als Resultat zweier unterschiedlicher Traditionen
gesehen, der britischen und der indischen, Traditionen, die in und durch die Kolonisierung
aufeinander trafen. Wenn dem so ist, dann erklärt sich hieraus auch zu einem Gutteil das
Stillschweigen, 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. Trautmann
Department of History
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
U. S. A.
e-mail: ttraut@umich.edu

Discovering Aryan Dravidain in British India

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Discovering Aryan Dravidain in British India

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

<TARGET "tra" DOCINFO AUTHOR "Thomas R.

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian

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

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 35

contribution came to be forgotten by the British themselves. Indeed I am

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 37

2. Orientalism in British India

of Foucault’s mutual entailment of power and knowledge, is not about India or

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 39

3. European and Indian ideas of language

In much of the world colonized by Europeans, indigenous knowledge of

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 43

4. The story of Calcutta

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 45

Telugu (actually a Dravidian language), though mixed with deśya words, is

5. The story of Madras

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 47

The Dravidian proof is found in an Introduction by Ellis to the Telugu

Europeans. Unpublished draft manuscripts in the Bodleian Library show how

6. Provisional conclusions toward work in progress

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 49

6.1 The ‘modern, Western’

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 51

6.2 Orientalism and the politics of racial hatred

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 53

historical relations among languages gives a very misleading picture of the

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 55

Jones, William. 1787. “A Dissertation on the Orthography of Asiatick Words in Roman

You might also like