Correspondence, scale and the Linguistic Survey of India's colonial geographies of language, 1896–1928

Abstract

This paper examines the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), a monumental exercise supervised by George Grierson to survey and classify the languages of colonial India. It considers why the LSI developed into an atypical scheme that corresponded with a multiethnic and multinational network of officials and scholars to survey India's languages. It makes the case that the networked practice of surveying was reciprocated at different scales, from localised linguistic surveys in districts and princely states to gather information and specimens, to a loosely governed transnational exercise involving Indians and Europeans to edit, review and publish results. The paper argues that the LSI's scalar geographies were negotiated by Grierson and, more importantly, his assistant Gauri Kant Roy and demonstrates that scale, as an analytic or process, was not an abstraction or predetermined for those entangled in the LSI's survey of India's languages.