Paper short abstract:

The paper traces the rhetoric of analogy between English and Hindustani in early colonial Hindustani grammars, in the context of orientalist philology and British Imperial attitudes, and speculates on the ways it reflects and inflects Imperial self-perception and notions of subcontinental modernity.

Paper long abstract:

Attempting to define a lingua franca for a polyvocal colony, the emergent English colonial state in late 18th- and early 19th-century India spurred a 'philologic-curricular revolution' of its own. The ensuing pursuit of linguistic knowledge entailed describing local vernaculars systematically, in the process (re)constructing them as suitably modern. Indigenous language-complexes would competitively aspire to identify under the sign of the 'modern,' and subsequently, the sign of the 'national.'

This paper attends to the earliest grammars that seek to render systematic the vernacular 'Hindustani.' Specifically, I will read the prefatory remarks of John Gilchrist's Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language (1796), Anti-Jargonist (1800), Oriental Linguist (1802), and Hindoostanee Philology (1810) to highlight the rhetoric of analogy deployed to uphold Hindustani as the desirable modern standard. I propose that a topos of kinship is forged between Hindustani and English, elaborated in terms of their genealogies, relationship with classical others, and hybrid natures. Pitching the two vernaculars as potential equals while maintaining the power gradient between them, I suggest, effectively fosters the idiom of a 'civil' and 'liberal' Empire even as it creates a template-space for a 'modern standard' native vernacular.

I read Gilchrist in the context of orientalist philology and British Imperial attitudes, to add nuance to the traffic of linguistic knowledge and the narrative of vernacular modernity in early colonial India. Broadly, I wish to speculate on the ways the language question reflected and inflected (a) Imperial self-perception in and through the colony; and (b) notions of subcontinental modernity.