Acknowledgments

This essay has benefited from the detailed comments and criticisms of Javed Majeed and Tim Harper, as well as the comments of Tom Trautmann, Chris Bayly, Eivind Kahrs, and Francesca Orsini. I am grateful to them all, though the responsibility for the ideas presented here is of course mine alone.

Translation has often been characterized as a ‘central act' of European colonialism and imperialism.¹

In each of these cases, the work of translation into English can be seen to operate in colonial contexts to construct European authority, whether that authority be of an eminently practical kind for the extension of the structures of rule, or as a cultural authority for the effective representation of the colonized as somehow ‘other.' This essay, while recognizing the centrality of translation within European imperialism that these kinds of approaches have highlighted, seeks to supplement them by historically situating translation as an evolving discipline. Moreover, it is argued that strategies of translation developed principally from European ideas about the status of language within the imperial project of imposing ‘civilizational advancement' upon the non-West through education. The principal context for this study, then, is the practice of translation into, rather than out of, Indian languages within colonial governmental educational institutions of mid-nineteenth-century north India. In particular, I contend that the connections perceived by Europeans between the features of a particular language and the collective mind of its speakers, or indeed their state of civilization, were fundamental in driving the translation of Western English-language educational text books into Indian languages. Moreover, particular strategies of translation can be viewed as a key mechanism through which Western concepts of progress through a civilizational hierarchy, at the top of which stood Britain, were authorized for Indian acceptance. Finally, this focus upon the translational strategies employed in governmental institutions raises important questions about the genealogy which lay behind the construction of ‘modern' languages, and in particular their functioning to somehow represent national or communal identities.

Of course, it may also be pointed out that by focusing upon the European intellectual genealogies that underpinned translation, this essay effectively marginalizes the impacts that the colonized had upon the development of European knowledges. Certainly it is true that in many instances (several of which are enumerated below) European writers and translators working in India derived much of their linguistic skill, as well as their knowledge of the cultural meaningfulness of Indian languages, from interaction with their tutors and assistants, who were in many cases brāhma[ndotu] pa[ndotu]ḍits (high-caste “learned men” trained in Sanskrit philology and philosophy). In a significant respect, then, the process of knowledge formation about Indian languages and Indian civilization reflected some sort of a dialogic process.⁷

I. British Orientalist Characterizations of Indian Language and Civilization

The story of Babel, as it appears in the book of Genesis, tells us that God dispersed the unitary population of the globe by confusing their single, common, or ‘natural' language. For many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European thinkers, this narrative lay at the very center of an intellectual tradition that viewed language as a principal marker for cultural and national difference.⁸

Yet quite aside from any question of purely historical chronology, eighteenth-century European discussions of linguistic difference were already invested with a sense of a ‘national' hierarchy. This stemmed, it would seem, from philosophical attempts to explain the origins of human linguistic diversity, and to understand the relationship between thought and speech, outside the realm of purely Biblical narrative and epistemology. The key text in the development of this body of thought is John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke's central thesis in the Essay had been formulated to reject the prevalent philosophical notion of innate ideas. In essence, Locke argued that language had a human origin, and that its creation and continued use were “primal expressions of our humanity.”¹¹

Early British orientalist¹⁸

In the case of Sanskrit, British orientalists recognized that this language was intimately associated with the ‘Hindu' religion by virtue of it being the medium for their various religious texts, as well as being the language of learned (i.e., religious) intercourse and religious ritual. In short, orientalists, from very early on, recognized that Indians believed Sanskrit to be deva-bhāṣaā—the eternal and uncreated “speech” or “language of the gods”—and as such, in a significant sense, India's ‘national language.' William Carey recorded in the early nineteenth century that “many of the Pundits assert that it is the language of the gods, and was never used as a common medium of communication among men, but revealed from heaven as a vehicle for the divine will, all the books esteemed of divine authority being written therein.”¹⁹

In addition to the recognition of Sanskrit's ‘sacred status,' orientalists had little doubt that Sanskrit was a language of great antiquity. In 1778, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed described Sanskrit as “of the most venerable and unfathomable antiquity.”²²

As European linguistic expertise in Sanskrit spread in the early nineteenth century, characterizations of the language also became based in Indian and European philological research. Following the discoveries of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed and William Jones on the affinity of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, a large number of Sanskrit dictionaries and grammars were published, first in India and then increasingly in Europe. These represented an effort to not only enable the wider study of India's textual records, but to further philological research into the historical relationships of languages, given Sanskrit's centrality in this regard.²⁴

While Sanskrit's copiousness and grammatical ‘perfection' could be viewed as a reflection of the relatively exalted status of ancient Indian civilization, in addition to its standing as a marker of India's antiquity and inherent religiosity, the increased interest in Indian vernacular languages manifest in the early nineteenth century resulted in the subjection of these, as well, to philological analysis and a searching critique of their character. During the course of his researches, William Jones had recognized that although Hindi and Sanskrit differed markedly in their grammatical structures, they shared a significant percentage of their vocabularies. He believed that “the pure Hindi, whether of Tartarian or Chaldean origin, was primeval in Upper India, into which the Sanscrit was introduced by conquerors from other kingdoms in some very remote age.”³⁰

By the second decade of the nineteenth century, a series of new vernacular dictionaries and grammars were being published in India which were able to take full account of the established historical relationship between them and Sanskrit. William Carey's 1815 dictionary of Bengali, for instance, noted that the majority of Bengali's vocabulary was derived directly from Sanskrit. His dictionary purported to provide an etymology for all its words, and included an appendix that listed all the Sanskrit roots (dhātu) from which much of the Bengali vocabulary was thought to have been derived.³⁴

While the comparison of the vocabulary and grammatical structure of the Indian vernaculars and Sanskrit contributed to the perception of the former's ‘degraded' status, the increasing publication during the course of the early nineteenth century of bilingual dictionaries, and several multilingual technical vocabularies, served to further highlight and systematize either the dependence of the vernaculars upon Sanskrit for their expressive capability, or those subject areas in which the vernaculars lacked any sort of vocabulary at all in comparison with English. The ideological work that comparative dictionaries do has been discussed in a quite different context by Lydia Liu. She argues that bilingual or multilingual dictionaries proceed upon the inherent assumption that “languages are commensurate and equivalents exist naturally between them.”³⁷

Comparisons of the respective vocabularies and grammatical structures of Sanskrit and the Indian vernaculars tended to highlight, then, a process of degeneration and reliance upon the intellectual achievements of an ancient age, while dictionaries that included English could be made to highlight India's relative lack of scientific and civilizational progress in relation to Europe. Peter Breton's 1825 medical vocabulary is an illustrative example of this latter process. Breton, a surgeon in the service of the East India Company, surveyed a series of medical texts, dictionaries, and vocabularies in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, and English in an attempt to highlight possible sources of cross-lingual misunderstanding among medical practitioners.³⁹

These early orientalist characterizations of Indian languages, and the potential extension of these characterizations to the collective mental or civilizational state of India, can now be further analyzed with reference to ways in which they found renewed influence in the educational programmes of the government colleges at Delhi and Benares during the middle of the nineteenth century. Both of these colleges undertook the large-scale translation and publishing of Western scientific texts with a view to the ‘intellectual and moral improvement' of north Indian society. While the European superintendents of these colleges agreed that the vernacular languages of India also required ‘improvement' in order to make them suitable vehicles for the transmission of Western knowledge, they took radically different views of the translational strategies which were to effect this improvement. While this difference reflected their distinct views on how best to produce cultural authority for their translations of Western knowledge, both men agreed that European intervention was required in the first instance to effect this linguistic improvement, and, further, that linguistic improvement was an essential prerequisite to India's civilizational progress.

II. The Power of English: Translating Science into Urdu at Delhi College

Thomas Babington Macaulay's “Minute” on education, issued in Calcutta on 2 February 1835, advocated the abandonment of ‘oriental' subjects in government-sponsored educational institutions in north India in favor of a renewed emphasis upon the teaching of Western knowledge imparted solely through the medium of the English language.⁴¹

Yet while a variety of Indian-language textbooks in Western learning had already been written for exactly this purpose, European educators realized in the late 1830s that these initial attempts were inconsistently translated, largely unreadable, or insufficiently tailored to suit ‘native' taste and sensibility.⁴⁴

By the mid-nineteenth century, it was generally agreed by British educators in India that the ‘vernacular' dialects of the subcontinent were not, in the words of Macaulay, to be considered “fit vehicles” for the conveyance of Western knowledge in their current state.⁴⁸

The programme for vernacular textbook production at Delhi College was first outlined in an educational Minute written by Boutros in 1842. After describing his plan for publications, which included an edition of Dr. John Abercrombie's general works, William O'Shaughnessy's chemistry text, elements of Dugald Stewart's moral philosophy, and William Robertson's History of America, Boutros then suggested guidelines for the maintenance of consistency across the translational scheme. These included the direct transfer of transliterated English-language scientific terms into the text in cases where no direct equivalent in Urdu could be found, such as for “sodium” or “chlorine.” As well, he recommended the maintenance of attested “scientific” terms in Urdu, such as loha for “iron,” wherever an equivalent could be found; and similar guidelines for the composition of compound terms. Interestingly, Boutros also sanctioned the inclusion of Greek prefixes such as “mono,” “di,” “proto,” “hypo,” or “peri,” in the composition of compound Urdu words, though he gave no examples of how this might be effected.⁵¹

In essence, Boutros felt that it was the English language which should be considered as the most suitable “feeder language” for the introduction of scientific terminology into Urdu. This was a policy that reflected views of English as a ‘powerful' vehicle for the expression of scientific truths, but also, and more importantly, the desire to reaffirm within the colonial educational context the civilizational ascendancy of Britain through its historical connection with scientific discovery and progress. Indeed, it was this history that authorized the entire colonial translational project. Moreover, Urdu recommended itself as the most appropriate Indian vernacular language for the spread of Western ‘useful knowledge' due to its peculiar ability to easily absorb foreign nomenclatures. Urdu's already-syncretic character, and its status as the product of historical cultural interaction (between the former ruling elite, the Mughals, and the ‘mass' of Hindus), together were thought by Boutros to render Urdu all the more easily amenable to the engraftment of English scientific nomenclatures into its vocabulary.⁵²

Yet the perceived ‘lack' in Urdu—the absence of equivalent terms for the expression of Western scientific knowledge—was in Delhi College interpreted as indicative not only of the degraded status of the language but, by extension, the degraded status of its speakers, and the civilization which it somehow represented. Linguistic comparison inevitably invited in this context an attendant civilizational comparison. For instance, it was argued in contemporary official accounts that the responsibility for the translation of English scientific works into Urdu, and the attendant improvement of the language, must, in the first instance, be carried out by Europeans in the employ of government. The actual task of “drawing out” the linguistic resources of the vernaculars, by a careful selection of English terms for engraftment during translation, was thought to require a “correct knowledge” of scientific and other ‘useful' topics, but also the possession of a “critical taste” that was thought to be “more readily . . . found among European minds than among those of Natives.”⁵³

As noted above, Boutros' scheme for translating English textbooks into Urdu soon found official government sanction with its wide-ranging publication in the NWP Government's reports on public instruction during the first half of the 1840s. By 1844, the year before Boutros left Delhi College, it would seem that his activities largely determined, or perhaps constituted, governmental views on vernacular publishing. There was a veritable explosion of Urdu-language textbooks prepared at Delhi, which were then published by either the College itself or the Agra School Book Society.⁵⁵

III. The Power of Sanskrit: Translational Strategy at Benares College

In 1845, Felix Boutros left the position of Superintendent of Delhi College, and with his departure the impetus behind the Urdu translational project waned. As unsold ‘improved-Urdu' textbooks began to pile up in the NWP Government's book depository during the later 1840s,⁶⁰

The translation of key Western scientific and philosophical texts formed a cornerstone of Ballantyne's project, and he believed that the ‘proper' translation of these English works was fundamental to extracting their maximum educational value for his Indian students. In this regard, he disagreed with the earlier translational strategy outlined by Felix Boutros, particularly the transliteration, or “engraftment,” of English technical terminology directly into Indian languages. Ballantyne thought this would bring about a “barbarization” of language. For example, he once commented that the use of English-language terminology in Indian-language textbooks would inevitably “degenerate into a gibberish,” such as had already happened in the case of “the digarī of our law-courts, for a ‘decree,' the tārpīn-kā-tel of our laboratories, for ‘turpentine,' or the māmlet of our kitchens, for an ‘omelette.'”⁶²

Ballantyne believed that the translation of Western science and ‘useful knowledge' into Indian vernacular languages for use in mass education required that it first be rendered into Sanskrit. At the most fundamental level, it was thought necessary to initially present Western knowledge in Sanskrit so that it would be readily available, and attractive, for the traditional intellectual leadership of India, the pa[ndotu]ḍits, “none of whom seem to like to read any thing but Sanscrit.” In other words, the use of Sanskrit was considered to be an “indispensable condition” to conciliate the “class of men” whose co-operation in constructive orientalist educational practices Ballantyne very much needed to gain those practices intellectual and social legitimacy among India's masses.⁶⁵

Nevertheless, Ballantyne believed that Sanskrit itself had to be “developed,” or rather, improved, to make it adequate for the “reproduction of European thought.”⁶⁷

However, the translation of knowledge expressed through the English language into the Sanskrit presented Ballantyne with several fundamental methodological difficulties. On the one hand, it was thought that the use of already-existing Sanskrit terms to express Western notions, such as technical terms from the jyotiśāstra for treatises of Western algebra and mathematics, would further demonstrate to the pa[ndotu]ḍits the points of connection between their own philosophical ‘traditions' and Western ‘science' and scientific methodology, and also facilitate the introduction of that knowledge.⁶⁹

Ballantyne was well aware of this problem, and discussed it in the “Preface” to his Christianity Contrasted with Hindu Philosophy. Here he warned that in producing a translation into an Indian language, one must ensure that one's words are “rightly comprehended” by the target audience, and he gave as a cautionary example the first Bible translation into Sanskrit (the dharmapustaka) of the Serampore Baptist missionaries, executed under the leadership of William Carey. The first verse of Genesis in the dharmapustaka, Ballantyne noted, states that God created heaven and earth, but by reference to the terms ākāśa and p[rdotu]thivī. This was problematic because in the nyāya philosophical system these terms refer to just two of the five elements—“ether” and “earth”—and so when the “learned Hindu reader” comes to the next verse and reads about God's spirit moving upon the face of the “waters”—considered as a third element—he “is staggered by the doubt whether it is to be understood that the waters were uncreated, or whether the sacred penman had made an oversight.”⁷⁰

Ballantyne thus recommended that already-existing Sanskrit terminology only be used in translations from English with a full understanding of the established nuances those terms had in “Hindu thought”: “only by tracing the development of Hindoo thought, and of the terminology in which it clothed itself, can we hope to avoid completely all such misappropriation of terms, as that which has, to a certain extent, baffled all European attempts at translation into the Hindoo dialects whenever the subject of discussion transcended the palpable.”⁷²

Here Ballantyne used the terms diva for “heaven,” derived from the verbal root div, which is also the basis for deva (‘God'), and as well as bhūmi for “earth,” which carries the dominant meaning of “place” or “territory.” Through these usages, Ballantyne managed to avoid confusion with the latter term, since it has no distinct philosophical associations, and with the former term he invoked a connection with the divine through an implicit etymological association.⁷⁷

That said, Ballantyne also believed that there were significant portions of European science which could find no exact correspondent within the corpus of Sanskrit literature, known as the śāstra, and that therefore the translation of this knowledge into Sanskrit would require the “devising of new terms.”⁷⁸

I have already noted that Ballantyne had explicitly rejected the direct imposition of English scientific terms into Sanskrit, because he worried that the language would degenerate into “gibberish.” However, several other, more fundamental, considerations drove this translational strategy. On one basic level, Ballantyne clearly considered such a transliteration of English to be simply unnecessary, for he thought Sanskrit to be a powerful language by its very subtlety and complexity, able to express a wide range and a depth of meaning; that is, he adopted the orientalists' (and pa[ndotu]ḍits') characterizations of Sanskrit as sa[mdotu]sk[rdotu]ta, “that which is perfected.” In particular, Sanskrit's organization into a large number of verbal roots (dhātu) meant that nearly endless new vocabularies could be easily coined.⁸¹

A further rationale behind Ballantyne's innovative translational methodology is best glimpsed through an examination of his attempt to construct a Sanskrit vocabulary for the Western science of chemistry. Western knowledge of chemistry had already been treated, to some extent, in William Yates' 1828 Padārthavidyāsāra,⁸²

On this basis, Ballantyne outlined a comprehensive chemical nomenclature in Sanskrit. Several words for metals and other common substances already appeared in Sanskrit, and Ballantyne suggested maintaining the use of those. For example, gandhaka and loha for “sulfur” and “iron” both appeared in the Amarakośa,⁸⁷

While Ballantyne's translational scheme was relatively straightforward, it could also produce rather lengthy compounds that, in effect, served to express the process by which a material was produced rather than simply the material itself. A good example of this is Ballantyne's translation of the word “magnesia,” which in Sanskrit became the rather cumbersome adāhyapaṭamūlajanakasya prā[ndotu]apradaja, or, “that which is born from oxygen, i.e. an oxide, of that which produces the basis of cloth, i.e. fibre, which cannot be burned,” referring to the magnesium component of asbestos.⁹⁰

Once the translation of key English scientific and philosophical texts into Sanskrit was underway at Benares College, Ballantyne undertook to superintend the further translation of these texts into Hindi and other Indian vernaculars. In particular, he advocated the direct engraftment into the vernaculars of the newly coined and heavily Sanskritized technical scientific vocabulary, which would render these languages sufficient for the task of expressing Western ‘useful' and scientific knowledge. A substantial number of Hindi textbooks were published under the auspices of Benares College during the 1850s which incorporated highly Sanskritized vocabularies, including Hindi versions of Ballantyne's A Synopsis of Science,⁹¹

This final stage of Ballantyne's translational strategy represented its most fundamental and important aspect, for it was realized that the mass of the Indian population would never have access to Western knowledge in Sanskrit. In official parlance, translation into the vernaculars was thought to demonstrate that “the Government of Great Britain in India recognizes no hereditary distinction in the realm of intellect, but wishes that all knowledge that is valuable should be placed within the reach of every man in the country who has a mind capable of appreciating its value.”¹⁰⁰

But as in Delhi College, it was thought that European initiative was necessary to effect this revolution in language, and subsequently, in thought within India. This is clearly demonstrated by the official appointment of Fitz-Edward Hall to the position of Anglo-Sanskrit Professor of Benares College in 1853, charged with overall responsibility for the rendering of ‘useful knowledge' into “pure and classical Hindi.”¹⁰¹

IV. Assessing the Importance of Government-Sponsored Translation in North India

Up to this point, this essay has largely been concerned with tracing the intellectual genealogy that lay behind the colonial government's strategy for translating scientific and otherwise ‘useful' knowledge from English into Indian languages. Yet Ballantyne's plan to Sanskritize Hindi also needs to be assessed by its reception among Indians and its longer-term success, as well as by reference to the actual processes and wider initiatives involved in the production of Indian-language textbooks.

There can be little doubt that many Hindi texts, as well as the Hindi dictionaries produced throughout the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, forged a close link with the vocabulary of Sanskrit. However, there was inevitably some measure of opposition to the wholesale importation of Sanskritic terms into the vernacular. For example, in March of 1853 the government distributed a Hindi version of A Synopsis of Science throughout NWP in order that its suitability as a textbook might be assessed.¹⁰⁴

Moreover, Ballantyne's advocacy of a highly Sanskritized vocabulary for Western science was largely ignored by the emerging class of Indian educators in their publication of Hindi school books in subsequent decades in north India, as these writers reverted instead to a transliterated English vocabulary. These men were often employed by government educational institutions, but in time, many of them would also come to form a culturally significant group of agitators for the promotion of Hindi and a strengthened form of Hinduism in northern India. For example, pa[ndotu]ḍit Sevaka Rāma's 1873 Śabda Prabandāvalī used terms such as arsenik for “arsenic,”¹⁰⁶

Despite this evident dead-end to Ballantyne's translational scheme, it is apparent that the conceptions and ideas which drove the project continued to have important influence in the construction of a ‘national' language and communal identities in India. In this regard, the ‘Sanskritization' of Hindi during the 1850s at Benares College as a means to bring about civilizational improvement, inextricably grounded within notions of a ‘classical' Sanskrit and its ‘mothering' relationship to the vernaculars, has been largely overlooked as an important contributing factor in discussions of the evolution and politicization of Hindi during the later nineteenth century. Both Vasudha Dalmia and Christopher King, in their recent studies of Hindi language and culture, have invoked Ballantyne's official reports to demonstrate that in the late 1840s there existed little in the way of a systemized language known as “Hindi” in Benares, and that the language itself had no necessary connection to any sort of religious nationalism: being a Hindu, in other words, did not necessitate speaking Hindi.¹¹¹

Questions of religious and national identity construction in the nineteenth-century colonial world were inextricably bound to the politics of language. Speakers of Hindi in the later part of that century increasingly used the language as a mode of self-description, to invoke an array of civilizational associations with the Sanskritic, which would come to have, certainly by the early twentieth century, relevance for the emergence of communalist politics and religiously based forms of anti-colonial nationalism. This essay has attempted to trace a potentially important and influential genealogy of ideas about the nature of civilization, language, and, ultimately, progress, between British colonial educators such as J. R. Ballantyne, ‘traditional' Indian scholars and intermediaries, and emerging cultural commentators such as Bhāratendu Haris'candra. This genealogy has yet to be adequately traced in its full complexity, a complexity moreover, that must encompass both continuity and discontinuity, influence and irruption. This is a historical process that may also find resonance with other contexts, such as in China, where ‘tradition,' understood as a particular vision of civilizational heritage, represented an authoritative force for adapting social and cultural norms, and ultimately held an ambivalent relationship to dominant European, orientalist ideas.