Languages and nations forms a pair with Aryans and British rule (University of California Press, 1997), Thomas Trautmann’s book on Calcutta-based Orientalism and Sir William Jones’s conceptualization of the Indo-European language family. The present volume focuses on the little-recognized Madras-based Orientalism of Francis Whyte Ellis and the “Dravidian proof,” the conceptualization of the Dravidian languages of South India as a unitary family unrelated to Sanskrit. Trautmann argues that the striking productivity of British India for linguistic theory grew out of the meeting of European ethnology not only with the linguistic richness of South Asia but also with the rich Indian tradition of language analysis.
Chapter 1 traces the unacknowledged religious roots of European linguistic science to a “Mosaic ethnology” derived from the Bible. The genealogical tree of nations, which related all human beings as descendants of Noah and his three sons, was transformed from a framework for the classification of peoples into one for the classification of languages, intertwining language and nations in European thought. But it was the empirical method of the comparative word list that “put the posited close relation of languages and nations to work” (p. 34). This “first, surgical move of historical linguistics” (14) abstracted elements from living languages which could be displayed as empirical data, cutting away some aspects as non-essential or foreign accretions, and canonizing others as core and authentic.
Chapter 2 reviews the Indian tradition of language analysis beginning with Pānini and highlights the formulation of structural word categories that were later mobilized by colonial linguists as historical, etymological accounts. Trautmann also proposes that the phonological analysis expressed in Indic script conventions helped shape the European system of phonetic representation.
Chapters 3 and 4 lay out a detailed account of Ellis, whose early accidental death contributed to his obscurity, and of the interaction between Indian and English scholars at the College of Fort St. George in Madras, which Ellis helped found. These chapters offer to the South Asianist a wealth of historical details assembled from diverse archives, and to the more general audience a view of the colonial policy of Orientalism, which aspired to rule India in accord with Indian culture and therefore required investigation of that culture through the study of Indian languages (79). Chapter 5 is devoted to the role of Indian and European scholarship in the development of the Dravidian proof itself, which Ellis was then the first to articulate explicitly in print, in 1816. (Appendices reproduce texts by Ellis, including the Dravidian proof.) Chapter 6 considers the influence of Ellis’s work on South Asian languages, politics, and scholarship.
The conclusion returns to the under-recognized place of Indian theories of language in modern thought, arguing that new knowledge was enabled by the conjuncture of the European and Indian traditions of language analysis. Trautmann also argues innovatively that race theory developed only when language was decoupled from nation, allowing the Aryan concept to emerge as a purely racial one, rather than a broad linguistic category encompassing diverse speakers of Indo-European languages.
