The debate over the issue of “Orientalism” now has a long history. Thomas R. Trautmann's new book will not resolve all the issues of that complex question—but it does provide an important perspective on them. One of the key practices of colonial knowledge production was the mastery of local languages. Linguistic issues are the focus of Languages and Nations, particularly the “proof” by which the idea of a Dravidian family of languages in India was solidified. This specific issue is set within a larger context that allows us to reconsider how we situate the phenomenon of Orientalism. Trautmann argues that Orientalism “was a pure product of the languages-and-nations project, resting as it does upon the presumption that languages and nations are so closely identified with one another that the one is the gateway to the inner meaning and constitution of the other” (216).

The core theme of the book revolves around the description of a major current in eighteenth-century European thought, the notion of a profound connection between languages and nations. The roots of the “languages-and-nations project” were biblical, involving a patrilineal “Tree of Nations” or “Mosaic ethnology” based on the descendants of Noah (10). Trautmann's first chapter describes how “the Mosaic ethnology, a classification of peoples, was transformed into a framework for the classification of languages” (13). Largely because of the development of the process of using a word list to study comparative vocabulary, eighteenth-century Europeans were prepared to conducted scholarly investigations that amounted to “ethnology by means of linguistics” (xi).

Enter Francis Whyte Ellis (1777–1819). Less well known than Sir William Jones, Ellis served as collector of Madras and was crucial to the establishment of the College of Fort St. George. The college, like its Calcutta predecessor, served to instruct civil servants in Indian languages, but Ellis hoped that it would also achieve a “revival of letters” (146) for South India. Ellis's most distinctive achievement, however, may have been his authorship of the proof of a Dravidian language family, demonstrating the differences between Telugu and Sanskrit and the similarities among Telugu, Kannada, and Tamil.

One of the strengths of this book is Trautmann's ability to uncover intellectual interconnections and social networks. Despite a strong emphasis on the work of Ellis, Trautmann is insistent that the Dravidian proof, and the languages-and-nations project more generally, were the result of the labors of many individuals. Ellis's numerous scholarly connections included several Indians: Sankariah (Bomakonti Shankara Shastri) and Vedam Pattabhirama Shastri, both of whom held positions at the College of Fort St. George. As Trautmann puts it, “Ellis and his circle at the College and at Madras generally … were engaged in discussions leading to innovative ideas about the South Indian languages and Sanskrit, in the course of which the grammatical traditions [of India] … were mixing with the language-nation obsession of Europe, and strange, unanticipated hybrids were being born” (184).

This book serves many purposes. It is an exploration of a major European intellectual project and its interaction with Indian linguistic knowledge, a reconstruction of scholarly networks in colonial Madras, and a history of a particular moment in the study of Indian languages. It is also, as mentioned above, a study with important implications for the history of Orientalism. Those who would hope for an extensive discussion of the interconnections between power and knowledge, however, may be somewhat disappointed. This is not to say that the issue is ignored—to give just one example, Trautmann considers Ellis “a nearly perfect embodiment of Orientalism as colonial policy” (79). He argues that the surge in linguistic scholarship sparked by the languages-and-nations project was “fired by the forces of national self-love and colonial utility, no doubt, but it exceeds them as well. Nor is it a natural product of these forces” (41). Trautmann appears to imply that it was the intellectual project of merging ethnology and linguistics, more than the colonial context, which determined the core dynamics of scholarly Orientalism in India. A more elaborate discussion of this issue might have been helpful in supporting this perspective.

That said, historians interested in Orientalism, however defined, will find many useful insights in this book. Trautmann does a good job in presenting some of the complexity of knowledge production in colonial India. In this account, we see how different intellectual “schools” of Orientalism—in Calcutta and Madras—competed with one another for influence. The historical agency of individuals, which is sometimes neglected by works exploring knowledge production and discourse, is readily apparent here, and Indian contributions to colonial scholarship are explored in great detail. Indeed, one of the most important features of this study is the way in which Trautmann demonstrates how Indian intellectual traditions and specific Indian scholars were involved in the production of colonial knowledge. In this way, he illuminates how Indian participation in the colonial process extended into the realm of linguistic scholarship.

Although those “dead to the delights of philology” (196; as Trautmann says of Hugh Elliot, the governor of Madras) may find certain sections of the argument to be a little overwhelming in their detail, this is a book with broad implications. An impressive work of thorough scholarship, Languages and Nations explores the connections of European and Indian intellectual history. It suggests that the conjunction of ethnology and linguistics should be placed alongside the mapping of space and time as one of several “technologies of location” (2) and, therefore, included among the major intellectual projects of human history.