Javed Majeed

On the face of it, the Linguistic Survey of India, led by Grierson and completed after herculean efforts by the late 1920s, is a listing of all the languages spoken in India, with brief descriptions, written examples and recordings. Majeed, however, digs through many layers and discovers the many assumptions and prejudgements involved in defining what speech form is a full language and which is a mere dialect, and finds a distinct tendency to favor Sanskrit-Hindi over Persian-Urdu forms. This is a part of Grierson's implicit preference for Hindu-Aryan as more genuinely Indian, as against imported forms based on Semitic-Islam and Persian-Arabic modes. The book also shows how the Survey, as also Grierson's larger work on Indian languages, especially eastern Hindi forms, was very much a collaborative effort with native scholars, and how Grierson maintained networks of communication, mutual support and profound personal regard, with these native scholars and savants, to many of whom he was both a bridge to western media and government levels, and a source of administrative and moral support.… (más)

A scholarly account of the inner contradictions and ramifications of the massive Linguistic Survey of India, motivated and coordinated by Grierson, mostly by remote control from England. The author makes the important point that this was not an imperial project driven from the top, but a cooperative enterprise carried out with the help of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people at the lower rungs of the administration, and local scholars and teachers as well. However the author sometimes seems to be reading too much into perfectly mundane activities or common metaphors, such as reading Freudian undertones to references to the mouth or lips or other organs (which are quite unavoidable when talking of language), or psycho-analysing the illnesses or doubts of the principal actors. In other wwords, it appears to me that the author is over-intellectualising.… (más)