Judges and Grammarians in Britain’s Liberal Pedagogic Performance: a Diglossic Approach to Colonial Bengal

Abstract

Many citizens of our putatively unified world regard as serious discourse, rather than as symptoms of ideology, the west’s posturing about its colonial intervention in the countries of the south. Scrutinizing the cultural mission of some key imperial «modernizers», one finds that the first three British authors of grammars of Bangla (a.k.a. Bengali) massively neglected their language learning responsibilities and produced shoddy work, which their administrative colleagues uncritically admired. On these shaky foundations of cultural «knowledge» the British built a «rule of law» whose judges, before they descended on Bengal, «studied» its language and culture from «textbooks» that reflected the low standards set by their predecessors in the cultural sector of the colonial enterprise. Unacceptable asymmetries in cultural study continue to this day. Until a critical number of western academics make amends by attaining adequate proficiency in the languages of the south and manifesting such serious literacy in the writing that they inflict on their public, the claim that western «academics» have established any bias-free «science» of languages, cultures or societies must be dismissed as premature.