Making the Local Foreign: Shared Language and History in Southern India

Abstract

This article explores tensions present in the encounter between British colonial understandings of language and local southern Indian categories of linguistic analysis as they appear within Telugu textual sources. It traces the introduction of a new notion of the foreign into existing southern Indian discourses on language and examines the displacement of intelligibility as an important reference point for analyzing language use. It furthermore argues that colonial scholars of Telugu reoriented language analyses toward an exclusive interest in the historical origins of words, changing the basis on which the usage of particular words was recognized and legitimized within a larger system of language categorizations.