Of Dictionaries and Dialectics: Locating the Vernacular and the Making of Modern Malayalam

Abstract

This paper looks at Hermann Gundert’s Malayalam-English dictionary at the juncture of the modernisation of the Malayalam language in the 19th century. Gundert, the then inspector of schools in the Malabar district, saw the dictionary as the first step towards the cause of a universal education through the standardisation of Malayalam language. But what did a dictionary for all and by implication a language for all mean to the Kerala society? For centuries, much of the literary output in Kerala was in Sanskrit language, even as Malayalam continued its sway. The diversity of the language system in Kerala navigated its way through the hierarchies of caste and class tensions, springing up new genres from time to time within these dichotomies. Like many other vernacular languages in India, the Malayalam language system remained as the society it was in, decentralised and plural. This fell into sharp relief against the language systems of modern post-renaissance Europe with its standardised languages and uniform education. The colonial project in India aimed at reconstructing the existing language hierarchies by standardising the vernaculars and replacing Sanskrit as the language of cosmopolitan reach and cultural hegemony with English. Bilingualism and translation was key to this process as it seemed to provide a point of direct cultural linkage between the vernacular Indian cultures and Europe. This paper argues that Gundert’s bilingual dictionary features itself in this attempt at the modernisation of Malayalam by reconstructing the existing hierarchies of Kerala culture through the standardisation of Malayalam and the replacement of Sanskrit with a new cosmopolitan language and cultural values.