What’s in a (Proper) Name? Particulars, Individuals, and Authorship in the Linguistic Survey of India and Colonial Scholarship

Abstract

This chapter examines how the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) grappled with the proper names of Indian languages and dialects. For the Linguistic Survey, India was a site for integrating the different branches of linguistics as a modern European discipline (phonetics, historical linguistics, dialectology, etymology, and philology) into a unified working project. However, this chapter addresses the modes of thinking and the operations of thought that precede this formal organization into linguistic knowledge. The published volumes of the Linguistic Survey, and especially the unpublished files, foreground the process of naming in the Survey’s attempt to separate individual entities from each other—whether these entities are languages, dialects, individual sounds, or individual persons. At this level, before any formal organization of knowledge, the Survey evinces what might be called a metaphysical mode of thinking. The Survey is an exercise in what Peter Strawson called descriptive metaphysics;1 that is, it seeks to distinguish individual entities or “particulars” from each other. This strand of the Survey reveals a complicated picture of colonial power in the realm of linguistic knowledge that belies the usual characterizations of colonial knowledge in this field in terms of strategies of command and clear-cut definitions.