FRONT LINES/ BORDER POSTS

Spring 1997
Volume 23, Number 3

The preface to Halhed's Grammar is an extraordinary document of the imperial archive that encapsulates, in its twenty-odd pages, many of the themes and rhetorics that informed the discourse of English colonization in the late eighteenth century. Interesting for our purposes is its ambitious, if finally unsatisfactory, equation of linguistic accuracy with political right, of knowing the language with ruling the territory. While recent critical theory has often made explicit the link between power and knowledge in the discourse of Orientalism in general, rather little has been done to address the specific historical problems encountered by early English Orientalists, especially the formal linguistic and political maneuvers by which they helped make India, in Mill's immortal phrase, a "highly interesting portion of the British History."4 The present essay attempts to isolate some of the particular strategies by which English humanistic knowledge about India supported the legitimacy of conquest in the absence of any acknowledged right to rule during the early years of its colonial project. The first section sketches the equivalences drawn between linguistic understanding, legal right, and political sovereignty in Halhed's preface. The second and third sections concern more properly historical and social issues, as the equivalences postulated by Halhed expand outwards into other fields of inquiry, such as commerce, religion, and education. Finally, I will turn to the lasting effects of English linguistic research on Indian languages to examine the structural imposition of Halhed's categories on the work of one of the first Indian grammarians who explicitly engaged them. The following introduction is a brief attempt to theorize some of the complex representations of ruler and ruled within the discourse of conquest.

See Also Paul de Man: Political Allegory in Rousseau (Summer 1976) Jacques Derrida: The Linguistic Circle of Geneva (Summer 1982) Patrick Brantlinger: A Postindustrial Prelude to Postcolonialism: John Ruskin, William Morris, and Gandhism (Spring 1996) Edward W. Said: The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions (Summer 1978)

4. James Mill, The History of British India (1817), quoted in Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography," p. 287. For a recent attempt at restoring historicity in the critique of Orientalism, see David Ludden, "Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge," in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 250-78.

Henry Schwarz is assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India (1997) and the editor, with Richard Dienst, of Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies (1996). He has published on British Orientalism, literary theory, and cultural studies and is currently writing a book on the development of modern literature in colonial India.