Discovering Aryan and Dravidian
Historiographia Linguistica
xxxi
:
1
(
2004
),
33
–
58.
issn 0302
–
5160
/
e-issn 1569
–
9781
©John Benjamins Publishing Company
in British India
A tale of two cities
*
Thomas R. Trautmann
University of Michigan
1.
Introduction
Aryan
and
Dravidian
, the keywords of my title,have ancient antecedents inSanskrit, but in their current meanings they are modern constructs that wereinvented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. To examine their genesis andmutual influence I began, not in my usual way, with a trip to the library, but asmy students are teaching me to, with a keyword search on the Internet. Theoutcome was quite revealing.For
Dravidian
I found a modest number of books listed on the AmericanBook Exchange, most of them about Dravidian languages and linguistics, a few
*
This essay is an attempt to sketch a large terrain, that of a project on ‘Languages andNations’ I have been engaged in for several years, concerning language analysis in early British India, and the ways in which it is an emergent product of interactions between twotraditions of language study, European and Indian. What can here only be sketched is put ingreater detail in my book,
Aryans and British India
(Trautmann 1997), chiefly about Indo-EuropeanandtheCalcuttaOrientalists,andabookmanuscriptinprogress,chieflyabouttheDravidian proof and the Orientalists of Madras, in which many of these matters are morefully explored and referenced than they can be in the short space of an article. The framingof the essay around the keywords
Aryan
and
Dravidian
was due to the conference for whichitwasfirstwritten,“
‘Arier’und ‘Draviden’:GeneseundWechselwirkungzweier interkultur-ellerDeutungsmusterundihreRelevanzfürdieSelbst-undFremdwahrnehmungSüdasiens”,heldattheFranckescheStiftungen,Halle,4–5October1999.Itwaspublished,inGerman,in
“Arier” und “Draviden”: Konstructionen der Vergangenheit als Grundlage für Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmungen Südasiens
ed. by Michael Bergunder & Rahul Peter Das (Halle/Saale:Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2002). I have made a few alterations in the originalEnglish version. I am grateful to Kevin Tuite of the Université de Montréal and an anony-mous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions, and to the editor for his sage andthoughtful editorial help.
34 Thomas R. Trautmann
about the Dravidian political movement in Tamil Nadu, and one or two worksof anthropology, all of them about South India and Sri Lanka. Western knowl-edge of the Dravidian, in short, is largely confined to scholarly books on India.Akeywordsearchfor
Aryan,
bycontrast,foundalargernumberofbooks,mostof them falling into two very distinct types: scholarly works about India (mostly linguistics)ontheonehand,and,ontheother,workspropagatingoranalyzingthe politics of racial hatred in the West, from 19th century beginnings throughthe Nazis to groups such as Aryan Nation which, unfortunately, flourish today in my own country. Though the scope of the Dravidian concept is largely confined to the study of South Asia, it is a striking aspect of the Aryan conceptthat it belongs to two quite different narratives, in which it has quite differentmeanings and functions. I will call these narratives “the story of knowledge”and “the story of ethnic politics”, by which I mean especially the story of thepolitics of racial hatred.The story of knowledge has to do with the discovery of the Indo-Europeanfamily of languages, adumbrated by Sir William Jones before the Asiatic Society at Calcutta in 1786(Jones 1786), anticipated by manyand put on a soundbasisby Franz Bopp beginning with his famous
Conjugationssystem
(Bopp 1816).Jones’pronouncementonIndo-Europeanfiguresinhistoriesoflinguisticsasanepochal momentleading to theformation of Comparative Philology.The Indo-European concept was a real breakthrough of scientific linguistics, linkinglanguages widely separated in space, forming two blocs, an eastern one of Persian and Indic languages and a western, European bloc, separated from oneanother by Semitic and Turkic languages. The Indo-European concept wasanything but obvious — the idea, that is, that the two blocs of languages, sodistant from one another, are nevertheless related to one another. Its discovery by Jones and others not only created a new science of language but it radically reordered existing ideas about the relations among different nations or races of peoples. Moreover it created new knowledge of such interrelationships in thedeep past of which the surviving ancient literatures, such as those in Latin,Greek or Sanskrit, preserved no distinct memory; and for peoples who had nowritten literatures, such as the American Indians (cf.Tooker 2002), it becamea new key to ethnological history. The discovery of the Dravidian languagefamilywaslessspectacularinitsgeographicalreach, butsimilarinitsattendingcircumstances. In these and other cases philology made durable additions toknowledge that remain in force among the experts to this day.The story ofethnic politics isthe morepowerful and urgentnarrative aboutthe appropriation and political deployment of the new ethnological ideas,
Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India 35
especially in the West, but also in South Asia. The story of politics is not, of course, separable from the story of knowledge and the two are connected inways that need to be examined and explained. The shadow of the death campsof Nazi period Germany darkens the aspect of the scientific breakthroughrepresented by Indo-Europeanist comparative philology, to which Germanscholars made such brilliant contributions. Thus one of the greatest scientificaccomplishments of the modern world is linked with the event which definesfor us the ultimate of human evil. Both narratives are sometimes merged intoa story of guilty knowledge; sometimes the story gets framed as a specifically German story (Poliakov 1974), at other times (Said 1978) in a quite differentdirection as a Foucauldian story of Orientalist knowledge produced and taintedby colonial power.In spite of all that has been written about them, our understanding both of theformationofmodernknowledgeaboutIndo-EuropeanandDravidian,andof the rise of modern ethnic politics in the West and in South Asia, are far fromcomplete. Much remains to be clarified about the relation of the story of Orientalist knowledge and that of ethnic politics, and much harm comes fromconcludingtooquickly,findingearlycausesforlateconsequencesbyevacuatinglapsed time between distant horizons, under the strongly directional light andshadow thrown from one theoretical perspective or another. We need to allowthe evidence itself to speak more loudly.Without pretending to be able to complete the work that needs doing, it ismy hope to contribute through the investigation of the genesis of the modernAryan and Dravidian concepts in British India — work which I have begun ina book,
Aryans and British India
(Trautmann 1997), and which continues in abook in progress on the discovery of the Dravidian language family. My reasonsfor concentrating on the British Orientalists to the exclusion of those of otherEuropean nations are not national at all, in any sense. I think that the story of knowledge is really about an intellectual encounter of Europe as a whole andIndia as a whole; it is a story of civilizations brought into close connection by colonial rule. The British Orientalists are interesting as an aspect of thatEuropean encounter; an aspect, moreover, which has been forgotten andneglected. For a couple of decades Calcutta enjoyed a virtual monopoly asproducer of a new, British-Indian Orientalism based on knowledge of Sanskritthat was avidly consumed in Europe, creating indeed a mania for India andSanskrit. The monopoly of Calcutta ended when the means of learning Sanskritwere brought to Europe, first by Alexander Hamilton at Paris, and then in theGermanies, as the British enthusiasm waned; at length the British-Indian
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