Where Boundaries Bleed

The true heart of Javed Majeed’s analysis of George W Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) rests in two adjacent chapters—“Mapping Languages” and “Double Names.” Here, Majeed draws our attention to the voc­a­bulary with which Grierson writes of the dialect continuum in India: dialects “overflow” their assumed boundaries, differences “melt,” lines of distinction between dialects appear “blurred,” “boun­d­aries bleed,” linguistic zones “shade” into each other and each language name rev­eals a further “swirl of names.” The two chapters bring to the surface an “idiom of doubt” and a narrative of “indefiniteness” in Grierson’s colonial know­ledge production (Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, pp 56–87).

Majeed’s fundamental, consistent and singular contribution is to remind us that Grierson, while steadfastly participating in regimes of colonial authority and lingui­stic cataloguing, also allowed the LSI to be undercut by “countervailing narratives” at each juncture of the LSI’s three-decade-long career. In doing so, his two-volume study (Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India and Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India) is a vastly complex and nuanced analysis of Grierson’s conclusions on the linguistic ecology of the South Asia region. However, equally, the chapters “Mapping Languages” and “Double Names” are an example of a dee­ply insightful and refreshing meta-analysis, drawing attention to Grierson’s use of metaphor, idiom, simile, and turn of phrase. They highlight the rich possibilities of research on colonial era documents. They also alert us to the implications of an unusual weaving of disciplinary acumen that Majeed—a scholar of English literature, Urdu poetry and prose, travel writing, autobiography, and postcolonial theory—brings to an analysis of the LSI. In the past, similar subjects of study have drawn the attention of anthro­pologists (Cohn 1997) and historians (Raman 2012).