Vernacular futures: Orientalism, history, and language in colonial south Indi

This dissertation charts the immensely generative intellectual encounter between the British and Indians during the expansion and consolidation of colonial governing institutions in the Indian subcontinent in the early part of the nineteenth century. As a result of the wars against Mysore, the British gained vast expanses of territory in South India during the 1790s. The development of governing institutions precipitated historical investigations into regional and local histories of the newly acquired territories. These early historical projects of the colonial state, and the related formation of colonial archives, have had an enduring legacy in terms of preserving, framing, and generating knowledge of India. This dissertation analyzes the ways in which the debates surrounding these historical studies and the creation of archives generated new definitions of culture and history, particularly in relation to ideas of language, and the place of language in a modernizing society. The dissertation begins by situating the historical projects of Colonel Colin Mackenzie (1753--1821), the first Surveyor-General of India, in the context of eighteenth century practices of history and then traces the intellectual culture of the early colonial period. The second chapter explores more particularly the intellectual encounter between Europeans and Indians that colonial historical studies involved. Rather than a relationship of simple dominance, the encounter unfolds to be much more complex, where Indian intellectuals entered a new space of exchange, the "colonial public." The chapter traces the emergence of a colonial public and the entrance of Telugu intellectuals into this arena. The third chapter takes a closer look at one British scholar who was dedicated to the Telugu language, Charles Phillip Brown (1798--1884). Through the figure of Brown the chapter explores the ways in which language study (philology) in colonial India brought about significant changes and shaped literary production. I argue that it was in the context of philological studies that ideas of history and progress were inscribed in the vernacular languages of India. Finally, I examine how philologists and their deeply historicist conceptions of language contributed to the fashioning of modern prose in Telugu. The dissertation has wider significance for understanding the colonial context for the emergence of the politics of language and linguistic identity in twentieth-century India.