Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras

3. Ellis and His Circle

chapter 3 Ellis and His Circle Having examined the structure of the European and Indian inputs into the British-Indian conjuncture, we turn now to the Dravidian proof. In this chapter I introduce the leading personnel associated with the emergence of the Dravidian conception; in the next, I will analyze the College of Fort St. George, which was the institutional context of its publication. This chapter is a collective biography of the persons involved. The key figure is Francis Whyte Ellis (1777–1819), Collector of Madras and senior member of the College of Fort St. George, which was his brainchild and which brought together the scholars and the different scholarly skills needed to formulate a proof of the Dravidian language family concept. The chapter also presents Ellis’s two close friends, William Erskine and John Leyden, partly to show how the archive surrounding the Dravidian proof was formed, but mainly to identify the personal projects of each of them. The specific characteristics of Ellis’s scholarly trajectory become clear when seen both in relation to those of his two friends, and also in relation to the other large project undertaken at Madras, that of Colin Mackenzie. The chapter also brings forward information about the three leading scholars in Ellis’s circle at Madras: A. D. Campbell; Pattabhirama Shastri, the leading head master at the College; and Sankaraiah, Ellis’s sheristadar, or head of staff, at the Collectorate of Madras. Although Ellis is the primary figure in the story of the Dravidian concept, in that he authored the published proof, it will become clear that it was the work of many hands. 73 finding ellis Some of the most profound and lasting intellectual effects of British colonial rule in India have been on the conception of India’s deep past. Here colonial philology and archaeology have made fundamental contributions that have augmented the existing textual bases of Indian history— the pur1âas, epics, and royal genealogies—recovering new material for history through the study of inscriptions, coins, monuments, and bringing India’s deep past into relation with the pasts of other ancient nations. The fundamental contributions were, again, the concepts of the IndoEuropean language family, announced by Sir William Jones in 1786, and the Dravidian language family, published by Ellis in 1816, plus the formulation of the concept of the Indus Civilization, first published by Sir John Marshall in 1924. These are the three fixed points of ongoing scholarly inquiry into the origins of civilization in South Asia. The last is also the topic of a public debate currently raging in India about the linguistic and religious identity of the Indus Civilization. Both from a world-history perspective, then, and from the perspective of the history of Indian civilization, Jones and Ellis had roles of immense importance. But while Jones is well known and much written of, Francis Whyte Ellis is nearly forgotten. One of the reasons for the nearly total obscurity into which the memory of Ellis has fallen is that his most notable achievement, the published proof that the Dravidian languages are interrelated and are not derived from Sanskrit, was superseded by the publication, in 1856, of Robert Caldwell’s A comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages. Caldwell’s magisterial comparative study of the Dravidian family has become a classic, and it is still in print. It is a great work of scholarship and a landmark in its field, wholly deserving of the high esteem in which it continues to be held. But Caldwell was not excessively generous in giving credit to his predecessors, and Ellis in particular gets much less than his due in Caldwell’s preface to the first edition . Caldwell writes: “The first to break ground in the field was Mr. Ellis, a Madras Civilian, who was profoundly versed in the Tamil language and literature, and whose interesting but very brief comparison, not of the grammatical forms, but only of some of the vocables of three Drâvidian dialects, is contained in his introduction to Campbell’sTelugu Grammar” (Caldwell 1856:iv). One notes the minimizing language in which Caldwell frames this recognition of Ellis’s priority: the comparison is interesting but very brief, 74 Ellis and His Circle and not of grammatical forms but only some of the vocables. Readers may judge for themselves whether this does justice to Ellis when we examine the Dravidian proof in chapter...