Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras

4. The College

chapter 4 The College Having met the leading personnel involved in producing the new knowledge about South India, we must now examine the College of Fort St. George, which was the main locus for this process. This chapter is not a history of the College as such (though such a history is very much to be desired). It is, rather, an inquiry into the relation of the College to the Dravidian proof. As such, our examination is limited to the period from the College’s founding in 1812 till the death of Ellis in 1819. madras before the college The College of Fort St. George was the brainchild of Ellis, and as senior member of the Board of Superintendence from its inception, he lavished on it his best knowledge and care. It filled his thoughts and ambitions, and was more important to him than the full-time day job he had as Collector of Madras. From a letter of his successor it appears that Ellis had rooms at the College where he kept books, as a result of which the cutchery , or court, of the Collector of Madras did not possess a complete set of the Regulations of Government when he died (MDR 29 May 1819, nos. 215, 256). From this we can infer that Ellis was accustomed to doing much of his scholarly work at his College rooms. The College was proposed as a solution to the problems of language in colonial Madras, and so I need to begin with a word about the lan116 guage situation at Madras, and in British India generally, prior to the College’s founding. Madras had been in possession of the East India Company since 1639, and the Company’s servants had been trading there since that time without producing a single grammar or dictionary of the languages of South India. The dictionaries and grammars that were available for Europeans had largely been made by Jesuit missionaries, and most of these circulated in manuscript form. By and large, the Company worked through Indian agents, or dubashes (people “having two languages,” though they were much more than translators), who by the end of the eighteenth century had acquired considerable power through their ability to manipulate the local political situation. Brahmins opened schools for teaching English of a sort to those who aspired to this profession. Some Englishmen learned Hindustani or Portuguese (the latter was in use along the coasts for quite some time as a language of trade, and has left a deposit of loanwords in many Indian languages), and Persian was cultivated as a language of diplomacy and continued as a language of government for the Company into the nineteenth century. The use of Persian and Hindustani largely perpetuated the pattern of the Mughal empire, to which the Company was to some degree the heir. In the first century of the East India Company’s occupation of Madras, Englishmen rarely learned the Dravidian languages indigenous to the South except, one supposes, a few phrases needed in the kitchen, the garden, and the bedroom. They barely even knew the names of the South Indian languages, calling them Malabar and Gentoo languages, or Malabars and Gentoos, rather than Tamil and Telugu, up to 1800 or so. The situation was similar at other East India Company factories and did not change till some while after the defeat of the Mughal power in Bengal (1757), when the Company assumed the administrative powers (diwani) of the Bengal government (1765) and faced the complex demands of administering the land tax for large areas of the Indian countryside. Though the English had acquired from the Mughals a firman, or charter, permitting them to trade in Bengal as early as 1634, it was not till after the all-important transition from trading company to ruling power that the first grammar of Bengali was published, in 1778, by an Englishman, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed. At that time, Halhed said, Bengali was utterly unknown in Europe and, indeed, “it is scarcely believed that Bengal ever possessed a native and peculiar dialect of its own” distinct from “Moors” (Hindustani or Urdu), which had been thought to prevail over all of InThe College 117 dia (Halhed 1778:ii). Halhed tells us that Europeans arriving in India, “reduced to a necessary intercourse with Mahometan servants, or Sepoys, habitually acquire from them this idiom [Urdu] in that imperfect and confined state which is the consequence...