Language and the Making of Modern India


Book Description

Explores the ways linguistic nationalism has enabled and deepened the reach of All-India nationalism. This title is also available as Open Access.




Language, Identity, and Power in Modern India


Book Description

This book is a historical study of modern Gujarat, India, addressing crucial questions of language, identity, and power. It examines the debates over language among the elite of this region during a period of significant social and political change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Language debates closely reflect power relations among different sections of society, such as those delineated by nation, ethnicity, region, religion, caste, class, and gender. They are intimately linked with the process in which individuals and groups of people try to define and project themselves in response to changing political, economic, and social environments. Based on rich historical sources, including official records, periodicals, literary texts, memoirs, and private papers, this book vividly shows the impact that colonialism, nationalism, and the process of nation-building had on the ideas of language among different groups, as well as how various ideas of language competed and negotiated with each other. Language, Identity, and Power in Modern India: Gujarat, c.1850–1960 will be of particular interest to students and scholars working on South Asian history and to those interested in issues of language, society, and politics in different parts of the modern world.







Language, Culture and Power


Book Description

This volume examines the relationship between language and power across cultural boundaries. It evaluates the vital role of translation in redefining culture and ethnic identity. During the first phase of colonialism, mid-18th to late-19th century, the English-speaking missionaries and East India Company functionaries in South India were impelled to master Tamil, the local language, in order to transact their business. Tamil also comprised ancient classical literary works, especially ethical and moral literature, which were found especially suited to the preferences of Christian missionaries. This interface between English and Tamil acted as a conduit for cultural transmission among different groups. The essays in this volume explore the symbiotic relation between English and Tamil during the late colonial and postcolonial as also the modernist and the postmodernist periods. The book showcases the modernity of contemporary Tamil culture as reflected in its literary and artistic productions — poetry, fiction, short fiction and drama — and outlines the aesthetics, philosophy and methodology of these translations. This volume and its companion (which looks at the period between 1750 to 1900 CE) cover the late colonial and postcolonial era and will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers of translation studies, literature, linguistics, sociology and social anthropology, South Asian studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, literary and critical theory as well as culture studies.




Language Policy and Education in India


Book Description

This book presents a history of English and development of language education in modern India. It explores the role of language in colonial attempts to establish hegemony, the play of power, and the anxieties in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century India. The essays in the volume discuss language policy, debates and pedagogy as well as larger overarching questions such as identity, nationhood and sub-nationhood. The work also looks at the socio-cultural and economic factors that shaped the writing and publishing of textbooks, dictionaries and determined the direction of language teaching, specifically, of English language teaching. Drawing on a variety of archival sources — policy documents, books, periodicals — this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of linguistics, language teaching, cultural studies and modern Indian history.




Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India


Book Description

The charged emotional politics of language and identity in India




Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India


Book Description

This book is the first detailed examination of George Abraham Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, one of the most complete sources on South Asian languages. It shows that the Survey was characterised by a composite and collaborative mode of producing knowledge, which undermines any clear distinctions between European orientalists and colonised Indians in British India. Its authority lay more in its stress on the provisional nature of its findings, an emphasis on the approximate nature of its results, and a strong sense of its own shortcomings and inadequacies, rather than in any expression of mastery over India’s languages. The book argues that the Survey brings to light a different kind of colonial knowledge, whose relationship to power was much more ambiguous than has hitherto been assumed for colonial projects in modern India. It also highlights the contribution of Indians to the creation of colonial knowledge about South Asia as a linguistic region. Indians were important collaborators and participants in the Survey, and they helped to create the monumental knowledge of India as a linguistic region which is embodied in the Survey. This volume, like its companion volume Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, will be a great resource for scholars and researchers of linguistics, language and literature, history, political studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies.




Indian Linguistic Studies


Book Description

Eminent scholaars of Indian Liguistics have offered insightful articles in honor of Prof. George Cardona, a luminary in the field of Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, and Paninian Studies for the past four decades. Besides Cardona`s bibliography, the volume contains 23 papers in the following areas: 1. Sanskrit Grammatical Theory; 2. Karaka Studies; 3. Historical Studies in Grammatical Traditions; 4. Lexical Studies; 5. Studies in Culture; 6. Modern Indian Languages. This volume represents cutting-edge research in the field of Indian Linguistic and Culture.




Modern Linguistics in Ancient India


Book Description

The ancient Indian linguistic tradition has been influential in the development of modern linguistics, yet is not well known among modern Western linguists. This unique book addresses this gap by providing an accessible introduction to the Indian linguistic tradition, covering its most important achievements and ideas, and assessing its impact on Western linguistics. It shows how ancient Indian methods of linguistic analysis can be applied to a number of topical issues across the disciplines of modern linguistics-spanning phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and computational linguistics. Exploring the parallels, differences, and connections in how both traditions treat major issues in linguistic science, it sheds new light on a number of topical issues in linguistic theory. Synthesizing existing major work on both sides, it makes Indian linguistics accessible to Western linguists for the first time, as well as making ideas from mainstream linguistics more accessible to students and scholars of Indian grammar.




Linguistics


Book Description

Thoroughly revised and updated with some 500 new entries-including the addition of pertinent Internet sites-this is the only bibliographic guide to information sources for linguistics. Coverage spans from 1957, the publication date of Chomsky's seminal work, to the present, with emphasis on English-language resources. DeMiller's detailed citations describe and evaluate each work, often offering comparisons to similar titles. Its broad coverage and in-depth reviews make this work essential to the research and study of general or theoretical linguistics. The book is also indispensable in the related areas of anthropological linguistics, applied linguistics, mathematical and computation linguistics, psycholinguistics, semiotics, and sociolinguistics, which are all treated in separate chapters, as well as the study of language and languages from a linguistic perspective. A must for any library supporting the study of linguistics or its related fields, this is a valuable reference and research tool. It i