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from Part I - Epistemic Habits
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2024
Chapter 3 explores colonial archives to unearth two models of comparatism – one diachronic or chronological and the other synchronic or territorial. The first model emerged from Jones’s works, both his translations and his speculative essays in Asiatick Researches, covering a broad range of subjects such as Indian chronology, astronomy, literary history, and so on. Along with this, and in explicit opposition, the second model was developed by colonial officials such as Brian H. Hodgson and W. W. Hunter through their copious comparative vocabularies: Hodgson’s numerous essays published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society after 1847 and Hunter’s A Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of India and High Asia, with a Dissertation (1868). The potential of these two phases was fully realized in the ambitious Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) under the supervision of George Abraham Grierson. My claim in this chapter is that, with Grierson’s attempt to enumerate and describe modern Indian vernaculars, and his seamless mixing of colonial structures and linguistic knowledge in the survey, we encounter the full range of the comparative method for the first time.
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