Abstract:
Drawing on my recent two-volume study of Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1903-1928), I will discuss the different axes, conflicting strands, and productive paradoxes of colonial knowledge in the Linguistic Survey of India [LSI]. In particular, I will address the following questions:

• What do the terms ‘India’, ‘Survey’, and ‘knowledge’ mean in the Linguistic Survey of India?
• In what sense is the Survey ‘colonial’?
• What is the relationship between superintending and authoring in the Survey?
• What role do ignorance & doubt play in the Survey’s generation of knowledge in relation to the failure of the planned Linguistic Survey of Burma?
• Finally, how might we think about the LSI’s postcolonial legacy?

Biography:

Javed Majeed is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London. His book publications include Ungoverned Imaginings. James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (1992); Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity. Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (2007); Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (2009); Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (2019); Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (2019); with Christopher Shackle, a translation and critical edition of Hali’s Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam (1997); and with Isabel Hofmeyr, the edited collection India and South Africa (2016). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2021.