Abstract
The second chapter focuses on how the British approached Sindh in constructing their colonial knowledge of the province and how they came to represent it through the study of the language. The first step in the making of the colonial knowledge on Sindh was to establish that Sindhi was a distinct language and not a dialect of Punjabi or Hindi. This chapter also highlights the indigenous agents that aided the British in completing their survey of Sindh, especially the archetypal munshi (scribe). It was the munshis, Hindus and Muslims, who translated texts generally from English into Sindhi. The last step was to provide the two essential tools for learning a language: grammar and dictionary. This chapter demonstrates that the study of Sindhi played a leading role in the knowledge of Indo-Aryan languages. As a matter of fact, in his Grammar of the Sindhi Language Compared with the Sanskrit-Prakrit and Cognate Indian Vernaculars that he published in 1872, Ernst Trumpp authored the first grammar devoted to Indo-Aryan languages, which was based on the latest advances in linguistics as developed by Ferdinand de Saussure. This book had a great influence on later scholars like John Beames. Among other sources, this chapter uses unknown archives collected in the Sindh Archives, in Karachi.
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Notes
- 1.
Cook had already dealt with this issue of Seth Naomal Hotchand (1804–1878) (Cook 2016: 54–65).
- 2.
- 3.
Interestingly in Bengal, the pothi (puthi) is a manuscript, but this designation was still used after the texts it contained have been printed (Ghosh 2006: 260).
- 4.
The Modi was a script coming from Brahmi, as the Khudawadi and the Khojki. It was used in different parts of India, especially in Maharashtra. See Sohoni 2017.
- 5.
On the relation between colonization and the development of the study of grammar in Europe, see Said 1978: 97, 160, 246.
- 6.
James Prinsep was the founding editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and he is known as having deciphered the Karoshti and the Brahmi scripts.
- 7.
On this aspect of Trumpp’s contribution, see the recent study by Arvind Iyengar (Iyengar 2017).
- 8.
The period of Antiquity appears with eighteenth-century European authors like Montesquieu and Gibbon. They wanted to underscore that after Pre-history, associated to a savage period of humanity, a new period marked the birth of civilization, especially with the Greeks and the Romans.
- 9.
Aesop’s Fables were a part of the classical legacy of the European knowledge. Thus, there were used for being translated in Indian languages, as for example in Bengali (Ghosh 2006: 82).
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Boivin, M. (2020). The Set-Up of the Colonial Knowledge on Sindh. In: The Sufi Paradigm and the Makings of a Vernacular Knowledge in Colonial India. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41991-2_2
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