ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the contribution of Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India to the definition of regional languages and cultures in India. It shows how Indians representing language associations and activist organisations interacted with him to develop a sense of their regional languages and cultures as discrete entities. In Grierson’s correspondence with these activists, intergenerational bonding, the extension of familial-like connections, friendship and personal nostalgia blended together to create distinctive sentiments underpinning regional linguistic and cultural consciousness. The individual biographies of Grierson and his Indian interlocutors intermeshed with each other to ‘personalise’ these regional languages as intimate objects intertwined with their lives, while also contributing to their emergence as subjects of study.
