ABSTRACT
While the Survey contributed to the emergence of regional languages and cultures, there were two other strands in it which were at odds with this tendency. One of these is the Survey’s mapping of Indian languages. Grierson stressed the ‘fictiveness’ of this mapping in so far as there were no clear boundaries between adjoining languages at the ground level. Moreover, the geographical imagining of India in Grierson’s Survey was in conflict with the colonial cartography of India. Furthermore, it centralised India in a global linguistic geography. The Survey was also at odds with India’s official post-colonial linguistic geography, because the re-organisation of India into linguistic states assumed the demarcation of languages with clear-cut boundaries. At the same time, though, the State Reorganization Commission’s Report used Grierson to underline its points about the indistinct boundaries between languages when arguing against the demands for some language states. However, in the final analysis, the Survey’s flexibly conceived geography and its expansive use of the term ‘India’ is more in keeping with India’s cosmopolitan past than current nationalist ideologies are.
