ABSTRACT
Following on from the previous chapter, this chapter examines the different strands which go into Grierson’s conception of the Indian nation. In his initial proposal for the Survey, Grierson stressed that in contrast to the 19th-century philological preoccupation with ancient India and Sanskrit, he would focus on contemporary India and its languages. However, the volumes and files show a tendency to frame the Survey’s findings through a specific version of the ancient Indian past. For Grierson, Aryan India is the apogee of Indian civilisation, and it is also the ‘real’ and authentic India. Moreover, Grierson initiates a crucial shift in the discourse about Indian Aryans, by sketching out alternative grounds to their being authentically Indian which are not based on claims to their being autochthonous. The chapter locates Grierson’s racialisation of Indian Aryans in a wider intellectual context. Grierson’s approach to race was ambivalent; while he tried to dissociate linguistics from race ‘science’, at times he also succumbed to the dominance of race as a discourse in his writings.
