ABSTRACT
The Survey’s mode of knowledge production sits uneasily with any attempt to draw hard and fast boundaries between European orientalists and colonised Indians. In the Survey, it is difficult to detect systematic distinctions drawn by European orientalists between a monolithic Occident and an equally monolithic Orient. It also reflects cleavages within Europe itself. The lack of any sharp distinction between the colonial British and colonised Indians is exemplified by Grierson’s own subject position as a go-between and cross-border figure. The Survey’s epistemological authority lay in its openness to the provisional nature of its findings, its idiom of doubt and approximation, and its frequently articulated sense of its own shortcomings and inadequacies. Rather than a narrative of mastery, the Survey highlights our lack of control and agency over language.
