ABSTRACT
There are other aspects of the LSI which do not conform to the idea of colonial surveys as expressing a language of command or as fixing Indian realities through the deployment of reductive categories. Grierson is at odds with colonial attempts to stabilise Indian names, and his own name is destabilised through the Survey. This is especially apparent in the context of authorship; here the discreteness of Grierson’s name as an author is problematic and it is drawn into an orbit of Indian names, with which it begins to share some characteristics. This reflects not just his own complex subject position but also the way joint authorship characterises the Survey’s production of knowledge and some of his other key texts. An important strand in the Survey’s culture of learning is joint authorship with Indians, in which Grierson’s self-development as an author is in reciprocal interaction with his Indian correspondents’ own emergence as authors in their own right. Along with Grierson, Indians helped to shape the colonial knowledge of India as a linguistic region embodied in the Survey.
