ABSTRACT
The transnationalization of the aesthetic mode resignifies the ruin as evidence of India's despotic rulers, the collapse of civilization and decaying social order – all of which necessitate British rule and intervention. This chapter offers the 'keywords' from the imperial lexicon is a quick tour of the enormous print and lexicographic empire of the British in India, an empire within which several generic engineering experiments and textual hybridization, such as Halhed's Grammar or Yule and Burnell's Hobson-Jobson, were performed. Grammars were integral to the imperial archive and scriptorial foundations because the English needed to understand the native languages and devise its own in order to negotiate and administer. Imperial lexicon and grammar were instrumental, in other words, in colonizing the subcontinent in particular ways: ordering, hierarchizing, instructing, commanding, dissuading, castigating, identifying even as it set about altering the native meanings of these same cultural practices.
