Introduction

In spring 2017 renewed episodes of violence against African students occurred in Greater Noida, New Delhi. In Victorian Britain, the particular vision of race gained the upper hand among anthropologists within the newly institutionalized bodies of the discipline. It overshadowed other formulations of the concept, such as the classification of people according to language groups. Francesca Orsini has looked at the popular press in Hindi and Urdu in post-1857 British North India. She has argued that other forces were also at work, which, in the pursuit of commercial interests, spread hybrid tastes and genres. In order to compare concepts and get hold of conceptual change across different places, cultures and languages we need to zoom in on translations. In British India the codification of South Asian languages in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries served to convert forms of textualized knowledge of the colonized into “instruments of colonial rule.”