‘A State of Affairs which is Essentially Indefinite’: The Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1927)

Historians of colonial India have argued that cartography was central to colonial power in India; maps came to define the British empire's authority in the subcontinent. The effectiveness of imperial geography made India a concrete entity for both British colonialists and Indian nationalists, for whom India came to be a single and coherent geographical entity whose boundaries coincided with those of the subcontinent. This article argues that the geographical imagining of India in the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1927) was in conflict with these colonial and nationalist mappings of India. It complicated the notion of India as a single, coherent, self-referential geography, and in doing so it centralised India in a global linguistic geography. Its cartographical exercises were at odds with the colonial state's investment in a particular geographical image of India, and with the canonical nationalist geographical imagining of India as a multilingual entity as expressed in the Report of the State Reorganization Commission of 1955.</p