Premsagar (1810) and Orientalist Narratives of the “Invention” of Modern Hindi by Rashmi Dube...

boundary 2 39:2 (2012)�DOI 10.1215/01903659-1597898�© 2012 by Duke University Press

Premsagar (1810) and Orientalist Narratives of the “Invention” of Modern Hindi

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

This essay poses a broadly conceived question: How can the imagi-native and philological work in literary study provide us with intimations of a secular definition of the non- European vernacular? Modern Hindi’s genealogy in Enlightenment philology requires that we reopen the his-torical moment in the long eighteenth century known as the Fort William moment.¹ It has been argued that Fort William is reducible to a set of facts that provide necessary information about the colonial period, and thus their value lies simply as historical information. Even when the Orientalist prac-

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.1. Fort William College was an academy founded by Lord Wellesley, then Governor Gen-eral of British India, and was founded in 1800 within the Fort William complex in Calcutta. Thousands of books were translated from learned languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. However, there was also a pronounced emphasis on the vernaculars of eighteenth- century Hindostan such as Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu at this institution. For standard accounts of Fort William philology, see David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1969); Sadiq ur- Rahman Kidwai, Gilchrist and the “Languages of Hindostan” (New Delhi: Rachna Prakashan, 1972).

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tices at Fort William are treated as arguments about knowledge practices, those arguments as they appear in Hindi and Urdu literary scholarship are broadly categorized as arguments in favor of Fort William—in effect, arguments that acknowledge the importance of Fort William’s scholarly labors—versus arguments that deny the contributions made to the ver-naculars by Fort William.² Whether as historical information or as pro or con arguments, the common theme is that further scholarly examinations of Fort William are not only formulaic and irrelevant; they exhibit a form of identitarian self- privileging. With this I respectfully disagree. I suggest that we view Fort William as an archive that demands a reading practice fully attentive to linguistic disciplining. Recent work by Sheldon Pollock, Muzaffar Alam, and Vinay Dharwadker has provided a range of insights concerning precolonial idioms and structures of linguistic knowledge, vernacularity, and literary cultures.³ It appears as if we are only now beginning to articulate the extent to which non- European vernaculars were linguistically disciplined by colonial and nationalist archives, producing the birth of the modern linguistic subject. I make a distinction between the great contributions to our understanding of the linguistic modern made from the perspectives of political science, his-tory, comparative linguistics, and anthropology on the one hand, and the work of secular criticism from the perspectives and tools of philology and literary study on the other. The latter provides resources for a reading prac-

2. See Frances Pritchett, “Selected Publications of Fort William College,” http://www .columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urdu/baghobahar/BBFORTWM.pdf. Retrieved December 14, 2011. I quote a paragraph from Pritchett’s website, where she provides a parenthetical gloss that divides the Fort William deniers from those literary histories that give it emphasis: “Muhammad Sadiq, from ‘A History of Urdu Literature,’* Delhi, 1984 [1964] (denying the importance of Fort William) . . . Ram Babu Saksena, from ‘A History of Urdu Literature,’* Allahabad, 1940 [1927] (emphasizing the importance of Fort William) . . . Shaista Akhtar Banu Suhrawardy, ‘A Critical Survey of the Development of the Urdu Novel and Short Story’ (1945), Chapter II * (emphasizing the importance of Fort William).” Fort William College, workshop materials, 2010.3. See Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 591–626; Muzaffar Alam, “The Culture and Politics of Persian on Pre-colonial Hindustan,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 131–98; Vinay Dharwad-ker, “Orientalism and the Study of Indian Literatures,” in Orientalism and the Postcolo-nial Condition, ed. Carol Breckenridge and Peter Van Der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 158–87; and Harish Trivedi, “The Progress of Hindi, Part 2: Hindi and the Nation,” in Literary Cultures in History, 958–1019.

World Literatures Dossier / Bhatnagar / The “Invention” of Modern Hindi�77

tice that would be fully attentive to questioning—who we are when we write and speak in Hindi, Urdu, Bhojpuri, or Braj, what we think is the language passing through us, and what it means to be linguistically constituted by Europe’s notion of Hindi—as matters of secular criticism.

It is precisely as a call for secular criticism adequate to the tasks of philology that I locate the work on Fort William by Aamir Mufti, who posi-tions Fort William in order to disrupt the notion of literary time posited by Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters.⁴ While in Casanova’s account vernaculars of the non- West enter world literary space in the mid- twentieth century, Mufti argues with considerable persuasiveness that lit-eratures of the non- West enter the arena of world literary space at the end of the eighteenth century through language primers, textbooks, and gram-mars manufactured in the language laboratory at Fort William College, the college for vernacular learning that (together with missionary transla-tions at Serampore Mission and the College of St. George) laid down the principles for a systematic and scientific study of Bhāsa, Boli, and Zubān. Mufti’s critical practice does not rehearse arguments and information that scholars already know as much as he draws on earlier work and pays trib-ute to them. We can read him as marking a break from that scholarship by delineating the planetary contours of the Fort William moment. To this end, Mufti’s argument alerts us to the processes that came into play when the archive objects of non- European vernacular languages and literatures were not only put into circulation in world literary time but constituted world literary time. The force of Mufti’s argument lies, firstly, in the opening up of a series of projects for secular criticism and, secondly, in the bold reconcep-tion of world literature as a methodological site for pursuing those projects in comparative, transnational, and planetary ways rather than as forms of Orientalist cosmopolitan or nativist learning. The present essay looks at the language primer Premsagar and the narrative concerning Fort William’s invention of modern Hindi in terms of the following lines of philological inquiry: 1. Why do invention narratives matter? Are they empty and meaning-less quibbles about date of origin? Does Enlightenment science mobilize invention narratives to perform core projects of Orientalism by classifying modern Hindi as a scientific, patented invention? Such a scientific Hindi

4. See Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 458–93; Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Let-ters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).


then draws attention to the individual scientist’s innovation and the drama of his creative process, while making invisible other processes involved in histories of usage, the linguistic mode of being, and Hindi’s sources of vitality and creativity among its speakers and poets.

2. Something very large and momentous was undertaken, achieved, and disseminated in the Fort William moment. Mufti calls it a philological- lexicographic revolution. That description alerts us to the fact that founda-tional notions about language were inscribed in and through a series of revolutions, and a terrible beauty was born. Premsagar was a language primer designed to meet the needs of counterinsurgency in response to the French and Haitian Revolutions in 1789 and 1791, those revolutionary upheavals that gave birth to the European modern. New editions of Prem-sagar discussed the invention narrative in the aftermath of the 1857 war in British India, known as mutiny in colonial historiography and as the war of independence in nationalist historiography. Finally, George A. Grierson’s reimagining of the invention narrative led to Orientalist anticipation of a linguistic indigenous (the famous product of this period’s colonial thinking about the linguistic indigenous was realized in the monumental work, Lin-guistic Survey of India) that parallels the economic indigenous in the Swa-deshi movement in 1905–1908. I think it necessary for the secular critic to wrench the philological- lexicographic revolution from its place as an unex-amined civilizational piety. This entails that we honor its enduring achieve-ments as well as look more closely at the routine, routinized, and extraordi-nary violence at work in received understandings of Bhāsa and Boli. 3. The invention of the Hindi narrative around Premsagar has a cru-cial function. It consigns to prehistory the philological revolutions of the Indo- Islamic millennium. Premsagar is at the heart of the disciplining of the other linguistic cartography in the eighteenth century in which Indo- Persian, Perso- Arabic, and Turkic linguistic traces of peoples’ histories underwent a secular linguistic purge. Premsagar calls this linguistic purge the abandon-ing of the Bhāsa of Yavanas, or geographically identified outsiders. Secu-lar purges of language are thus part and parcel of the invention narrative around Premsagar and explain the constitutive violence at the birth of the linguistic modern subject. 4. Were the munshis at Fort William College loyalists, rebels, practi-tioners of colonial mimicry, learned men or hacks, plagiarists or mechanical translators? In order to address that question, I examine them as a class formation directly connected to the needs and urgencies of the revolution. I suggest that the figure of the Fort William munshi in the person of Kavi


Lallu Jee Lal is central to our understanding of the class of intellectuals that metamorphosed into the Hindi publicists of the nineteenth century.⁵

Retrospective Accounts of the Invention of Hindi Narratives

Premsagar was composed as a textbook for the training and super-vision of males between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. It bears say-ing that the history of English philology should not be narrated without also taking into account its history of involvement with Hindi. Through its material existence as a textbook in the service of colonial forms of govern-mentality, Premsagar was canonized as one of the most successful lan-guage experiments undertaken in the language laboratory of Fort William College at Calcutta. Premsagar had other quite distinct reception histories as well. As a translation from the Bhagvata Purana, Premsagar enjoyed a steady popularity with Hindi readers; the work itself went through fif-teen editions and remained a popular book reprinted by the Nawal Kishore Press in Lucknow.

Among Hindi Orientalists, Premsagar had a complex reception his-tory. It was the unacknowledged prototype for nationalist reworkings of the avatar Kr·ṣṇa, for it played a minor role in Orientalist formation of a Semitic and Christianized Vaishnavism, a long process that involved rereading the Bhagvata Purana and the Bhagvata Gita as the Bible of Hindus. In the context of Orientalism’s construction of the literariness of literary Hindi, Premsagar ’s experiments in the fashioning of Hindi constitute the unac-knowledged influence behind Bhāratendu Hariśchandra’s own Braj- Hindi experiments. Another and quite distinct reception of Premsagar was sedi-mented in Ramchandra Shukla’s articulation of what Milind Wakankar has called the poetics of Hindi responsibilty.⁶

5. What I am broadly proposing in this essay is a munshi- centered theory of the Fort William translations and adaptations that attends to differences between the archaic popular machinery of translation embodied in Bhagvata Purana, as distinct from the Sanskrit- Urdu translation of Abijñaña—sākuntalm and theory and practice of translation at work in that instance at Fort William, marking both off from the linked and yet distinct set of translation issues and strategies activated in Mir Amman’s “invention” of a certain conception of Urdu prose by adapting Tahsin’s more ornate Urdu version. For Sanskrit- Urdu translations at Fort William, see Romila Thapar, “Adaptations: Another Popular Tra-dition and Its Role in Another Court,” chap. 5 of Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 189–96.6. Milind Wakankar, “The Moment of Criticism in Indian Nationalist Thought: Ramchandra Shukla and the Poetics of a Hindi Responsibility,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall


Central in many of these reception histories is the argument and counterargument about the exact ways in which Premsagar was the found-ing text for Orientalist narratives concerning the invention of modern Hindi at Fort William College in the long eighteenth century. An invention nar-rative often involves a mode of violence in discursive and historiographic realms. We are invited to imagine that the language object did not exist prior to the invention. Here it may be useful to note that Allison Busch pro-poses, as a challenge to the invention narrative of Fort William, a range of possible beginning points for Hindi language- literature.⁷ According to Busch, the Hindi tradition, often held by nationalist historiographers to be some self- evident patrimony of Hindus, owes much of its early cultivation to Muslims, whether we look at Hindi couplets from the Ghaznavid court, the Sultanate rulers’ patronage of Sufi texts in Eastern Hindi (Awadhi), or the rise to prominence of Braj Bhāsa cultivated in the Indo- Muslim courts of Mughal India.

What Is Bhāsa and How Does It Work as a Vernacular?

The present essay does not approach the invention narrative as a determination about whether it is fact or fiction. Nor am I treading famil-iar ground concerning arguments for or against Fort William. Instead, I examine the claims, the narrativity around invention, and the epistemo-logical status of the invention object. What exactly was invented when the Bhakka language department was formally instituted at Fort William Col-lege in 1801, and Lallu Jee Lal was selected as the first Braj Bhakka scholar to occupy this newly fashioned disciplinary space? What was invented through Premsagar cannot be described simply as the creation of a lan-guage object. It would be more accurate to say that the invention of Hindi narrative and Hindi’s division from Urdu were second- order effects. The linguistic divide was in effect the dispersal and dissemination of effects assembled to embody a larger and more abstract idea. This other and much more ambitious idea involved the production of the spatiotemporality of the

2002): 987–1014. More recently, Wakankar has further elaborated on his work on Shukla in a talk titled “Subjecticity, or the ‘Vyakti- vichitra’: Ramachandra Shukla on Tulsidas,” in the workshop titled “Histories of Concepts: The Political,” Centre for the Study of Devel-oping Societies, Delhi, September 2011.7. See Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).


North Indian vernacular.⁸ I offer a working definition of the spatiotemporal in the non- European vernacular. Orientalism powerfully persuaded colonial subjects that the life of a language, the active processes through which a language grew and matured and came into its own linguistic and literary identity, inhered in its morphological structures of word choices and syntax. The vernacular was therefore defined as the sum total of its morphological structure, its lexicon, syntax, and phonology. We must be careful here, because Orientalism did not invent philo-logical attention to word choice and syntax of the vernacular. For instance, similar linguistic concerns can be found in what Pollock calls the precocious philologies of medieval Kannada.⁹ What was new lay in the fact that Orien-talism produced a form of philological reasoning and a new attentiveness to the scientific definition of language. By defining the life of a language as inhering in its lexical, syntactical, and phonetic levels, Orientalism proposed that the active and dynamic processes that were at work in the vernacular were most clearly visible, and most amenable to study and classification, through the Orientalist scientific apparatus. Fort William was thus part of the philological revolution that systematized the scientific basis on which non- European vernacular languages could be objects of study and could facilitate colonial pedagogy, although a number of Dutch and Portuguese dictionaries and grammars had already begun the work of codification.¹⁰

8. In an earlier and still valuable phase of secular criticism that was brought to bear on Hindi, Alok Rai argued that “the important thing that emerged from Fort William is the idea of twoness, of linguistic duality.” Fort William, Rai argues, “gave institutional recog-nition to the notion that there were in fact two ways of doing Hindustani—one which used the available and mixed language, and another from which the Arabic- Persian words (i.e. words of ‘Muslim’ origin) had been removed in order to produce a language (register? idiom?) more suitable to Hindus” (Hindi Nationalism [London: Sangam Books, 2001], 22). I find the notion that cultural colonialism is a condition of linguistic schizophrenia and of an incomplete and still painful twoness persuasive and moving. However, the present essay pushes for a more aggressive argument. In my view, what is at stake is something beyond the condition of linguistically manifested twoness, and extends in fact to the very constitution of what we think we know or intuitively apprehend about the spatiality and temporality or the space- time materiality of Hindi.9. See Sheldon Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (February 1998): 6–37.10. Recent scholarly interest by Urdu philologists in Joan Joshua Ketelaar is a case in point. Ketelaar was the trade director of the Dutch East India Company and published the first Hindustani grammar in Dutch in 1698 titled Dissertatione Selectae. A full and detailed analysis of the reception histories of these early phases of the philological revolution in the long eighteenth century in Hindostan would provide a nuanced sense of the strate-


We may distinguish the philological labors of these early European pioneers from English philologists at Fort William by noting the latter’s emphasis on the relation between political power and language name. The languages of Hindostan did not automatically become eligible for the nomenclature of a vernacular entity; they had to fit the criteria for the ver-nacular, and to do so they had to be reconstituted with the help of the mun-shis. Both language definition and scientific method were mobilized for the production of linguistic and literary indigeneity as modernity and as modern forms of thought. It is in the matrix of this bigger idea that we must place the invention of the language object Hindi and the anxiety of location that was linked to Hindi.

I want to draw attention to the inflections of meaning in the word choice for vernacular as well as for scientific invention of vernaculars. Lallu Jee Lal’s preface for the 1810 edition of Premsagar used two words for the vernacular, Bhāsa भाषा and Boli बोली.¹¹ Both words contained a long and sedimented history of usage. It is noteworthy that Lallu Jee Lal avoided the Hindavi word for scientific invention, आविष्ार or इजाद. Nor did he turn to tadbhava loan words from Sanskrit for invention, like विरामाण, or even the word for cosmic creation, सृवष‍ट, which is heavily weighted with religious meanings.¹² He opted instead for the more modest and craftsmanlike word, dhara धरा, which contained the Sanskrit vocable dha ध, which means set-ting, placing, establishing, constituting. The sense in which Premsagar had placed—not invented—Khari Boli Hindi also carried accretions of meaning

gies by which the self- representation of Fort William College depended not only on con-signing to prehistory Jain, Buddhist, and diverse vernacular philological practices but also relied on erasing Dutch, French, and Portuguese grammars and lexicons. See the recent address by the vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, Sibghatullah Farooqi, at the National Seminar on Structures of Contemporary Urdu and Tracing the Footsteps of Urdu Grammatical Traditions, February 2, 2012. See also J. Ph. Vogel, “Joan Joshua Ketelaar of Elbing, Author of the First Hindustani Grammar,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 8 (1936): 817–22.11. All page references to Premsagar refer to the 1810 edition. The full title of the work is Prem Sagur; or, The History of the Hindoo Deity Sree Krishn, Containing in the 10th Chapter of Sre Buhaguvut, or Vyasudevu, translated into Hinduvee from the Brij Bhasa of Chutoorbhooj Misr by Shre Luloo Lal Kub, Bhasa Moonshee in the College of Fort William (Calcutta: Sanskrit Press, 1810). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as Premsagar.12. Indian grammarians used the terms tadbhava, tatsama, and desi to denote words in vernaculars having the same form as Sanskrit, or having a Sanskrit root word that was corrupted by vernacular phonetics and spelling; desi signifies regional words.


from the Braj language, in which dhara धरा signifies a range of meanings—to hold, to mount over a frame, to scaffold.

What was it that had been placed or mounted into the vernacular in Premsagar ? Here again, Lallu Jee Lal chose a homely and undramatic phrase for the linguistic process; he called it an abandonment or a letting go (chor छोर) of one type of Bhāsa and the placing of another type of Boli, or speech, in its stead. The Bhāsa that had been abandoned was called Yavani Bhāsa यििी भाषा, connoting the language of outsiders or those who came from the outside. Since the term Yavana यिि goes to the heart of the invention narrative and the invention of a linguistic indigenous, it may be useful to note here that the inscriptions on a thirteenth- century Chatesvara temple refer to a campaign against the Yavanas, and this suggests that the term does not automatically signify a religious identity but indicates a geo-graphical location of arriving from the outside.¹³ Of the several terms that signified ethnically defined outsiders (Turuska, or the Turks) and culturally identified non- Sanskritic people outside the structuring of caste (mleccha मललेचछ), the term Yavana, to denote outsiders, was a value- neutral rather than a value- laden term.¹⁴ Lallu Jee Lal’s conjoining of language and geographical location as the outside (Yavani Bhāsa) as a counterpoint to a deliberate and purposeful making of a linguistic inside (dilli agre ki boli ददलली आगरले ्ी बोली) was inno-vative. What was also new was the suggestion that there was an essential language object Hindi that could shed its connection to the histories it made with people from the linguistic outside and newly connect to a demotic lan-guage of Delhi and Agra. This process of linguistic essentialism brought to bear on Hindi could best be initiated in the scientific language laboratory of Fort William. In effect, this conception of what a vernacular is, what it does, how it performs its essential functions, how it occupies space, and how it nestles inside time schemes—this was, in effect, the invention of the inven-tion narrative. To Premsagar ’s contemporary readers, Yavani Bhāsa would have referred quite explicitly to Persian, Arabic, and Turkic words, phrases, and syntax in Hindavi, although it is worth noting that the slide from lan-

13. See Sumit Guha, “Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Iden-tity in the Dakhan, 1500–1800,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 2 (2004): 23–31.14. For a secular historical lens on the word mleccha, see Romila Thapar’s essay, “The Image of the Barbarian in Early India,” in Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpreta-tions (New Delhi: Orient Longmans, 1978), 137.


guage of the outside to colonial, nationalist, and orthodox revivalist idioms for the Muslim outsider was still in the future.

The all- important difference between the Yavani Bhāsa theory of lan-guage invention in Lallu Jee Lal’s Hindi and his near contemporary in the Awadh court Insha- allah Khan’s artful language game of producing Hindui involves the spatiotemporality of Hindi. When Insha- allah Khan promised his readers that there would be no trace of “bahar ki boli” बाहर ्ी बोली (words in Persian, Arabic, and Turkic), in effect he made a class- specific dis-tinction between rustic words (gaanwari ) and refined urban court usage.¹⁵ Moreover, in Insha- allah Khan’s linguistic geography, members of the Awa-dhi Muslim elite (like Insha- allah Khan himself) were included as language users of Hindui. This point is reinforced in Insha- allah Khan’s preface to Rani Ketaki Ki Kahani, where his interlocutor rearticulates the class content of the poet’s Hindui as “acchon se accha” अचछों सले अचछले (loosely translated as the elite) and “bhale log” भलले लोग (people of good breeding) speaking amongst themselves. Such lexical discriminations were not unknown to Braj, Saddhu-kari, Awadhi, Begumati Zubān, or Rekhta Urdu. What was new in Lallu Jee Lal’s representation of Yavani Bhāsa was that he mobilized well- known processes of lexical discriminations to a violent and new Orientalist idea of vernacular indigeneity. There was something altogether novel in the way the notion of Yavani Bhāsa enabled Hindi to territorialize a linguistic and spatial interior to which the Yavanas and their language were positioned on the outside. The lexical spaces emptied by the letting go of Perso- Arabic and Turkic words were refilled in Premsagar with a living speech, Khari Boli, anchored to a concrete linguistic geography and place name described as Dilli Agre ki Boli ददलली आगरले ्ी बोली. Orientalism in India produced linguistic- literary indigeneity. Within that larger idea, Premsagar possessed the dubious honor of scientific proof. Premsagar showed that this linguistic pogrom could be done. Lallu Jee Lal’s subsequent translation projects in collaboration with Mazhar Ali Khan Vilá are characterized by a verbal surface notable for the mixture of Hindavi with Perso- Arabic and Turkic words.¹⁶ It appears as if Lallu Jee Lal

15. See Shyam Sundar Das, ed., Rani Ketaki Ki Kahani (Kashi: Nagari Pracharani Sabha, 1925), 2–34. For a feminist perspective on the concept of play in this seminal text, see Ruby Lal’s chapter on Insha in her book titled Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl- Child and the Art of Playfulness (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).16. This anomaly in the many Hindis in Lallu Jee Lal’s writings is commented upon by


wished to represent the Yavani Bhāsa dimension of Premsagar as a virtu-oso exercise in craftsmanship. However, the pogrom of linguistic cleansing could not be undone; the construction of Hindi through a continual attention to word choice and syntax began in earnest.¹⁷ Debates about the possibility or even the feasibility of purging modern Hindi of its lexical impurities pre-occupied Hindi Orientalists.

Archive of Hindi Instruction and Idiom of Counterinsurgency

At Fort William, John Gilchrist’s phrase for his great work was Hin-dostanee Philology. I will read the Orientalist invention narrative in terms of the fear of revolution in the Fort William philological- lexicographic revo-lution. When does philology acquire the menace of a revolution, and how can critical secularism track the arguments and texts through which phi-lology reverses its revolutionary path and becomes instead the instrument of counterinsurgency? Revolution requires a revolutionary subject, and in this case the first pedagogic task at Fort William was to impress on young Englishmen that the exercise of power necessitated a disciplinary regime around natives’ languages.

Official anxiety concerning the spread of revolutionary ideas exerted a strong presence in Fort William’s Hindi. The vernacular was designed to function as a barrier to intimacy as much as it was a medium of com-munication. If young Englishmen were tempted to link the official policy of vernacular instruction with the ideals espoused in French by black Jaco-bins in Santo Domingo, Fort William’s Hindi discouraged this linkage by becoming the language of command and distant power. Language primers were part of a larger project to protect English boys from the plebeian life in the Calcutta bazaars on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to insu-late them from pernicious ideas associated with the French Revolution,

Christopher R. King in One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth- Century North India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). King notes that the 1805 edition of Baital Pachisi translated from Braj Bhakka by Mazhar Ali Khan Vilá and aided by Lallu Jee Lal is written in a much more mixed language than the Hindi of Premsagar.17. The connection between the language purity achieved in Premsagar and the interests of empire are made explicit by W. Hollings’s English translation of the work in 1848, where he notes in his preface, “The Hindee of the Prem Sagur is remarkably pure, and the book is, I believe, an examination Book at all the Presidencies” (W. Hollings, trans., The Prem Sagur of Lallu Lal [Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2008], 1). See also the lexicon composed from word lists obtained from Premsagar by William Price, ed., A Vocabulary: Khuree Bolee and English (Calcutta: Hindoostance Press, 1814).


ideas that trickled out of Europe in the late years of the eighteenth century and might have provided the ideological impetus for mixing with natives in British- occupied territories. Correspondence between Lord Wellesley and John Gilchrist, as well as letters between Wellesley and the Board of Direc-tors in England, contains several discussions about official fears concern-ing apprentice officers of the East India Company learning non- European vernaculars in the unregulated space of the Calcutta bazaar.¹⁸

How could Premsagar ’s Hindi protect and insulate Englishmen from these linguistic pleasures, and why would the problem of language take pre-cedence over the problem of sexual and affective bonding? Literary texts fill out the silence of the company archive; Rudyard Kipling’s Kim can be read as a literary fantasy of the linguistic pleasures of the native bazaar. The vernaculars of Bangla, Oriya, Urdu, Hindavi, and Bhojpuri were too sweet and intimate, and full of terms of endearment and curse words. Bhāsa was a form of improper touching between English boys and natives of the Cal-cutta markets. As a language primer, Premsagar implemented a certain conception of what constituted a vernacular language, how the English boy might acquire expertise in this vernacular, and what were to be the range of communications between company officer and Hindu native through this vernacular. In effect, Fort William’s Hindi was designed as the counter-insurgent idiom of distant power: Hindi as antidote to sansculottes and lin-guistic pleasures of the Calcutta bazaar. There is a dry irony in Bernard Cohn’s reading of numerous commands in Gilchrist’s Hindi textbooks, and Cohn observes, “The Sahib often gets lost.”¹⁹ I would like to fill out the pic-ture Cohn provides by noting that the implied reader of Premsagar was a twenty- , twenty- two, or twenty- four- year- old English male. The tenor of commands in Gilchrist’s language manuals disciplines the English male’s perambulations into native parts of the city or the countryside. These excur-

18. See John Borthwick Gilchrist, A Dictionary: English and Hindoostanee. . . . (Calcutta: Stuart and Cooper, 1787–90); Gilchrist, The Anti-Jargonist; or, a short introduction to the Hindoostanee Language, . . . with an extensive Vocabulary. . . . (Calcutta, 1800); Gilchrist, Gilchrist’s Hindee- Arabic Mirror; or, improved practical table of such Arabic words as are intimately connected with a due knowledge of the Hindoostanee language. . . . (Cal-cutta, 1802); Gilchrist, The Hindee- Roman Orthoepigraphical Ultimatum; or, a systematic descriptive view of Oriental and Occidental visible sounds of fixed and practical principles for the Languages of the East. . . . (Calcutta, 1804).19. For an argument about Gilchrist’s Hindi as the language of command, see Bernard S. Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16–35.


sions had to be carefully monitored in linguistic code so that he did not learn to speak to natives in Hindavi. The pedagogy based on Premsagar ’s Hindi cast the non- European vernacular as the managing of distance and degrees of formality, punishment, criticism, and reprimand. We gain some access to the archive of instruction from the margi-nalia I discovered in Princeton University’s copy of the first edition (1810) of Premsagar. The title page generates two opposed modes of philologi-cal instruction. One pedagogic mode is made possible by the emphasis on translation as the generator, translation as the womb of language. For example, the title page reads: “Premsagar translated [emphasis mine] into Hinduvee from the Brij Bhasa of Chutoorbhooj Misr by Shree Lulloo Lal Kub Bhasa Moonshee in the College of Fort William. Calcutta Printed at the Sanskrit Press. 1810.” The reason that this portion of the title page hints at a precolonial philology is that Bhāsa is portrayed as a practice of translation first and language name afterward. There is further proof that Lallu Jee Lal interpreted the instructions by Gilchrist to invent a new language to signify translation: for instance, the modest portion of works in Hindi printed by Fort William contained Lallu Jee Lal’s translation of the court poet Bihari’s Satsai. Thus, modern Hindi in its gestation stages in Fort William was a lan-guage within which invention metonymically signified translation. More accurately, we might say that adhunik आधुवि्, or modern Hindi, inherited and refashioned a centuries- long tradition of Bhāsa- as- translation. The metonymical interchange between Bhāsa and translation is of great relevance to Premsagar, because it was birthing Hindi through translating the Braj version of the tenth book दसर स्नध of Bhagvata Purana written in Braj by Chatoor Bhuj Misr. In the early modern period, the liter-ary vernacular of Braj Bhāsa was the vernacular of translation par excel-lence. A similar point is made by Wakankar in his study of Kabir. Wakankar calls for a radical rethinking and delinking of early modern vernaculars from our modern understandings of language.²⁰ If modern Bhāsas were not lan-guages, what were they? Bhāsas were a loosening and unbinding of ideas and spiritual- material knowledges that were disseminated among popula-

20. Wakankar argues that “we understand the ‘vernacular’ less as a language than as an ethic of plurality implicit in the practical everyday ethics of caste subalternity” and uses as his exemplary case Kabir as the poet “with the greatest commitment to the vernacu-lar.” See “The Anomaly of Kabir,” in Muslims, Dalits, and the Fabrications of History, ed. Shail Mayaram, M. S. S. Pandian, and Ajay Skaria (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005), 99–139, esp. 108. For translation theory that is hospitable to this expanded understand-ing of non- European translation traditions, see Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).


tions and communities traditionally excluded from these domains. We learn this especially from Pollock’s work with Sanskrit- Kannada and Wakankar’s work with Kabir’s Saddhukari. Precolonial vernaculars began by incubat-ing themselves in the spatiality of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, as in the case of Kannada, translating from Puranic Sanskrit, as in the case of Braj, or housing itself in the spatiality of high Persian, in the case of Zubān- e- urdū- e- mŭallā. We may speculate from this that poets in the early modern period were concerned with embodying a structure of feeling and a spatiotempo-ral imaginary first, and cathecting language name to the signified of lan-guage much later. However, the marginalia in the 1810 copy of Premsagar suggest that this revolutionary inheritance of modern Hindi was intercepted by the Orien-talist archive of instruction. Philological practices around Premsagar moved away from issues of translation. Little interest was lavished on Premsagar ’s relation to Braj as a literary vernacular, or to the dating and provenance of the Puranas. Here it may be worthwhile to mention that Romila Thapar and several other scholars have reopened the Orientalist archiving of the Puranas in order to ask significant new questions regarding the function of itihāsa- purana in non- Western historical thinking. Other scholars have begun to take a closer look at Puranic narrative forms and the Puranas as key source texts for the archaic popular. Premsagar ’s relation to the Ori-entalist archiving of the Puranas is therefore of considerable importance, especially as the precise function of the Puranas in vernacular language and literary developments has not received adequate scholarly attention.²¹

21. One of the dynamic areas of new scholarship on Orientalism revolves around the Bhagvata Purana. In her book From Lineage to State (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), Romila Thapar makes two points concerning the itihāsa- purana tradition that shed light on the historical transference of knowledge practice associated with the Puranic texts from Brahmins to non- Brahmin suta, or bard. Firstly, Thapar suggests that we can derive “a different type of information from this [Puranic] date that would be more enlightening on lineage forms, geographical distribution and to some extent political per-spective” (135). In the context of Premsagar, I interpret this to mean that the effects of routing modern Hindi through Puranic translation must be understood in terms larger than the teaching of beginner’s Hindi. For what was really at work was that Hindi was infused with an alternative concept of the political. Secondly, Thapar notes that the origin myth around the transmission of the fifth Veda (the claim of being the fifth Veda is tra-ditionally made for the Puranas) indicates ambivalence about the intellectual class that was to be the bearer of this knowledge form. The fifth Veda moved partially out of Brah-manical knowledge practice; it is believed that Vyasa taught it to his non- Brahmin disciple Lomaharsana. Subsequent histories of instruction around the fifth Veda were sourced in the figure of the suta, or bard, who inhabited a different social relation to his patrons than


On the flyleaf, the student records the first lesson in Hindi language, a les-son that is designed to link Hindi with Hindu. The lesson gains impetus from the section heading on the title page, “Prem Sagar or, the History of the Hindoo Deity Sree Krishn, containing in the 19th chapter of the Buha-guvun of Vyasudevu.” The introductory background lecture recorded in the 1810 copy consists of information concerning how Hindoos divide their year, dispositions of the body according to Hindoos, rituals involved in a Hindoo marriage. The marginalia indicate that Premsagar is a primer for producing a linguistically accessible archive object belonging to the Hindoo. Further proof can be adduced from the lecture notes on the opposite page of the flyleaf. These notes provide a plot summary of the Ramayana that makes sense only if the lesson to be learned is Hindi as the language of govern-mentality, insofar as it is inscribed as the language belonging to Hindoos and therefore a language that makes them intelligible through their reli-gious texts.

In the process of compiling a personal glossary, the unknown owner of the 1810 edition numbered difficult words in Lallu Jee Lal’s preface. The word Yavani was numbered and explained first as Moorish. This glossary helps us to date the marginalia, for it suggests early English perceptions that the language of the natives of Hindostan indicated their common ancestry with the Moors of Africa. This glossary also dates the marginalia in another way, for it was John Gilchrist, the founder and principal archi-tect of vernaculars at Fort William, who discredited the practice of calling Bhāsa Moorish in a pamphlet titled “On the Subject of the Hindostanee Language, Improperly Called Moors.” Partly erasing the word Moorish, the student then wrote Persian as the meaning of Yavani, indicating that in imperial pedagogy, Premsagar was taught as an example of the removal of linguistic traces of Moorish Africa and Persia from Hindi. This archive of instruction affords us a brief and tantalizing glimpse of the ways Premsagar was taught: it was approached as a primer to Hindu, as well as a gateway to the Hindu religious mentalité.

the Brahmins. Thus, the Premsagar–Bhagvata Purana relation signified a knowledge practice that was not exclusively Brahmanical. Modern Hindi was therefore sourced in the bardic and hence its dwelling place was in the domains of performance, the archaic popular, the folk, and belonged to the intellectual classes that were potentially capable of broadening Hindi’s imagined communities to include subordinate groups. See also the Bhagvata Purana Research Project at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies by project leaders Ravi M. Gupta and Kenneth R. Valpey.


Orientalism’s Specific Histories in Modern Hindi

Premsagar has not received adequate scholarly attention by noted scholars of nineteenth- century Hindi. Ronald Stuart McGregor’s magnifi-cently insightful account of Braj- Hindi literary relations opens the door to the possibility of reexamining Premsagar for its role in the use of Braj for the birthing of modern Hindi. In a comparable way, Francesca Orsini’s ency-clopedic and extraordinarily well- researched account of the nineteenth- century Hindi public sphere focuses on the later period of 1920–1940. Yet it is also possible to argue that Orsini’s study of those fateful twenty years provides a template for examining the prehistory of the Hindi public sphere in the printing presses, language primers, and translations in and around Fort William College that inaugurated Hindi (and Urdu) as print vernacu-lars and delegitimated oral, manuscript, and scribal cultures around clas-sical Hindi, Braj, and Awadhi.²² One way to explain scholarly disinterest in the long and complicated histories of Orientalist preoccupation with Hindi is to recognize, as Allison Busch does in her monograph on classical Hindi, that Hindi’s account of itself and its genealogy is enmeshed too closely with the story of nationalism and with the version of precolonial Hindi litera-ture provided by Orientalism and Indian nationalism.²³ While Busch rightly calls for a reassessment of the pieties of Hindi’s literary histories, I tweak her formulation by suggesting that one of the places to rupture the closed and sealed- off account of literary history is to delve into the specific recep-tion histories of early Hindi works by munshis such as Kavi Lallu Jee Lal. We cannot gain unmediated access to Premsagar unless we take account of its histories of reception. This reception history might provide us with a glimpse of both the linguistic disciplining that occurred, the forms it took, and the resistances developed in response to that disciplining. By the 1880s, the invention narrative around Premsagar under-went significant reassessment. I refer here to the aftermath of the political- epistemic revolution unleashed by the war of independence known in colo-nial histories as the 1857 mutiny. In 1882, Hariśchandra, the foremost voice among the intellectual class of Hindi Orientalists, offered his oblique read-

22. Ronald Stuart McGregor, “The Progress of Hindi, Part 1: The Development of a Trans-regional Idiom,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).23. Allison Busch, Braj beyond Braj: Classical Hindi in the Mughal World (New Delhi: India International Centre, 2009).


ing of Premsagar ’s Yavani Bhāsa in the evidence he presented before the Hunter Commission. “It is rather difficult,” Hariśchandra told the commis-sion in an English- language speech delivered in absentia, “to answer the question what is our vernacular language?”²⁴ Locating himself in the geo-political space of the North- Western Provinces, Hariśchandra proceeded to answer the difficult question by staging two languages, Braj Bhāsa and Khari Boli, as the principal vernaculars of this region.²⁵ At a certain point in his evidence, Hariśchandra made a pointed reference to the model of Hindi provided by Pandit Lallu Jee Lal. This was a crucial moment in the his-tory of Hindi Orientalism, in part because there were so many dimensions of Premsagar ’s mixture of Hindi with the Braj vernacular that Hariśchan-dra not only admired but imitated. Nevertheless, Hariśchandra rejected the model for Hindi prose provided by Premsagar. The grounds of his rejection are of interest to us; he characterized the Hindi invented by Pandit Lallu Jee Lal as Pandit Hindi.

By Pandit Hindi, Hariśchandra meant a Hindi riddled with priest-craft and Brahminical pedantry, and therefore unfit for the future projects of unnati or progress through Bhāsa. Hariśchandra was so much the intel-lectual product of Hindu reform movements and Hindi Enlightenment that his own model for Hindi prose positioned itself as secular, socially engaged, satirical, cosmopolitan, and fully capable of indigenizing European ideas—all of which was antithetical to what he saw as Premsagar ’s pundit Hindi. We see a series of paradoxes here. While it was entirely appropriate and even prescient for Hariśchandra to recoil from Premsagar ’s linguistic purges, he too was in the thick of the Hindi Urdu debates. He too advocated Hindi/Nagri for court language and mocked the rival claims of Urdu. Inci-dentally, what appeared as a natural and unforced flowing of Hindi into Braj in Premsagar appeared more deliberate and less spontaneous in Hariś-chandra’s writings. Hariśchandra’s influential disavowal of Premsagar ’s Hindi prose sent out the following message: the mental and affective trans-

24. All quotations from Bhāratendu Hariśchandra are from Bhartendu Samagra, ed. Hemant Sharma (Varanasi: Prachark Granthavali Pariyojna, Hindi Pracharak Sansthan, 1979), 1757.25. For a suggestive account of Bhāratendu Hariśchandra’s multiple and complex uses of Braj for devotional purposes and for versifying as everyday practice, see the monumental work by Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition: Bhartendu Harischandra and Nineteenth Century Banaras (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). Of rele-vance to the present essay is the chapter from Dalmia’s book, “Hindi as the National Lan-guage of the Hindus,” 146–221. See also my essay “What’s Braj Got to Do with the Hindi Urdu Divide?,” Critical Quarterly 52, Issue 3 (October 2010): 69–77.


formation through Hindi’s age of reason that Hariśchandra had in mind was only possible through progress, or उनिवि. Hariśchandra powerfully recon-ceived Bhāsa, not in its modes of existence in the early modern period but in a specifically colonial sense as an essential plank of progress, an enlight-ened interiority that could only be accomplished by nij Bhāsa विज भाषा; the word nij विज, meaning “of one’s own,” was recast and released a host of ambivalent meanings. In short, the Hindi Enlightenment that Hariśchandra envisioned for all the people of Bharatvarsh required the secular Hindi of his famous speech in 1883 at a fair in Ballia district outside Benaras. The fast- paced, richly idiomatic, and progress- oriented Hindi of Hariśchandra’s Ballia speech marked itself off from the pundit Hindi of Premsagar.

While Hariśchandra’s conception of the philological- lexicographic revolution drew on the notion of progress in Europe’s Enlightenment as a model for Hindi Enlightenment, we see a conservative backlash in Frederic Pincott’s 1897 translation and annotated scholarly edition of Premsagar. What comes through as an insistent theme in Pincott’s annotations is the role Fort William’s philology plays in postmortem analysis of the causes for alliances between Hindu and Muslim rebels and soldiers in the 1857 war against the British occupiers. Hindus and Muslims united, Pincott suggests, because they had been insufficiently disciplined into the linguistic modern. As yet, they did not quite understand that they spoke different languages and had distinct and opposing political and social interests, and no com-mon interests. The blame for this insufficiently realized linguistic modern could be traced back to Fort William and its principal scientist, John Gil-christ. In the passage below, Pincott characterized Gilchrist as an Urdu lover who betrayed the empire by encouraging the development of what Gil-christ called the Hindostanee language. In Pincott’s characterization, Gil-christ was an evil Prospero given to excesses of republican sympathies, and the proof was that he “caused a whole literature to be written in this mongrel dialect.” In the excerpt below, Pincott appears to be simply relating a brief biography of the founder of Fort William in the 1801–1805 period; in reality, the passage distinguishes between good and bad revolutions:

Dr. Gilchrist was a medical officer in the employ of the East India Company, at the beginning of this century, who devoted his attention to the cultivation of the patois which formed the medium of commu-nication between the Persian rulers of northern India and the inhabi-tants. He caused a whole literature to be written in this mongrel dia-lect, and by copiously enriching it with Persian words, may be said to have created what Europeans call the Hindustani language. This


artificial form of speech having been adopted for public business in 1830, has spread since then at a prodigious rate, and has had the unfortunate result of greatly obstructing communication between the rulers and the ruled.²⁶

I wish to draw attention to the relation between revolution and lan-guage in the writings of Hariśchandra and the veiled reference to the 1857 war of independence in the above excerpt by Pincott. The dangers repre-sented by the rebels of Hindostan (as versions of the sansculottes of France and the black Jacobins of Santo Domingo or modern Haiti) are described as the distinction between the mongrel dialect versus the orderly, order- producing, and scientifically produced Hindi of Premsagar that has been cleansed of impurities. Although Hariśchandra’s politics favored linguistic self- determination, he too confessed in his periodicals and in his testimony to the Hunter Commission that the vernaculars of the North- Western Prov-inces were excessively diverse, too richly multilingual. For Hariśchandra, the revolution could not spring from this linguistic diversity; it had to be ordered and disciplined by the people themselves.

In these post- 1857 texts—the Hunter Commission (1882), the Ballia speech (1883), Pincott’s translation of Premsagar (1897)—an earlier philo-logical approach to language definition is folded into a new paradigm for vernacularity. The earlier Fort William language definition is characterized as “twoness” in Alok Rai’s words, and as one language and two scripts in Christopher King’s words. The violence and painfulness of linguistic schizo-phrenia in the Hindi Urdu divide recede into the background; in the post- 1857 period, the twoness—Bhāsa for Hindus, Zubān for Muslims—is read as established fact of philological science. Pincott’s fear of the 1857 revo-lution sharpened his tone; language definition had to bear the burden of explaining and resolving what had gone wrong to cause the 1857 rebellion. The diagnosis required a thorough rethinking not only of how to treat Indi-ans and English- Indian relations but of how to teach Indians the science of Bhāsa as the necessary concomitant to progress. A revisionist history of the Fort William moment was deemed necessary. It was not enough to accuse Gilchrist of encouraging a language mongrel. Pincott went on to state that Urdu- Hindustani was “artificial” and, like an epidemic, “spreads . . . at a prodigious rate.” Metaphors of disease, pandemic, unnatural, the perver-

26. Frederic Pincott, The Prema- Sagara or Ocean of Love Being a Literal Translation of the Hindi Text of Lallu Jee Lal as Edited by the Late Professor Eastwick, Fully Annotated and Explained Grammatically, Idiomatically and Exegetically by Frederic Pincott (West-minster, 1897), no pagination.


sion of the natural purpose of language as communicative medium—all these were regular features of counterinsurgency. Urdu- Hindustani, Pin-cott suggested, was the Zubān of treason because it “has had the unfortu-nate result of greatly obstructing communication between rulers and ruled.” Once we are familiar with Urdu- Hindustani as the language of mutiny, we are better prepared to appreciate Pincott’s representation of Premsagar ’s Hindi as the language of indigeneity:

It is well known to all who have given thought to the languages of India that the Hindi, or Bhasha as the people themselves call it, is the most widely diffused and most important language of India. There are, of course, the great provincial languages—the Bengali, Marathi, Panjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, and Tamil—which are spoken by immense numbers of people, and a knowledge of which is essen-tial to those whose lot is cast in the district where they are spoken; but the Bhasha of northern India towers high above them all, both on account of the number of its speakers and the important admin-istrative and commercial interests which attach to the vast stretch of territory in which it is the current form of speech. The various forms of this great Bhasha constitute the mother- tongue of about eighty- six millions of people, that is, a population almost as great as those of the French and German empires combined; and they cover the important region stretching from the Rajmahal hills on the east to Sindh on the west; and from Kashmir on the north to the borders of the Nizam’s territory on the south. Necessarily there are differences, both verbal and grammatical, over a district of this vast extent; but these differences arrange themselves under two great divisions, which have been called respectively the Eastern and the Western Hindi. Of these the Western Hindi is now the more important of the two, on account of the extensive literature which it has produced, and is yearly expanding; and because of political, commercial, and social considerations. One of the pioneers in the modern literature of this Western Hindi was S’ri Lallu Lai Kavi, Bhasha Munshi in the College of Fort William at the beginning of this century.²⁷

I cite the post- 1857 Orientalist language definition of Bhāsa in terms of its own distinctive and influential understanding of the spatiality of Bhāsa, which is also at one and the same time the linear ordering of time for Bhāsa. Pincott’s annotated English translation of Premsagar made it

27. Pincott, “Translator’s Preface,” in The Prema- Sagara or Ocean of Love.


clear that Hindi needed the scolding supervision of its natural ally, English. Furthermore, the 1897 archive of instruction concerning Premsagar con-tained this explicit guideline: the pedagogic apparatus of learning Hindi required that Urdu be abused. Finally, the invention narrative was retooled for bleak times by chastising Gilchrist and gently correcting Pundit Lallu Jee Lal from the vantage point of footnotes whenever his translation erred by introducing a word in Gujarati or Bhojpuri that marred the purity of Prem-sagar ’s Hindi.

Perhaps the most vigorous resurrection of the invention narrative around Premsagar stemmed from the planetary scale of revolutions around the notion of linguistic indigeneity spearheaded by Orientalism and mobi-lized by the early waves of Swadeshi in anticolonial liberation struggles. In 1886, at the Vienna session of the Congress of Orientalists, it was decided that a thoroughgoing linguistic survey of India needed to be undertaken, an idea that found favor with Max Müller, Sir Monier Monier- Williams, and Max Weber. Linguistic Survey of India created a sound archive for the northern vernacular in 1894–1928 that was hailed as an imperial museum of Hindi, a linguistic botany. The Vienna session testified to the profound Orientalist engagement with Hindi. George Grierson’s archive appeared to replace the polemical contention between the geography of Urdu versus the geography of Khari Boli Hindi with a new and documented division between Eastern and Western Hindi. Grierson’s division was spatial and gave prominence to all those varieties of the northern vernacular that were spoken in villages and small towns as well as cities of colonial India. Coming at the end of the first few phases of the Hindi Urdu divide and both anticipating as well as running parallel to the revolutionary idiom for Swadeshi manufacture and indigenous self- determination, the redistribution of the northern vernacular into Eastern and Western Hindi in Linguistic Survey of India reopened the questions: What is Hindi, how do we recognize this language object, and what exactly was invented in Fort William’s Hindi?²⁸

28. See George Abraham Grierson, The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan (Cal-cutta: Asiatic Society, 1889); Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, 11 vols. (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903–1922). My essay attempts to shift the study of Orientalist scholarship from the auteur philologist to the unarchived dialogue and instruction between scientist and scribe munshi in the Gilchrist–Lallu Jee Lal relation. In this context, I note that Shahid Amin shifts attention from George A. Grierson to Ram Gharib Chaube in “Grierson, Ram Gharib Chaube and the Great Linguistic Survey of India” (lecture, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, January 2006); Amin, “The Marginal Jotter: Scribe Chaube and the Making of the Great Linguistic Sur-vey of India, c. 1890–1920” (lecture, India International Centre, Delhi, February 22, 2011).


In unequivocal language, Grierson recalled the publication of Prem-sagar in 1810 as a moment of spectacular invention. According to Grierson, Fort William had invented a non- European language. What intrigued Grier-son was that this invented language had been accepted by the natives. Here, then, was an excellent example of how the indigenous could be con-ceptualized and controlled in the laboratory of science. Why did this inven-tion succeed? The answer, Grierson felt, was the prestige of its inventors. In effect, Grierson’s contention was that Fort William had refashioned the linguistic indigenous for the people of Hindostan. The revolution of order and science and benevolent imperial British gift of language was opposed once again to the revolution of mongrel speech and unregulated language revolution in the Mughal bazaar of Akbar’s Agra.

Grierson described this other mongrel revolution as birthing the language that Lallu Jee Lal drew on. In Grierson’s words, “In 1801, under Gilchrist’s tuition, Lallu Jee Lal wrote the Premsagar in the mixed Urdu language of Akbar’s camp followers and of the market where men of all nations congregated.”²⁹ This sentence created a set of contrasts between the unregulated and wild invention of Urdu, associated with the empire of disorder. Contrarily, the regulated and scientific invention of Hindi was associated with the empire of order. Urdu in Grierson’s carefully neutral language was linked to the indiscriminate jostling and pushing of plebian bodies of soldiers, traders, and customers of the native bazaar. Hindi too laid claims on the vox populi, with the proviso that it emerged from the sci-entific laboratory of Fort William and was happily accepted by the people.

The Griersonian version of the invention narrative broadens the lens to include a comparison of two philological revolutions: the one that poets and literary historians recall as the linguistic innovations and creativity that occurred in the seventeenth- century Mughal bazaar and that was asso-ciated in popular memory with Akbar’s Agra and his nomadic court; that earlier revolution is then superseded by the revolution associated with Fort William in the long eighteenth century. However, Grierson was not really interested in these earlier moments; they served as historical arguments for Grierson’s preoccupation with the philological revolution under way in his own times. One of the reasons that Grierson admired Hariśchandra was that he saw the latter as shaping an idiom for mobilization that reinforced the notion of Hindi as the domain of indigeneity, irrespective of the cos-mopolitan aspirations in Hariśchandra’s journals. Both the monumental work compiled into Linguistic Survey of India over the years 1894–1928 and

29. Cited in Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition, 149.


Grierson’s reimagined invention narrative for Premsagar in the 1880s had a common aim—to shape this new movement that would acquire the broader revolutionary idiom of Swadeshi in 1905–1908.

Grierson’s version of the invention narrative located Premsagar in new and eloquent thoughts about the indigenous as the domain of self- determination. Reread in this exigent way, the expulsion of Yavani Bhāsa from Hindavi appeared as no less than a scientific transformation that anticipated the Swadeshi movement and liberation struggles. If science could invent a language, then science could also produce the notion of “we the people.” Thus, language populism in the Griersonian archive was designed to birth the geography of Hindostan. The entire scientific claim around Premsagar rested on one overarching philological principle, namely, that the non- European vernacular could be cut, spliced, and refashioned at the level of vocabulary and grammar. A nation space called India could be invented by Orientalists just as they had invented Hindi. Grierson praised Lallu Jee Lal because the latter had “used only nouns and particles of Indian, instead of those of Arabic or Persian origin.” The slippage in this sentence lay in the opposition between Perso- Arabic nouns and particles versus a new language entity called Indian nouns and particles. Grierson noted that in spite of the common grammatical basis of Hindi and Urdu, “the vocabulary was almost entirely changed. This new language, called by the Europeans Hindi, has been adopted all over Hindustan as a lingua franca of Hindus.”³⁰ We see in Grierson’s invention narrative the full elabo-ration of the dominant colonial and nationalist spatiotemporality of Hindi—it was located in the geography of Hindustan and belonged to the archaic- mythic temporality of Hindus and Hindu civilization. Was this the full story about Premsagar ? In the final section of this essay, I explore other spec-tral afterlives of Fort William, in the figure of the munshi, and in the spatio-temporal of Premsagar.

Class Formation, Intellectual Work, and Invention Narrative of Hindi

Preceding sections have made a case for a set of criteria that might stage the Fort William moment on comparative, transnational, and plane-tary lenses rather than confine the terms of inquiry within the epistemo-logical parameters ordained by Orientalist discourse. The most difficult and elusive component of a reading practice adequate to the Fort William

30. Cited in Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition, 149.


archive is this: How can we read the figure of the munshi employed by the Fort William College in order to better understand the emergences, obso-lescences, and new opportunities in the class formation of intellectuals?³¹ More specifically, how can we learn to read Kavi Lallu Jee Lal, translator, poet, creative collaborator, first Braj Bhakka pandit at Fort William, and later owner of the printing press and successful entrepreneur in the print-ing and sale of Fort William’s textbooks? Lallu Jee Lal carried out certain philological revolutions in plain view. At the same time, in a modest and yet equally far- reaching way, he recast other philological revolutions by hiding them in plain view in Premsagar. In looking at a series of interpretations of the figure of the munshi by Gilchrist and Ramachandra Shukla, and more recently by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, we are afforded partial illuminations about the intellectual class that played a crucial role in the birth of the linguistic modern. Much before the emergence of the linguistically disciplined Hindi and Urdu subject, an integral aspect of the invention of Hindi narrative con-sisted in the formation of an intellectual class that was trained to execute and disseminate the new science of language as well as the language object Hindi. It is within this social formation and knowledge episteme that we can comprehend Lallu Jee Lal as a remarkable figure of transition. One of the strongest critiques of Orientalist knowledge hierarchies has emerged from a revaluation of the figure of the traditional intellectual. Already a figure transformed by the demands of Mughal and Sultanate states, the tradi-tional intellectual of the Mughal munshi forms and is formed by systems of patronage and the client- patron jajmani system. What happens to the figure of the munshi in the shift of power from late Mughal to Fort William modes of patronage? No doubt a sharp and sudden diminution of stature in the idiom for the traditional intellectual is evident. Standard accounts tend to map out the Fort William munshi in the master- servant dialectic of the sahib- munshi relation.³² In these accounts, the English sahib at Fort William was the inventor, philologist, visionary; the munshis were the hacks, mechanical translators, native informants who

31. I am grateful to Ronald Judy for posing the Gramscian question of intellectual work and class formation in the case of Lallu Jee Lal.32. See Sisir Kumar Das, Sahibs and Munshis: An Account of the College of Fort William (New Delhi: Orion, 1978). Das notes that the salaries of the munshis at Fort William Col-lege were substantially lower than the English professors. The munshis were ranked as Chief Munshis, Second Munshis, and Sub- ordinate Munshis, and received a monthly salary of Rs. 200, 100, and 40, respectively. In Das’s words, “The inner rhythm of the Col-lege life and its activities was regulated by this relationship of Sahibs and Munshis” (xiii).


wrote under strict supervision of the sahib. The Fort William munshi was discursively located as adherents of an outmoded system of learning who needed training in modern philological sciences of Europe. In fact, Gilchrist called them learned pedants.³³ As a consequence, the munshi’s learning and the philologist’s science were positioned as polar opposites. For this polarity to work, we would have to believe that either the munshis were a blank slate, or that philological traditions were wholly absent in pre- British Hindostan.

Gilchrist noticed that the traditional intellectuals of Urdu- Hindustani and Braj Bhakka seemed to refer all inquiries concerning the mode of exis-tence of the vernacular, as well as its material life as a language, to the learned languages. Gilchrist noted with considerable surprise that this idiom of vernacularity, this habit of referring all questions concerning Urdu and Braj to Indo- Persian and Sanskrit, shared a common tropological base that was powerful and tenacious. At this point, in 1798, Gilchrist had not yet made up his mind that Hindus required their own Hindi language. Sepa-rate departments of Hindustani and Bhakka at Fort William were still in the future. Gilchrist’s words, therefore, constitute a text for retracing the emergence of Orientalist reasoning on philology, and the vexed questions around the precise nature of the munshi’s learning. This text is valuable because it traces out in some detail the problem confronted by Gilchrist as well as the solution he proposed for it.

The problem that preoccupied Gilchrist in this period of his work as language inventor was that Urdu- Hindustani and Braj seemed to have dis-covered their distinctive linguistic identity through a prolonged form of inti-macy with Indo- Persian and Sanskrit, respectively. Gilchrist did not under-stand how or why this intimacy between Sanskrit- Braj and Urdu- Persian incubated the spatiotemporal imaginary of Braj and Urdu in the interstices of the learned languages. We know that the relation between vernacu-lar and learned language was predominantly oriented toward spatiality, because Gilchrist tells us so. The topos of space was foregrounded in the following statement when Gilchrist gently mocked his munshis: “My learned colleagues, were some of them with their minds’ eye roaming for farfetched expressions on the deserts of Arabia,” or “every mountain of Persia,” or “groping in the dark intricate minds and caverns of Sanskrit lexicography.”

The term of disapproval that Gilchrist frequently used to describe

33. All subsequent quotations and paraphrases concerning Gilchrist’s statements are from John Borthwick Gilchrist, “Introduction,” The Oriental Linguist: An Easy and Familiar Introduction to the Popular Language of Hindoostan (Calcutta, 1798), i–ix.


this alternate philology was pedantry. I want to pause for a moment before this word and this expression of disapproval in order to better examine the ways in which the knowledge object is formed in such a way to push a certain ensemble of literary- linguistic practices into the realm of useless excesses of obsolete pedantry. For Gilchrist, the antonym of Oriental ped-antry was Western science. Gilchrist’s critique of pedantry did not denote absence in a direct way; the munshis’ learning was registered as presence. Linguistic violence lay in recoding. Learning that did not fit Orientalism was recoded as irrelevant to the colonial modern. For this purpose, the term pedant delegitimized the munshis’ understandings of the vernacular as an outmoded knowledge system, one that must be displaced by the science of the European modern.

Curiously enough, Gilchrist did not distinguish between the ped-antry of Hindustani- Persian relations and the pedantry displayed by Bhakka scholars, in spite of the fact that Sanskritic literary culture was singled out as the golden age of Indic civilization by William Jones in this very period. Gilchrist asserted that there was a common approach to vernacularity between Urdu and Braj. It was precisely this commonality that irked him. The solution Gilchrist proposed was to displace these linguistic geogra-phies with the European conception of the spatiality of the vernacular. In his words, “My operations were avowedly directed to, and calculated for, the open, accessible plains of Hindustan.” Gilchrist permitted Lallu Jee Lal to forge Hindi out of Braj because, in the logic of indigenity, Braj signified the pre- Muslim anti- Urdu original vernacular of the Hindus in their primi-tive state of “Arcadia.” The notion that the vernacular must be conjoined to a concrete and empirically defined place, in Gilchrist’s phrase “the open, accessible plains of Hindustan,” returns us to the logic of the indigenous that was outlined in Lallu Jee Lal’s purges of Yavani Bhāsa as well as in Grierson’s notion of Hindi for Hindus in Hindustan.

Thinking Outside the Orientalist Box: Modern Hindi as Musical Beat of Time

Were there heterogeneous spatiotemporal imaginaries that belonged to the vernaculars in the late Puranic period as well as in the Indo- Islamic millennium? Recent work by Pollock on the emergence of Kannada against the background of cosmopolitan Sanskrit provides a vital clue about the relation between learned languages and the vernacular. Pollock’s writings on vernacularity constitute a major shift in the massive and unquestioned


prestige of Orientalist philological paradigms for the vernaculars of South Asia. The fact that such a shift occurred at the site of Sanskrit and Sanskrit- Kannada relations itself tells us something important about the way Orien-talism organized philological practice around the linguistic historiography and origin myth of Sanskrit. My suggestion here is that one of the protocols for interrogating Orientalism’s story of modern Hindi might be to widen the lens and look more attentively to Khari Boli Hindi’s relation to Sanskrit and Persian, as well as to Braj, rather than simply to Hindi’s relation to Urdu.

Pollock noted that the production of difference required that the Kan-nada vernacular possess the epistemology of Sanskrit and the dignity of its philological apparatus.³⁴ The emergent vernacular made little or no attempt whatsoever to distance itself from Sanskrit cosmopolitics. Instead, the ver-nacular appeared to pull epic spaces and epic time of Sanskrit into its orbit. In effect, the vernacular discovered its own distinctive linguistic identity by mapping Sanskrit’s spatiotemporality onto a recognizably local landscape. The limitations inherent in Pollock’s theorizing of vernacularity occurred at the point when he asked, If the globalized cultural formation of Sanskrit demonstrates that Sanskrit could travel, then could the vernacular travel as well? His answer is no, the vernacular occupies des दलेस, or local place, that which does not travel at all. This is not borne out in the case of Braj and Urdu. While the term des is often associated with Braj as the language of Madhya des रधय दलेस, several Hindi language scholars have noted that Madhya des is a fluid geography. Thus in literary Braj, the spatiality of des is not tied down to the local place of Brindavan. Instead, the spatiotemporal of Braj is both concretely sensuous and can migrate into other vernaculars, across space and time, flow in and out of Sanskrit, and merge with Prem-sagar ’s Hindi.

As a scholar of Braj, Lallu Jee Lal was trained in the literary and lin-guistic history of Braj prose and poetry. What this means is that in com-posing Hindi from Braj, as well as from Braj- Sanskrit relations, Premsa-gar signaled its self- location in the long line of Braj poets who had put together Braj’s chronotope through translations of the Bhagvata Purana. Like these Braj translations, Premsagar did not take liberties with the San-skrit text. Braj translations of the Bhagvata Purana stayed as close as pos-sible to the Sanskrit text. It was only through subtle shifts of emphasis as well as the abridging or lengthening of certain parts of the narrative that the vernacular poet indicated his interpretation.

34. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).


I am suggesting here a vernacular philology that produces differ-ence from the learned language by reshaping the contours of the Sanskrit narrative. Thus, the narrative that was formerly in Sanskrit now inhabits the vernacular, undergoing a reshaping that is not reducible to word choice or syntax. The essential feature of this philology was that the vernacular reshaping and contouring of the Puranic Sanskrit text appeared as tiny and untraceable and yet persistent contouring of the spatiotemporal. Yet the amazing fact was that it was through these little movements of a transla-tion, a translation that strove for passionate fidelity to the Sanskrit and Braj text, that we perceive the early stirrings of the spatiotemporal imaginary of an emergent vernacular. Translating and remaining close to the story of the avatar Kr·ṣṇa in the Puranic text, Braj realized its own chronotope in the spatiality of Brindavan and the temporality internal to Braj leela (cos-mic play).

In Premsagar, Lallu Jee Lal essayed a craftsmanlike vernacular reshaping that owed as much to the long tradition of Braj translations as it did to Fort William science. For instance, the frame narrative reads very differently in Puranic Sanskrit, Braj, and Premsagar ’s Hindi. In the San-skrit original, the frame story concerns Parikshit as the great- grandson of the Pandava warrior- kings, and the narrative arc involves Parikshit coming to know himself by coming to know the warrior- kings. The project of under-standing the past is propelled by an agonistic question: Parikshit must know before he dies why the Pandava brothers were considered emblems of heroic virtue. Thus the focus is on conventions of what Mikhail Bakh-tin called the epic relation between descendants and clan ancestors. Epic protocols belonging to Puranic Sanskrit are subtly altered in vernacular Braj translations. Without any marked changes in the frame narrative, Braj versions of the story of Parikshit treat it as a portal to the idyllic space of Brindavan, which generates a range of poetic meanings in Braj riti, or court poetry and devotional poetry.

Through subtle shifts of emphasis, Kavi Lallu Jee Lal’s Premsagar reimagined the story of the god Kr·ṣṇa not as the epic Sanskritic concern with ancestors and descendants, nor even as the Braj poetic contemplation of play, or leela, but as a musical beat of time for a new language that can be called the time of modern Hindi prose. To this end, Premsagar repre-sented Parikshit as a young man who ventured into the liminal space of the forest, the very space where epics composed in Sanskrit locate the others of caste- structured society, a social order that in Sanskritized Hindi is called varna- ashrama- dharma िणमा आश्रर धरमा. Notable among these others are the


demon king Ravana; the Asuras, with magical powers; the low- caste Shu-dra; or the desiring woman Supnakha.³⁵ In keeping with the Sanskrit origi-nal, the forest in Premsagar was portrayed as the place that turns the world upside down. In the forest, Parikshit misreads the allegorical figure of Time, or Kal ्ाल, Earthly Space, or धरिी, and the Righteous Path, or marg रागमा of Dharma धरमा. The notion of marg, or रागमा, in the opening pages of Prem-sagar, does not adhere to Pollock’s conception of the des/marg binary. Here it is not so much a spatiality as a signifying code for the spiritual tra-jectory and worldly Dharma in a given human life. Most importantly, marg or Dharma is not counterposed to des. What Premsagar strives for cannot be read as a flat and faithful reproduction of the Puranic Sanskrit, nor can it be seen as a mechanical extension of the use of tadbhava or Sanskrit loan words in the vernacular. Instead, Lallu Jee Lal turns Parikshit and his misreading into an allegory that can haunt Hindi, an allegory that might become Hindi’s own distinct chronotope.³⁶ In Lallu Jee Lal’s translation, the pedagogic emphasis falls on the misreading. In this way, his translation distances itself from the epic focus of Puranic Sanskrit as well as epic meditations on relations between ances-tor and descendant. The misreading of time and space is fatal because Parikshit commits the polluting deed that invites his death. The polluting deed occurs because Parikshit does not understand the power of Kal, or time. The translation returns again and again to this problem: the concept of responsibility. Given that the story of Kr·ṣṇa was reinterpreted by later nationalists to signify the high seriousness of nation building, it is perfectly plausible that in Premsagar Lallu Jee Lal reinterpreted the story of Parik-shit to signify a non- Western concept of the political as a companion piece to his translation of Rajniti. The burden of sovereignty entails recognition by the ruler that time is out of joint. Lallu Jee Lal treats the Puranic tale as a set of semiotic codes that can be reworked to construct a historically

35. For an anticaste perspective, see Bhim Rao Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras? (1936). Ambedkar attempted to explain the formation of the Shudras (the lowest caste in the hierarchy of the Hindu caste system). See Valerian Rodrigues, The Essential Writ-ings of B.R. Ambedkar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), part 8, chap. 27, pp. 385–95.36. One of the works translated by Lallu Jee Lal at Fort William was the Rajniti: A Col-lection of Fables Originally Translated from the Hitopadesa into the Braj Language for the Use of the College of Fort William (Calcutta, 1915). I suggest that the subterranean and yet unmistakable theme of invoking an alternative conception of the political, the niti, or political economy, for raj or for kingship, link both of his translations Premsagar and Rajniti.


resonant meditation on political failure caused by the prince at odds with Kal, or time. In Lallu Jee Lal’s retelling, Parikshit attempts to master time by placing it on his royal crown. However, he does not realize that it is time which has mastered him, putting him in a state of delusion. It is in this deluded state that Parikshit re- enters the forest and contravenes the laws of varnashram dharma society within which disrespect toward a Brahmin is taboo. The curse follows swiftly. It is at this point in the frame narrative that Parikshit as the implied reader takes the first step toward acknowledg-ing that he is in a state of अज्ाि; in this context, the word signifies a state of delusion induced by ignorance about the true nature of time. The story proper begins because he seeks instruction from the sage Shukracharya.

Language invention in Premsagar is thus tied to a narrativity, a repertoire of storytelling, and this is a very different order of attention from the lexical and syntactical purges signaled by the term Yavani Bhāsa. Hindi is fundamentally a Hindi narrativity, or a narrative mode for retelling the tale of responsibility and timely mediations. Once this Hindi narrativity is real-ized in one language primer and imitated/mobilized by another translation, the unmistakable suggestion of Premsagar was that this vernacular story-telling would in time mark itself off from Braj and Sanskrit versions. We wit-ness the emergences of Hindi’s chronotope for the concept of the political in the figure of the abdicated king Parikshit who poses the following ques-tion to the sage Shukracharya: How can you guide me as I navigate the ocean of eternity, or Bhavsagar, after death? At first we are made aware that Hindi narrativity is a mode of Puranic storytelling with a fully elaborated pedagogy for human beings who wish to understand the ineffable mystery of salvation. The topos of crossing, the crossing over from human life to the ocean of eternity, is deployed by the assembled sages. They tell the young king that it is Shukracharya who must tell the story of Kr·ṣṇa, “yeh sab dharmo se uttam dharma kahenge” यले सब धरमो सले उत्िर धरमा ्हेंगले (He will teach you the highest ethical science among all other dharmas [Premsagar, 6]). The narrative capacity of Shukracharya is explained as the power to enable the young man to arrive at a certain state of mind; in this state of poise, Parikshit will cut himself loose from the cycle of life and death, and cross over to eternity: jis se tu janam maran se choot bhavsagar paar hoga वजस सले िू जिर ररण सले छू‍ट भिसागर पार होगा (With this Dharma you will leave behind/abandon the life- death cycle and cross the ocean of eternity [Premsagar, 6]). It is the anxious and impatient Parikshit who approaches the topos of crossing over as metaphor for life, death, and salvation by translating the metaphor into human time. He says: “saat din meh kya karoonga” साि ददि रें


कया ्रूं गा (Seven days and what can I possibly do in them? [Premsagar, 7]). To Parikshit, there seems to be no adequation between the infinite quantity of his adharma अधरमा, or state of ignorance, and the work of crossing over. This work of crossing over must simultaneously be performed in the order of time, yet beckon to the state outside human time. Parikshit laments that he has a paltry seven days to achieve such an impossible task. Therefore, Lallu Jee Lal has Parikshit cry out to the sage: “adharma he apar—kaise bhavsagar hoga paar” अधरमा ह ैअपार ्ैसले होगा भिसागर पार (My ignorance is immeasurable/infinite—how then can I cross Bhavsagar? [Premsagar, 7]). Bhavsagar and Premsagar constitute, I submit, the signifying code for vernacular revolutions in the Indo- Islamic millennium. The constant pun-ning and wordplay in Lallu Jee Lal’s text invoke the temporality of Bhav-sagar, or the ocean of eternity, in dialectical relation to the temporality of Premsagar. While the cosmic ocean of Bhavsagar calls to mind the notion of time as eternity, and also the time of human life as the crossing of the ocean of eternity, the temporality of Premsagar is of a quite distinct order. The temporality of Premsagar signifies the longer duration of reading, writ-ing, meditation, and bodily practices associated with Bhakti, or participant devotion. As the sage Shukracharya tells Parikshat, the most difficult les-son he must learn is that these temporal units of worldly time in Kalyug are traversed by an aporetic temporal, the epiphany in which the human being crosses the cosmic ocean instantaneously. The sage states: “Tu thode din mat samajh—mukti to hoti hai ekahi ghari ke dhyan mein” िू थोडले ददि रि सरझ—रुद् ि िो होिी ह ैए्ही घडी ल्े धयाि रें (Do not see seven days as insuf-ficient—the state of mukti or the realm of freedom occurs in a moment of distilled contemplation [Premsagar, 7]). What the text is discussing is not transcendence or the dissolving of human concerns and human compre-hension of duration by a superhuman order. Remaining anchored in the human and material matrix of clock time, the sage suggests to Parikshit that time is not linear and does not proceed in the same measure, that there are sciences of contemplation and narrativity that can accelerate the work of crossing over from life to death. The possibility of salvation is located in two time frames: the luxurious plenitude of seven days and the epiphany of a single charged moment of dhyan (meditation). Lallu Jee Lal was striving to create Bhāsa as a series of musical notes on time, a grammar of time as it were, that would then be filled out as Hindi developed and matured. In Lallu Jee Lal’s vision, Hindi as a gram-mar of time was to be possessed of a certain tension. This tension derived from the competing claims of Rajniti and bhakti, or the path or marg of


political responsibility versus the path or marg of devotional love as itself a form of affect- centered knowledge. And it is here that Lallu Jee Lal slipped into the text his own affiliation to the many worlds of language invention in Mughal and Sultanate epochs. In the Indo- Islamic millennium, the dia-lectic between the path of gyaan and the path of bhakti was continually invoked and played within bhakti poetry. So profound were the interimbri-cations of this dialectical tension in medieval vernaculars that the gyaan/Premsagar dialectic evolved into one of the principal signifying codes for the vernacular in the Indo- Islamic millennium. There is no mention in the invention narratives by Gilchrist and Grierson of the fact that a certain his-tory of language invention was evoked in the title of the Fort William primer. The prefix prem प्लेर in Premsagar indicated Lallu Jee Lal’s literary affiliation with the Prem Bhāsa of Kabir, Sursagar, Dnyaneshwari, and bhakti poetry around Vallabh. I am of course suggesting here that this dense and highly complex, rich, and multiple thinking about vernacularity was activated in Lallu Jee Lal’s labors of translation not only from Puranic Sanskrit but also from Chaturbhuj Misr’s Braj translation of the Bhagvata Purana. Insofar as Fort William can be credited with one of the birthings of modern Hindi, we can define the vernacular Hindi as not simply or even primarily as the sum total of its lexicon, syntax, morphology, and phonology. Rather, Hindi is more fully understood as the locus for redistributing the relations between Parikshit and Shukracharya—the former who asks for gyaan and the latter who imparts the lesson of bhakti—by remapping them onto the social rela-tions between vernacular poet and participant audience, reciter and audi-tor, ruler and ruled, and from thence into Hindi’s imagined communities and social relations between leader and community. What happened to the transcendence of human history and the metaphysics of Puranic Sanskrit when Puranic cosmogony was translated into modern Hindi’s grammar of time? And where precisely can we locate Hindi’s relation to historical time in its richly particularized and individual-ized dialectic between competing and colliding modes of comprehending temporality—the conquest of time through gyaan and the disruption of time through prem bhakti? To find the beginnings of an answer to these ques-tions, we must look more closely at the divine locus of transcendence in the text. Premsagar ’s Kr·ṣṇa was a bleak figure. Lallu Jee Lal’s Devakiputra (son of mother Devaki) anticipated nationalist reworkings of the avatar Kr·ṣṇa. For later nationalists, the narrative moment in the Bhagvata Purana when Kr·ṣṇa left the utopian space of rural Braj and journeyed to Mathura to kill the demon tyrant Ravana functioned as an allegory for the need to move


beyond the state of political quietism into the states of mind and action appropriate to nation building. I suggest that a certain tonality pervades Lallu Jee Lal’s translation and that this tonality neither fully breaks free of the idyllic Kr·ṣṇa of Braj poetics nor is Premsagar ’s Kr·ṣṇa contained wholly in the traditions of literary Braj. Hindi’s grammar of time folds the transcendental into the historical. Lallu Jee Lal did not bear out the Orientalist cliché that the Hindu pos-sesses no conception of historical time, since all time in the Hindu men-talité is perceived in relation to sacred time.³⁷ Folding the historical into the transcendental describes a very different operation from the clichéd portrait of the ahistorical Hindi- speaking Hindu, who must learn the discipline of historical time from Europe. Contrarily, many readers of Premsagar under-stood its historicity in a somewhat different way—the historical actor experi-enced her relation to her place in human history by reinterpreting one of the foundational narratives of Vaishnavism, namely the avatar Kr·ṣṇa’s jour-ney from Braj to Mathura. As Lallu Jee Lal saw him, Kr·ṣṇa was a figure of unceasing vigilance. Alternate chapters of Premsagar presented the god in human form in the attitude of prem, or love, and also in the posture of vio-lence. Perhaps the most powerful impression conveyed by the literary world of Premsagar was that the grammar of salvation had become undecipher-able to human beings. Again and again in Lallu Jee Lal’s text, Kr·ṣṇa was portrayed as reassuring the people who love him that he is the guarantor of their safety from the violence around them. In spite of divine reassurance, we find a portrait gallery of characters who are like Parikshit in that they are anxious, fearful, and unable to distinguish the proper attitudes of prem as distinct from and yet dialectically related to gyaan. Acharya Ramachandra Shukla’s own reading of Tulsi and his elabo-ration of Hindi’s spatiotemporality owe something to his interpretation of those dimensions of Premsagar where it was the intellectual child of the vernacular revolutions in the Indo- Islamic centuries. Shukla seized on the building blocks of Premsagar ’s chronotope—a king who must abdicate because he does not know that his relation to time is broken, a king who must relearn the relation between time, space, and the marg of Dharma. This is a chronotope that cannot be grasped at the lexical level, although I hasten to clarify that Hindi’s chronotope is strongly connected to the materi-

37. Refuting this Orientalist notion about the fundamental ahistoricity of Hindi, Allison Busch titles one section of her monograph “Hindus Had History, and They Wrote It in Hindi.” See Busch, Braj beyond Braj, 19.


ality of language. The all- important distinction I make from Fort William’s Orientalist philology is that Hindi’s spatiotemporal is not, in the final deter-mining instance, reducible to word choice and syntax. This way of looking at Hindi means that its spatiality is not and need not be wholly subsumed in the logic of indigeneity. This way of looking at Hindi also means that the pre-cisely detailed imaginary of the vernacular cannot be scientifically modified but must belong to the demos, to the demotic, and to the domain of par-ticipant devotion called bhakti. Bruce Robbins has asked if the violence of Orientalism can be named and, by naming, judged.³⁸ Is Premsagar better understood as the work of a historian? In recent times, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have challenged the colonial- nationalist view by suggesting that the munshi possessed the linguistic and scribal education of a Karanam, or historian in vernacular:

The real interlocutor for the Company official thus was the munshi, who was mediator and spokesman (vakil ), but also a key personage who could both read and draft materials in Persian, and who had a grasp over the realities of politics that men such as Warren Hast-ings, Antoine Polier, and Claude Martin found altogether indispens-able. . . . The munshi was thus the equivalent in the Mughal domains of the south Indian karanams, whose careers and worldview have recently been the object of an extensive treatment. Since such materials fell into a branch of knowledge that was regarded as secular, in the sense of being distinctly this- worldly and largely devoid of religious or theological connotations, we are not entirely surprised to find that many of their authors, includ-ing Harkaran himself, were Hindus, usually Khatris, Kayasthas, or Brahmans.³⁹

Alam and Subrahmanyam’s portrait of the munshi as a resilient, adaptive, and cosmopolitan class allows us to question received ideas about the tradition of learning of the traditional intellectual. We learn some-thing extraordinary about Braj literary culture from the fact that Lallu Jee Lal was equally at home in the narrativity of the Dastan evident in his co- writing the eloquent phrase ibtada- e dāstān इबिदा ऐ दासिाि (the beginning of the Dastan) that opens Baital Pachisi. Simultaneously, Lallu Jee Lal was able

38. I am indebted to Bruce Robbins for posing this question at the “Orientalism and the Invention of World Literatures Conference,” UCLA, May 2010.39. See Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Making of a Munshī,” Com-parative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 2 (2004): 61.


to inhabit the narrativity of purana sune sunave पुराण सुिले सुिािले in Prem-sagar.⁴⁰ One of the ways to destabilize hierarchical relations in knowledge practice is to attend to the possibilities of conversations between these munshis, and not only between sahibs and munshis. Were there intellectual exchanges between Sadal Mishra, Lallu Jee Lal, Mir Amman, Mazhar Ali Khan Vilá, Mirza Qasim Ali “Jawan,” and Munshi Beni Narayan in the lan-guage laboratory of Fort William? Is this an unarchived history?⁴¹ We have a fleeting glimpse of the give- and- take of respect and solidarity between traditional intellectuals in that intriguing phrase written in the preface of Baital Pachisi, when Mazhar Ali Khan Vilá states, “Shri Lallu Jee Lal Kavi ki madad se bayan kiya tha” श्री लललू जी लाल ्वि ्ी रदद सले बयाूं द्या था (Shree Lallu Jee Lal has helped me to narrate this Dastan).⁴² To seek and receive help in bayan बयाूं, or narration, suggests a coequal narrator. Were these intellectual and creative alliances also the first stirrings of a bond between the munshis of Fort William? I am suggesting that there are future studies of Fort William that might extrapolate a view from below of relations between sahib and munshi, textbook writer and English male student. In certain respects, Premsagar is a window into a linguistic, literary, and history- writing mentalité that simultaneously inhabited the narrativity of the Dastan and purana sune sunave. What were the processes of violence unleashed when Lallu Jee Lal affirmed this dual belonging in one transla-tion project, while disavowing this belonging in another translation project? We can more usefully read Premsagar ’s Hindi as a site of language inven-tion where radically different concepts of the vernacular remain in uneasy tension. Under the explicit guidance of Gilchrist, the Hindi vernacular was shaped through linguistic pogroms and in accordance with the scientific principle that a language is the sum total of its morphology, word choice,

40. I am grateful to the brilliant and promising dissertation student at UCLA Maryam Wasif Khan for forcing me to think through the linkages between Lallu Jee Lal as the co- writer of Baital Pachisi with the Lallu Jee Lal who emerges as author-translator of Premsagar.41. Premsagar ’s reception histories constitute an archive that also contains an unarchive, in part because the invention narrative erases many aspects of the innovative and ingenious uses of Puranic materials by munshis and their readers to forge new narra-tives for colonial subjects. I owe my exploration of the notion of the vernacular archive and unarchive to Gyan Pandey, who invited me to present a paper at his workshop, “Unarchived Histories,” in February 2011. See also Gyanendra Pandey, “Unarchived His-tories: The ‘Mad’ and the ‘Trifling,’ Economic and Political Weekly of India 47, no. 1 (Janu-ary 7, 2012).42. See Mazhar Ali Khan Vilá’s preface in The Bytal- Pacheesee; or, The Twenty- five Tales of the Demon, ed. Eshwar Chandra Vidyasagar (Calcutta: Sanskrit Press, 1852), 2.


and syntax. At the same time, Lallu Jee Lal’s training in Braj bhasa, as well as his intimate knowledge of the long history of Braj- Sanskrit and Braj- Urdu interactions, came into play in fashioning Premsagar ’s Hindi as a language that inhered in its spatiotemporal imaginary, and therefore Hindavi could not simply transition into adhunik Hindi through purges, excisions, or scien-tific retooling. In this essay, I make exploratory and tentative moves to address those questions about the complex relation between violence and enabling opportunity in Orientalism by suggesting that Orientalism’s large project of constructing the indigenous had to erase and domesticate heteroge-neous vernacular formations and focus Hindi’s attention on anxiety of loca-tion. The strange and wondrous birth of a new vernacular occurs on the streets, in the marketplace, in the verse of wordsmiths, in work songs and in the transmission of Bhāsa bhakti poetry through itinerant singers, in the spaces of domesticity, and in women’s speech. In the transfer of individual and collective linguistic creativity to the space of the Fort William labora-tory, we can note the violent transformation and divestment of agency from language users and poets in favor of granting authority to language scien-tists. The birth of the modern Hindi subject revolves, I submit, on the con-stant assembling and reassembling of individual and institutional positions around the freeing of Hindi from Yavani Bhāsa or, contrarily, the unlegis-lated mixing of Hindi with Yavani Bhāsa. Concomitantly, the modern Hindi subject carries with him or her the perceived burden of the invention nar-rative. Both the open- ended processes of lexical purges and the agonis-tic temporality of death- facing Parikshit crying aloud “saat din meh kya karoonga” साि ददि रें कया ्रूं गा (Seven days and what can I possibly do in them?) combine in the reiteration of modern Hindi as the spatiality of the indigenous and, contradictorily, modern Hindi as an alternative grammar of time for the colonial modern.

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Premsagar (1810) and Orientalist Narratives of the “Invention” of Modern Hindi by Rashmi Dube...

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