Languages and Nations.

• Position: Book review

Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras. By THOMAS R. TRAUTMANN. BERKELEY and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2006. Pp. xv + 304, plates. $49.95.

Nine years after publishing Aryans and British India, historian Thomas Trautmann offers a companion volume about the Dravidian south. Just as the first work highlighted the role of Sir William Jones in the formulation of an Indo-European, or "Aryan," ethno-linguistic family, the second centers on the part that Francis Whyte Ellis (1777-1819) played in the formulation of a Dravidian ethno-linguistic family. Ellis's name is less familiar than Jones's, just as Dravidian languages have been less studied than Indo-European languages, the Madras school of Orientalism less fully explored than Calcutta's Asiatic Society, and the College of Fort St. George less examined than the College of Fort William. The present book will go a considerable way toward providing a fuller picture and better balance in our understanding of ethno-linguistic studies in India during the early colonial period.

The first two chapters set the stage. Chapter one, "Explosion in the Grammar Factory," points to a worldwide and dramatic growth in the production of grammars and comparative lexicons for missionary and colonial purposes in the eighteenth century. Chapter two outlines the brilliant indigenous Indian tradition of linguistics, including grammars of Prakrits, and thus attempts more than its title, "Panini and Tolkappiyar," intimates. Indeed, only one paragraph is devoted to Tolkappiyar (p. 55; Tolkappiyar is not noted in the index). Trautmann, who admits that "[o]ne approaches the task of providing such a sketch with fear and trembling" (p. 46), was prompted to undertake this survey since "the discouraging confinement of Panini within a special branch of Indology in the imaginaire of linguistics continues," and since "most of the literature produced by the specialists is readable only by other specialists" (p. 46). Some choices, such as treating declensional patterns under the subheading "phonology" (p. 60), while introducing the Sivasutras under the subheading "grammar" (p. 49), depart from standard linguistic analysis. Yet, debunking "the powerful tendency in modern thought to treat India as a mere supplier of data for European theory in the production of knowledge" (p. 42) is a crucial part of the blending of scholarly traditions which Trautmann sets about to document.

Chapter three...