UCLA

The present cultural geographies of South Asia were first forged in the crucibles of South Asian nationalisms of India and Pakistan in the early 20th century. Roughly from 1900 to 1950, South Asian intellectuals began using vernacular languages to create cultural and political geographies and spatial imaginaries within South Asia. This dissertation specifically asks three questions, namely what made it necessary to draw such cultural geographies in South Asia in the nationalist period in the early 20th century, what these cultural geographies meant, and finally, why languages were at the center of such considerations of cultural geographies. In asking these questions, this dissertation titled Philological Encounters and the Making of Cultural Geographies of South Asia, 1750-1950 examines the encounter between a North Indian textual ecumene, and 19th-century colonial liberalism within the realm of discourses about language. I examine the ways in which this encounter shaped the cultural geographies and spatial imaginations of North India. In examining these discourses, this dissertation details the accretion of ideas about North Indian languages that resulted from the South Asian encounter with colonialism in the late 18th and 19th-centuries. First, this dissertation argues that late 18th and early 19th centuries colonial encounter concertedly added discourses regarding cartography and liberalism and utilitarianism to North Indian languages. In addition to this cartographic specification, 19th-century liberalism presented a different way of conceiving the relationship between language, people, land, and space than had previously existed, thereby connecting land to language through customary usage. It was through this ‘micro’, and ‘macro’ mapping that discourses regarding language began to mirror discourses regarding ethnicity and territory. The mapping of language through the sciences of cartography and through the politics of liberalism had a profound effect on the ways in which North Indian intellectuals conceived of their space and place in North India during the nationalist period. Second, this dissertation argues that in addition to the idea of cartography, languages throughout the 19th century were rendered as having familial relations. The metaphor of family concertedly entered discourses regarding languages in North India. Discourses regarding ethnic unions and families began to shape the discourse of native scholars during the nationalist period. Finally, this dissertation argues that the 19th century colonial encounter made these philological transformations and cultural geographies part of state sciences. It was these transformations—from linguistic geography to cartography, and from ecumenical disputations to ethnic discourse, and the governmentalization of such discourses as part of state sciences—that laid the conditions for North Indian intellectuals in the early 20th century to conceive of cultural geographies of language in the Nationalist period. It is also because cultural geographies of language became part of administrative discourses that early 20th century North Indian intellectuals began to contend with administrative geographies of language by pitting their own ideas of cultural geography against administrative ideas of language.