Sir James Mackintosh and the first linguistic survey of India, 1806–1811

Abstract This article recovers the history of the first systematic British attempts to survey the languages of India. Long before George Abraham Grierson proposed his monumental survey of Indian languages at the end of the nineteenth century, the Scottish judge James Mackintosh suggested a similar undertaking to the Literary Society of Bombay in 1806. This article follows those who pursued the project over the next several years. Their efforts stretched across India, the north-west frontier into Afghanistan, east into Burma, as far north as Nepal, and all the way south into Ceylon. Almost all of those involved in these efforts were Scots who were educated at the University of Edinburgh and so, as well as reconstructing a forgotten chapter in the history of British imperialism, this article supplements our pictures of the histories of imperial knowledge production and Scottish orientalism.