Colonial birdwatching

Abstract The emergence of the modern natural science has been inextricably linked to European colonial expansion, as scholars of ‘Colonialism and its forms of knowledge’ (Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The British in India . Princeton: Princeton University Press) have shown. The exchange between Western metropolitan and indigenous local knowledge (e.g., Raj, Kapil. 2007. Relocating modern science: Circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 . Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan; Winterbottom, Anna. 2016. Hybrid knowledge in the early East India Company world . London: Palgrave Macmillan) thus took place in a highly multilingual and multicultural contact situation, with linguistic consequences both for the nascent local variety of English in general as well as for the specialised register of scientific writing in particular. This paper will focus on the development of one of the defining aspects of the scientific register, namely the emergence of specialised lexis within a colonial and multilingual context. It will concentrate on a particular nexus in the colonial history of ornithology in India (cf. Ali, Salim. 1979. Bird study in India: Its history and its importance. India International Centre Quarterly 6(2). 127–139), drawing on the perspectives of natural history, colonial history, the history of early Indian English, contact linguistics, and last but not least the history of art: The natural history drawings commissioned by Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore (British Library, Raja Serfojee of Tanjore Collection . NHD7/1001–1116 (1801–1803)). What makes this “small visual archive” (Lowther, David. 2023. Encountering ‘colonial science’ in the visual archive: The natural history paintings of Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore (1777–1832). In Rachel Bryant Davies & Erin Johnson-Williams (eds.), Intersectional encounters in the nineteenth-century archive: New essays on power and discourse , 91–114. London: Bloomsbury) so fascinating are the comments in English added by Serfoji himself. The collection contains 31 drawings of birds, inscribed with their names. This paper will trace the multilingual origins of these names in the interaction of local knowledge with international scholarly networks. In proceeding, it will also cast a spotlight on the multilingual communities of practice in which Serfoji participated. It will also offer a glimpse at early Indian English as a contact language in a multilingual linguistic ecology.