Sumit Guha - Imperial Power and Language Ideologies in South and West Asia

The role of state agency in the spread and establishment of languages has often been invoked by scholars. Equally, inherited patterns of extant language use have been foundational to explain nationalism worldwide. Modern nation-states have themselves acted to establish, homogenize – and extirpate – favored and disfavored tongues. Sociolinguists study the valorization of certain languages as a ‘language ideology’. The concept of states as constituted by the coalitions of interest groups has long been important in political sociology and is used to explain scribal control of archives.

This talk develops a heuristic framework (or ‘model’) of these processes as they unfolded across West and South Asia. It begins with a great empire – the Achaemenid – that did not deploy its founders’ ethnic speech in governance, but instead refined an older state language, Aramaic, for that purpose. That entrenched an interest group, the scribal masters of the archive who endured through the fall of that empire and of the Hellenic one that overlay it for two centuries. Decentralization following the Arab conquest caused the emergence of ‘New Persian’. Conquest elites emerging from Inner Asia and today’s Afghanistan carried it, and its scribes into their growing domains in the Indian subcontinent.

This is where I deploy my heuristic to explain why the non-Persian Mughals transformed Persian into a state language and why even the English promoted it in the first century of their empire. This was followed by the decline of official Persian and the rise of a new language politics the late colonial vernacular world.