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Sir James Mackintosh and the first linguistic survey of India, 1806–1811
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2025
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.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Asiatic Society.
References
1 J. Majeed, Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (Abingdon, 2018); J. Majeed, Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (Abingdon, 2018).
2 G. Campbell (ed.), Specimens of Languages of India (Calcutta, 1874); Majeed, Colonialism and Knowledge, p. 2.
3 Friedrich Max Müller to G. A. Grierson, 21 August 1886, BL, George Grierson Papers, MSS EUR E223/299.
4 For mentions of Mackintosh and the survey, see, among others, J. Ehrlich, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2023), pp. 142–143; R. Rocher and L. Rocher, The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company (Abingdon, 2012), p. 72; J. Bastin, Sir Stamford Raffles and Some of his Friends and Contemporaries: A Memoir of the Founder of Singapore (Singapore, 2019), p. 37, n. 70; B. P. Cooper, Travel, Travel Writing, and British Political Economy: ‘Instructions for Travellers,’ circa 1750–1850 (London, 2022), p. 118; P. Pels, ‘From texts to bodies: Brian Houghton Hodgson and the emergence of ethnology in India’, in Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania, (eds.) J. van Bremen and A. Shimizu (Richmond, 1999), p. 81.
5 The book that probably best represents the Foucauldian–Saidian synthesis is B. S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996). For an important work on the history of colonial linguistics aiming to see beyond the knowledge–power nexus, see R. Steadman-Jones, Colonialism and Grammatical Representation: John Gilchrist and the Analysis of the ‘Hindustani’ Language in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2007).
6 See especially T. R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, 1997); T. R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (Berkeley, 2006).
7 See, e.g., F. Solleveld, ‘Expanding the comparative view: Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache and its language materials’, Historiographia Linguistica 47 (2020), pp. 49–78; I. F. McNeely, ‘The last project of the republic of letters: Wilhelm von Humboldt’s global linguistics’, Journal of Modern History 92 (2020), pp. 241–273.
8 F. Adelung, Catherinens der Grossen Verdienste um die vergleichende Sprachenkunde (St. Petersburg, 1815).
9 McNeely, ‘Last project of the republic of letters’, p. 255.
10 Adelung, Catherinens der Grossen Verdienste, pp. 93–95.
11 Mémoires de l’Académie celtique (Paris, 1807), vol. i, pp. 99–134. On the Académie celtique’s linguistic interests, see I. Stewart, ‘Language and the national past in Napoleonic France: reassessing the Académie celtique, 1805–1813’, French History 35 (2021), pp. 219–242.
12 In his history of Catherine’s project, Friedrich Adelung noted Mackintosh’s interest in contributing to the project. See Adelung, Catherinens der Grossen Verdienste, pp. 190–191; Asiatic Annual Register 10 (1811), p. 47.
13 L. Andersson Burnett and B. Buchan, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750-1820 (New Haven, 2025); see also B. Buchan, ‘Scottish medical ethnography: travel, stadial theory and the history of race, c. 1770-1805’, Modern Intellectual History 17 (2020), pp. 919–949; L. Andersson Burnett and B. Buchan, ‘The Edinburgh connection: Linnaean natural history, Scottish moral philosophy and the colonial implications of Enlightenment thought’, in Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge, (eds.) H. Hodacs, K. Nyberg, and S. van Damme (Oxford, 2018), pp. 161–186.
14 On their influence, see, e.g., I. McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future (Cambridge, MA, 2013); B. Buchan and S. Sebastiani, ‘“No distinction of black or fair”: the natural history of race in Adam Ferguson’s lectures on moral philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 82 (2021), pp. 207–229; C. Bradford Bow, Dugald Stewart’s Empire of the Mind: Moral Education in the Late Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford, 2023); I. Stewart, ‘Dugald Stewart and racial theory in the late Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas (forthcoming).
15 See J. Mill, The History of British India, three vols (London, 1817), vol. i, bk 2.
16 On colonial knowledge production and the involvement of local intellectuals, see, e.g., P. B. Wagoner, ‘Precolonial intellectuals and the production of colonial knowledge’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003), pp. 783–814.
17 K. Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke, 2007), especially pp. 10–14.
18 See, among others, C. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge, 1997); M. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1763–1843 (Chicago, 1997); A. Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (London, 2016); Rocher and Rocher, Making of Western Indology; J. Patterson, Religion, Enlightenment, and Empire: British Interpretations of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2021).
19 Ehrlich, East India Company, pp. 2–3.
20 Ibid, pp. 138–149.
21 Ibid, p. 146.
22 Though see the important article J. Rendall, ‘Scottish orientalism: from Robertson to James Mill’, Historical Journal 25 (1982), pp. 43–69, for Mackintosh’s place in Scottish orientalism. On Mackintosh’s intellectual interests more broadly, see J. Rendall, ‘The Political Activities of Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832): A Study of Whiggism between 1789 and 1832’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University College London, 1972).
23 J. Mackintosh, Plan of a Comparative Vocabulary of Indian Languages: Read at the Literary Society of Bombay, on the 26th May, 1806 (Bombay, 1806). This was reprinted at the Hindoostanee Press in Calcutta in 1808.
24 Ibid, p. 3.
25 See B. Smith Barton, New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (Philadelphia, 1797).
26 Mackintosh, Plan, p. 6.
27 John Leyden noticed that ‘Tamul’ was ‘an original language totally unlike any other, not even excepting Sanscrit and entering deeply into the composition of several other dialects in the Peninsula’ (see John Leyden to William Erskine, 15 September 1804, BL Add Ms 26561, f. 50r), but it remained generally unrecognised until 1811 and unproven in print until 1816; see Trautmann, Languages and Nations.
28 Mackintosh, Plan, p. 6, original italics.
29 Ibid, p. 8.
30 Ibid, p. 9, original italics.
31 Ibid, pp. 15–19.
32 Ibid, pp. 9–10.
33 Ibid, p. 10.
34 James Mackintosh to Lord Minto, 31 July 1807, NLS Ms 11726, f. 11r.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 E. S. Frissell to James Mackintosh, 13 June 1806, BL Add Ms 78765, ff. 70r–81v. For an obituary, see Monthly Magazine 25 (1808), p. 378.
38 Frissell to James Mackintosh, 13 June 1806, BL Add Ms 78765, ff 72r–v; E. S. Frissell to James Mackintosh, 10 August 1806, BL Add Ms 26605, ff. 14r–22r.
39 ‘Sindee vocabulary’, BL Add Ms 26605, ff. 23r–30v. The report is signed ‘T. M.’ and the table of contents at the beginning of Ms 26605 names him as ‘Dr. Thomas Marshall’. He was the author of Statistical Reports of the Pergunnahs (Bombay, 1822).
40 ‘Sindee vocabulary’, BL Add Ms 26605, f. 29r.
41 BL Add Ms 26605, f. 31r–32v. On Carey, see D. Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley, 1969), pp. 51–56, 64.
42 Francis Irvine to James Mackintosh, 10 August 1807, BL Add Ms 26605, ff. 33r–34v.
43 D. Doig, Two Letters on the Savage State, Addressed to the Late Lord Kames (London, 1792).
44 Francis Irvine to Alexander Irvine, 23 December 1802, BL, IOR, MSS PHOTO EUR 355. These are photocopies of letters sold through Bonham’s and, apart from the first five sheets, are not paginated.
45 Rendall, ‘Scottish orientalism’.
46 Francis Irvine to Alexander Irvine, 3 January 1804, BL, IOR, MSS PHOTO EUR 355.
47 Francis Irvine to Alexander Irvine, 5 January 1804, BL, IOR, MSS PHOTO EUR 355.
48 Steadman-Jones, Colonialism and Grammatical Representation.
49 Francis Irvine to Alexander Irvine, 5 January 1804, BL, IOR, MSS PHOTO EUR 355.
50 Ibid, original italics.
51 This was not out of the ordinary for practically minded aspiring company employees, but seems notable for someone interested in linguistic study for its own sake.
52 Francis Irvine to Alexander Irvine, 18 March 1805, BL, IOR, MSS PHOTO EUR 355.
53 See, e.g., Irvine’s reference to Jones’s eighth discourse in F. Irvine, ‘On the similitude between the Gipsy and Hindoostanee languages’, Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay 1 (1819), p. 59. See I. Stewart, ‘After Sir William Jones: British linguistic scholarship and European intellectual history’, Journal of Modern History 95 (2023), pp. 808–846, for the Jonesian influence on the Scots.
54 Irvine, ‘On the similitude’, p. 59.
55 Ibid, p. 68.
56 Francis Irvine to James Mackintosh, 10 August 1807, BL Add Ms 26605, ff. 33r–v.
57 See the English translation, H. M. Gottlieb Grellman, Dissertation on the Gipsies, (trans.) M. Raper (London, 1787); W. Marsden, ‘Observations on the language of the people commonly called Gypsies’, Archaeologia 7 (1785), pp. 382–386.
58 Francis Irvine to James Mackintosh, 10 August 1807, BL Add Ms 26605, ff. 33v–34r.
59 Ibid, f. 34v.
60 Irvine to Mackintosh [?], no date, BL Add Ms 26605, f. 35r.
61 Mackintosh, Plan, p. 10.
62 Francis Irvine to Alexander Irvine, 19 October 1808, BL, MSS PHOTO EUR 355.
63 See, e.g., S. M. Hanifi (ed.), Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia: Pioneer of British Colonial Rule (London, 2019).
64 For an accessible overview of Afghanistan and the East India Company at the time, see W. Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839–1842 (London, 2013).
65 Francis Irvine to Alexander Irvine, 19 October 1808, BL, MSS PHOTO EUR 355.
66 Irvine to Erskine, 2 October 1809, BL Add Ms 26605, ff. 45r–v.
67 Ibid, ff. 45r–v.
68 Ibid, ff. 45v–46r.
69 Ibid, f. 46v.
70 Ibid, ff. 47r–v.
71 Irvine to Erskine, 25 January 1810, BL Add Ms 26605, ff. 52r–v.
72 Irvine to Erskine, 24 February 1810, BL Add Ms 26605, ff. 53r–56v.
73 Francis Irvine to Alexander Irvine, 5 August, 21 September 1810, BL, MSS PHOTO EUR 355.
74 Irvine to Erskine, 16 August 1810, BL Add Ms 26605, f. 72r. Irvine’s unfinished work of political economy is preserved in Lord Minto’s Papers in NLS Ms 11727.
75 James Mackintosh to Lord Minto, 31 July 1807, NLS Ms 11726, ff. 10r–11v.
76 Transcript of a letter from Jonathan Duncan to George Barlow, 7 August, 1806, NLS Ms 11726, f. 28r.
77 NLS Ms 11726, f. 28v.
78 Ibid, ff. 24r–v.
79 Ibid, f. 28v.
80 Copy of Thomas Brown to David Brown, 7 August 1806, NLS Ms 11726, f. 29r.
81 William Hunter to Thomas Brown, 24 December 1807, NLS Ms 11726, ff. 32r–v.
82 On Colebrooke and the Plan, see Rocher and Rocher, Making of Western Indology, p. 72.
83 Copy of Colebrooke’s Minute of 15 August 1807, NLS Ms 11726, ff. 32v–33r.
84 T. E. Colebrooke, Miscellaneous Essays, by H.T. Colebrooke, with Life of the Author, three vols (London, 1873), vol. i, p. 229.
85 Copy of Colebrooke’s Minute of 15 August 1807, NLS Ms 11726, ff. 32v–33r.
86 On Leyden, see I. M. Brown, ‘John Leyden (1775–1811): His Life and Works’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1967).
87 John Leyden to Olivia Raffles, ‘God knows what day’ October 1806, NLS Ms 971, f. 47r.
88 J. Leyden, ‘On the languages and literature of the Indo-Chinese nations’, Asiatic Researches 10 (1811), pp. 158– 289.
89 F. Gladwin, A Vocabulary, English and Persian (Calcutta, 1791).
90 Copy of Colebrooke’s Minute of 15 August 1807, NLS Ms 11726, f. 34r.
91 Colebrooke, Miscellaneous Essays, vol. i, p. 229.
92 On Mackenzie, see T. Wolffhardt, Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the Early Colonial State, and the Comprehensive Survey of India, (trans.) J. Rafferty (New York, 2017). On Buchanan, see M. Vicziany, ‘Imperialism, botany and statistics in early nineteenth-century India: the surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762-1829)’, Modern Asian Studies 20 (1986), pp. 625–660; M. F. Watson and H. J. Noltie, ‘Career, collections, reports and publications of Dr Francis Buchanan (later Hamilton, 1762-1829): natural history studies in Nepal, Burma (Myanmar), Bangladesh and India’, Part 1, Annals of Science 73 (2016), pp. 392–424.
93 Copy of Colebrooke’s Minute of 15 August 1807, NLS Ms 11726, f. 34r.
94 F. Buchanan, An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal (Edinburgh, 1819).
95 F. Buchanan, ‘A comparative vocabulary of some of the languages spoken in the Burma empire’, Asiatick Researches 5 (1799), pp. 219–240.
96 Ibid.
97 ‘An account of a journey undertaken by order of the Board of Trade through the provinces of Chittagong, and Tiperah, in order to look out for the places most proper for the cultivation of Spices by Francis Buchanan M.D.’, BL Add Ms 19286, ff. 34v, 35r–36v, 50v–51r, 62v–63r.
98 F. Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, three vols (London, 1807).
99 BL MSS EUR G16; BL MSS EUR G13; BL MSS EUR G24.
100 Royal Asiatic Society, collection of papers donated by Sir Alexander Johnston, GB 891, AJ/1.
101 ‘English-Sinhalese-Pali-Sanskrit vocabularies’, Royal Asiatic Society, collection of papers donated by Sir Alexander Johnston, GB 891, AJ/1, item 5.
102 ‘A Tamil vocabulary’, Royal Asiatic Society, collection of papers donated by Sir Alexander Johnston, GB 891, AJ/1.
103 Baron W. Humboldt, ‘An essay on the best means of ascertaining the affinities of oriental languages’, Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1829), pp. 213–221. This was printed in a separate pamphlet: Baron W. Humboldt, An Essay on the Best Means of Ascertaining the Affinities of Oriental Languages (London, 1828), which is the version from which I quote here. On the relationship between Johnston and Humboldt, see P. Swiggers, W. Thomas, and T. Van Hal, ‘On the “Affinities of oriental languages”: Wilhelm von Humboldt and his British connections’, in Missionary Linguistics VI, (ed.) O. Zwartjes and P. De Troia (Amsterdam, 2021), pp. 265–287.
104 Humboldt, Essay, p. 3.
105 Ibid, pp. 5–6.
106 For a summary of Humboldt’s linguistic work, see J. Trabant, Weltansichten: Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachprojekt (Munich, 2012).
107 Humboldt, Essay, pp. 10–11.
108 Alexander Johnston to Wilhelm von Humboldt, 30 January 1829, Berlin, Archiv Schloss Tegel, Inv.-Nr. 1056, Bl. 41/43.
109 In this era, the fundamental work on this dimension was F. Schlegel, Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (Heidelberg, 1808).
110 Trautmann, Languages and Nations, especially pp. 21–34.
111 Humboldt, Essay, p. 11, n. 1.