Taming the ‘rude’ and ‘barbarous’ tongues of the frontier: Bor Saheps, Sutu Saheps and their encounters with languages, scripts, and texts (1835–1904)

Abstract

This article looks at an alternative history of colonial expansion in the North-East Frontier region during the nineteenth century by exploring the crucial role of colonial officers deployed there, who were locally known as Bor/bura saheps, sutu saheps or simply saheps. Scholarship on these officials has studied their roles as diplomats, administrators and military commanders, while this study instead examines their encounters with local languages, scripts and texts as well as their linguistic projects in the former frontier state of Manipur. The region was described as a recalcitrant frontier space, inhabited by ‘savages’ speaking ‘rude’ and ‘barbarous’ tongues. Yet the saheps’ knowledge of its languages, scripts, and local literature was vital for information-gathering as well as for their daily administrative work. This article raises questions about the ramifications of these colonial linguistic projects on the process of colonial expansion and consolidation and the concomitant establishment of language hegemony. It argues that the early linguistic projects were not only an indispensable instrument for colonial conquest but also produced rudimentary philological knowledge of the languages of the region, calcifying differences and hierarchies along linguistic lines and contributing to the methodical state-funded linguistic projects undertaken in the early twentieth century.