S03/ THE REVERSE COLONIAL PROJECT
The Reverse Colonial Project/ 2018
A video series highlighting the Indian influence on the English language.
Word in Focus: Tiffin
Year: Fall 2018
Typology: Video
Size: 1280 x 720 px
Typology: Video
Size: 1280 x 720 px
Tools: Adobe After Effects, Adobe Creative Suite
Typefaces: Neue Haas Grotesk by Max Miedinger
Typefaces: Neue Haas Grotesk by Max Miedinger
Annexing the English Language, one word at a time, the Reverse Colonial Project was an attempt at highlighting the Indian influence on the English language.
This project began with a visit to the Providence Public Library as part of Graduate Studio I, with the goal of choosing an “origin object” to set our research processes in motion. Among the displayed books at the library that day was Dr. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755 in England. As a child, I had heard from my grandfather that Dr. Johnson was known for his wit, and that his dictionary was the first to employ humor and literary quotations in its definitions of words. For example, he parted with any horticultural definitions of oats, and instead defined it as “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” And so I chose the book as the starting point for my future design investigations.
The Reverse Colonial Project/ 2018
A video series highlighting the Indian influence on the English language.
Word in Focus: Pundit
Dr. Johnson, it seems, was as conseravtive in his vision for the English language as he was witty in his definitions of words. He belonged to the prescriptivist school of lexicography, wanting to freeze linguistic mores in time. He wrote in the Plan (the document outlining his desires for the dictionary), he intended to write a “a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.”
There were several other characteristics that distinguished Johnson’s dictionary from dictionaries in the past. For one, it was quite sophisticated in its language, assuming levels of literacy that didn’t exist in England at the time. Hence, one would presume that it was a document catered to the wealthy, with its fine paper, large size, and price lending further credence to that assumption. The class implications of Johnson’s work didn’t quite end there. The lexicographer had a specific vision for its readership: he wanted the book to be read like a piece of literature, something that the working class simply couldn’t afford to do.
The Reverse Colonial Project/ 2018
A video series highlighting the Indian influence on the English language.
Word in Focus: Avatar
In response to the origin object, my plan was to stand in opposition to Johnson’s vision for the English language by speaking to the disappearing history of the Indian subcontinent’s influence on the spoken word of the colonizers. To that end, I discovered an aptly named book, Hobson Jobson, that exhaustively documented all the English words that found their roots in India and Sri Lanka. Leveraging its breath of material, I decided to reify several of its definitions in a digital format. I set up a YouTube page named the Reverse Colonial Project, and began recording five-minute-long video essays on specific words every week.
The Reverse Colonial Project/ 2018
A video series highlighting the Indian influence on the English language.
References
1 Yule, Henry, and A. C. Burnell. 2010. Hobson-Jobson: being a glossary of Anglo-Indian colloquial words and phrases and of kindred terms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.