Chapter 1 A discursive on minority studies would suggest that power in the form of knowledge was what created hegemony. So also when we look at the colonial discourse, we have come to an understanding or rather it is understood that one of the pertaining factor that sustained the domination over the colonies was ‘power’ in the form of knowledge. That very knowledge further gave the colonizers the power to ‘represent’ the colonized. Edward Said says, Orientalism is the colonizers way of, “dealing with the Orient by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, ruling over it,” or rather, “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.” (3) However even …show more content…
And how through such objectification, they subjugated the natives, I will be arguing how surveys conducted on language were used as tools to further their dominance. I will be looking at a specific region and further try to bring out the various ways in which the British administrators tried to represent the languages of that region and thereby exercising their control over the area. By taking a reconnaissance on the languages of the Ao Nagas by the colonizers I would like to contemplate on how language was perceived and how it changed after the colonial intervention among the Ao …show more content…
The difference among them is regarded just as some certain dialectal variations spoken among the various villages. However I would like to dispute such a statement because there are many instances where a Mongsen speaker cannot comprehend the language spoken in Changki and vice versa . Such kind of categorization and labeling the various dialects I argue is a colonial construct which was done by the ethnographers more for their convenience without understanding the nuances of the dialects. For instance the statement made by J.P. Mills in his, The Ao Nagas, makes it very clear. Where he wrote a chapter on the language of the region and this is what he has to say about why he attempted to ‘learn’ Mongsen and reduce it into