By TCN News:
Aligarh, August 04: LAMM (Language of Advertising, Media and Market), Department of Linguistics, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), organized a talk by Charlotte Madere, University of Minnesota, USA on “Colonial, Relational Selfhood in John Borthwick Gilchrist’s the Orienti-Occidental Tuitionary Pioneer to Literary Pursuits (1816)”, today.
The speaker explored the autobiographical dimensions of John Borthwick Gilchrist’s “the Orienti-Occidental Tuitionary Pioneer to Literary Pursuits (1816)”, a compilation of reports that Gilchrist submitted to the British East India Company followed by a discussion on his approach to teaching the Hindustani language at Fort William College. This conception of self supports the assertion of “new imperial history” that India and Britain mutually constituted each other.
She positioned Gilchrist’s Tuitionary Pioneer as a step toward that division, as it occurs through literature because as scholars of Hindi and Urdu have long recognized (though to varying extents), his work as a whole fostered the separation of those languages.
In addition to focusing as these scholars do on Gilchrist’s philological capacities, Charlotte Madere, argued that the model of selfhood that his Tuitionary Pioneer presents offers valuable insight for the field of English literature into the early nineteenth-century colonial context.
Prof. S Imtiaz Hasnain, Chairman Department of Linguistics welcomed the guest speaker and requested Prof. Raj Nath Bhat of Banaras Hindu University to preside over the talk.
Dr. M J Warsi, Coordinator LAMM, briefly shed the light on the scholarship of John Borthwick Gilchrist who is better known for his study of the Hindustani language, which led to it being adopted as the lingua franca of northern India.
He also introduced the speaker Charlotte Madere of the University of Minnesota, USA.
A larger number of faculty members from Linguistics and other departments including Prof. Afrina Rizvi, Dr. Masood A. Beg, Dr. Sabahuddin Ahmad, Dr. Abdul Aziz Khan, Dr. Sadia Hasan and many research scholars from the department attended the talk.