"Corrupt as this dialect is, it will not be totally useless". Colonialism and an "anomalous" Indian language in Hadley's Grammatical remarks

This contribution, based on Captain George Hadley's Grammatical remarks on the practical and vulgar dialect of the Indostan language commonly called Moors (1772), casts light on the perception of "anomalies" in a vernacular Indian language, and the efforts to "reduce it to a system", in order to make it fit European (i.e., essentially Latin) grammatical standards. In an intellectual context admitting a hierarchy of languages according to their varying supposed "perfection," Hadley's project was to explain Moors' seeming "corruption" and to reframe it using a more understandable organization of the language. In doing so, however, he powerfully contributed to further "anomalizing" that language from the reader-learner's perspective, insisting on its shortcomings, flaws, or introducing uneasy new grammatical categories - reinforcing, the colonial perceptions about this "most barbarous language."