A materialist dialectical history of Indian literature has barely begun

Evidence

One might, therefore, venture the generalization that the much more difficult task of assembling a history of ‘Indian Literature’ which does not derive its sense of unity from some transhistoric metaphysic nor from the territoriality of the existing nation-state, nor by simply assembling discrete histories of the different linguistic traditions, but traces the dialectic of unity and difference – through systematic perodization of multiple linguistic overlaps, and by grounding that dialectic in the history of material productions, ideological struggles, competing conceptions of class and community and gender, elite offensives and popular resistances, overlaps of cultural vocabularies and performative genres, and histories of orality and writing and print – has barely begun. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 515

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘checklist’ of what a genuinely dialectical literary history must include — unity and difference grounded in material productions, ideological struggles, class/community/gender, orality and print — is a dense methodological program, itself a model for any national-literature project.
• XREF: connects to: Indian literary historiography fails through idealist and Brahminical premises — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1089; India lacks institutions to systematize its multilingual literary knowledges — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1093; A grounded Indian literary history must trace material dialectics of unity and difference — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1164

Related

• A grounded Indian literary history must trace material dialectics of unity and difference (similarity 0.95)
• Indian literary historiography fails through idealist and Brahminical premises (similarity 0.88)
• India lacks institutions to systematize its multilingual literary knowledges (similarity 0.84)
• Indian literature’s unity is an effect of geography and the nation-state (similarity 0.82)
• Literary periodization must rest on culture-wide material shifts, not chronology (similarity 0.82)
• Pre-modern Indian literary culture was polyglot, not unilingual (similarity 0.81)
• European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations (similarity 0.81)
• Only a materialist-comparatist frame can break the colonial grip on Indian English Studies. (similarity 0.81)
• India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages (similarity 0.80)
• Aggregating discrete literatures into ‘Indian’ is a qualitative, not additive shift (similarity 0.80)
• Literature and culture are not coterminous with language and state boundaries (similarity 0.79)
• English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.79)
• English literature has shaped the very categories of modern Indian thought (similarity 0.78)