British administrative needs, not nationalist impulses, generated early Urdu prose production

Evidence

That history we shall ignore, but a certain material condition of that production can be specified: many - though by no means all - of those prose narratives of the opening decades of the nineteenth century were written and published for the simple reason that a certain Scotsman, John Gilchrist, had argued within his own circles that employees of the East India Company could not hope to administer their Indian possessions on the basis of Farsi alone, and certainly not English, so that Fort William College was established in 1800 for the education of the British in Indian languages. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 450

Categorization

• XREF: Directly central to the reader’s project on strategic essentialism vs. materialist critique — Ahmad’s whole point is that material/administrative conditions, not discourse of nationhood, shaped this literature. — connects to: Urdu prose narratives bear no trace of colonial resistance or national sentiment; Colonial administrative needs for language training generated Indian prose fiction — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 192; Colonial-era Urdu prose narratives aimed to preserve tradition, not engage colonial rule — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 453
• SEED: Essay angle: materialist counter-cases to discourse-first reading, where a library/archive was built by colonial administrative enterprise rather than nationalist resistance.

Broader Connections

• Colonial administrative needs for language training generated Indian prose fiction #corroborates (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 192