Colonial administration simply could not operate in its own imperial languages
Evidence
But the actual elaboration of colonial society was contradictory, and both the Christian missionary and the colonial officer were soon to discover that neither Sanskrit nor Persian nor even English could serve at the time as a language of command, in the administration of souls and bodies, so far as the masses of Indians, or even the colonial clerks, were concerned; they had to be spoken to in the languages they themselves spoke – in what we now call ‘the regional languages’. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 516
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the theme of language of command from Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ and to Gramscian hegemony debates about rule through subordinate languages.
Related
- An empire’s number of colonies shaped whether it trained administrators in native languages. (similarity 0.80)
- Colonial languages taught for administration carried revolutionary ideas that doomed empire (similarity 0.80)
- Colonial language legacies still govern which texts circulate. (similarity 0.80)
- Colonial English persists as an instrument of bourgeois state centralization. (similarity 0.79)
- Colonial rule of India by its own laws required European mastery of Sanskrit. (similarity 0.79)
- English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.79)
- Colonial conquests powered the scientific comparative study of languages. (similarity 0.79)
- Post-colonial state expansion deepened rather than reversed colonial language structures (similarity 0.78)
- The scale of an empire determined whether a single administrative language was feasible (similarity 0.78)