Colonial administrative needs for language training generated Indian prose fiction

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. For some time Farsi remained the most popular of all the languages taught at the College, but Gilchrist fancied himself as a scholar and exponent of the indigenous vernaculars, Urdu among them. He hired some of the most erudite men of his time and got them to write whatever they wanted, so long as they wrote in accessible prose. It was a stroke of luck even more than genius, for what came out of that enterprise was the mobilization of the whole range of speech patterns and oral vocabularies existing at that time (the range of vocabularies was in keeping with the pedagogical purpose) and the construction of narratives which either transcribed the great classics of oral literature or condensed the fictions that already existed in Arabic or Farsi and were therefore part of the cultural life of the North Indian upper classes. Thus the most famous of these narratives, Meer Amman’s Bagh-o-Bahaar, was a condensation, in superbly colloquial Urdu, of the monumental Qissa-e-Chahaar-Dervish, which Faizi, the great scholar, had composed some centuries earlier in Farsi for the amusement of Akbar, the Mughal king who was almost an exact contemporary of the British Queen Elizabeth I. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 192

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that British administrative needs accidentally jump-started Urdu prose fiction is striking — worth checking against the fuller history of late-18th-century Urdu prose to see how causal the connection really is.
• XREF: A striking inversion of the usual colonial-power narrative: here the colonizer’s need to learn local languages, not the colonized’s reception of metropolitan forms, drives literary production. — connects to: British administrative needs, not nationalist impulses, generated early Urdu prose production — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 450
• SEED: Essay angle: colonial language pedagogy as an accidental engine of literary canon formation — Fort William College as a case of institutional contingency shaping national literature.

Related

• British administrative needs, not nationalist impulses, generated early Urdu prose production (similarity 0.92)
• Urdu prose narratives bear no trace of colonial resistance or national sentiment (similarity 0.81)
• Literary study entered colonial curricula primarily as a language-teaching tool (similarity 0.78)