Colonial education split Indian intellectuals into stratified, class-based functions

Evidence

From contradictions of this kind came broad, essentially class-based divisions of intellectual function among the new intelligentsias which arose out of the apparatuses of colonial education. The development of these intelligentsias was highly uneven both regionally and sectorally, and we still need far more accurate monographic studies of the social history of their development in terms of regional roots, class origins, religious or caste affiliations, social mores, schooling patterns, and linguistic competences. So one can never be sure, but certain patterns can be summarized. The dominant, more privileged strata among these new intelligentsias – often reflecting a nexus of class, caste, college degrees, and the upper layers of colonial service – acknowledged the three-part division, came to adopt English as the main language of public function, but sometimes learned Sanskrit or/and Persian also, as the languages of scholastic and courtly eminence in India’s own past, while retaining the indigenous language for common discourse in household and community. These clusters tended to produce not ‘writers’, in the literary sense, but ‘scholars’ in the Humanities and the Social Sciences – or (a favourite pastime) translators of either a modern European text into an Indian language or a classical Indian text into English, more or less in the Orientalist genre. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 522

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial India’s dominant intelligentsia adopted a stratified three-track language division — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1185

Related

• Colonial India’s dominant intelligentsia adopted a stratified three-track language division (similarity 0.95)
• Colonial India’s national intelligentsia came from upper castes and state-linked professions (similarity 0.82)
• English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial intelligentsias are structurally compelled toward the colonizer’s language in public life (similarity 0.81)
• India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages (similarity 0.81)
• English in India is stratified as a class boundary, not a neutral world vehicle (similarity 0.81)
• English literature has shaped the very categories of modern Indian thought (similarity 0.80)
• Only a materialist-comparatist frame can break the colonial grip on Indian English Studies. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonialism produced both a decrying intelligentsia and a false nationalism (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial schooling shaped even its most successful products into a colonially formed intelligentsia (similarity 0.79)
• Early Indian English teachers wrote in their own tongues while teaching the English canon (similarity 0.79)
• Indian print literatures were assembled by culturally beleaguered petty-bourgeois str (similarity 0.78)
• Indian reformers embraced English as a scientific window, not a literary imposition (similarity 0.78)