Colonial India’s national intelligentsia came from upper castes and state-linked professions

Evidence

During the colonial period itself, the ‘national’ intelligentsia which operated on the all-India scale, and which very much included some of the fractions of the nationalist intelligentsia, had arisen predominantly from the upper and middle castes and from inside the pursuits and professions that were closest to the institutions of the (colonial) state: administration, law, commerce, English-language journalism, teaching staffs of colleges and universities. There was already, during the colonial period, a distinct hierarchical divide between the ‘national’ functions of the intelligentsia, which were carried out in English, and the regional functions, which were carried out in the indigenous languages – sometimes by the same people, but at distinct sites. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 119

Categorization

• XREF: The caste-profession-state correlation echoes the class-reproduction argument in Bourdieu and the reader’s interest in how institutional structures shape who gets to write. — connects to: Genius requires belonging to a privileged caste that treats the universe as its own. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1951; Bhakti offered colonial intellectuals a democratizing, anti-Brahminical medieval inheritance — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1193

Related

• Colonial education split Indian intellectuals into stratified, class-based functions (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial India’s dominant intelligentsia adopted a stratified three-track language division (similarity 0.81)
• Bhakti offered colonial intellectuals a democratizing, anti-Brahminical medieval inheritance (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial intelligentsias are structurally compelled toward the colonizer’s language in public life (similarity 0.79)
• English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial schooling shaped even its most successful products into a colonially formed intelligentsia (similarity 0.79)
• India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages (similarity 0.78)