Colonial Indian writers adopted English chiefly for technical fields, not literature

Evidence

Only in selected social strata did any appreciable number of Indian intellectuals come to believe in the intrinsic literary superiority of the English language to the extent of desiring to write in it, even though it was generally recognized that the physical and social sciences, the technical fields, historiography, lexicography, urban planning and numerous other areas of modern knowledge were much more highly developed in Britain than in India. The sense of the superiority of Western know ledges was thus established not in the literary but, generally, in the cognitive and technical fields. This can easily be witnessed in the fact that compared to the vast numbers who wrote in the older indigenous languages and actively participated in the emergence of modern literatures in those languages, relatively few Indian writers during the colonial period took to writing poems and ficrion in English, even though many came to love this foreign literature which had in some ways become their own; whereas, in direct contrast, English became the predominant language both for the higher levels of administration and for writing in a whole range of fields other than the literary. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1182

Categorization

• XREF: Materially grounds the discourse-vs-structure question: colonized literary self-assertion stayed in indigenous languages while English served administration and science — a concrete counterpoint to discourse-determinist readings that center English literary hegemony. — connects to: Literary English teaching in colonial India served administrative and technical ends — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1178; English shaped Indian literature through imported genres rather than language. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1182; Indian reformers embraced English as a scientific window, not a literary imposition — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 519 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Indian reformers embraced English as a scientific window, not a literary imposition #corroborates (0.92) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 519
• English shaped Indian literature through imported genres rather than language. #qualifies (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1182
• Western literary forms replaced indigenous genres down to the level of language itself #complicates (0.72) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1140