Colonialism produced both a decrying intelligentsia and a false nationalism
Evidence
This ‘assault’, then, contributed to the widening of cultural horizons: a ‘progressive’ role, clearly, even though one has considerable reservations about some simplification here. But Namboodripad then specifies yet another dialectic specific to colonialism: the growth, on the one hand, of a dependent, comprador intelligentsia – ‘the foreign and foreign-trained intellectual elite’ who emerged as ‘the dominant force moving the new bourgeois literature and culture of India’ and were ‘interested in decrying all that was Indian … as “barbarian” and “uncivilized”’ – and, on the other, a ‘false nationalism’ which defended everything Indian, old and new, and relied for its arguments, ironically, upon that other body of imperialist scholarship which had taken to idealizing ‘ancient Hindu society’. The praxis of the socialist revolution is then seen, in the closing paragraphs of Namboodripad’s brief text, as the negation of the whole of that colonial dynamic, and as the precondition for ‘that final defeat of the stagnating and decadent society and culture, inherited by the Indian people from their several-centuries-old development since the pre-historic tribal societies were disintegrated and class society was formed under the garb of caste society’. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 479
Categorization
- XREF: The twin poles of colonial reaction echo Said’s Orientalism and connect to ‘On Sacrifice’ type twin-dialectic analyses.
Related
- Said centrally shaped literary theory on colonialism after Orientalism (similarity 0.80)
- Colonial and post-colonial categories mask divergent intellectual trajectories spanning both eras (similarity 0.80)
- Colonial education split Indian intellectuals into stratified, class-based functions (similarity 0.79)
- Anti-colonial critique before Said was overwhelmingly Marxist-affiliated (similarity 0.79)
- Othering and essentialism predate and exceed Europe; colonial capitalism gave them world-historical force (similarity 0.79)