Comparing Hindi and Urdu to French and English distorts Indian literary relations
Evidence
Like most analogies this one has its uses, but one of the distortions which result from confusing an analogy with a model is that the modern languages of India are then seen as discrete and markedly differentiated entities, as if the relationship between, say, Hindi and Urdu, or between modern Hindi and the half a dozen languages which have historically composed it and continue to have extremely diverse relations with Hindi itself, as well as with each other, were of the same order as, say, that between English and French, or Italian and Spanish. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 490
Categorization
- SEED: The ‘analogy mistaken for a model’ framing is a strong spine for an essay on why comparative-literature frameworks imported from Europe misfire on Indian languages.
- XREF: connects to: Class and gender pressures, not colonialism, shaped the formative Urdu novel; European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1095
Related
- European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations (similarity 0.87)
- Indian literature’s unity is an effect of geography and the nation-state (similarity 0.81)
- English literature has shaped the very categories of modern Indian thought (similarity 0.81)
- English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.79)
- Only a materialist-comparatist frame can break the colonial grip on Indian English Studies. (similarity 0.79)
- English in India is stratified as a class boundary, not a neutral world vehicle (similarity 0.78)
- English in India is simultaneously knowledge production, global connection, and class division (similarity 0.78)
- Urdu fiction never made colonialism the dominant frame it holds in English novels (similarity 0.78)