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🪵 The Threshold

Early Indian English teachers wrote in their own tongues while teaching the English canon

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, factual_claims, trade, singleton, category/factual-claims
aliases@ahmad_theory_1992, loc. 537

2 min read

Early Indian English teachers wrote in their own tongues while teaching the English canon

Evidence

A typical college teacher of English in an earlier generation was an activist of the nationalist or communist parties (sometimes both), or a crusader for civic reform. He was likely to be teaching English mainly to earn a living and to satisfy his love of this foreign literature which he had in some ways made his own, but he was likely either not to write at all or to write about the literature of his own indigenous culture, probably in the language of his family; equally likely, he would teach English in accordance with the English literary canon but write not criticism, not English, but poetry or fiction in his own tongue. This kind of bilinguality – the felt cultural distance between the language of the taught text and the language of one’s own sense and inwardness, hence one’s own writing – was all the more probable if he did not come from the upper class, and virtually inevitable if he were of the progressive political persuasion. So readily and completely would his own social milieu then reaffirm that cultural distance that he would not feel it, subjectively, as a split within himself. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 537

Categorization

  • XREF: Connects to the general theme of colonial education producing bilingual, split-voiced intellectuals — echoes of Ngugi wa Thiong’o on the language question and postcolonial ambivalence toward the colonizer’s literature.
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