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🪵 The Threshold

English's colonial literary impact came through genres, not composition

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tagsja-picks, xref, deepthinking, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@ahmad_theory_1992, loc. 521

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English’s colonial literary impact came through genres, not composition

Evidence

The sense of the superiority of Western knowledges 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 fiction 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. In the field of literature, English had its greatest impact not directly as a language of composition but through some specific genres which the Indian writers now encountered for the first time; the Homeric epic, the sonnet, tragedy in both its Greek and its Shakespearian variants, blank verse, the prose essay, Bunyan-like allegory, the historical romance, the many kinds of prose fiction. Virtually all these compositional forms were tried, at one time or another, by one writer or another. But the encounter that proved decisive was with realism, especially in its Russian and French variants, albeit in English translation. Most other forms came and went, but realism remained, mainly because its ways of apprehending the world corresponded to that historic moment within Indian society when it was undergoing its first bourgeois upheavals, obtaining its own class structure and household arrangements of the capitalist type, forming its own self-consciousness as a society beset with revolutionary crises, albeit in a colonial setting. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 521

Categorization

  • XREF: Connects to theories of literary form as responsive to social conditions, e.g. Lukacs and the rise of the realist novel tied to bourgeois emergence. — connects to: English shaped Indian literature through imported genres rather than language. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1182; Decolonized writers transformed English fiction via imported-colonial language — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 288
  • DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely nuanced causal argument: realism is selected not by imperial fiat but because its cognitive form matches a specific local conjuncture — a claim that reworks both naive diffusionism and nativist rejection.
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