English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia.

Evidence

The only national literary intelligentsia that exists in India today – an intelligentsia constituted as a distinct social stratum and dispersed in all parts of the country, which brings to bear upon its vocation and its work a shared body of knowledge, shared presumptions and a shared language of mutual exchange – is the one that is fairly well grounded in English; and the only literature that is taught through the length and breadth of the country is English Literature – and that too not in the shape mainly of what gets written in India but of what comes from elsewhere. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 534

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Anderson’s point on colonial administrative languages; also echoes Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s critique of English dominance. — connects to: India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1211

Related

• India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages (similarity 0.96)
• English in India is simultaneously knowledge production, global connection, and class division (similarity 0.88)
• English literature has shaped the very categories of modern Indian thought (similarity 0.86)
• English in India is stratified as a class boundary, not a neutral world vehicle (similarity 0.86)
• English was justified as the necessary glue for a fragmented nation (similarity 0.85)
• Only a materialist-comparatist frame can break the colonial grip on Indian English Studies. (similarity 0.85)
• Indian literature’s unity is an effect of geography and the nation-state (similarity 0.85)
• English is structurally the worst Indian language for conveying India’s oral literature (similarity 0.84)
• European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations (similarity 0.84)
• India lacks institutions to systematize its multilingual literary knowledges (similarity 0.84)
• Enumerative national literature categories derive their unity from geography, not composition (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial India’s dominant intelligentsia adopted a stratified three-track language division (similarity 0.83)
• Aggregating discrete literatures into ‘Indian’ is a qualitative, not additive shift (similarity 0.82)
• Indian reformers never rejected English, wanting it only as epistemic access (similarity 0.82)
• English was confined to elite higher education while vernacular schooling served the masses (similarity 0.82)