English in India is simultaneously knowledge production, global connection, and class division

Evidence

In present-day India, surely, English occupies a much more contradictory space: as simultaneously a language for the production of knowledge, a means of connecting the country with currents around the world, both good and bad, and as a line of demarcation, a cultural boundary between privilege and dispossession; for many among the literati, it is also the language of Raj nostalgia. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 403

Categorization

• QUESTION: This contradicts the civilizing-mission view of English being pushed by Said — a useful counterpoint worth holding onto for debates about global English.
• XREF: connects to: India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1211; English in India is stratified as a class boundary, not a neutral world vehicle; the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”

Related

• English in India is stratified as a class boundary, not a neutral world vehicle (similarity 0.95)
• India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages (similarity 0.88)
• English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.88)
• English literature has shaped the very categories of modern Indian thought (similarity 0.84)
• English serves as the carrier medium of cultural and linguistic imperialism in globalization (similarity 0.82)
• Only a materialist-comparatist frame can break the colonial grip on Indian English Studies. (similarity 0.82)
• English was justified as the necessary glue for a fragmented nation (similarity 0.82)
• English was confined to elite higher education while vernacular schooling served the masses (similarity 0.81)
• Indian reformers embraced English as a scientific window, not a literary imposition (similarity 0.81)
• Indian reformers never rejected English, wanting it only as epistemic access (similarity 0.81)
• Post-colonial state expansion deepened rather than reversed colonial language structures (similarity 0.80)
• English is structurally the worst Indian language for conveying India’s oral literature (similarity 0.80)
• Indian literature’s unity is an effect of geography and the nation-state (similarity 0.79)
• European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations (similarity 0.79)
• Literature and culture are not coterminous with language and state boundaries (similarity 0.79)