English was justified as the necessary glue for a fragmented nation
Evidence
The main cultural claim of English during the colonial period was also a non-literary one. The claim, rather, was that India was internally so fragmented, so heterogeneous, such a mosaic of languages and ethnicities, that it needed a centralizing language to sustain its national unity – the ‘nation’ in this conception was coterminous with exigencies of administration and, indeed, with the state itself. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 117
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the nationalist functionalism critique in chapter 1’s account of literary theory, and to the reader’s interest in how infrastructure (here, linguistic-state infrastructure) shapes culture.
Related
- English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.85)
- Inability to reconceive national unity kept English’s unifying role unchecked (similarity 0.84)
- English in India is stratified as a class boundary, not a neutral world vehicle (similarity 0.83)
- English in India is simultaneously knowledge production, global connection, and class division (similarity 0.82)
- Only a materialist-comparatist frame can break the colonial grip on Indian English Studies. (similarity 0.82)
- Post-colonial state expansion deepened rather than reversed colonial language structures (similarity 0.81)
- India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages (similarity 0.81)
- Literature and culture are not coterminous with language and state boundaries (similarity 0.81)
- Indian literature’s unity is an effect of geography and the nation-state (similarity 0.81)
- Colonial English persists as an instrument of bourgeois state centralization. (similarity 0.81)
- Comparative historical-cultural study can break the colonial grid in English teaching (similarity 0.80)
- Pre-modern Indian literary culture was polyglot, not unilingual (similarity 0.80)
- Enumerative national literature categories derive their unity from geography, not composition (similarity 0.80)
- Aggregating discrete literatures into ‘Indian’ is a qualitative, not additive shift (similarity 0.80)
- English literature has shaped the very categories of modern Indian thought (similarity 0.80)