European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations
Evidence
The tradition of any sustained effort to study the literatures of the various languages in mutual relation, as overlapping realities constituting a unified configuration, is even weaker, so that we have, as a rule, a peculiar disjunction between an assertion that there is an ‘Indian’ literature, and the actual production of a knowledge which refers essentially to discrete archives of individual languages, with principles of aggregation either absent or very weakly developed. This replicates in some ways those other conceptual frameworks which produce the category of a ‘European Literature’ both as a civilizational unity and as a comparatism of discrete national literatures. Like most analogies this one has its uses, but one of the distortions which result from confusing an analogy with a model is that the modern languages of India are then seen as discrete and markedly differentiated entities, as if the relationship between, say, Hindi and Urdu, or between modern Hindi and the half a dozen languages which have historically composed it and continue to have extremely diverse relations with Hjndi itself, as well as with each other, were of the same order as, say, that between English and French, or Italian and Spanish. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1095
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the research question on discourse-determinism obscuring material structure — the ‘Indian Literature’ as civilizational-unity claim mirrors the strategic-essentialist maneuver of holding a construct literally for political ends. — connects to: Indian literary historiography fails through idealist and Brahminical premises — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1089; India lacks institutions to systematize its multilingual literary knowledges — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1093; Comparing Hindi and Urdu to French and English distorts Indian literary relations — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 490 (+8 more)
Broader Connections
- Comparing Hindi and Urdu to French and English distorts Indian literary relations
#exemplifies(0.92) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 490 - Indian literature’s unity is an effect of geography and the nation-state
#expands(0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 512 - Literature and culture are not coterminous with language and state boundaries
#corroborates(0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 487 - English literature has shaped the very categories of modern Indian thought
#expands(0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 541 - Enumerative national literature categories derive their unity from geography, not composition
#expands(0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1150 - The category of literature is ambiguously constructed rather than given
#expands(0.72)