Even Gandhi’s anti-modern nationalism never rejected English as such
Evidence
Even Gandhi’s most extreme statements of obscurantist nationalism in Hind Swaraj (1909) – where he fumes against the railways as carriers of communicable diseases and for violating caste purities, while he also dismisses the whole range of modern professions such as law and medicine – are remarkable for the absence of the English teacher as an object of ridicule; the purported claim that English is superior because of its European origin or that any social superiority attaches to an Indian who learns it is rightfully debunked, but there is no sense that English as such has no rightful place in India. That kind of opposition to English came only from those even more rigidly obscurantist circles – located for the most part in the overlap of extreme religiosity, precapitalist landed property and small-scale commercial capital – which were opposed to a great many reforms of Indian society as such, whether advocated by the British or by the more advanced sectors of Indian society. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 519
Categorization
- XREF: Contra the common picture of Gandhi as anglophobe; also a useful corrective to simplistic nationalist historiography. — connects to: Indian reformers never rejected English, wanting it only as epistemic access — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1177
- SEED: Article angle: what it reveals that rejection of English correlates historically with obscurantist, precapitalist class positions — language attitudes as class indicators.