Indian literary historiography fails through idealist and Brahminical premises

Evidence

The difficulty in thinking of an ‘Indian’ literature, therefore, is not that it is spread over many languages, with histories of very uneven development, nor that the state boundaries which have historically contained these literary productions have been shifting through all the centuries we know of. The difficulty lies, rather, in the very premisses that have often governed the narrativization of that history, which has (1) privileged High Textuality of a Brahminical kind to posit the unification of this literary hisrory; or (2) assembled the history of the main texts of particular languages (in a very uneven way) to obtain this unity through rhe aggregarive principle; or (3) arrempred ro reconsrrucr the cross-fertilization of genres and themes in several languages, bur with highly idealistic emphases and with the canonizing procedures of rhe ‘great books’ variety, with scant attempt ro locate literary hisrory within or her sores of hisrories in any consistent fashion. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1089

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A materialist dialectical history of Indian literature has barely begun — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 515; A grounded Indian literary history must trace material dialectics of unity and difference — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1164; European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1095 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• A materialist dialectical history of Indian literature has barely begun #expands (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 515
• A grounded Indian literary history must trace material dialectics of unity and difference #expands (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1164
• European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations #corroborates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1095
• Traditional literary histories reduce texts to examples and force crude causalities upon them #qualifies (0.75)
• Subaltern Studies aimed to wrest Indian historiography from nationalist elites #corroborates (0.75)