Indian reformers embraced English as a scientific window, not a literary imposition

Evidence

The constitutive logic of Colonial Discourse Analysis is such that significant practitioners of it have come to construe the English language in India as a pure colonial imposition, and English literature itself as some kind of central enterprise of the colonial state in its bid for the construction of consent in India. Both these propositions are substantially inaccurate. It is of course true, in some partial way, that English was an imposition, but the more remarkable fact is that in the entire history of Indian reformism, from Rammohun to Vivekanand to Sir Syed to Tilak and Gandhi, there is always an attachment to and a competence in one or two Indian languages, but never any rejection of English as such; virtually all of them wanted it, not as a literary language but as a window on the most advanced knowledges of the world, mainly in the physical and social sciences, in historiography, in the technical fields. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 519

Categorization

• XREF: Directly challenges the Saidian/postcolonial framework Ahmad elsewhere contests; echoes his broader debate with postcolonial studies. — connects to: Indian reformers never rejected English, wanting it only as epistemic access — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1177
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘Colonial Discourse Analysis’ presumes about English — that Ahmad argues is empirically wrong.

Related

• Indian reformers never rejected English, wanting it only as epistemic access (similarity 0.96)
• English literature has shaped the very categories of modern Indian thought (similarity 0.85)
• Only a materialist-comparatist frame can break the colonial grip on Indian English Studies. (similarity 0.83)
• English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.81)
• English in India is simultaneously knowledge production, global connection, and class division (similarity 0.81)
• English’s colonial literary impact came through genres, not composition (similarity 0.81)
• English is structurally the worst Indian language for conveying India’s oral literature (similarity 0.80)
• Decolonization produced a proliferation, not decline, of literature in colonial languages (similarity 0.80)
• Post-colonial state expansion deepened rather than reversed colonial language structures (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial India’s dominant intelligentsia adopted a stratified three-track language division (similarity 0.80)
• English shaped Indian literature through imported genres rather than language. (similarity 0.79)
• Inability to reconceive national unity kept English’s unifying role unchecked (similarity 0.79)
• India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages (similarity 0.79)
• English in India is stratified as a class boundary, not a neutral world vehicle (similarity 0.79)
• Comparative historical-cultural study can break the colonial grid in English teaching (similarity 0.78)