Mass political mobilization, not elite scholarship, drove modernization of India’s regional languages.

Evidence

There were also the many strands of social and political movements which now, after decolonization, we have come to think of as, simply, ‘the national movement’. The mass character of these movements required the use of modern, spoken languages, both in print and in social action, and it is arguable that nothing contributed – in areas as diverse as journalism, literature, social and historical sciences, public oration, the labour movement, the nitty-gritty of political mobilization – so much to the development of the modern/‘regional’ languages of India as did the political mobilization of the masses of Indian people during the half-century or so leading up to the moment of decolonization. We tend to ignore, however, the fact that many of the tendencies which went into constituting what can now be described as our canonical nationalism were deeply implicated in various kinds of revivalisms – and if they were not revivalist in the narrow religious sense, they nevertheless thought of the ‘greatness’ of India’s past almost always in terms of its dynastic splendours, its high-caste textualities, its priestly pieties, its elite Sanskritic past. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 531

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Anderson’s imagined communities and the role of print-nationalism in the spread of national languages.
• SEED: An essay angle: how protest and mobilization, not education policy, have been the true vernacularizing force in India and elsewhere.