Print culture in India developed primarily in indigenous languages, not English
Evidence
An English-language press, of course, kept evolving, and much was imported from England for the British themselves as well as the emergent Indian Third Estate, but the first two printing presses, at Serampore and Fort William, came into being for publication of material primarily in the Indian languages, for both Indians and Europeans, and the history of all subsequent developments of printing presses in various parts of the country is inextricably linked with the need for textbooks and other educational materials – in the fullness of time, for the pedagogies of reformist literature’ very centrally – in the indigenous languages. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 517
Categorization
- XREF: Reverses the Andersonian assumption about print capitalism consolidating imperial languages; here print capitalism consolidated vernacular publics instead. — connects to: India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1211
Related
- India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages (similarity 0.84)
- Indian print literatures were assembled by culturally beleaguered petty-bourgeois str (similarity 0.81)
- English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.81)