Realism took root in Indian literature because it matched bourgeois class upheaval
Evidence
But the encounter that proved decisive was with realism, especially in its Russian and French variants, albeit in English translation. Most other forms came and went, bur realism remained, mainly because its ways of apprehending the world corresponded to chat historic moment within Indian society when it was undergoing its first bourgeois upheavals, obtaining its own class structure and household arrangements of the capitalist type, forming its own self-consciousness as a society beset with revolutionary crises, albeit in a colonial serring. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1183
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: This is classic historical-materialist literary explanation: literary form is selected for by correspondence to class structure and household arrangements of a society mid-bourgeois-transformation — a strong, dense, causal claim directly modeling the materialist reading practice Ahmad is contrasting against discourse-determinism.
- XREF: Pairs with Lukács’s and Jameson’s arguments that realism is the aesthetic form of bourgeois self-consciousness; extends Ahmad’s ongoing contrast of materialist vs. discourse-first explanation in this chapter. — connects to: Indian print literatures were assembled by culturally beleaguered petty-bourgeois str — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1190; Print capitalism shifted literary production from artisan-peasant life to the leisured classes — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1127; Metropolitan and Indian bourgeois elites form a class alliance canonizing English cosmopolitan literature. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 299
Broader Connections
- Indian print literatures were assembled by culturally beleaguered petty-bourgeois str
#expands(0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1190 - Print capitalism shifted literary production from artisan-peasant life to the leisured classes
#corroborates(0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1127