Religious reform movements checked the secularization of modern Indian literatures.
Evidence
To the extent that even the modern languages were thus pressed so widely into the service of religious scholarship, sectarian education and proselytizing, such movements had the effect of reinvesting these modern idioms with lexicons and sensibilities derived from the universe of religious discourse, and privileging the religious text, along with all the paraphernalia of priestly gloss and commentary, within the literary canon. This effectively checked, with devastating effect, the impulse towards democratization and secularization of literature which we have noted above. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 529
Categorization
- SEED: A productive tension for an essay on how reform movements — even progressive ones — can reversely sacralize the very languages they work through.
- XREF: Echoes the ‘Grafting & Growth’ theme of cultural projects carrying contradictory seeds — and the general point that reform re-inscribes what it opposes. — connects to: Secular Indian modernism conceded religious texts’ greatness in exchange for a nonreligious sphere. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1204