Urdu literature rejected any myth of collective precolonial innocence.

Evidence

The typical Urdu writer has had a peculiar vision, in which he or she has never been able ro construct fixed boundaries between the criminalities of the colonialist and the brutalities of all those indigenous people who have had power in our own society. We have had our own hysterias here and therefar too many, in factbut there has never been a sustained, powerful myth of a primal innocence, when it comes to the colonial encounter. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 464

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to strategic essentialism: a nationalist self-understanding that refuses innocent-identity founding myths is a case where collective identity is held without collapsing into purity claims. — connects to: Class and social critique, not colonial experience, dominated pre-Partition Urdu fiction. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 464; Nineteenth-century Urdu prose fiction ignored colonial conquest while poetry and letters documented it — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 193

Broader Connections

• Nineteenth-century Urdu prose fiction ignored colonial conquest while poetry and letters documented it #expands (0.82) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 193