AYAz AHMED Aijaz Ahmad (b. 1947) is a contemporary Pakistani Marxist theori fusccl ia India: He bas witeat’Giinsive cotimentary on South Aaa politics as well as literature, and has taught and held fellowships in many places in India, the US and Canada. He is an editorial consultant with the Indian news magazine Frontline. Although Ahmad has published several books on political issues as well as colonialism and neo-colonialism, as literary critic, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures (1994) remains his best known work. Outline of the Essay Aijaz Ahmad’s essay, “INDIAN LITERATURE’: Notes towards the Definition of a Category” does not define Indian literature. Instead, indian literature, investigates the it deconstructs the notion of I problems in defining the category, the ways in which the category has been used, and finally, what may be done to come up with such a category. For Ahmad, describing the unity called Indian literature requires that one must first investigate if such a unity is possible, 2 unity that pervades all the literary traditions. For ‘Ahmad, this category must be more than the aggregate of different regional literatur He argues that if the basis of unity in the region is considered to civilisational rather than national, then that itself necessitates 2 + the national form of literature reflects this uh? In addition, he discusses the j of Indian literature. enquiry into whethe This is the analysis that he undertakes. role of academic institutions for the study a For Ahmad, lack of institutional support, translations 20 cri seudy, is the primary reason why regional literarures have remain vonfined to their linguistic locales. There is no moveme™’ ©, regional liceratures. In examining early literarur, one suffers 0” HF wher hand from understanding slow transitions that allow a compari aIndian Literaire: Nos Towards he Dion aa (om of a Cavegory 231 Si a wraditions, for instanc that in the earl awe am and Bhakti ee ree nd Sha, and on the other Fer quid and mised. For Ahmad one way of ae of such 4 unity is to look at the genealogy of genre iad the study sppear to be eraslingulstic Howeree these gehies falacbesorreahad . 5 just be approached from @ comparative perspective, as merely enumerating them woul Fo ales. Other than linguistic difcults, there are abo aie that come from orality, for instance, epic literature, as acu ia of its related branches, are also performance texts and oral tate, Performance and orality also bring into being other issues fos instance, embeddedness in context and the question of molicnc and rormer. Following print capitalism, the power of the oral texts is given over (0 the printed word, itself generating new problems in the classification. ‘Ahmad directly attacks Orientalism as a factor in the repression of national literature. For Ahmad, Orientalsts privileged carle, “clasicl” traditions at the expense of later literature, and consequently, holstered pre-existing class and caste privileges. Moreover, i also created a hierarchy of values for literature of the different eras, in ich, even though Vedic/Sanskrtic texts had had their glorious past English texts alone were representative of the modern era. Ahmad also takes issue with proponents of colonial discourse analysis (followers of Edward Said) such as Gauri Vishwanathan for whom English was 2 colonial imposition. Ahmad argues, from the perspective of subaltern studies instead, that English was hardly the language of the masses: it was taught only at select public schools to a select part of the population, while the majority education was conducted in the vernacular, For Ahmad, none of the intellectuals of the Indian reform movements used only English; they were all of them familiar with at one or more Indian languages and their traditions. The sip of English was perceived moreover in the technical and scienti domains rather than in the literary domain. This sense of belonging in multiple linguistic worlds made it possible to pose the th 2 fngvage politics for the first time amongst these ina - fe ey turned to movements such as the Bhakti a ee efSein mocratic, anti-Brahmanical impulses. Many of ©232 Aijes Abmed movements such as Anya Samaj took theie cues fom mexjeyy Indi languages in order to reach wider audiences, reinterpreting the clad in a new light. Ahmad argues that infinitely more ing educational reform were opened as a result of these tendencies rather than English institutions, and they also much larger section of society. It was also the spread of education that made the national movement possibl political edge and coherence. . In the last sections, Ahmad calls upon English and com literature departments to engage in what he understan transgressive act: see beyond the categories of “English” and “Lit as neither can capture the complexity of Indian literary tradition, Polyglot heterogeneity and generic diversity, Ahmad opines ar scattered in texts that are much larger in extent than is allowed by these categories, in a wide range of fields including religion, anthropology, philology and so on. In other words, literary studies would only be a subset of a larger field of enquiry within cultural and historical studies. Ahmad also thinks that, at least in the moder era, English literature too needs to be studied bi y comparatists alongside Indian literatures. Ahmad takes inspiration from the scholarly work of D.D. Kosambi (1907-1966), whose interests ranged not only in a wide variety of fields from mathematics to genetics, but who ako contributed to the study of Indian literature, from classical Sanskrit texts to more modern political texts, combining it with his other interests in science and other disciplines, and grounded his analysis in a materialist understanding of Indian history. For Ahmad, this intetdisciplinarity and cross-fertilisation of disciplines in scholarship is a model to be emulated for the study of Indian literature. itutions teformig reached Of this foamy © and gave ig parative) ds as 4 erature,” Details of the following selection: Aijaz Ahmad, “Indian Literature Nows towards the Definition of a Category,” In Theory: Clases, Nations, Literatur Condon: Verso, 1992) pp, 243-285| qypiaN Lrrerature’: Nores towarns typ DEFINITION OF A CATEGORY af my difficulties with the theoretical category of “Thitdl World One oa it should be clear enough, is its rather cavalier way with er jts homogenization of a prolix and variegated archive which him understood and then hurriedly categorized; its equally homogenizing impulse to slot very diverse kinds of public aspirations vader the unitary insignia of ‘nationalism’ and then to designate this rationalism as the determinate and epochal ideology for cultural production in non-Western societies; its more recent propensity to inflate the choice of immigration into a rhetoric of exile, and then to contrive this inflation as the mediating term between the Third World and the First. Kosambi once said: “The outstanding characteristic of a backward bourgeoisie, the desire to profit without labour or grasp of technique, is reflected in the superficial “research” so common in India! Ironically enough, so much of what is published in the merropolitan countries displays this very characteristic of the ‘backward bourgeoisie’ when it comes to the ‘Third World’. find it all the more difficult to speak of a ‘Third World literature’ when I know that I cannot confidently speak, as a theoretically coherent category, of an ‘Indian’ Literature. The purpose Of this chapter, therefore, is not to pose, category by category, an ian Uterature’ (the national specificity) against “Third World Psa? (the tricontinental generality) but, rather, to explore some One *dificulies we currently have in constructing such a category. or cohen arguments here is that we cannot posit a theoretical unity of dhe of an ‘Indian’ literature by assembling its history in rms leat A but discrete histories of India’s major language— ' A’national’ literature, in other words, has to be more than there ss regional constituent parts, if we are to speak of its unity % Given this position, I could not possibly be arguing at234 Aijae Ahmed me time that ifwe can assemble the historiography Pics: national literatures in these tricontinental Zones, somehow arrive at a “Third World Literature’ In other emphasize not just the obvious lacunae in our empirical know, ledge but also that (a) developments during che colonial Petiod ay, everywhere embedded as much in the pre-colonial legacies as in the colonial processes as such; and (b) cultural productions everythee greatly exceed the boundaries set by the colonial state and in police, so that the highly diverse historical trajectories may sim available for generalizing theoretical practices and unifie OWledge We shay Words, | PIY not be cd. nattativey ‘on the tricontinental scale, A literature exists as a theoretical obj productions can be examined in rel determinations by the development of the periodization comes to rest on shifts mo: breaks in chronology and is able to accou major generic forms, their uneven devel, and region, as well as the material con ject to the extent that its lation to their objective culture as a whole, so that re fundamental than mere int for the dominance of the lopments in terms of petiod ditions for the subordination f historical development. The the material development of a cult ture can certainly exist actos languages and state boundaries. Culeu re and literature, in other words, ith linguistic formation and sate } in countries like India, even after the tinetpence of such a state; the tise of Print capitalism is a variable but by no means an invariable detetminant. The difficulty in thinking of an ‘Indian’ literature, therefore, is not that it is spread over many » with histories of very uneven development, nor that the fons have been shifting difficulty lies, sather, ; i have often governed the nancy sin the very premisses that i fey catvization of that history, which has (1) privileged tre cay of Brahminical kind to posi che unification oft pari 2% © (2) avembled the history of the main 5 & 3 Nn @ Very uneven way) to obtain this unity 0r Indian Literature: Nots Towards the Definition of Catgory 235 rive principle; or @) attempted to reconstruct the cross- of genres and themes in several languages, but with highly tio phases and with the canonizing procedures ofthe ‘great idealist ‘ety, with scant attempt to locate literary history within other i ani in any consistent fashion, sorts shall discuss these ways of narrativizing Indian literary history ; me length below. Theoretically advanced work in histories of #0 sad economic structures has shown chat it is possible to speak of an Indian history which is not the history of mere rulers and caps and eligions, and is nor composed of discrete developments ir ecors and geographical regions. This work, most notably of the Manist historians, has laid the basis for future work of the empirical kind and created the possibility of theoretical abstraction and generlizaton, hence for the plotting of periodization as regards the main forms of production and property, as well as their regional and temporal variants, gaps in knowledge and disagreements among the historians themselves notwithstanding. It is in comparison with these other kinds of histories that the relative underdevelopment of the resarch genre of literary history in India stands in sharpest relief, especially as regards its theoretical premisses. One of the consequences of these very uneven developments is undoubtedly that it is in these other kinds of histories, rather than the straightforward literary histories, that one comes across some of the most profound insights about what we could generally designate as ‘literary’, especially for the tatest centuries. My own attempt here, in any case, is not to chalk ut a full theoretical position, which for me would be at the very least Premature, nor to examine in detail the existing approaches, but Simply to demarcate some areas which I find especially troublesome. 1 the 8 ization anne level, of course, every book written by an Indian, inside the NYY oF abroad, is part of a thing called ‘Indian Literature’ But ofthe wtOMs that could produce a coherent and unified knowledge ious language literature clusters in India, either in a strictly leone Framework ot as a unified, albeit mulingual object of * have had a rather sporadic development, so that despite |236 Aijac Ahmed superb work by individual scholars eRe few insu ‘here such knowledges may be systematized and dissemina ea voabers of srudents and teachers. AB a result, the in ed reproduce these knowledges on an extended a, quite dispersed and in some key areas largely undevelop to several kinds of difficulty. : There are major languages and literatures for Which no comprehensive history is really avaiable. The tradition of citculating tex through the various linguistic communities of India by mos of mutual translations, without the mediation of English, is so weay developed that even where such historical research does exist, it ig rarely accessible to readers outside the particular linguistic community, The tradition of any sustained effort to study the literatures of the various languages in mutual relation, as overlapping realities constituting a unified configuration, is even weaker, so that we have asa rule, a peculiar disjunction between an assertion that there is an ‘Indian’ literature, and the actual production of a knowledge which refers essentially to discrete archives of individual languages, with Principles of aggregation either absent ot very weakly developed. This replicates in some ways those other conceptual frameworks which produce the category of a ‘European Literature’ both as a civilizational unity and as a comparatism of discrete national literatures. Like most analogies this one has its uses, but one of the distortions. which result from confusing an analogy with a mode is that the modern languages of India are then seen as discrete and markedly differentiated entities, as if the relationship between, say, Hindi and Urdu, or between modern Hindi and the half dozen languages which have historically composed it and continue to have extremely diverse relations with Hindi itself, as well as with each other, were of the same order 25, sy, that between English and French, or Italian and Spanish. These confusions and inadequacies of reliable information as t0 texts, authors, genres, modes of transmission, audiences, and so on, are most marked with respect to those early periods when what we now know 25 our modern languages emerge out of complex and Prolonged processes of mutual influences and differeniatione And of Sourse, these processes have been regionally very uneven. Tamil in HiOMAI sas ted amon telligenssi, le remain ed, leadingaz oe wae REBATE RE % a eee ~& SAS >: Indian Lert Notes Towards the Definition of a Category 237 wat Joubredly had @ much ss hi developmen ges ig a court language very carly, alongside Sanskrit in the wd been at the earliest extant texts can be dated more or less orth ape first century BC or thereabouts, even though much pr gaye by the PaSi8e of time and unreliable modes of nae, For Kannada, the earliest inscription ry AD, though large bodies of writing came nly scant studies, available in other Indian of the process whereby languages of the South got their vend denies; of the role of Sanskrit in the succeeding qoutes i affecting the linguistic—literary, as distinct from the gious, ambience of these languages (8 per cent of the vocabulary * Mala is said to be of Sanskrit origin, but what is the literary eye of this linguistic property?)s oF of bodies of literature, rotbly Sangam Tterature?in Tamil, which remains much less studied in both literary and historiographic aspects than the contemporaneous Sanskrit literature, The transition from Sangam to Bhakti, which was sho a Tamil phenomenon, is known only in very broad outline, but toc rely a8 a ranstion, more as a discrete epochal shift, after a gap sfeentries and the intercession of an ‘epic tradition. Nor is it clear how this phenomenon of Tamil origin spread through the Deccan plateau and then across the Vindhyas, eventually to all corners of the lind—if, indeed, the Northern forms of Bhakti were in some fundamental way a continuation of the Southern, which is again not a established, except through discrete pieces of evidence in the work of individual poets. ae the North itself, the gradual differentiation berween the various e ee led eventually to the consolidation, mor the modern languages is also known only in outline, with iy eae information for the various linguistic gions Wer that it happened; that the initial phase of key itvasaprolon spans roughly the tenth to the welfth centuries: that modern ged and uneven process, with the consolidation of some languages (e.g, Bengali) taking place much sooner than y i Uitrnhas or spats ae North Idan dhs chat were perce corruptions of Sanskrit.238 Aijae Ahmed differentiation between some others (c, which is an ongoing affair, starting in while many such questions have remain (the shift of milons of people in Uttar Pradeh Hindi and Uniuin the 1961 Census, and in pia li Maithili, are cases in point).4 The gaps in knovledge "Om Hing geet Audigy and unquanifabiliy of hae y 4 ™ chastening for anyone who sets out to theorize : Literature’ Even plain historiography is at a very nen? given the large gaps in existing bodies of documentaieg a descriptive kind of knowledge about ‘Indian Litens unities, its essential periodizations, the relationships be sets of writings which are available from th circulation: of principal genres through h cluster, and about scores of other such isucs, is sill of B® uneerin manure. Yet histories of individual Languages a. dur? entities also tend to be misleading, since multilinguality and polygor fluidity seem to have been chief characteristics possibly sp characteristics—which give ‘Indian Literature’ its high degree of unification in the premodern phase. Unilingualty seems to have berg the aspiration only of certain kinds of canonical scholasticam, whereas mass literary cultures, and even many of the elite formation, remained polyglot well into the nineteenth century, when the insertion of print capitalism, modern forms of unilingual vernacular education, the rise to literary predominance of professional petty-bourgcis strata, and the rise of many regional and religious particuarisms speeded up the process of linguistic differentiation and the avendan claims — objectively fabricated and subjectively felt claims — of unilinguality. For the earlier period, Mohan Singh Diwana states the matter eloquently: Ws between tj, the late wig i an ang : Neteeng et Uy ed Unset Cent! ‘Indian St » $0 that even Ure a5 ig Ween various © same period, the overlapping ling Prelimin; (oltre were hardly any poets fom Gorakh ofthe 10h ena oe Farid in che early half of the nineteenth century belonging ‘© a sedi! Gujarat, Bengal, Agra, Oudh, Bihar, Delhi, Punjab or Sindh, = iad writen in thie languages — the mother tongue, the provinil SEEN, the common Hindustani language, Hindui, besides Persian or $2 even GU as he could command. Even Zafar and Sauda wrote in Punjabi ameure: Notes Towards the Definition of a Category 239 Indian Litera te in Persians otird S enone in Persia i” San ak De Dadu wrote in Pun in Braj, in Rekhta and in Khyal; even Guru singh nskrit, in Kafi, in Lahndi; even Namdev, jabi and Hindui. In Bengal the writers me Miran wrote in Rajasthani, in Gujarati and in Hindui’ i obits of pa ting 08 might have mentioned Akbar, who is said wong MUBM in Braj some verses in the Bhakti mould which have ae vvably lost, and for Bengal one could name Vidyapati ireaiaimed by Hindi and Maithili as well as Bengalis the ‘words, could be virtually infinite. Even the linguistic trae so fluid that the chree languages for Miran are named cnr nt Joshi alternatively, a8 “Rajasthani, Viaj and Gujarati Wntine becween ‘Hindu’ and ‘Via’ undoubtedly being very thin, jad, Ihave pointed out elsewhere,” even Diwand’ own insistence ya and opulent heterogeneity, which is itself entirely well placed, 0 foreunately too contaminated with the restrictive triadi paforunatly adic category othe mother tongue, the provincial language and the common Hindustani language’ — which was invented, in a more or less fanustic manner, in the course of the nineteenth century through a sing but always unholy alliance between indigenous linguistic are and colonial demographers, to be recovered in post- ssi ply in the ‘ial three-language formula. On none of the a — — notes the languages in which individual P us fixe triparti ivisic i linguistic fuidities have been ise ical eae ee | arenes have been historically ofa very diferent kind. Ie et hos Aides, so naturally embedded in the versions an ae aie Aes so bewildering for the untrained modern This f inguistic aspect of comparative work begi te pit sussion of overlapping multlingualities remains 23 well fog dette todenenre ig multilingualities remains as well for intodacion of prine it as they have been assembled since the cu, bat ie ane ind he classificatory practices of the nineteenth begga aa takes some new forms. Because the major individual much more ‘clearly de i aa competences, pr ‘ ly demarcated in terms of dite the question Is int archives, authorial oeuvres and reading nt Indi OF translations, back and rope lian languages by , and forth, among the Presing. ‘This | P€comes at once more complex and far machinery of translations for the circulation of Mi Sees x :240 Aijas Ahmed literary works within the various literar developed, being left in a significant de preference, with litte institution Y communi BICC (0 individ and systematic whole range of ties is Doo al industry a ffort 1 pp Publishin, 7 8 it Kashi tdu Lang et langua alized from experience, for example, that the Urdu gives us no sense of literary Punjabi or Modern Hindi ot Telugu, has always existed in regions and sta are also spoken and written, often b the Urdu academies, all the Depart universities, have failed to sponsor scholarship, research and translation, of the composite linguistic and cultur {believe this emphasis on exclusivity is by no means Unique to Und institutions, even though the situation is different in differen linguistic communities. Translations from other Indian languages ate ‘ore common in Telugu and Bengali (mainly through init’ from the literary intelligentsias themselves) as well as Hindi (owi to state sponsorship and to individual i that receives much emphasis in most Lacking such public institutions direct knowledge of an ‘Indian’ literatu: So many languages that only rare special and considering that public rewards for such labours are minimal, competences of that kind presume rare kinds of linguistic abilities combined with very exceptional kinds of individual industry and devotion — indeed, most of the work in this integrated field has been done by individuals who managed this rare combination, Meanie, itis in English more than any other language that the largest archive of translations has been assembled so far; if present trends continue, English will become, in effect, the language in which the knowledge of Indian’ literature is produced, The difficulty is that itis the language least suitable for this role—not because it was inserted into India in findem with colonialism, but entcely because itis, among all S Indian languages, the most removed, in its structure and capa from all the other Indian languages, hence least able to Ne Cultural gap between the original and the translated text. This dis developments in even though the U, tes where these oth Y & majority of the peo ments of Urdu in colleges any real project of compan aimed at a fuller understand al mieux in which they oper languages, for overlapping translations, He presumes the knowledge of lists could command them al,y ~~ ~~ jan Literature : Notes Tow i ae Towards the Definition ofa Category 244 is perio greater the closer the original text is to the al formatives ‘i the assumed, th the ve iran in any other Indian language would make sen, ne insite nothing much better than doggerel is really cama in ie Hamental) altering the original to the point of uecopiaity in kinds of modern, realist narratives work perfectly well in igh; the rest works very infrequently. This is quite additional to whe ft that the vast bulk of the literary intelligentsia in India is not nd has not been very proficient in English, even as a reading public, less of what the upper layers of half a dozen cosmopolitan cited ay believe : My third example of the kind of comparatism we need in order to establish both the heterogeneity and the fundamental unity of ‘Indian Literature’ refers to genres and forms of composition. We Fmow that the pada," for example, became a translinguistc, often very Fusble gente for the Bhakti poets, as did the doba;* we also know that the doha — like the barabmassa,* which was also a favourite translinguistic form for these polyglot poets — survived well into the contemporary petiod, in less and less religious forms, becoming more and more secular: doha more in oral traditions, barahmasa in lengthier and therefore in slightly more formal ways, both oral and written, What are the histories of the genesis of these respective forms, their properties, their usages, their alterations over time and across language-lterature clusters? Which social grids and belief systems produce them, which ones account for their mutation, decline, replacement? What happens to: the barahmasa, for example, a it evolves in Hindui, develops in one direction into what was increasingly differentiated into Hindi and Urdu, lived in Urdu in close proximity with the other generic form, mathnavi, as it was initially imbibed from Fai but as it drew close, fist metrically and then in systems of belief and imagery, to genres like barabmassa? How does one locate, then, Daya Shankar Nasi famous (and in Urdu the first major) matt + entitled Gulzar-e-Ishq (Garden of Love) in these systems of generic the domestic, the custoinary, Pada: The Sanskrit term for metrical foot in poetsy Doha A thyming couplet which is alo a specialised form of Pos A form of folk poery celebrating the ewelve months242. Aijae Ahmed more than get ic similar questions about the more modem eric — overlaps? — an ‘One could as 0 : ms of both thematics and genetic shifts, What hap, Petiog ‘Ppen, in tern ‘ ss net narrative traditions in the nineteenth cen: : example, (0 Indian ditions the idea of companionate marriage Is introduced, as a necessa thee household in bourgeois Soe 235 regons and lagy into the imaginative universe and the narrative structures of the in trmergnt, modern Third Estate? We need to assemble these ees sree, a well a thee sociology, not for any formalist epg Far because the gence often serves asthe very horizon which deg the general semantic field, che presumptions of belie systems the politics of transgression and containment, and the very possibilities Pe hat are called the aesthetic effects of individual utterances, aswel gs of authors and oewores. For instance, ifthe name ‘Kabit’ can simply tecome a collective signature for certain kinds of utterances, panly erasing the distinction between the poet and the panthi,* that is because in certain kinds of belief communities the sharing of spcitic genetic features of some existing utterances generates the posibiliy OF more such utterances so profuse that only the act of compilation and transmission sets the limits of their reproduction. By the same token, the possibility of generating more and more such utterances disappears or becomes transmuted only when the belief community which gave the genre its stability disappears or shifts to markedly different systems of belief and utterance. That is why merdy enumerating the compositional forms, classifying their aesthetic effects and properties, and slotting various available works under the various generic designations — which is what our literary history generally does when it addresses the question of genre at all — while it may often be of much empirical value, remains, from the standpoint of history itself, merely tautological. Ss for 1 hen TY form IL Let me illustrate this problem of historicizing the linguistic layerings and of generic unclassifiability, as it confronts someone, with a m2! yy * Panthi: The reference is to Kabir panthis, the followers of the mystic Kabir (1440-1518) medievdIndian Literature: Notes Toward the Deni of “ategory IAS raining in an age of print capitalism, by wee mown properties of even those pre-y Me already gained canonical status; th stich i be there to negotiate, in equally difficult viously ; YS) for any ob at of literature who approaches the lit etary culture of the *emporaty popular classes as well. Iwill ignore for the mom ool a spe obvi0US fact that a eteat. many. of these texts are implicated = and are generally recognized to be implicated — in histories of philosophy and religion, and that the disciplines both of Ancient History and of ‘Anthropology routinely rely on these texts. Let me raise only the ‘literary’ question. It is well enough known, first, that a great many of the constitutive texts of our literary traditions, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata included, consist of centuries of sedimentation, in all aspects of their composition from the linguistic to the ideological, with the ideological frequently embedded in the linguistic itself, it is also well enough known that regardless of the enormous machinery of textual standardizations and commentators glosses that all such texts have undergone, their essential status in the culture at large, century after century, has been fundamentally performative; | hence the durability of their imaginative re-enactment, the always local and immediate construction of their meaning, the flexibility of their | asimilation into the felt life, as well as their irretrievable mutability eens until the much more recent phenomena of cinema and television began attempting a centrally produced, technically infinitely reproducible celluloid performance that could now aspire to displace both the mutability and the agential immediacy of all local Petformances and figurations. Meanwhile, numerous Bhakti poets present us with the added ficult, apare from. che frequent impossibility of fixing individual ship even when the signature line is there, that not only their rerll oewures but even individual compositions have embedded in ' compositely, earlier versions of not one but several of what we PY know as our modern languages, and that the poetry hue bes 2a belonged fundamensally to the oral—performative dom but ern that not only the producer, the petformer oF the RAT ®¥en the subsequent scribe(s) would continually amen Y citing only two of modern literary texts «SE Properties would244 Aijae Ahmed ively, Considering just these two fey el performatively 4; One textually an t thy well ask whal ; ther than the presumed sensit verbal meaning 0 : in ; vhich prepares one to approach such the printed form, which prep PP 1h artefys 4 product of print capitalism, ere dein the disciplinary knowledge ofa vers ivity to ranges of Presumes y criticism, Literary. critic ° it presumes stable textual objects, even y . f printed texts; capi efeext is to be undertaken and the objective is, pe to establish a stable text; it distinguishes itself from other Ways of knowing by choosing for itself objects which are said (0 disclose thei, meanings primarily through their verbal Construction; at its wides, it admits biographical background, social origins of the author 4, sociology of aesthetic effects; but it presses us to return, always, to poems as printed units in relation to other poems, also as Printed units. The pedagogy of ‘New Criticism’, which is che dominant an frightfully universal pedagogy of English Departments, especialy in India, narrows these engagements as much as possible, through what is called ‘close reading’. What happens to this pedagogy, into which we are all recruited, when we approach texts which are forever distributed between word and performance, where layers of language may be several even in the strict philological sense, where authorship is itself frequently layered and sedimented, where undeterminsble contradictions of authorial location introduce equally difficult problems of both sociological origin and ideological locations — even of periodization — of individual texts, authors, oeuvres, given that we often know little about the immediate circumstance of composition even for the text as it comes to us? Linguistic and philological problems are myriad, and they exist at one level of difficulty; but one would need to know, in the same sweep, the aesthetic densities of certain kinds of music, dance, gesture, ritual, on the local as well as the trans-Indic plane; the anthropology of certain kinds of recitation and locution; the socal history of certain kinds of belief; the genealogies of temples, maths Communities, pilgrimages; the hard economy of materialties out of which arise certain kinds of images and addresses, certain genetic “pressions of grief or joy, which now come to us primarily aesthetic form — and because we, as progeny of the wider culture the hen elyv Indian Literature: Notes Towards th Definition ofc a Catege ory AS power of many of them, we often make in carelessly, that we know their origins, chi wwers and meanings, and the modalities of What they have be i rast or may now be in other locations of class and community in wa today. It is the purest error of the literary-critical mind to think sr che structure of such cultural artefacts, the central documents of our literary tradition, is essentially verbal, linguistic and. therefore sppekensible as poetry — though, of course, itis poety in the most fundamental sense of that word. My suggestion, however, is not that ‘ach one of us has to develop all these other kinds of abilities before wwe qualify to speak of this history; that would be nonsense. My sense, rather, is that mere literary-critical abilities simply will not do, that the requisite kind of work can be done, individually and collectively, only across disciplinary boundaries and through undertakings which submit ‘literary criticism’ to a whole range of the expressive arts and the human sciences. But we need also to take the measure of what the development of print capitalism, which has become increasingly the determining material condition for India’s literary development over the past two centuries, has done to our sense of what literature and the site of its production is, As we look back at some of the most powerful developments up to the eighteenth century, we find that the locus of literary production — certainly for those immense movements which changed the face of India in their own time —was most frequently not the urban elite but the life-process of the artisanate, the peasantry, the women, the shudras, the precariously located clusters of dissent. With the arrival of the printing presses, however, ‘literary’ has come o mean that which we see in printed form, and because of this privileging of print in a predominantly non-literate society, the social weight in the very process of literary production has shifted towards the leisured class and the professional petty bourgeoisie, away from the altemative modes of preservation and transmission which do not ‘tvolve print and are then involved also in modes of evaluation rather Yennt fom those of the print culture, The gap, within the naculars, between the popular and the petty-bourgeois forms and “evabulaies has widened to such an extent that all progressive cultural gel the the mistake of the whole range of dof246 Aijaz Abmed ie beset, to a lesser or greater degree, with the prof y yocabulAty of forms and enunciations that may by ‘on of the relationship between oral—performatiye as in the urban setting of High Culture is seen which literature’ and the other arts (theatre, most often pt entally a relation between rural and urban, pop Sid undamental . 4 and that which i. 2 tlt that which is authorized as ‘literature’ and that which is no, elie be posed in some different ways as regards, precisely, the oder The other emphasis of my argument here, on 4 rolling, surely has to do with our personal ives — 2! wwould be an Indian with any degree of urban or periutban ey who functions with only one language — but also with the ve of our collectivity, past and present. For unlike that of European countries, where the historical movement which co them as nation-states was also, in each case, the one that their national literatures, the principle of our unity was cj and historical for many centuries before it came to be contin i the national form, so that the ‘national’ literature of India finds jn principle of unity not in linguistic uniformity but in civilizations ‘moorings and cultural ethos, hence in histories of ‘literary’ movement and even compositional forms which have crisscrossed geographied boundaries and linguistic differences. In this respect, the marked difference of Indian political culture from the European one is tha the period in which print capitalism established its power in Indi is precisely the one in which a multilingual anti-colonial nationalism spread from one end of the country to the other; even the divisions which came within that nationalism — on religious, communal, das: lines — were themselves multilingual. This civilization has been 2 oa ote precisely to the extent that it has Possessed, in the eae ae remarkable history of an essential unity in ing, yet great diversity in forms of belief and aT hi have then mavelled through and across Linguisic = ee : se Which have in the past and may again in the a ee ose unities have taken many forms, barby Ley OF even predominantly, the linguistic. Muliplicyy © Biages is the fundamental characteristic of this civilization, his work om OF fn ridge iy and prin, ing ® teation ) but ig Petience ry shapes the West nsolidated, Constituted ivilizationalIndian Literature; Notes Toward: the Definition ofg Category 247 Positivistically aot ifable than in Europe or in Europe's offhoot in Navy fark Wight add that this characteristic of loose and diverse Aneti@ no means unique to India, since ie obviously ex -g erature, and the structure of its unity ig is ities hi ‘Asian and African countries as well; the scale on which os needs to be addressed here, however, is historically is epee mw here is doubtless the generally undisputed idea. that an ‘Indian Litertue exists, whether definable and quantifible or not in generic or any other terms, one whose unity resides in the common national sign ofits authors and the common civilizational ethos ofthe Indian peopl. This is neither better nor worse than the way national leratures are usually defined, even though the civilizational depth in this case is far greater than most, and even though our actual knowledge or understanding of this unity, as regards ‘Literature’, remains more or less opaque. Many of these gaps in our knowledge are inevitable results of very incomplete kinds of evidence which have survived, or of the inevitable inadequacy of a still developing tradition of literary historiography; these material conditions one accepts. What is disconcerting, however, is that much of the existing and ongoing research seems to be governed by the ideology of the literary text as a discrete, aesthetic object — partly canonical in the New-Critical way, partly spiritual in the iconographic mould — and of literature % 2 ucasure-chest, virtually a temple, of such objects. The histories of various language—literatures, from Assamese to Telugu, which Sahitya Akademi is in the habit of issuing from, time to rime, are marvels of this discreteness of texts, genres, periods, linguistic ormations — even of ‘Literature’, most of the time, from the non- literary, Within these broad predicates, meanwhile, we have at least ™o different ways of demarcating this literature. long go no ditional one, which has endured for a remarkably ‘ime, privileges the classical texts and then follows them up with Unt cect selection ofa few medieval and modern texts, bestowing “Pom them a vast canonicity, with lie regard ro the possible a248 Aijae Ahmed relationship between the canonized text and the Jap ern of literary productions and thet sci port "ng often seems to hold this canon together is a Preference Baha and metaphysics, so that it is said t0 exude, transhisoy ji ‘Align essential Indianness in the form of an abiding sprit) ca! e privileging of antiquity and preponderant citation of Sanger asthe unique repertoire of Indian Literatur’ is there oreo 28 (frequently German) Orienaliss, from Wilhelm von gy Maurice Winteniz, who played a key role in conann category in the first place,’ but in full splendour also in such 1, nationals as Aurobindo Ghosh? Winternite did devor on? three volumes of his history to the eatly Buddhise and Jan tn so that the emphasis on Sanskrit becomes less exclusive, bog significant that ‘Indian Literature’ to him sill meant, ix ae g decades of the present century, predominantly a universe of Yet Sans, eligious and metaphysical texts of North Indian ang ‘Tamil literature seems not to have interested this trader o Orientalist High Textualty, despite its ow antiquity, pethaps beau of the inherent Northerly/Sanskritc bis of the Indo-Aryan pico construct, perhaps because of ae availabilty ofthe Sangam anlage even in printed Tamil, and, conceivably, because the secularity and this-worldliness of Sangam poetic traditions really do not apped to the kind of mind for which the outstanding attribute ofthe India tradition is its purported spirituality. It was not, of course, posible for Winternit, in the first quarter of the present century a bougeis nationalism got going inside India, to ignore entirely the pin fr that India did continue to have a history after the seventh cenuy as well, s0 thar subsequent developments, spread over some fifen hundred years and in scores of languages, do appear in hs book — in’a brief appendix. Quite apart from being astonishingly ahistorical, these Or ways of privileging the early tradition so entirely at the expen ¢ later ones are doubtless highly obscurantst and even represen bes own special ways, as my later comments will indicate. It f eh remarking, though, that these emphases were nevertheless eae superior and infinitely more productive than the colonial —™ ientalisty dian Literature Notes Towards the Definition of ion of a Cae, gory 149 who famously declared he Orientalists} who rap pean 1 library was worth the whole ue a single and Arabia’, and then went on to conclude ea a pining of Arabic and Saki books ae srarement js not only that it is so outrageously aa irony i ss rong in devaluation of those traditions and texts, but also that ic a nts the Orientalist viewpoints which emphatically nee reprinting, translating, studying and putting those very gents on tho very shelves of any ‘good European library’. The original Orientalist position, diametrically opposed to Macaulay's, was stated rs no less Heroic Flourish, by William Jones in his address to the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1776: ‘the Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greck, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.” that there is much in Jones's own work which the ways in which colonialism substantially derailed, inside Europe and elsewhere in the world, that universalist outlook and humanist aspiration of the better tendencies in the Enlightenment which often surface in writers like Vico, as for example in his contention that “there must in the nacure of human jnstirutions be a men! which tal language common uniformly grasps the su! ible in human social life bstance of things and expresses it in as many diverse modificati may have diverse as 212 Jn the Indian context, the canonical statement of the colonialist negatio! aspect of the Enlightenment project. Orientalist s often tainted by that very negation — came to haves of its career, the colonialist jnstitution 3S the site reproduction — but it would be simply Mrindless 10 deny tat were also aspects of this Orientalist work 07 Sanskait that bore e impress of the more universalist aspirations of the Enligh eae Hekate scholarship is in fact riven, Wi i ee contending pressures of colonialist Burocen’ : humanism and saboai — and riven 28° jn far more complied sitions ° facaulay them [ie ¢ od Europea250 Aijee Ahmed ween colonii ways, bet A : European Romanticism often overlapped yj is it deniable that in collecting. thy alist modernity and the obscutantis en Meng ic in which h Indy Brahminism. Noi ple# ty Ose materials from Sanskrit the Orientalsts brought together ang available toa public domain texts that had been widely scattereq, in sacrosanct possession of sundry sectarian groupings, and thu performed a task of collation and dissemination for which many - those sectarian groupings were scarcely willing, The Brahminica, samp and generally metaphysical bias (medievalist, since much og Romanticism was itself ofen attracted by medievalism) temainey strong in that body of scholarship, but it is also true that in transfert those texts to some of the modern languages — albeit the European ones —the Orientalst scholar played a useful role in freeing them, however partially, from that sectarian, ecclesiastical stranglehold and made them accessible, in whatever layered wrappings, forthe scrutiny of the modern, secular, critical intelligentsia. The damage Orientalism often did can now be undone by superior scholarship, if and when we ourselves produce such scholarship, but the Orientalist scholarship as such cannot simply be dismissed as an exercise of bad faith, any more than the first Farsi translations of some of those same texts can be dismissed because they were done under Muslim kings in a ‘foreign’ language.!? The translation of many of those same Sanskrit texts into many of the modern Indian languages, in fact, played a considerable role in the process of the consolidation of these languages as well, even though the translations of Christian texts done under European missionaries received far greater emphasis in our literary historiography. A study of these various traditions of translation — under the Mughals in Farsi, in English and German during the British period, and into modern languages of India ftom numerous sites during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — would in fact constitute an important atea of comparatism in the study of Indian Literature, and might soca he weaknesses as well as the strengths of Orient ihe ip in ways that have been suppressed in contemporiy The inadequacy of the model developed by ninereenth-cent” n textual le fen ing pAIndian Literature : Notes Towards the Definiti mn of 0M of a Catego ry 251 narrating the history of Indian | an literature j s em, ais f0 by many contemporary writers, Phasized ‘icism of objection he actual or mr enough ed enone ans resticted, a8 a tule to the ee at later developments ji ee eeu wa is er pments in Indian Literature, vt reat the Orienalist readings, selections, mph : | ian ever interrogated, nor is it Samoa niaane i wpa gd which accounts for assembling Fars a ea a naratives which itself greatly contributes to eae a kind ‘anonicity of the literary and the religious texts, For the nates soment in which this particular idea of an ‘Indian Li «ora into being was also that same moment in which a acl Aa i it (oadicard Hinduism in Romila Thapar cing ce sas aso asembled, more or less on the eae ine phaxe) model of the Se igi wih nodons of uniform beliefs, canonical texts, prophetic reigns, "ted incietions Sdfiéable:hodieniofpecsiriptisie’ act atk i prescri rest. Overlaps in the fabrication of literary nee ep ae ccaviy. were intense ld ta.er : ity and. religious rident in the standard i ‘Indian Literature’, ‘Indian Tradition’ and ‘Hindu Reli ees . . Mf i i a fie aa items, especially those that receive the ey ae —- the'same;-with the-diffevence'thar.the former'enc igre ae nat ee room for some ‘Muslim’ items foeithe an ereaft o a a eT er. In constructing this overlapping oo wonicity, the work of the Orientalist itself oreapped wi the ambitions of a great many of the Hindu refe eee eee indu reformers sSiadanvbesean % E : tinction between reformism and eee ee less and less clear. his eee tic notion — stated at considerable length in Vanikts ae of =o Culture — thar the Mahabharata, rea niecriatie (much less so) the plays of Kalidasa of Indi ites the essence, the difference and the achievement Substantial Svlin ee this narrowing of canonicity and the es ad literary and the religious; apart from some tony in as narrative realism, what Aurobindo emphasizes Precisely theip wy i mannes) of a great many elite traditions, is physical grandeur and spiritual timelessness. This prvi yee leges certain kinds of readings and disallows others. iii282 Aijae Ahmed Characteristcally, then, the religiously canonized text "err primary for its suliity bur noc ne at ag secular or profane writing: not only i the Bhuynay over other Gitas found in the same Mahabhane wai sublimity as ‘erature’ is so thoroughly famed by ie metaphysic that it cannot be read in relation to the secul, of its own production, nor as an ideological text whe to offer an imaginary resolution for real conflicts in a task i familia material domains. Even to read propetly the fis, own meraphysic would be, in this overlap ofthe leary ant not only an ineligious but also-already an inferior fore In an expanding circle of interpellations, then, the whole Mahabharata gets bathed in sacralty and becomes, ¢'* over a period of time, the constituting epic of the natin SD lierature, a seproclimed panchom Vede (ih Ved, ae strictly Vedic texts), a flamboyant television spectacle of mpaid violence and kitsch, as well as a structure of belief and the authori test of Bharatya Janata Partys Hindutva — whose ratlans the condenses, incongruously, the symbology of Lord Krishna’! charioteering for Arjun, the all-purpose tizhul of Lord Shiva ae various travels of Rama (the Lord and the Prince), Ayodhya medieval pilgrimages, in precisely that syndication of Hinduism which, in the more otherworldly ideologies ofthe scholastic type, is said to be the essence of Indian Literature. The upshot of this simultaneity in constructing the literary and the sacred canonicities is that a certain kind of sanctity comes to be attached even to those cognate texts which are not so central in the specifically religious canon, while the sacred comes to be uniquely privileged in texts which are riven between the sacred and the profine, and are of enduring importance for the reconstruction of our seolt histories. Implicit in all Hindu nationalisms is the notion, eae in much Orienalst writing, that che entire tradition of igh xi? in India up to the Turko—Persian (called simply ‘slamic) init xpresses a Hinduism. In this enlarged version, which elevates Tr kinds of Brahminical ideas to canonicity while asimilaing © cultural tendencies under its own dominance, Buddhism, Jains Priv On, bur UPrema, 3 COnditig ul UTES of j the sacr Of read simultaneoudy -Indian Literature: Notes Towards the Definition of jon of aC, of a Care gory 253 nd small dissents, reli | {10h secbnd ss but fi aula $0 religious, are a ig religious hegemony i Tocesses oon Thi igious hegemony is then br mee of diate cer centuries as well, so that the di fought forward to et seruped, 100, 85 60 Many moments aa tendencies of phat at Cributed between the High traditio A nlinds spiticuaicy ich is dist! Médaive in and the Low, betwee vosophical (6g. Vedantic) and the narrative (eg, the Pur a . a, . 7 eo) and the populistelyrical (e.g. Bhakti), but remains E entially the same - é irenty and an ene ies address those documens of High ene plicat : methods of both literary aestheticism pi speculative a e letaching the documents from their historical locations an ¢ determinate conditions of their production, in order to contemplate them as detached moments in which the Indian spirit sets ‘out to delight the senses, instruct the mind and satisfy the soul's inexhaustible yearning for lassitudinous metaphysic. Only we more materialist school of modern Indian historiography, and jin writings which have emerged under the influence of that school of historians of Ancient India, do we find sustained efforts to lift such fog. Vv ‘The other, relatively more sober version of an ‘Indian Literature’ is the one that is in fact composed of discrete language—literature traditions, so that the word ‘Indian’ is superimposed upon diverse texts drawn, say, from the various periods of the development of Dogri and Bengali and Marathi, much as anything written in any corner of Aiica is immediately slotted into something ‘ealled ‘African Literature. In the routine manifestations of this latter version, the unity of the object called ‘Indian Literature’ appears (© be an effect of geography and the nation-state. At its best, though, this second version jing the make a i only by assembling great deal of sense, in S0 far as only Zz docun ments and literary histories of the different langue leratures of India would it be possible actually i et te) itovicize their overlaps, if we aTe 6° see at all wae iruent unit add up to a unified history, however diverse in i254 Aijaz Ahmed In other words, itis only by passing through the compa, that a knowledge of the unity can be obtained. ‘The emyrn th via ich work, therefore, is enormous. What is often lc is the sense that a shift from Marathi or Bengali or Urdy , however is both aggregative and qualitative, and that the shift fron, Indian to quality, from mass t0 composition, requires altogether an Lins of conceptual apparatuses and theoretical princi narrativization. It is possible, as a matter of contrast, to speak of a Euro, Literature, for example, because European universities cone produce and reproduce large numbers of incllecrual, eich priveel knows several European languages, who can together, thro Sl complex grid of textual exchanges, produce a unified body of knowledge about literary production in the various linguistic formations of Europe; this is supplemented, then, by a brisk industry of translations, back -and forth. It is because of these institutional structures that a thing called ‘European Literature’ does exist, albeit with its own system of exclusions and stratifications, both as a comparatist discipline and as a unified object of critical knowledge. ‘That we cannot hope to match the scale of such institutions in te advanced capitalist countries is doubtless a matter of scarce resources, Nor do we need to replicate either the canonizing procedures of Europe’ famous comparatists, such as Curtius or Spite, or the ethnocentric racisms which are so central in the construction of European uniqueness as that comparatism construes it in the High Imperial fashion. The past and present cultural boundaries of India are in fact very indeterminate. The traffic between India and its neighbours in both western and eastern Asian zones is infinitely more complex than the problematics of Aryanization, ot Islam. or marauding tribes and armies, would signify; the history of Buddhism alone show that the migration of ideas and peoples took many direction’ and forms. Even in the much narrower frame of narrative literature, Russian and French influences 1¥* as fundamental as British—colonial. And of course, the maP™ of our cultural productions which we loosely cll irr” essentially anti-canonical. The point, in other words, is Value iples ofvy Indian Litrarure: Notes Towards the Definition ofa Category 255 ni ideologies and procedures, Europe ot |g of a ngualities, however, the fact that che existing Given or ag. institutions would not even be structured, on ferat so Poo produce comparast knowledges of the vation stare! Gn ip, L belive, a systemic distortion. The lamentable ets OF Rent of Indian Literature as a scholarly discipline 7 ae relative obscurity of those Comparative Literatare which focus on Indian Literature at all, as compared aaee, nubnber and prestige of English Departments — reflees ie ee T know, of course, that there are individuals — ‘ified ais ase individuals — who have sought to do this kind of work, sion dit own of with some minimal institutional suppor, of oul oppositional networks. I also know that there are some vepenisy departments and insticutes where a few dents are being made. What I am deploring here is that the Literature Departments in our universities have not been reorganized more fundamentally; that thee are not more, more highly developed and better-funded institutes for this purpose — so that this kind of work could be done not only by some devoted individuals but by a whole category of a new type ofschooed, institutionally supported intelligentsia that could then give us adequate knowledge of this prolix ching called ‘Indian Literature’. Lacking any nationwide network of such institutions, we can asser: the category ‘Indian Literature’ as necessary tel civilizational unity of our peoples, equally eal centralizing imperatives of of the thing itself, corollary of the very » OF aS a consequence of the the modern nation-state, but ‘Indian Literature’ — its historic constitution and Brneric composition, its linguistic overlaps, its supposedly unified and Practices — we still know relatively little. ‘ « a that a more complex sense of this unity/diversity problem, ; the need for a comparatist method for reading a period and Bente an as wide an Indian scale as possible, is altogether lacking.! sa pes and confidence, but also the sobriety and modesty, of Literature Das in his recent detailed survey of modern Indian ‘ng pit Rowever, exemplary in this regard, hence very i ae © makes two preliminary observations. One is that the ™® Pertaining to the Modern Period (1800-1910), has been i256 Ain Abed | cause work on the others i 50 mh mop nleted first bi © dif oe also points out that all the present state of oy, uk he als Bt eee permits, ever OF 8 scholar as encyclopaedic ag pie te tno ee soar have institutional support and the cag ~ who, : Natio and for so recent a period, is the pre Chronology and the charting out of y comprehensive scale, he says, of a whole team — of a comprehensive 5 tic history on an} ie a an Faure. The work i proportionately mor died ort periods, when print played no roe in circulation of rey coon proce dating is hard, let alone the task of collation, Cay then, in the present state of our knowledge, really speak of ‘p, in, Literature’ as an object already there, available for theorization? Sis Kumars very thoughtful observations would seem to suggest thar descriptions of various kinds are certainly possible, and theoretic speculations about specific and delimited areas may be offered mag fruitfully, but the present state of our empirical knowledge does not really warrant confident theorization on too broad a scale.!” One might, therefore, venture the generalization that the much more difficult task of assembling a history of ‘Indian Literature’ which does not derive its sense of unity from some transhistoric metaphysic nor from the territoriality of the existing nation-state, nor by simply assembling discrete histories of the different linguistic traditions, but traces the dialectic of unity and difference — through systematic periodization of multiple linguistic overlaps, and by grounding tht dialectic in the history of material productions, ideological struggles, competing conceptions of class and community and gender, elite offensives and popular resistances, overlaps of cultural vocabularies and performative genres, and histories of orality and writing and print — has barely begun. Nor can it be otherwise. v Part of the problem arises, of course, from the residual fers of imperialist scholarship, colonially determined educational appa"2"™** and the colonial etiquettes of mapping our history, in culeural as ™ 2th politcal domains. The consequences ofthe clonal pvodi of Indian History into the so-called Hindu, Muslim and BrIndian Literature : Notes Towards the Definition ofa Category 257 wll enough known for the discipline of pei rk of the consequent disorientations of got (0 Pe alte and popular levels. ‘The best of ou, Ma ee a mere shift in nomenclature which epi al, Medieval and Modern for that seme a does not really help, even though it takes some of ne sting out of these procedures, In the cultural domain, oe f periodization was further buttressed by the colonial ek High Textuality, mechanisms of monarchial aed See galiaton¥end Lnguag tof command, in both religious imperil coal epheres. These preoccupations led — naturally, as it were sole pileging ofthe Vedic and Sandkrtic tax ks aoe Sage Mughal texts for the Muslim/ ai eipsttichd ph enubaiisteehcattca British/ Benes conceptual universe in which the colonial eats of research and education were first assembled, as the Pee bEsWillamJonés! othe whole conipler ety fears eee on founding of Fort William College in 1800 up to. the eedlikineshoithe-fiesttires,Tandcaaalie aie 1857-58, with Macaulay's Minute of 1835 in between, would amply ire Bur the acral elaboration of colonial society was contradictory, an both the Chrisan misionary and the colonial officer were i dicover that neither Sanskrit nor Persian not even English couk = atthe time asa language of command, in the administration of es and bodies, so far as the masses of Indians, or even the colonial 7 , were concerned; they had to be iat the wee cy themsces spoke — in what we now call ‘the region . The at history of the printing presses and grids of colonial ducation demonstrates this fact clearly enough. An Englitlangige Press, of course, kept evolving, and much was imported from ae for the British themselves as well as the emergent Indian Third Estate, but the frst two printing. presses, at Serampore and Fort William, sails ial primarily in the Indian tant into being for publication of material primarily real Si2ees for both Indians and Europeans, and the hisay of a Subsequent developments of printing presses in various pa! pee “ountry is inextricably linked with the need for textbooks and o historiography, Dnsciousness at historians also substitutes the Millsian sense the this pl Se258 Aijae Abed in the fullness of time, for the ional materials education Pedayy Leg F reformist ‘literature’ very centtally — in the indigenn, of refi lan Bape, This was obviously connected also with the evolving educar ed is ional rares sponsored by the colonial sate the Chrisian min” structures, spons ee ati "tthe Indian reform movements, in which most of an ¢ n the educainn and instruction were cartied out in the indigenous {, Macaulay or anyone else notwithstanding, Specialized training ;, the classical languages of India— Sanskrit, Farsi, even Arabic imparted in the Oriental Colleges and the academies whi established for this purpose, but most such scholarship mainly through more traditional institutions and privately g circuits, even though some instruction in these languages was in some of the regular schools and colleges as wel. English became the language of higher education, especially at university level; wh normal schooling was carried out everywhere in what was taken 1g bbe — and was therefore greatly standardized as — the local vernaculy Only in the handful of highly exclusive public schools was Engst taught in an exclusive way. There, a key sector of the dominan, intelligentsia evolved which was actually removed from any productive relation with any other of the Indian languages. Considering that barely 15 per cent of the population was in any sense literate by the time of decolonization, the failures of the sytem are obvious enough, and in some senses all of this literate segment of the population could be construed as some kind of ‘elite’, since even bare literacy did help in the long-term dynamics of social mobilities. In terms of decisive class privilege, however, which combined higher education with considerable property and/or income, the real ‘educated elite’ was a mere fraction of that 15 per cent. Bac education did reach sizeable proportions of the under-privleged Strata, especially through the schools established by the reform movements and philanthropies and local entrepreneurs, secondarily through mission schools, but also through government schools, which were few in number but heavily subsidized. The bulk of the literte Population came out of these schools, knowing a litle Englib (ometimes enough, often not even enough for colonial service) bt they were schooled in the indigenous languages, and this vernacuat Bape, Was ch were SUTVived "ganized availabley ooling ¥ a networ i ' tesiden ee in Calcutta, Elphinstone in Bombay, Government Coll 2 ~ duced bilingual intelligentsia and scotes of wrines Dees spartihit UndullHindi(Pusiabt, did en ane co penal Gujarat a tu, Hindi, Punjabi, and so on, For who came out of other kinds of colleges, which were by fi che majority and were established most often by indigenous sed ents and philanthropies, moorings in English were even less secure. This education system corresponded fairly accurately to the Mf colonial administration il, which was conducted in seman only atthe upp levels where British personnel were diedly involved. The rest was conducted either bilingually, through inermediaries at the median levels, or in the indigenous languages, by Indian personnel at the lower levels; this constituted the vast bulk of the administrative machinery. Conversely, publishing too — venspapers, journals, the book trade — was preponderantly in the indigenous languages, even though the English-language press ‘ommanded, and still commands, a disproportionate degree of influence. The issue of ‘literature’ must be viewed in this broad Indian Literature : Notes Towards the Definig ion of a Cat gory 259 5 then greatly supplemented by the evolvin, je. Even the most clte colleges — eg preneutt context. The constitutive logic of Colonial Discourse Analysis is such that sgnficant practitioners of it have come to construe the English language in India asa pure colonial imposition, and English lteraure itself as some kind of central enterprise of the colonial state in its bid for the construction of consent in India. Both these propositions are substantially inaccurate. It is of course true, in some partial way, that English was an imposition, but the more remarkable fact is that in the entire history of Indian reformism, from Rammohun to Vivekanand to Sir Syed to TTilak and Gandhi, there is always an atachment to and a competence in one or two Indian languages, but never any eejection of English as such; vreually all of them wend it, not as a literary language but as a window on the most advant laowedges of the world, mainly in the physical and social scieness, in historiography, in the technical fields. Even Gandhi mor extreme Satements of obscurantist nationalism in Hind Swart] (1909) Where he fumes against the railways 2s caries of oman“" 260 Aijae Abmed i i violating caste purities, while he also qj rag me aed plots ch ilar anc medicine ne sable | for the absence of the English teacher as an gj sical che purported eae ntti is oe because st i origin or that any social superiority attaches t9 ay 1 eae ie tightly debunked, but there is no seree tha ce as such has no rightful place in India. That kind of opposi® iE English came only from those even mote rigidly obscurantn — located for the most part in the overlap of extreme reli capitalist landed property and small-scale commercial capital were opposed to a great many reforms of Indian society whether advocated by the British or by the more advance of Indian sociery. TTo the extent that English war imposed by the British, ic yas imposed primarily as the language of administration, managemen, modem professions such as law and medicine, technical field, cents surveys, and so on. The introduction of literary texts into vatious sors of syllabi was primarily a means towards such ends, the zeal of particular ideologues notwithstanding. Inculcatng abelifin Chisianity or in the grandeur of British civilization was obviously an imporant goal for a colonizing power that saw itself as carrying out a ciilzng mission among the heathen, and zealots doubtless made much of it But a traditional British pedagogy also held that the best way 0 improve one's knowledge of a language, especially a foreign language, once you have mastered the basic vocabulary and simple grammar, is chrough stylistically accessible poems such as Wordsworth’ ‘Lucy’ Sequence, or through fables or historical romances. The role ofliterary compositions in the school curricula for Indian children was one expression of that pedagogy, but language teaching for British Personnel at Fort William College was also organized according to that same principle, Thus a number of books, such as Acraish-e-Mehfil ot Bagh-e-Baher, which eventually came to be included among the key classics of Urdu prose, were initially composed as textbooks for British Personnel who needed to learn the language and know its culturd ambience. It was similarly believed that a mastery of Milton's poet” Might or might not make a Christian out of anyone, but it Citcles Osity, pre. — which aS such, d sectorsp Notes Towards the Definition fa Category 26} Literature >) Indian , standing of the En one’s understani inly improve * mpound sentence, It ay 10 write te co t the ways of God w coe HT enrece thal rhe COMPO : ble. jected social strata did any appreciable cr only in sel lieve in the intrinsic literary superiority Only jectuals come to bel Boaca ba net ccactiu\cheleniine BF desiring to write in it, ene, te Engh lang a recognized that the physical and soci gow 8 seni dds" hscoopraphy lexicography, urban ceenees, the ech us other areas of modern knowledge were ma 7 epee in India. The sense of the ng tain than in In ° Foe hh developed ee was thus eablshed noe in the superiority of mead the cognitive and technical fields. This a literary but, = in the face that compared to the vast nr h ily be witns asa es and actively participated in eal be older indigenous languag ee Wee eae those languages, relatively : Taad trader diving ih colo podod ma ting poems an Inn sis de even though many came to love this forcign fizion in English, ev become their own; whereas, in pica seat eae redominant language both for i lo die cobra sisal for writing in a whole range 7 f administration an a ish had enue Sie the literary. In the field of literature, English . of fields other erary. of epociioa but Serre te te = + knoe of on specific genres which the Indian eee ee elie the Homeric epic, the sonnet, ree pinee cesay ; ian variants, blank verse, the prose esay, Greek and its Shakespearian variants, aS the many ki of prose Mati rian fr eperac yey A Pw fiction, Virtually all these compositional ‘hevehcnatiie tha peed oF another, by one writer or another. But th ties kad Biendh decisive was with realism, especially in its forms came and i Sa s i rion. Most other ing Variants, albeit in English hc Rete iia wayrof'a pprchend 8 Went, but realism remained, mainly cette Indian soe the world Cotresponded to that histori is upheavals, obainng is when it was undergoing its first bourgeois up! italist types Was undergoing ents of the capitalist class Sttucture and- household ae beset with revolutionary forming its own self-consciousness as a lish grammar and was in the teaching ete seen to be highly number of jus262 Aijaz Ahmed crises, albeit in a colonial setting, vi From contradictions of this kind came broad, essentially cass bag divisions of intellectual function among the new intelligentsia wiicy arose out of the apparatuses of colonial education.'® The developmeny of these incligensias was highly uneven both regionally and sectoral and we still need far more accurate monographic studies of the social history of their development in terms of regional roots, class origin, religious or caste affiliations, social mores, schooling patterns, and linguistic competences. So one can never be sure, but certain patterns can be summarized. The dominant, more privileged strata among these new intelligentsias —often reflecting a nexus of class, caste, college degrees, and the upper layers of colonial service — acknowledged the three-part division, came to adopt English as the main language of public function, but sometimes learned Sanskrit or/and Persian also, as the languages of scholastic and courtly eminence in Indids own past, while retaining the indigenous language for common discourse in household and community. These clusters tended to produce not ‘writers’, in the literary sense, but ‘scholars’ in the Humanities and the Social Sciences — or (a favourite pastime) translators of either a modern European text into an Indian language or a classical Indian text into English, more or less in the Orientals genre. Concurrently, however, clusters of a new type of professional petty bourgeoisie were also assembled in the various regions of the country, which then found themselves functioning with a new kind of bi- and even trilinguality, whereby professional work was done in a mixture of English and the indigenous languages, which gave them a Bhadralokish Window on English literature as well. Cultural life was lived, by and large, in the language(s) of locality and region, while for the majority of those who were thus incorporated into these new, regional clusters — often drawn from the impoverished sections of the upper cast or from the middle castes and Petty property — any real, working ‘owledgeofSansst or Persian was either fragmentary ov nonesis?r Indian Literature : Notes Towards the Definitio f mn of a ¢ ‘ , “Atego sen happens i” the case of professional Strata 776s wi s diverse classes and social groups, there was c A s : onsi jo op between the dominant and the middie tb afi nd" : : ng layers, by : ; ie bu ane goo, in theit respective generalities, strycty t they a te ; red into di ile, the establishment of i ren — Printing presses in different woes! etic regions Was revolutionizing the means of litetary and ae i i an waalistic production, turning the new professional Strata and th . ie reid classes generally into ‘reading publics’, for English often but, on a far greater numerical scale, for the ‘tegional’ : . ; ‘gional’ i lbeit very unevenly in the different Tegions: earlier and far more extensively for Bengali, more than a century later in Kashmir, Meanwhile, the education system was such that the thin upper crust of the highly Anglicized urban elite which went to the more exdusive convents and the select public schools were hardly ever encouraged to specialize in any Indian language, classical or modern, and either made do with English alone or fell back on family network, and private instruction for indigenous language(s), while the traditional sectors of those same dominant classes developed institutions for the dissemination of literary productions in the indigenous languages, outside the apparatuses of the colonial state. The fact that these upper clases frequently coincided with upper castes meant that, regardless of the exact nature of their relationship with the upper layers of the colonial apparatuses which had the English language at their epicentre, many of them came out of family traditions which included a knowledge of Sanskrit and/or Persian. This was particularly true in the case of those scholastic fractions which had been located in either the religious or the judicial institutions of pre-colonial society, or were Es to the courts either at imperial or regional and local levels. ‘Court’ in pre-capitalist society, we must remind ourselves, went down ‘© the level of individual fief-holders, and the scholastic caste fractions were quite widely spread,!? ze Contradictions of the education system, howe we ried St among the petty bourgeoisie, ofboth the edtons Pr Kehoe (Professional) kinds, because the oyvards English While i. and professional ambition drove paw them roored in cultural pressures of their own lives K¢P! hich ate drawn264 Aijar Ahmed their own linguistic communities. ‘The pattern of served only to deepen these contradictions, since th lng h the 1 hil 1 Link i wi spoken and lived language was strongest atthe lower leet ‘els, English kept taking over more and more as they went fut colleges and universities. It was mainly, though by exclusively in the hands ofthese culturally beleaguered indy belonging neither to the colonial elite nor to the exuly nt i 2 clases, who were themselves riven by the contradiction bere 'n tf of el if, hn 2 spech, eg language of administrative command and the language the print literatures of India, in languages of our ow, fst assembled on any appreciable scale. Thus it was nt prin in the inttations of colonial edication, nor even in the ean” philological researches of Western Orientals who doubues much useful work, but in the productions and investigations of hn who actually produced literature in the modern languages ofthe lan thatthe question ofthe relationship between their own spoken tngu and their immediate linguistic precursors in the pre-modern, mediee] languages of India — not just Farsi, the language of command in regions but a language of felt life only for a few, but all those lind linguistic histories that came between the classical past and the modern speech — was first productively and systematically posed, in the terms of a modern scholarship, The literary clusters which arose in the so-called ‘regional languages during the colonial period were drawn preponderanty from the emergent Third Estate, typically combining meditim-scae propery with professional or commercial location and a mixture of knowledges drawn from English as well asthe vernacular; che relatively impoverished sectors of those upper castes which had traditionally occupied intellectual functions in pre-colonial society dominates this new formation. To the extent that the majority of them did not come from the upper layers of the traditional landowning casts mY thought of themselves as part of a democratizing dynamic that from inside the crisis of pre-capitalist society. Many felt opPret ie é that varia by the proximity and power of that moribund structure, 50 aps therotics of reform, in both enlightened and mystficatory "2, often more or less naturally to. them. In turn, they were 2... |- Indian Litera sure : Notes Towards the D he Definition ion of a C ‘ategory 265 i hose parti aor’ ro thos particular parts of 7 sof pot ly eonnected with the idiom our medievalit as nce these literatures arose oo and beliefs y which w tet India W4S experiencin| b in regional la 8 of the po bi nent scale Se aioe oth a colo Inguages at shoe srifietion affected partly sia mney subjectionsof fa basicaly by colonial stn kind of bo of ye ant-colonial moveme! pitaist structure pee and. the fen had 2 deep Ne ‘ itself, the elds and - ut regional scularities ae negotiating th 5 of these pee ein the ae dead ee ween ip se of the Si les of the Bast unity. Furth tween sss, that india any movement a period, spesially with sede literary cull to witn area ly with rata hae ess the aaa say suing a2 were, in gradual emi ural many kit g against religious many of thei ergence of full a inds of both perso particularit eit articulati i in innumerable ways i nal and collecti ty and obscurants om ee theft ime in our Mi the past as i eee ad at os religous narratvizati istory, vowards ati hes also attempted ral sa ‘OF che “uiaiets historici > groping, fo a Wonder” th Preval ‘world icbarion and r geen, hat then, given thi id. non- special interest i many of th this whole eau est in thos ese new intel range of thei ively call ° ¢ many st lectuals cam emege whole, with Bhakti. F rands of out e to have a an en . For Bhakti medieval ate ihn eorons de Tas bas soe which essed = aad ocratizati in associ ae anhiiaté esa tization of li iated, on oe eee of caste hi literary language cs Wadi ah had b egemony in fa 5 had protects yas; was i een regional our of th Whether ne the gend ideologically ST er on bah ' ol - ini in its Ma esol construction of nical had. deep lop p or speech i all. dialogi et : ical Fi itself; gic rela izing inspirati é and was hit ions, a g and somew tions. In oth ighly ecumenical physical hat liberati er words, i ‘ a delet rating, as , it was these sits pecul rmination but it pects of Bhakti — not i ny i iarly irreconci ut its overall ant ee ‘a a ated Ba ee tension becws i-Brahminical 5 its cum with the idge between our i consent and ladiee Fo perspective and modernity and our mation as a clus speech of the popular tet of regional and eve?