Foundation and Sociological Ethos of the Indian English Novel

Abstract

The act of educating Indians in English is largely seen as a practice to extend hegemonical
dominance on the part of the colonial rulers who wanted to spread their administrative and
political imperatives through the language. But the irony of such a process lies in the fact
that English literary education, in turn, gave birth to ‘humanistic ideals of enlightenment to
coexist’ alongside language being used for socio-political control. The Britishers who
thought that Indians needed to be ‘taught’ to appreciate literary traditions and for this tried to
raise them up to ‘their’ intellectual levels had started it in the guise of a noble initiative but
contradictions were there within their methods. Gauri Visvanathan observes in this
connection ‘The claim that literature can be read meaningfully only when a high degree of
morality and understanding is present in the reader implied that certain controlled measures
were necessary to bring the reader up to the desired level. But paradoxically, those measures
took the form of instruction in that same literature for which preparation was deemed
necessary