Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere : Western India Under Colonialism

Contents: Introduction. 1. Textual hierarchies, literate audiences and structures of patronage: language and power in pre-colonial Western India. 2. Colonial education and the laicisation of knowledge : re-making cultural hierarchies and modes of contestation. 3. Colonial education and the cultivation of English and Marathi: hierarchies of language and the emerging political structure. 4. Colonial power, print and the re-making of the literature sphere. 5. Bilingualism, hegemony and the ‘Swing to Orthodoxy’: the shaping of the political sphere (1860-1881). Glossary. Bibliography. Index.

"The bilingual relationship between English and the Indian vernaculars has long been crucial to the construction of ideology as well as cultural and political hierarchies. Print was vital for colonial literacy – for initiating a shift in the relation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ languages. This book looks at the relationship between linguistic hierarchies, textual practices and power in colonial Western India. Whereas most studies of colonialism focus on India’s ‘high’ literary culture. this looks at how local intellectuals exploited their ‘middling’ position through initiatives to establish newspapers and influential channels of communication.

"How was the ‘native’ intelligentsia able to achieve a position of ideological influence? This book shows that, despite their minority position, such people negotiated the arenas of education policy, the press, and voluntary associations to advance their interests as a social class. In doing this it illuminates the Indian intelligentsia’s self-definitions before anti-colonial thinking articulated its hegemonic claims as nationalistic discourse.

"This book will interest readers of Indian history, cultural politics, and colonial ideology." (jacket)