The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger inquiry into the construction of English literary education as a cultural ideal in British India. British parliamentary documents have provided compelling evidence for the central thesis of the investigation: that humanistic functions traditionally associated with the study of literature — for example, the shaping of character or the development of the esthetic sense or the disciplines of ethical thinking — are also essential to the process of sociopolitical control. My argument is that literary study gained enormous cultural strength through its development in a period of territorial expansion and conquest, and that the subsequent institutionalization of the discipline in England itself took on a shape and an ideological content developed in the colonial context. In what follows, I propose to outline the preliminary stages of the historical process by which literature was made serviceable to British political interests — a process, I may add, that is replete with numerous ironies, contradictions, and anomalies. I have titled my essay The Beginnings of English' rather than, say The Rise of English' or The Growth of English' to emphasize two things: first, my interest is in seeking out the historical moment at which English literature as a subject for study made its appearance in India, a moment that can be identified as a 'beginning' which, in Edward Said's formulation, 'includes everything that develops out of it, no matter how eccentric the development or inconsistent the result'; 1 and second, my method of doing so is by describing the historical conditions which enabled that appearance in the first place, indeed even necessitated it. Neither of these two goals, I believe, is adequately represented by the words 'rise' or 'growth' , with their implications of inexorable

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