Colonial Impact and Indian Response

Abstract

Abstract How does our understanding of the cultural impact of colonialism change if we take a located and multilingual perspective? That colonialism had a profound impact on North Indian society and literature at structural and epistemic levels—from education to notions of literature—is beyond doubt. This chapter shows how ideas of indigeneity vs. foreignness produced competing discourses about Hindi and Urdu as distinct languages with separate, quasi-monolingual, literary histories, which elided not only traditions in the “other” language but also contemporary orature and Muslim folklore. But redirecting our attention to continuities as well as disruptions and radical innovations, this chapter argues, shows the resilience of aesthetics and tastes that modern literary reformers condemned as irrelevant, decadent, and dangerous. The chapter also shows how new genres other than the novel, such as musical theater, reproduced and exploited multilingual repertoires. These genres were arguably more significant to the consolidation and spread of nationalist and other ideologies.