He argues that the concept of nationalism, as it appeared with the rise of the modern nation-state in the West, cannot be easily applied to the cultural production of non-Western societies since that would homogenize the radical diversity of India’s fluid geographical and cultural formations which, in turn, embody many diverse public aspirations. In this essay, “‘Indian Literature’: Notes towards the Definition of a Category”, Aijaz Ahmad examines the theoretical category called ‘India Literature’ by questioning its ability to capture and explain the varied multilingual literatures of India. The essay under study was published in his book In Theory.
He is a consultant editor of the magazine Frontline and is a regular contributor to journals like the Socialist Register. His most recent book is In Our Time: Empire, Politics, Culture which has published by Verso, London, in 2012. He has authored many books, among which are In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures Lineages of the Present: Ideological and Political Genealogies of Contemporary South Asia Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of Our Time On Communalism and Globalization - Offensives of the Far Right. He is also a visiting Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto. At present he is the Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. He received his education in Pakistan, and subsequently lectured in various universities inthe US and Canada. He was born in India before his parent migrated to Pakistan after the Partition. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negative: the artificial, mechanized or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.‘Indian Literature’: Notes towards the Definition of a Category Aijaz Ahmad 1 Aijaz Ahmad is a well known literary critic and political commentator working in the tradition of Marxist literary criticism. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point away from, rather than towards, something definite. tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify.
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