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 work looks at how local intellectuals explored 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 and the bilingual division, 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.