Paper Details

This paper examines vernacular literary production in colonial India as a domain of epistemic contestation rather than merely cultural expression or nationalist sentiment. Focusing on Marathi, Urdu, and Tamil intellectual traditions between 1835 and 1943, it argues that vernacular writers did not simply oppose colonial rule politically, but challenged the epistemological hierarchies through which colonial authority constituted itself. The year 1835 marks a decisive rupture with Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Education, which institutionalised English as the language of higher learning and repositioned vernacular traditions as culturally expressive yet intellectually subordinate. Against this restructuring of linguistic authority, vernacular discourse emerged as a site through which alternative histories, moral frameworks, pedagogical models, and conceptions of modernity were articulated. Through a comparative reading of Gulamgiri, Musaddas, and Ini Varum Ulagam, the paper traces distinct yet interconnected modes of vernacular knowledge production. Phule reinterprets Brahminical mythology and caste history through Bahujan Marathi in order to expose the relationship between language, religion, and social domination. Hali transforms Urdu poetry from a courtly literary form into a pedagogical and sociological mode of public reasoning centred on moral and intellectual reform. Periyar moves beyond both colonial modernity and civilisational revivalism to articulate a radically rationalist and futurist critique of caste, religion, patriarchy, and inherited social structures. Read together, these texts demonstrate that vernacular writing in colonial India functioned not merely as a medium of communication but as a theoretical space capable of reorganising the terms through which history, society, and authority were understood. Methodologically, the paper employs critical discourse analysis of secondary literature to examine how vernacular intellectual traditions have been framed within colonial and postcolonial scholarship. In doing so, it distinguishes between the “post-colonial” as a temporal condition following formal empire and the “postcolonial” as an epistemic critique of colonial structures of knowledge. Although the texts examined here were produced within the colonial period, they are read as postcolonial interventions insofar as they destabilise the discursive foundations of colonial epistemology itself. By repositioning vernacular literature as a site of intellectual and theoretical production, this paper argues that the making of modern Indian thought cannot be understood solely through colonial institutions or English language discourse, but must also be located within the vernacular publics that reconfigured the epistemic foundations of modernity from within colonial rule itself.

Vernacular Literature; Colonial Epistemology; Postcolonial Thought; Epistemic Resistance