Whose Culture is it? Contesting the Modem II The institutionalization of English Literature took place in the colonies long before it was introduced in England as the basis for a compulsory education.1 As Gauri 140 Viswanathan has argued, the introduction of English education in India was 'an embattled response to historical and political pressures: to tensions between the English parliament and the East India Company, between parliament and the missionaries, between the East India Company and the native elite classes' (Viswanathan 1987: 24), English Literature, through which the English language would be made familiar, was to be emblematic of the finely honed system of 'discriminations' which the colonised elite would learn to perceive. The 'appreciation' of literature would not only help impart what the educational vocabulary of the day named as 'useful learning' but also 'improve the morals' of its readers, and cultivate among them both the desire for 'improvement' and a new universe of spiritual values. I will not go into the background of Macaula/s infamous Minute on Indian education and the introduction of English in government schools in 1835.2 We must call to mind, however, the increasing need for Indian bureaucrats and lower functionaries by the colonial state, and the urgent task of educating them into a universalist capitalist work-ethic (which included, importantly, the drive to achieve 'distinction' and the ability to differentiate between 'feudal' morality and the newly emerging codes of conduct). Macaulay's dismissal of indigenous literatures and the privileging of the literature of Europe is enabled by the operation of an evaluative system which aligns 'European value' with positive value and everything else with lack of quality or negative value, contrasting the 'poor and unformed' native languages with the 'rich and cultivated' European ones (Trevelyan 1838: 122). 'Our subjects have set out on a new career of improvement,' enthused Charles Trevelyan, an advocate of English education, 'they are about to have a new character imprinted on them.' That this national movement should be taken under the guidance of the State,' he argued, '. . . will hardly be denied to be as conducive to the welfare of our subjects as it will be to the popularity and permanence of our dominion over them' (Trevelyan 1838: 181). The older systems of learning in India 'have been weighed in the balance, and have been found wanting' (85), and henceforth Indian students will be 'encouraged to acquire the various kinds of information which English literature contains, and to form their taste after the best English models' (47, emphasis mine). As Trevelyan tells us: 'Arrangements were made with the school-book society for the publication of a book of selections from the English poets, from Chaucer downwards, and the expediency of publishing a corresponding volume in prose is now under consideration' (17). These canons of English Literature, first formulated for use in the colonies, were also employed in the late nineteenth century to civilize the English working classes and young women. In the domestic economy as well as that of the wider reaches of Empire, the study of literature helped form 'able servants and valuable subjects' Journal of Arts & Ideas