D Tejaswini Niranjana (5), diligent, impartial and efficient, well-qualified 'to appreciate the acts and designs of the government (6). The creation of a westernized, English-educated elite and their domination over intellectual production is made possible by the working of an elaborate system of discriminations. Even our contemporary attitudes towards indigenous lit- 141 eratures are shaped by the evaluative paradigms promoted by English education.3 In a curious convergence of colonialist and nationalist interests, a powerful strand of Indian nationalism demanded, as an anti-colonial gesture, the revaluation of literature and knowledge in the vernacular languages. An 'Indian' tradition, was sought to be formed, a tradition which desired to 'purify' itself in response to the accusations of inferiority and barbarism made by missionaries and other colonisers. Indians felt it necessary 'to demonstrate that [they] were not innately or naturally bestial, and that with stern application we could attain an intellectual standing as well as ... strength of character and purpose. . / (Tharu 1989: 258). Already in 1838, writing in support of the filtration theory advocated by Macaulay, Charles Trevelyan had argued for the need to create a vernacular literature. 'A liberal English education' was crucial for 'the middle and upper classes,' 'in order that we may furnish them with both the materials and the models for the formation of a national literature' (Trevelyan 1838: 175). 'Out of their fulness, from minds saturated with English knowledge and tastes formed by the study of English masterpieces' (175), Indians would begin to write in their own languages. Tracing the connections between Macaulay's imperial 'moment and the nationalist 'moment', Susie Tharu writes about how 'the agendas set up in the nineteenth century . . . actually constituted the concept of an Indian literature' and how 'these agendas informed the literary history as much as they did literary production, pedagogy and criticism' (Tharu 1991: 163). It is not merely the nationalist concept of an Indian literature that comes into being in our 'modem' period, but also the concept of a Kannada literature, a Telugu literature and so on.4 I mean literature here as it presents itself, in a post-Romantic idiom, primarily as imaginative, creative writing. This imaging of literature draws directly upon the nationalist impulse to build a 'higher culture', an impulse which is foundational for Kannada literary criticism—even, or especially, in the Princely State of Mysore—in the Navodaya [New Dawn] period of the early decades of the twentieth century associated, among others, with the names of B.M. Srikantaiyya, Masti Venkatesa lyengar, D.V. Gundappa and A.N. Moorthy Rao. To this end, the function of the critic was to teach the reader how to appreciate poetry and thereby become a 'cultured' person. The word culture or samskriti in Kannada is admittedly a new one (having come into usage in the 1920s or so), but it derives from the older word samskara, which is glossed by the Kittel Kannada-English dictionary5 in its primary meaning as 'forming well or thoroughly, making perfect, perfecting) completing, finishing, refining, refinement, accomplishment', as 'making pure, purification, purity' [Meaning 6], and as 'a sanctifying or purificatory rite or essential ceremony (enjoined on all the first three classes or castes . . .)' [Meaning 7], i.e. the savama castes. Numbers 25-26