ABSTRACT
It has been established by recent scholarship that the nineteenthcentury Indian efforts of writing a history of India must be seen in the broader context of ‘national self-assertion’, identity shaping and intellectual emancipation from the British raj.2 It is the
contention of this chapter that the writing of literary histories can be seen in the same perspective,3 the only difference being, that, in this case, it was not the existence of an Indian nation ‘from times immemorial’ that was at stake but the genealogy of a future Indian national language, its national literature and hence implicitly also its national values.4 As Vasudha Dalmia has pointed out in her groundbreaking study of Bharatendu Harishcandra, the historicisation of Indian languages (especially Hindi) and their literatures consequently became an important strategy of supporting the process of nation-building on a cultural and ideological level.5
