Postcolonial Studies have demonstrated the constitutive role of the politics of knowledge in the European colonial project. Bringing this perspective forward to the globalised present, the article considers the shifting status of literary studies in the contemporary situation of knowledges. It traces the historic continuities between the development of scientific modernity enabled through the process of colonizing India – with the central part ascribed to literature – and the cognitive regime gradually imposed by Globalization, to argue for a historicized revaluation of the European category of ‘literature’ that accounts both for its current situation and its intrinsic, trans-historic connectedness to India.