Investigating the emergence of Hindi publishing in colonial Lucknow, long a stronghold of Urdu and Persian literary culture, Shobna Nijhawan offers a detailed study of literary activities emerging out of the publishing house Gaṅgā Pustak Mālā in the first half of the twentieth century. Closely associated with it was the Hindi monthly Sudhā, a literary, socio-political, and illustrated periodical, in which Hindi writings were promoted and developed for the education and entertainment of the reader. In charting the literary networks established by Dularelal Bhargava, the proprietor of Gaṅgā Pustak Mālā and chief Edited by of Sudhā, this volume sheds light on his role in the development of Hindi language and literature, creation of canonical literature, and commercialization and nationalization of books and periodicals in the north Indian Hindi public sphere. Using vernacular primary sources and drawing on scholarship on periodicals and publishing houses as well as Edited by-publishers that has emerged over the past two decades, Nijhawan shows how one publishing house singlehandedly impacted the role of Hindi in the public sphere.

Hindi Publishing in Colonial Lucknow centers on the literary activities emerging out of the publishing house Ganga Pustak Mala in colonial Lucknow in the first half of the twentieth century. Closely associated with Ganga Pustak Mala was the Hindi monthly Sudha (lit. nectar, ambrosia), aliterary, social, political and illustrated periodical, in which Hindi writings in prose and poetry, including Hindi literary criticism, and other activities concerning the Hindi public sphere, such as language politics, social reforms, matters concerning lifestyle, health, arts and sciences, andthe political emancipation of women and men were promoted and developed. Building on the defining work of Gerard Genette on paratexts as well as on scholarship on text-image relationships, this book charts the literary networks established by the publishing house's proprietor and chief editor of Sudha, Dularelal Bhargava, who played a pivotal role in the emergence ofHindi literary production out of Lucknow and in the commercialization and nationalization of Hindi literature in the north Indian Hindi public sphere.

What did everyday Hinduism in India look like a hundred years ago? Were its practices more varied and less politically curtailed than now? Hindi Hindu Histories provides illuminating historical accounts of Hindu life through individual actors, autobiographical narratives, and genres in the Hindi print-public culture of early twentieth-century North India. It focuses on four fascinating figures: a successful woman doctor in the Indigenous medical regime, a globe-trotting Hindu ascetic who opposed Gandhi, an anticaste campaigner who spoke for sexual equality, and a Hindu communist who envisioned an egalitarian utopia in the world of labor. These public intellectuals harbored vernacular dreams of freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their vantage points of caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism. Opening up a vast and under-explored Hindi archive, this book presents a dynamic spectacle of a plural Hindi-Hindu universe of facets that coexisted, challenged each other, and comprised an idea of Hinduness far more inclusive than anything conceivable in the present moment.

"This chapter sets out the located and multilingual approach to literary history employed in the book. It outlines the geographical and historical scope of the book and traces the changing political boundaries of Purab (East), the region east of Delhi in the Gangetic plain of northern India later better known as Awadh, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. The presence of many small towns (qasbas), which were administrative, economic, and cultural nodes, but no capital city until the eighteenth century marks the decentered character of the region. The chapter also makes a case that the multilingual approach 'from the ground up employed in this book can help produce a richer and more textured take on world literature"--

This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations that expand the assumptions that have typically framed literary histories, and creatively re-draws their boundaries, both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities, and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. The accompanying translations—from Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Urdu—not only round out these scholarly explorations and comparisons, but invite readers to recognise the assiduous, intimate, and critical labour of expanding access to the vernacular archive, while also engaging with the challenges—linguistic, cultural, and political—of rendering vernacular articulations of gendered experience and embodiment in English. Collectively, the essays and translations foreground complex and politicised expressions of gender and genre in fictional and non-fictional print materials and thus draw meaningful connections between the vernacular and literature, the everyday and the marginals, and gender and sentiment. They expand vernacular literary archives, canons and genealogies, and push us to theorise the nature of writing in South Asia. Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular is a significant new contribution to South Asian literary history and gender studies, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of History, Literature, Cultural Studies, Politics, and Sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

This book focuses on subjugated indentured Indian women, who are constantly faced with race, gender, caste, and class oppression and inequality on overseas European-owned plantations, but who are also armed with latent links to the women’s abolition movements in the homeland. Also examining their post-indenture life, it employs a paradigm of male-dominated Indian women in India at the margins of an enduringly patriarchal society, a persisting backdrop to the huge 19th century post-slavery movement of the agricultural indentured workforce drawn largely from India. This book depicts the antithetical and contradictory explanations for the indentured Indian women’s cries, degradation and dehumanization and how the politics of change and control impacted their social organization and its legacy. The book owes its origins to the 2017 centennial commemorative event celebrating 100 years of the abolition of the indenture system of Indian labor that victimized and dehumanized Indians from 1834 through 1917.

Subaltern Narratives in Fiji Hindi Literature is the first comprehensive study of fiction written in Fiji Hindi that moves beyond the hegemonic and colonially-implicated perspectives that have necessarily informed top-down historical accounts. Mishra makes this case using two extraordinary novels Ḍaukā Purān [‘A Subaltern Tale’] (2001]) and Fiji Maa [‘Mother of a Thousand’] (2018) by the Fiji Indian writer Subramani. They are massive novels (respectively 500 and 1,000 pages long) written in the devanāgarī (Sanskrit) script. They are examples of subaltern writing that do not exist, as a legitimation of the subaltern voice, anywhere else in the world. The novels constitute the silent underside of world literature, whose canon they silently challenge. For postcolonial, diaspora and subaltern scholars, they are defining (indeed definitive) texts without which their theories remain incomplete. Theories require mastery of primary texts and these subaltern novels, ‘heroic’ compositions as they are in the vernacular, offer a challenge to the theorist.

This book explores the making of colonial Northeast India and offers a new perspective to the study of the Assamese identity in the nineteenth century as a distinctly nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon, not confined to linguistic parameters alone. It studies crucial markers of the self — history, customs, food, dress, new religious beliefs — and symbols considered desirable by the provincial middle class and the way these fitted in with the latter’s nationalist subjectivities in the face of an emphatic Bengali cultural nationalism. The author shows how colonialism was intrinsically linked to the assertion of middle class intelligentsia in the region and was instrumental in eroding the essential malleability of societal processes nurtured by the Ahom state. Rich with fresh research data, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of history, political science, area studies, and to anyone interested in understanding Northeast India.

A fascinating 2003 study of the precolonial kingdom of Kota through its historical documents.