This Book Fills A Gap In Our Understanding Of The Role That Language Has Played Int He History And Politics Of Modern Indai And Will Make Interesting Reading For Historians, Linguists, Cultural Studies Scholars As Well As General Readers.
This is the first academic study of Christian literature in Hindi and its role in the politics of language and religion in contemporary India. In public portrayals, Hindi has been the language of Hindus and Urdu the language of Muslims, but Christians have been usually been associated with the English of the foreign ‘West’. However, this book shows how Christian writers in India have adopted Hindi in order to promote a form of Christianity that can be seen as Indian, desī, and rooted in the religio-linguistic world of the Hindi belt. Using three case studies, the book demonstrates how Hindi Christian writing strategically presents Christianity as linguistically Hindi, culturally Indian, and theologically informed by other faiths. These works are written to sway public perceptions by promoting particular forms of citizenship in the context of fostering the use of Hindi. Examining the content and context of Christian attention to Hindi, it is shown to have been deployed as a political and cultural tool by Christians in India. This book gives an important insight into the link between language and religion in India. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Religion in India, World Christianity, Religion and Politics and Interreligious Dialogue, as well as Religious Studies and South Asian Studies.
Bully. Outsider. Iconoclast. Villain. Antagonist. Misfit. This is how the Hindi literary world perceives Upendranath Ashk. In this powerful biography, Daisy Rockwell presents the many faces of the writer and his tumultuous life and times, unfolding in the process, the period, the literary histroy of Hindi and the Hindi-Urdu divide. She also traces the development of Modern Standard Hindi, participants in its evolution and Ashk's role in it.
Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism--progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental--in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit ("untouchable caste") fiction. Drawing on a wide array of writings from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V. S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce?
Islamic South Asia has become a focal point in academia. Where did Muslims come from? How did they fare in interacting with Hindu cultures? How did they negotiate identity as ruling and ruled minorities and majorities? Part I covers early Muslim expansion and the formative phase in context of initial cultural encounter (app. 700-1300). Part II views the establishment of Muslim empire, cultures oscillating between Islamic and Islamicate, centralised and regionalised power (app. 1300-1700). Part III is composed in the backdrop of regional centralisation, territoriality and colonial rule, displaying processes of integration and differentiation of Muslim cultures in colonial setting (app. 1700-1930). Tensions between Muslim pluralism and singularity evolving in public sphere make up the fourth cluster (app. 1930-2002).
This volume critically engages with recent formulations and debates regarding the status of the regional languages of the Indian subcontinent vis-à-vis English. It explores how language ideologies of the “vernacular” are positioned in relation to the language ideologies of English in South Asia. The book probes into how we might move beyond the English-vernacular binary in India, explores what happened to “bhasha literatures” during the colonial and post-colonial periods and how to position those literatures by the side of Indian English and international literature. It looks into the ways vernacular community and political rhetoric are intertwined with Anglophone (national or global) positionalities and their roles in political processes. This book will be of interest to researchers, students and scholars of literary and cultural studies, Indian Writing in English, Indian literatures, South Asian languages and popular culture. It will also be extremely valuable for language scholars, sociolinguists, social historians, scholars of cultural studies and those who understand the theoretical issues that concern the notion of “vernacularity”.
This volume examines Sayyid Ahmad Khan's life, his contribution, and legacy in the context of current times. The editors engage his writings, ideas, and activities to read and present his work critically, not as a biographical account of his life but approach his work keeping in mind the tumultuous political events and changes of the nineteenth century, after the failed revolt of 1857 when Indians were transformed into colonial subjects. The collective anxieties of the Indian communities, particularly the Muslims, cried out for a new local leadership; Sayyid Ahmad Khan rose up to this occasion etching the way forward for Indians, in general, and Muslims in particular. Sayyid Ahmad Khan's multifaceted work offers an important understanding for national thinking emerging from the location of the Muslim, but it is not a 'minority' voice with vested political interests rather a constructive and integrative voice of relevance even today for addressing difficult problems.