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In this conversation, the authors discuss their scholarly trajectories working on history, languages and literatures in their areas of expertise--North India in the case of one, and East Asia in the case of the other. Their discussion covers multilingualism and the role of orality in North India, the role of written Chinese and its interaction with the vernaculars in East Asia, the importance of scripts and the history of books and writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of print and religious publics in colonial India has largely been told as one of reformist groups and religious polemics. But this covers only a small part of the story of religious print, which extends well beyond reformist groups. This essay focuses on the most systematic and long-lived project of publishingsantorature (bani), theSantbānī Pustakmālāof the Belvedere Press, Allahabad. It examines its scope, aims and methods as well as its religious orientation and conceptualisation of a religious-devotional public in early-twentieth-century North India. Halfway between oralbhajangroups and the scholarly publications of the collected works (granthavali) ofsantpoets, throughout the twentieth century the Belvedere Press booklets have commanded tremendous currency as religious print-objects in the Hindi devotional public sphere. The results of one publisher's effort and investment, and of significant reorganisation of material from manuscript sources, these booklets have been extremely popular and lasting products in the extensive market for religious material, clearly a crucial technology for individual and group religious practice (bhajan), before which the lineages' own publishing efforts pale into quasi-insignificance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After over a century of language nationalism and almost as long a period of intense competition and mutual contempt, in post-liberalisation and post-low caste assertion India the boundaries between English and Hindi have recently become more porous, and the hold of both ‘pure Hindi’ and ‘British/pure English’ has become much more limited. English is of course still the language of greater opportunities in local and global terms, and increasingly so, but as low-caste politicisation and literacy widen the sphere of Hindi, and the ‘new middle class’ remains resolutely bilingual in its everyday and entertainment practices, the relation between English and Hindi has become more a relationship of parallel expansion, though still perceived in public discourse as a zero-sum game. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper examines the Assamese short story “Xomoi-Xeema” (2005) by Saurav Kumar Chaliha and the English poetry collection, Street on the Hill (2006), by Anjum Hasan to propose an expanded notion of Anglophone writing through multilingual readings of regional Indian literature and offer alternative modes of political inclusivity. It examines the role of English in Northeast Indian literary texts in articulating cosmopolitanism from a marginalized space and probing the linguistic frontiers of the postcolonial nation-state. Through this comparative reading, the essay envisions the relationships between region, nation, and world through a series of overlapping linguistic exchanges and provides an alternative understanding of world literature to current models focused on the English-language novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a textured history of the multivalent term "hindu" over 2,500 years, with the goal of productively unsettling what we think we know. "Hindu" is a ubiquitous word in modern times, used by scholars and practitioners in dozens of languages to denote members of a religious tradition. But the religious meaning of "hindu" and its common use are quite new. Here I trace the layered history of "hindu," part of an array of shifting identities in early and medieval India. In so doing, I draw upon an archive of primary sources—in Old Persian, New Persian, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and more—that offers the kind of multilingual story needed to understand a term that has long cut across languages in South Asia. Also, I do not treat premodernity as a prelude but rather recognize it as the heart of this tale. So much of South Asian history—including over two thousand years of using the term "hindu"—has been misconstrued by those who focus only on British colonialism and later. We need a deeper consideration of South Asian pasts if we are to think more fruitfully about the terms and concepts that order our knowledge. Here, I offer one such contribution that marshals historical material on the multiform and fluid word "hindu" that can help us think more critically and precisely about this discursive category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1930s Hindi short story "Mugaloṃ ne saltanat bakhś dī" ("The Mughals Gave the Sultanate Away") by self-proclaimed apolitical author Bhagavatīcaraṇ Varmā offers an alternative version of how the British Crown took the rule of India away from the Mughal Empire. An in-depth analysis of this story written during the buildup to the decolonization of India evaluates how two different kinds of what is often referred to as "outside rulers" are depicted in this story: the Mughal emperors and the British colonial rulers. This case study assesses whether the story shows a different attitude toward Mughals and the centuries-old Muslim culture in India, compared to how both historic rulers are viewed and represented by right-wing Hindu nationalists: Muslim Indians seem to be made part of the "other" rather than a part of an inclusive interpretation of the Indian "self." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes selections from Modern Review and Visva Bharati Quarterly, to study the complex act of nation-building taking place in India during the first half of the twentieth century. Through these periodicals, it discusses three interconnected occurrences that contributed to the envisioning of new India: firstly, the construction of a politically aware public sphere through nationalistic sentiments and anti-imperial internationalism; secondly, India's localization of modernity as oscillating between the colonial subjects' reactionary modernity and the colonially administered modernity of domination; and thirdly, the emergence of a modernism that was more immersed in restructuring social and political systems of power than being restricted to formal and aesthetic novelty. Thus, drawing on writings published in Modern Review and Visva Bharati Quarterly, the paper assesses the degree to which the two periodicals realized the identity of new India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centers on an Urdu-language manual on lithography, published in 1924 by the Nizami Press in Budaun (United Provinces), to explore how a Muslim printer-publisher in a North Indian qaṣbah tried to reform educational methods in his trade. It introduces the Nizami Press (est. 1905) and compares the manual with similar European and Indian instructional handbooks. How did Indian printers and publishers learn their craft? What were the tools and materials used for lithographic printing in colonial India? And given the popularity of lithography, why were such manuals rarely published in Indian languages? By examining the material and technical aspects of the lithographic printing process explained in the Urdu manual, this article engages with larger scholarly debates revolving around knowledge production, pedagogy, and technological developments in South Asia. Furthermore, it analyzes the manual's language to demonstrate how printers and publishers were engaged in discourses about nationalism, modernization, and social reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1903–1928) is one of the most complete sources on South Asian languages. It has influenced all subsequent studies of the language situation in India. However, there are indications in the Survey's volumes, in its unpublished files, and in Grierson's correspondence, that extra-linguistic considerations affected his approach to some Indian languages. Drawing on these sources, this essay focuses on Panjabi, Siraiki, Assamese, and Hindi-Urdu. It shows how factors stemming from Grierson's views on religious difference and on language as a basis for nationality, as well as colonial politics of governance, may have influenced his characterisations of these languages. However, this does not invalidate the Survey, which is not straightforwardly 'colonial'. Moreover, each of these languages is also described using linguistic argumentation, as reflected in the LSI's skeletal grammars and its focus on dialectal variation. As such, we have to work with this tension in the LSI, without trying to resolve it either by rejecting the Survey in toto because of the instances of politics affecting its analyses, or by accepting it wholesale while ignoring the extra-linguistic considerations which influenced how it characterised some Indian languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Kathak as an Inter-Asia dance form across India and Hong Kong. Typified as "classical" dance in India, Kathak's twenty-first-century transposition to Hong Kong is enabled by members of the Indian diaspora and local performers. Kathak's expansion is also facilitated by an interest in popular Indian culture across Asia, notably through Bollywood. Against this background, Kathak cohabits a tension between a classicized identity in India, and an ethnicized folk representation abroad. Drawing on perspectives of Kathak practitioners and my study of the dance in Hong Kong and India, I examine structures that enable the institutionalization of certain art forms and popularization of others. An analytical consideration of dance as performance art, academic discipline, and professional pursuit requires an Inter-Asia methodology of triangulation to examine narratives of "high" culture. Such an approach offers a variegated understanding of Kathak as an embodied art form that resonates across postcolonial Asian societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Naisargi N. Dave examines the relationship between animals and love in India, animals and love in multispecies anthropology, and between ethics and love more generally. She argues that ahimsa (nonviolence) and love share the characteristic of abnegating moral responsibility beyond the self and its attachments. Thus, Dave argues, against some strains of contemporary political thought, love is not the antithesis to ethical indifference but its very ground. Love is an indifference to all that does not accomplish its lovability. Dave's offering of an alternative interspecies ethic is what she calls indifference to difference—or "being in difference"—and she locates shades of this immanent ethic in precolonial South Asian conceptions of love as well as in a prenationalist revolutionary philosophy of ahimsa. Dave claims that love is an injustice because when we love it is the one or ones who are special to us that we save. She argues instead for an impassioned ethics without love: an indifference to difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike Kamala Das and Maitreyi Devi, Pritam made a conscious decision to not self-translate her autobiography in English despite being a multilingual female author. In the twentieth century, when Pritam wrote about female emancipation and the strength of feminine authorship, English education was not offered to most women in the country.[35] Unlike Das or Devi, Pritam, although educated and plurilingual, lacked formal English education. While Kamala Das and Maitreyi Devi rely on the colonising linguistic influences of the English language in their self-translations, Pritam's distinct authorial choice of using her mother tongue to write her own confessional narrative is crucial to this research. Unlike Devi's narrative that barely touches upon the atrocities of the British rule in India, twentieth-century poet and author Amrita Pritam uses her authorship to delve into the cruelties brought forth by the Indian war of independence against the British. [Extracted from the article]

This article considers some of the novels of towering modern Hindi language detective novelists Ved Prakash Sharma and Surender Mohan Pathak. The articulation of masculinity that each novelist proffers through their plots and characters is considered within a nuanced context of popular detective novel traditions in other languages in India as well as the various paratexts of the novels themselves (covers, authors' notes etc.) This article ultimately argues that both Sharma and Pathak reveal nuanced iterations of vernacular masculinity. Sharma plays with stereotypical notions of male heroism and villainy within a localized context of nationalist discourse, while Pathak features antihero protagonists in the roles of modern Indian 'everymen.' The idea of a vernacular gendered aesthetic here thus refers to a pointedly localized–as opposed to global–approach to language, theme, literary style, circulation, and audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has been held in the Indian city of Jaipur for the past ten years. The event has grown spectacularly and has provided an arena for encounters between literary worlds. It has also become a focus of debate and friction within the sphere of Indian writing. This article is based on fieldwork at the JLF 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the quotidian politics of community vigilantism over women involved in interreligious love affairs in two radicalized Indian slums. Using a Hindu nationalist slum in Mumbai and a communally sensitive Muslimdominated slum in Hyderabad as ethnographic landscapes, I show how women and children (and peripheral state actors) used secret surveillance, exclusionary party politics, public shaming rituals, and physical punishment to rein in poor women's sexual permissiveness. Some women in deviant relationships displayed excessive loyalty to their community to compensate for their transgressions. Some others legitimized their radical position by branding honor policing as primitive and unfit for an urban citizenry. By advancing an analytical discussion on this bargaining space between vigilantes and their victims, I argue that women and children in slums, ghettos, and shantytowns play a central role in producing, managing, and violently enforcing uncertainties related to poverty and urban security, even if they are recast through religiopolitical discourses of female honor and religious purity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY: Meeting runaway intercaste couples hiding in a safe house in Delhi led me to reflect on the kinds of mobility at work in their lives and in the city today. By highlighting the social and physical parameters of their mobility in a single ethnographic context, I argue that it is the quest for mobility rather than an expression of individual choice that is most significant about their flouting of social norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Then article presents an essay which discusses the demands that the city has historically made on the Indian film form. It mentions the novels of Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, which depicts relationship between city and space. Other topics include development of spatial codes in Indian film, and theatrical logic of interactions in novels.

The Indian Constitution (IC) has been considered in terms of its intertextuality with preceding colonial documents such as the Government of India Act 1935. This essay relocates the IC in intertextual relationships with anti-colonial autobiographies and texts such as Gandhi'sHind Swaraj, showing the parallels between the way they dramatise self-rule and mix global, Indian and regional levels of identity. Both the IC and these texts are marked by processes of transnational and internal dialogue, and reflect transnational aspects of Indian print culture and the subject positions it gave rise to. Widening the discursive sites of the IC to include anti-colonial autobiographies raises questions about the IC as a species of autobiography itself, and it also gives us another perspective on the tensions within the IC, showing how the conflict between liberty and power is manifested in its linguistic cosmopolitanism and its approach to translation. Constitutions embody the aspirations of a nation's citizens, and the IC's verbal skills grade and structure these aspirations, plotting them along a spectrum of possible futures and grounding them in a variety of pasts. This concern with temporality has a parallel in some anti-colonial autobiographies where the consciousness of time is particularly acute. Finally, both the IC and Indian anti-colonial life writing can be seen as instances of South Asian literary modernity in terms of the style of their creative choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the insights regarding the genealogies of feminism and women's writing in India. Topics include the writings of Hindi woman writer Mannu Bhandari and Tamil woman writer R. Chudamani which portray female characters who possess the same desires for freedom of sexual expression, the genealogy of feminist politics in India, and the category of women's writing in India which helped widen the nationalist activism such as widow immolation, widow remarriage and child marriage.

The article discusses the play "Heroic Abhimanyu" by Pandit Radheshyam Kathavachak which premiered at the Sangam Theatre in New Delhi, India on February 4, 1916. Topics mentioned include an overview of the play which is based on several episodes taken from the Indian religious text Mahabharata, the importance of the play in the history of the modern Indian theatre, and the play as an expression of anticolonial nationalism and a criticism of the British empire.

In 1982, the then ruling Left Front government in West Bengal (India) abolished the teaching of English from its primary schools. The move led to a high-pitched controversy over the social importance of teaching English, and when and how it should be taught. The main arguments in favour of the decision were to confront the elitism inherent in giving primacy to a “foreign” language and to promote higher enrolment and reduce drop-out rates. Those opposed to the decision spoke of redrawing class maps and the difficulties of negotiating a nation of many languages with fluency in only one regional language. Over the years, there were more complex arguments; moreover, demand for English among the rural poor led to a greater demand for private schools or private tuition. The abolition of English was accompanied by major interventions in Bangla language-teaching, which were also hotly debated within the academy. Twenty-five years later, in 2007, a new-look Left Front government sought to reverse the decision and re-introduce English into primary schools. There was opposition within the government from those who had been votaries of the previous decision. The reversal was endorsed by government, however, despite vocal protests. This paper revisits some of the arguments attending this policy flip-flop. It argues that these arguments have wider significance for language policy in higher education in West Bengal, and that they also resonate in other contexts with strong traditions in regional languages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste ideologues, cartoons, and police reports from colonial north India. It particularly looks at the two sites of clothing and romance to mark representations of mass and individual conversions to Christianity and Islam. Through them, it reads conversions by Dalit women as acts that embodied a language of intimate rights, and were accounts of resistant materialities. These simultaneously produced deep anxieties and everyday violence among ideologues of the Arya Samaj and other such groups, where there was both an erasure and a representational heightening of Dalit female desire. However, they also provide one with avenues to recover in part Dalit women's aspirations in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay investigates the sexual cultures of contemporary Hindi-language ‘detective’ novels by focusing on the writings of one of India's biggest-selling authors, Ved Prakash Sharma. Sharma's novels are usually available at railway stations and bus stands, as well as bookstalls in the poorer localities of north Indian cities. The essay suggests that the sexual motif in the novels sits alongside an unstated discourse of ‘Indian traditions’ – such as brahmcharya (celibacy) and ‘the stable Indian family’ – and that this discourse is established both through narratives within the novels, as well as techniques that lie outside them, such as the author's letter to readers that prefaces each novel. The silent presence of ‘Indian traditions’ forms the ground upon which engagements with consumerist modernity – marked by goods, technologies and transnational connections – is predicated. The pleasure and ‘efficaciousness’ of the novels lie in the constant relay of choices between the world of globalized consumerist modernity and ‘traditional’ morality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT Exploring the highly competitive bilingual news field in urban India, I illustrate how localization of news content has led to conflictual discourses around who should constitute 'the local' and for what end. Mediatized contests over 'the local' frame urban politics along linguistic and cultural divides, articulated through populist challenges to neoliberal media discourses of 'the global local.' In turning a critical eye to these mediatized contests, I extend the recent emphasis on the need to 'ground' globalization studies and explore the concrete ways in which globalization imprints itself on local spaces. I argue that local and global formations are embedded in the dynamics of news fields in ways that elude generalized claims advanced by pessimists of cultural homogeneity as well as by optimists of local resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sociolinguistics, Urdu and Hindi are considered to be textbook examples of digraphia—a linguistic situation in which varieties of the same language are written in different scripts. Urdu has traditionally been written in the Arabic script, whereas Hindi is written in Devanagari. Analyzing the recent orthographic practice of writing Urdu in Devanagari, this article challenges the traditional ideology that the choice of script is crucial in differentiating Urdu and Hindi. Based on written data, interviews, and ethnographic observations, I show that Muslims no longer view the Arabic script as a necessary element of Urdu, nor do they see Devanagari as completely antithetical to their identity. I demonstrate that using the strategies of phonetic and orthographic transliteration, Muslims are making Urdu-in-Devanagari different from Hindi, although the difference is much more subtle. My data further shows that the very structure of a writing system is in part socially constituted. (Script-change, Urdu, Urdu-in-Devanagari, Hindi, Arabic script, Devanagari, orthography, transliteration)* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The status of Kalhana's poem Rajatarangini was mediated in colonial India in part through its English translations. However, the intent of the translations has been insufficiently analyzed in the context of the interrelationship between Orientalist and nationalist projects and the historical and literary ideas that informed them. The translators of Rajatarangini framed the text as more than a solitary example of Indian historical writing; rather, they engaged with it on multiple levels, drawing out, debating, and rethinking the definitions of literature and history and the relative significance of and relationship between them in capturing the identity of the nation and its regions. This article examines two translations of the text -- one Orientalist and the other nationalist -- with the purpose of interrogating these categories, by drawing out the complex engagement between European and indigenous ideas, and the dialogue between past and present that informed their production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on weddings and wedding videos in north Kerala, India, and asks two interrelated questions: one, how have marriage rituals and the ways in which a wedding is performed changed with the critical presence of the photographer and videographer? Two, how does the wedding video represent marriage, conjugality, and love, and how have these changed with changes in technology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hindu Succession Act of 1956, one of the first laws relating to property and family enacted by the newly independent government of India, remains in the final analysis an anti-women piece of legislation. This article explores the reasons that forced the hand of the new post-colonial state in that direction. There had been, from the early nineteenth century, a small but influential section of Indian reformers who had argued in favour of granting property rights to women: wives, widows and married daughters. Dr B.R. Ambedkar, one of the chief framers of the Hindu Code Bills, of which the Succession Act was part, as well as Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister, were also strong proponents of women's property rights. Why then were their endeavours defeated in the final legislation? Through an analysis of the debates around the Hindu Succession Act, I argue that the anti-woman nature of the law was inextricably linked to the modernization of Indian families. The latter did not necessarily imply a move from the extended family to nuclear structures or from non-contractual to contractual bonds between individuals. It entailed other kinds of changes and adjustments, often from extended to joint families. The centrality of the family has important implications for thinking about the history of modern property and the propertied subject in the Indian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the way sex education for unmarried youth is understood at the national and local levels in India. It begins by describing the dominant political debates regarding the teaching of sex education in central government schools. These discussions are not gender neutral, and reveal some political dissatisfaction with India's participation in a globalizing world. Young people's access to formal sex education in the bustees (urban slums) of Kolkata is related to the construction of hegemonic Muslim femininities and masculinities. The article examines young people's experience with informal sex educators, and reveals that although informal sources are not adequate, young people are ambivalent about learning sex education in a formal context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how participatory research processes aid in our understanding of a 'proper' Muslim girlhood in the bustees (urban slums) of Kolkata. Specifically, young women in this paper use PhotoVoice to analyse what it means to be a 'good Muslim girl' in the conservative Muslim slums. By focusing on clothing and the body, young women use photographs to depict societal expectations of them. This exploration points to various ways young women resist and challenge the normative understanding of the 'good girl' in their everyday lives. The paper shows that participatory inquiry can begin a process of dialogue amongst peers to address and support young women's desires. It ends by mapping the impact of young women's participation in this research project, and calls for new ways to quantify 'genuine children's participation'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author describes the Hindu movement of bhakti as a dynamic interaction between society and private devotion of the heart. The author presents India's religious life in such a way that the broad social elements of caste, labor, media and the markets cannot be separated from private religious devotion. Elements like economics and urban development interact in union with personal acts like worship and hagiographic reverence. The author concludes that bhakti is a public religious movement.

The article examines the cultural dynamic opportunities provided by phenomenal growth of Bhojpuri cinema in India, including its charge metaphors of change used to characterize associated with the cinema. Several assertions were also pointed out about Bhojpuri films. Including the harbinger played by the music industry on the cinema, exclusion of non-affluent upper caste members and migration of lower castes segments as audiences. Information about the political aspirations and cinematic fantasies associated with the films is presented.

The article examines the relationship between the establishment of the public sphere, the production of national identity and the formation of state sovereignty. Related aspects of political modernity have been considered through a hypothesis that creation and reproduction of Indian and Turkish public spheres were deliberate strategies of nationalization and étalization. Some institutional structures and political and cultural practices that modified the creation of abstraction were also examined.

The aim of this article is to highlight the ways in which women achieved agency in a nationalist movement that, while encouraging female participation, attempted to spatially delimit this activity to the home. While nationalist historiographies have acknowledged those women who left the home and joined nationalist protests in public, there were many more women supporting those processions and meetings in private. While the home cannot be considered outside of the community, local or national scale activities that framed it, an examination of the varieties of political participation within the home should help revise Partha Chatterjee's suggestion that the Indian middle-class home was a site of silencing and resubjection. Combining interview material with archival evidence, this research investigates the ways in which women in Delhi between 1930 and 1947 responded to Gandhi's call to be politically active from the home. Using the work of bell hooks on 'homeplaces', the home is portrayed as a potentially political space of anti-colonial resistance, rather than an apolitical site of withdrawal, oppression or safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]