1st Edition
Indian Modernities Literary Cultures from the 18th to the 20th Century
This volume studies the ways in which modernity has been conceived, practiced, and performed in Indian literatures from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It brings together essays on writings in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and languages from Northeast India, which form a dialogical relationship with each other in this volume. The concurrence and contradictions emerging through these studies problematize the idea of modernity afresh.
The book challenges the dominance of colonial modernity through sociohistorical and cultural analysis of how modernity surfaces as a multifaceted phenomenon when contextualized in the multilingual ethos of India. It further tracks the complex ways in which modernism in India is tied to the harvests of modernity. It argues for the need to shift focus on the specific conditions that gave shape to multiple modernities within literatures produced from India.
A versatile collection, the book incorporates engagements with not just long prose fiction but also lesser-known essays, research works, and short stories published in popular magazines. This unique work will be of interest to students and teachers of Indian writing in English, Indian literatures, and comparative literatures. It will be indispensable to scholars of South Asian studies, literary historians, linguists, and scholars of cultural studies across the globe.
Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgments xii
Introduction: Entanglements of Indian Modernities: Poetics, Praxis, Possibilities in Literary Cultures of India from the 18th to the 20th Century 1
NISHAT ZAIDI
PART I
Performing Modernity, Affecting Modernism 21
A: Intimations of Modernity
1 Registers of the New: Translating Modernity in 19th
and 20th Century India 23
SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI
2 Tagore and the Modern 42
SUKANTA CHAUDHURI
3 Provincializing Modernity: From Imagined Community to Communitarian Imaginaries in Malayalam Fiction 50
E.V. RAMAKRISHNAN
4 Past Continuous: Munshi, Gujarat, and the Patan Trilogy 62
RITA KOTHARI AND ABHIJIT KOTHARI
B: Trajectories of Modernism
5 B.S. Mardhekar’s Interliterary Poetics and the Emergence of Avant-garde Modernism in Marathi 81
SACHIN C. KETKAR
6 Moody Modernism: Miraji Becomes Sappho 97
GEETA PATEL
7 Modernisms in the Magazine: A Case for Recovery in Hindi 115
AAKRITI MANDHWANI
8 Dark Dispatches of Modernity and Nation Making: A Rereading of Nirmal Verma’s Dark Dispatches 132
BHARTI ARORA
PART II
Modalities, Movements, Histories 153
9 Fashioning Readers: Canon, Criticism, and Pedagogy
in the Emergence of Modern Odia Literature 155
PRITIPUSPA MISHRA
10 Punjabi Kissa: Negotiating Modernities and Mediums 172
AKSHAYA KUMAR
11 “A People’s Literature”: Reimagining Telugu Literary History 187
RAMA SUNDARI MANTENA
12 Progressivism and Tamil Modernity: Tracing the History of Progressive Literature in Tamil, 1940–1970 201
RAJESH VENKATASUBRAMANIAN
13 An/Other Modernity and the Literary Cultures of Northeast India 226
SUKALPA BHATTACHARJEE
PART III
Translating Modernity 239
14 Negotiating Modernity: Translation as a Critique of the Orientalist Agenda With Special Reference to Tamil 241
C.T. INDRA
15 Translation and the Making of Modern Kannada Literature: English Geetagalu as a Canonical Text 258
THARAKESHWAR V.B.
Index 309
Biography
Nishat Zaidi is Professor and former Head, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.
This rich collection explores the many meanings of modernity and modernism in India and the different forms they took in literature: as engagements with the new and as self-fashioning, as efforts at translating concepts and experiences, and as searches for new idioms and new readers, whatever the position of the writers on the political spectrum. A most valuable contribution to the scholarship on global modernisms and to Indian literary history.
Francesca Orsini,
Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature,
SOAS, University of London, UK
