The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism

by Francesca Orsini

In this fascinating book, Francesca Orsini documents the creation and development of a public sphere that shaped literature, language, and religious nationalism during the nationalist movement in India.

498 pages, Hardcover

First published February 6, 2002

About the author

Francesca Orsini is Reader in the Literatures of North India. She took her undergraduate degree in Hindi at the University of Venice, followed by a long spell in Delhi. Her PhD research at SOAS was on the Hindi public sphere of the 1920s and '30s. She taught at the University of Cambridge for 11 years and joined SOAS in 2006. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Hindi literature.

Dr Orsini's main area of research is modern Hindi literature, where she has published on Hindi literary life during the nationalist period; commercial genres such as detective fiction and "social romances"; women writers and women's journals; nineteenth-century commercial publishing in Hindi and Urdu. She has organized several workshops and conferences, including one on Love in South Asia.

Reviews

[aman caur · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book traces how the heterogeneous Hindi literary world of the 1920s--When Hindi as a language was unevenly spread over the geographically and social terrain--changed to a closed, narrowed, homogeneous one by the end of the 1930s and 1940s. It is in this period that the nationalization of religious, literary and linguistic traditions that Vasudha Dalmia has traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century (in her book "Nationalization of Hindu Traditions") come to fruition. The book is a must-read in the sense that it shows how to a colonized people agitating for freedom, a people divided by many languages, cultures and religions, the one language-one nation concept of nationalism proved to be powerful and seductive. This also meant excluding certain discourses and voices that did not fit in the framework of the homogeneous nation. This book is remarkable in the sense that it focuses on those excluded discourses and voices to trace the making of Hindi public sphere.