Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular : Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia

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.

Charu Gupta is Professor in the Department of History, University of Delhi. She is the author of Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (2001) and The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (2016).

Laura Brueck is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. Her book, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (2014) analyzes the vernacular discursive sphere of contemporary Hindi Dalit literature.

Hans Harder studied Indology and cultural anthropology at Hamburg, Heidelberg and Halle universities, and has been Professor of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany, since 2007.

Shobna Nijhawan is Associate Professor at the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University (Toronto). She researches Hindi literature of the early twentieth century published in women’s, children’s, medical and literary periodicals.