Rāṅgey Rāghav’s Literary Biographies, Loī kā tānā and Ratnā kī bāt, in the 1950s and the Debates on the Status of Indian Women and Dalits

The article proposes to investigate the political and ideological uses of Hindi literary biography, with focus on two texts by Rāṅgey Rāghav, Loī kā tānā (“Loi’s Warp’’) and Ratnā kī bāt (“Ratna’s Speech”), based on lives of Kabir and Tulsīdās respectively. The relevance of Rāghav’s biographies goes beyond the merely literary and derives from the ideological and political functions played by these texts in the period they were written. Viewed by Rāghav as complementary works with a didactic and ideological value, they move away from the ‘brahmanical’ interpretations of the early modern Hindi poets by scholars of the 1920s and 1930s. To understand Rāghav’s motives and strategies, one needs to examine the ideological and political context in which he recast values linked to the main figures of the early modern devotional (bhakti) literature. As the 1950s witnessed debates on the status of Indian women and Dalit communities, the same becoming crucial to Hindi literary sphere, special attention needs to be paid to the representation, in Rāghav’s biographies, of Loī and Ratnā—Kabīr’s and Tulsīdās’ wives respectively—who embody some of the politically and ideologically progressive slogans which Rāghav projected on to these poets. The present work, based on recent studies on literary biography (Benton 2005, 2011, Middlebrook 2006, Miller 2001), is also an attempt to investigate some of the intellectual and ideological aporias which seem to have affected Hindi literary progressivism since the first decades of the postcolonial period.

The Worship of the Goddess of Language: Ram Mani Acharya Dixit’s Efforts in Standardization of the Nepali Language in Benares

This paper will focus on a 20th century Nepali intellectual, Ram Mani Acharya Dixit (1883–1972), and his trans-border activities for the promotion of the vernacular by investigating his integration of the progress of a language with his nation, his apotheosis of the vernacular and his devotion in strengthening prose writing for the sake of the development of the divine mother tongue. Foregrounding his linguistic activities such as writing, publishing and printing in Nepal and India, with Benares in particular, it will try to answer questions such as: What was the motivating factor that inspired him to write and publish in the Nepali language? Was he in any way influenced by the Hindi language movement that was at its peak in North India of the time? How influential was Dixit’s role in standardizing Nepali? Besides this Nepali language standardization concern, the paper will also examine Dixit’s idea of serving mother, motherland, mother tongue and [Hindu] religion through service to a language.

Re-Presenting the Past in the Hindi Novel: The Darkness in Bhīṣma Sāhnī’s Tamas

While the modern literary novel in Hindi has traditionally grappled with contemporary issues impacting society in north India, Bhīṣma Sāhnī’s famous novel Tamas (“Darkness”) may be considered a unique endavour to revisit the horrific events that marked the transfer of power and partition of British India in 1947. This article represents a preliminary attempt to consider the emergence of a work of literary fiction in Hindi approximately 25 years after the events on which it is based.

WE are Dalit History

Life writings had time and again been used as source material for historical research both in the West and the various literary cultures of South Asia. Considering the absence and a deliberate, socially conditioned erasure of Dalit history from the mainstream narratives of Indian historiography, some scholars have introduced the notion of viewing Dalit life writings as exercises in history writing. This article explores several Dalit autobiographies as instances of engagement with the process of constructing history of Dalit communities in India. Starting from this premise, it undertakes a preliminary analysis of various narrative strategies employed in Hindi autobiographies by Dalit authors in the hope of revealing the nature of their engagements with India’s past and present. The study presented in this paper is based on four relevant examples of prose in Hindi—by Kausalya Baisantri, Sushila Takbhaure, Omprakash Valmiki, and Sheoraj Singh Bechain.

Modern Punjabi Literature and the Spectre of Sectarian Histories

This essay explores two instances in the modern Punjabi literary engagement with the past, to consider the ways the writing of Sikh history has been configured as a modern literary construct. After brief consideration of the canonical work Sundarī by Bhai Vir Singh (1898), I consider a novel by Kartar Singh Duggal Nānak Nām Chaṛhdī Kalā (1989, “Blessed are those who Remember God”) to examine the legacies of the formulation of Sikh history operating in Vir Singh’s work. In doing so, I also consider the ways exclusionary and plural discourses coexist and comingle, to understand the multivalent nature of such representations, which cannot be assumed to express singular political affiliations and therefore reflect the complexity of Sikh articulations within colonial and postcolonial political fields.

Some Remarks on Computer Terminology in Persian and Hindi on the Basis of the Localizations of the Kdelibs4 Package

Scientific and technological vocabulary, especially computer terminology, is a particularly interesting field in which to analyze/study the most recent trends in the development of vocabulary. The present article focuses on the Persian and Hindi translations of the Kdelibs4 software package. The author attempts to address a number of questions on the basis of the analyzed material, i.e., what are the origin and the proportion of loanwords within the analyzed vocabulary? Are the languages historically important as vocabulary donors (Arabic in the case of Persian and Persian in the case of Hindi) still prominent in this new sphere of vocabulary? What are the widespread syntactic and word-formational patterns among the discussed forms? The vocabulary in question is also juxtaposed with the official language policy in India and Iran, thus exhibiting various levels of deviations in both cases. The lexical items selected on the basis of objective criteria have been compared with the official vocabulary lists issued by the responsible/authoritative/ relevant governmental bodies. Additionally, in the case of Persian, an extensive Internet search has been performed to check their popularity among the users.

The Past as an Exponent of the Present in Modern Tamil Literature: Story-(re)-Telling and Telling History in Selected Works of Indira Parthasarathy

Indira Parthasarathy is the author of many works that touch upon historical issues but are in fact reflections on contemporary India. Although the narrative of some of them takes place in the past, they cannot be called historical literature. While the author is not really interested in describing the past per se, as is also often the case with other contemporary Tamil writers, clear references to the past and history help him showcase contemporary issues, current problems, and life as it is here and now. The article briefly discusses two plays, whose protagonists are historical figures; a novel based on a contemporary event that has become an integral part of the history of Tamil Nadu; and two other works which came to be written on the basis of writer’s own life experience in Poland and are in a way related to the history of that country.

Patronage over Literature, Translation and Print: Some Remarks on 1809 Edition of the Dabestān-e mazāheb Published in Print with the Support of the East India Company

Dabestān-e mazāheb is an interesting example of a 17th century text on various faiths and creeds of the Indian subcontinent. The present case study looks at possible explanations for its popularity claimed for it in the editorial note found in the first printed edition (1809) while simultaneously analysing reasons behind selection of this particular text for a print publication in the light of patronage extended by the East India Company to translation and printing of selected Indian writings. The process in this case is well documented in the correspondence of British officials such as Sir William Jones, but as to the reasons for the printing even more may be deduced from the highly ornate Persian peritext appended at the end of the 1809 edition by the book’s editor, Nazar Ashraf. The note provides an interesting testimony to the evolving fusion of the long tradition of manuscript writing and the advancements in printing which the paper explores.