Preetha Mani | Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (original) (raw)
Books by Preetha Mani
MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies; ACLA Rene Wellek Prize Honorable Men... more MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies; ACLA Rene Wellek Prize Honorable Mention for Best Overall Book in Comparative Literature; MSA First Book Prize Shortlist; AIIS Prize in Humanities for First Book Shortlist
Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon could be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English.
Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani —imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.
Essays by Preetha Mani
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, 2023
This chapter explores a tension in postcolonial Indian literature between the monolingual form of... more This chapter explores a tension in postcolonial Indian literature between the monolingual form of the nation and the multilingual tendencies of the linguistic regions through a comparison between the Sahitya Akademi’s (India’s national academy of letters) activities and Tamil putukkavitai (new poetry) writing. By promoting translation and constructing a Sanskritic literary past, the Akademi used literature to manage multilingualism and make it compatible with the monolingualism intrinsic to the nation. Putukkavitai writing, by contrast, epitomizes the challenge of linguistic regionalism to national integration, offering a view of Indian multilingualism in less hierarchical terms than those expressed in Akademi discourses. To understand Tamil literature as Indian literature, the chapter proposes, requires taking the monolingual dimensions of the region into greater account. Tracing Tamil new poets’ engagement with new poetry in other Indian languages in the magazine Eḻuttu, the chapter argues that Indian multilingualism is built on shared experiences of linguistic alienation.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2020
The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationshi... more The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke the wider debates about tradition and modernity that these female types commonly represented without affirming the social reformist positions to which they were linked. Through the short story, Pudumaippittan dislodged his portrayals of the Indian woman from existing gender norms, sealing the shift from social realism to modernist realism within the Tamil literary sphere.
Comparative Literature, 2019
This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which w... more This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows how the Movement inaugurated a modernist realism characterized by attention to genre, rhetoric, and style on one hand, and commitment to social reality on the other. Combining rhetorical strategies—such as shifting narrative voice, allegorical descriptions of landscape, and implicit reference to authorship and the condition of postcolonial literary production—with structural and thematic tensions between form and content, this mode developed an interchangeability between author, reader, and character, which did not previously exist in Hindi literature and which reconfigured the category of the middle class in the universally recognizable terms of alienation. Using the case of the nayī kahānī, the essay offers a new literary historical approach that moves beyond sweeping accounts of a single postcolonial mode to attend to regional realisms and modernisms.
Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, 2018
This essay explores an unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing that emerge... more This essay explores an unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing that emerged in debates in Maṇikkoṭi and Āṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, two well-known Tamil magazines that were launched in the 1930s. Through short stories and critical essays, the writers who contributed to these magazines attempted to create new lenses through which to view the purpose of literature in society. While discussions of Indian modernism have sidelined regional and communitarian aesthetic and socio-political concerns, the Maṇikkoṭi-Vikaṭaṉ debates demonstrate that extremely localized, intimate conversations profoundly influenced the trajectory of Tamil modernism. The essay shows how the 1930s literary¬-popular distinction situates Tamil modernism at a tangent to scholarly characterizations of late colonial Indian modernism as preoccupied with anticolonialism and nation-building. The essay argues that Tamil modernism centered on formulating new aesthetic sensibilities aimed at diffusing regional contentions regarding linguistic and caste affiliations-rather than as focused on either developing or subverting Indian nationalist politics.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2016
This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamine... more This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bhandari's and Chudamani's writing provides insight into literary discourses of gender equality circulating in the immediate postindependence moment. In particular, she argues that these women writers broadened the scope of feminist thought and literary expression existing at the time through their rhetorical use of a language of entitlement that universalizes feminine desire in humanist terms. They did so through the portrayal of female characters who express the desire to possess sexual freedom, economic independence, and human equality on the same terms as the male characters. Feminist scholarship has characterized the 1950s and 1960s as a moment of paucity in women's writing and decline in feminist politics. Yet Bhandari's and Chudamani's distinct uses of a language of entitlement offer a deeper understanding of the role of the literary in shaping feminist thought. Their work thus provides alternative genealogies of the categories of feminism and women's writing in India.
Translations by Preetha Mani
The Playwright and the Stage, 2019
Book Reviews by Preetha Mani
A book of translations should aim for transparency and comparability. It would thus be very nice ... more A book of translations should aim for transparency and comparability. It would thus be very nice if the next edition of this book could contain bibliographical references to the Bangla originals, not just for Bengali readers, but also for the growing number of learners of Bangla who would benefit greatly from having the translations and the originals side by side.
Theses by Preetha Mani
Fiction by Preetha Mani
Queen's Head & Artichoke, 1999
Papers by Preetha Mani
UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Apr 1, 2010
National integration, a primary goal of the 1950s in India in both the cultural and state spheres... more National integration, a primary goal of the 1950s in India in both the cultural and state spheres, required the constitution of Indianness as a shared cultural and legal identity. Its determined outcome, Indian citizenship, thereby entailed the production of affective ties in terms of both national affiliation, as well as legal rights, in order to give coherence to the hyphen binding an already existing idea of nation to the newly formed Indian state. A driving question of the post-Independence era was thus: how can, will, and already do all Indians embody Indian citizenship vis
MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies; ACLA Rene Wellek Prize Honorable Men... more MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies; ACLA Rene Wellek Prize Honorable Mention for Best Overall Book in Comparative Literature; MSA First Book Prize Shortlist; AIIS Prize in Humanities for First Book Shortlist
Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon could be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English.
Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani —imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, 2023
This chapter explores a tension in postcolonial Indian literature between the monolingual form of... more This chapter explores a tension in postcolonial Indian literature between the monolingual form of the nation and the multilingual tendencies of the linguistic regions through a comparison between the Sahitya Akademi’s (India’s national academy of letters) activities and Tamil putukkavitai (new poetry) writing. By promoting translation and constructing a Sanskritic literary past, the Akademi used literature to manage multilingualism and make it compatible with the monolingualism intrinsic to the nation. Putukkavitai writing, by contrast, epitomizes the challenge of linguistic regionalism to national integration, offering a view of Indian multilingualism in less hierarchical terms than those expressed in Akademi discourses. To understand Tamil literature as Indian literature, the chapter proposes, requires taking the monolingual dimensions of the region into greater account. Tracing Tamil new poets’ engagement with new poetry in other Indian languages in the magazine Eḻuttu, the chapter argues that Indian multilingualism is built on shared experiences of linguistic alienation.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2020
The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationshi... more The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke the wider debates about tradition and modernity that these female types commonly represented without affirming the social reformist positions to which they were linked. Through the short story, Pudumaippittan dislodged his portrayals of the Indian woman from existing gender norms, sealing the shift from social realism to modernist realism within the Tamil literary sphere.
Comparative Literature, 2019
This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which w... more This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows how the Movement inaugurated a modernist realism characterized by attention to genre, rhetoric, and style on one hand, and commitment to social reality on the other. Combining rhetorical strategies—such as shifting narrative voice, allegorical descriptions of landscape, and implicit reference to authorship and the condition of postcolonial literary production—with structural and thematic tensions between form and content, this mode developed an interchangeability between author, reader, and character, which did not previously exist in Hindi literature and which reconfigured the category of the middle class in the universally recognizable terms of alienation. Using the case of the nayī kahānī, the essay offers a new literary historical approach that moves beyond sweeping accounts of a single postcolonial mode to attend to regional realisms and modernisms.
Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, 2018
This essay explores an unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing that emerge... more This essay explores an unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing that emerged in debates in Maṇikkoṭi and Āṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, two well-known Tamil magazines that were launched in the 1930s. Through short stories and critical essays, the writers who contributed to these magazines attempted to create new lenses through which to view the purpose of literature in society. While discussions of Indian modernism have sidelined regional and communitarian aesthetic and socio-political concerns, the Maṇikkoṭi-Vikaṭaṉ debates demonstrate that extremely localized, intimate conversations profoundly influenced the trajectory of Tamil modernism. The essay shows how the 1930s literary¬-popular distinction situates Tamil modernism at a tangent to scholarly characterizations of late colonial Indian modernism as preoccupied with anticolonialism and nation-building. The essay argues that Tamil modernism centered on formulating new aesthetic sensibilities aimed at diffusing regional contentions regarding linguistic and caste affiliations-rather than as focused on either developing or subverting Indian nationalist politics.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2016
This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamine... more This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bhandari's and Chudamani's writing provides insight into literary discourses of gender equality circulating in the immediate postindependence moment. In particular, she argues that these women writers broadened the scope of feminist thought and literary expression existing at the time through their rhetorical use of a language of entitlement that universalizes feminine desire in humanist terms. They did so through the portrayal of female characters who express the desire to possess sexual freedom, economic independence, and human equality on the same terms as the male characters. Feminist scholarship has characterized the 1950s and 1960s as a moment of paucity in women's writing and decline in feminist politics. Yet Bhandari's and Chudamani's distinct uses of a language of entitlement offer a deeper understanding of the role of the literary in shaping feminist thought. Their work thus provides alternative genealogies of the categories of feminism and women's writing in India.
The Playwright and the Stage, 2019
A book of translations should aim for transparency and comparability. It would thus be very nice ... more A book of translations should aim for transparency and comparability. It would thus be very nice if the next edition of this book could contain bibliographical references to the Bangla originals, not just for Bengali readers, but also for the growing number of learners of Bangla who would benefit greatly from having the translations and the originals side by side.
Queen's Head & Artichoke, 1999
UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Apr 1, 2010
National integration, a primary goal of the 1950s in India in both the cultural and state spheres... more National integration, a primary goal of the 1950s in India in both the cultural and state spheres, required the constitution of Indianness as a shared cultural and legal identity. Its determined outcome, Indian citizenship, thereby entailed the production of affective ties in terms of both national affiliation, as well as legal rights, in order to give coherence to the hyphen binding an already existing idea of nation to the newly formed Indian state. A driving question of the post-Independence era was thus: how can, will, and already do all Indians embody Indian citizenship vis
South Asia Research, Nov 1, 2012
South Asia-journal of South Asian Studies, Sep 2, 2020
The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorise the relationshi... more The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorise the relationship between literature and society in the late colonial era. He used the genre's brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types-such as widows, prostitutes and goodwives-into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke the wider debates about tradition and modernity that these female types commonly represented without affirming the social reformist positions to which they were linked. Through the short story, Pudumaippittan dislodged his portrayals of the Indian woman from existing gender norms, prompting a shift from social realism to modernist realism within the Tamil literary sphere.
South Asia Research, Nov 1, 2014
Nehru and the National Academy of Letters 5 The Nayi Kahani and the Cirukatai I am deeply gratefu... more Nehru and the National Academy of Letters 5 The Nayi Kahani and the Cirukatai I am deeply grateful to many people for their generosity, guidance, and patience during the last ten years that I have been undertaking this project. First and foremost, I am indebted to my committee members, who have kindheartedly and tirelessly encouraged me and whose teaching and scholarship have informed each word of this text. My co-chairs Vasudha Dalmia and George Hart have taught me how to approach the study of literature with openmindedness and intellectual rigor and have offered me unwavering support even in those moments when I believed I could not continue. Vasudha has fostered in me the firm commitment to the study of literary history that has shaped me into the scholar I am today, and George has helped me to hear and feel the sounds and textures of language and express them with eloquence in my writing and translation. Paola Bacchetta has given me the tools to understand and fight against structures of inequality and oppression through academic scholarship and teaching. Raka Ray has offered me critical insights at what seemed to me impossible impasses in this project by asking those difficult questions that enabled me to think through my arguments. Usha Jain and Kausalya Hart, my first language teachers at Berkeley, welcomed me despite my utter lack of training in Hindi and Tamil and have given me the surest of foundations from which to approach my lifelong study of these languages. Swami-ji, Neelam-ji, and Vidhu-ji in Jaipur and Dr. Bharathy, Mrs. Soundra Kohila, and Mrs. Jayanthi in Madurai have been the most rigorous, dedicated, and warm-hearted of language teachers, without whom I could never have dreamed of taking on such an in depth study in languages I did not already know. I continue to draw from the constant encouragement and enduring patience they showed me during my yearlong studies with them, which were unfailing even on those days when I gave into my own frustrations and disheartenment. My dear friends Kannan M. and Anupama K. took me in as a young scholar, gave me a home and a community during my long stays in Pondicherry, and fed me countless, delicious meals. Kannan has helped shape my understanding of modern Tamil literature, opened my eyes to the Tamil writers I have since been studying, and patiently worked through many of my interpretations and translations with me. I am also grateful to V. Arasu, V. Geetha, and Dilip Kumar, all of whom generously entertained my innumerable and sometimes misinformed questions during the early stages of this project. Francesca Orsini happily and unhesitatingly offered me unqualified support during my two years in London. From the moment I arrived, she warmly drew me into the South Asian studies community at SOAS, engaging me as student, colleague, and friend. Despite her incredibly busy schedule and countless commitments, she took the time to read through drafts of several of my chapters (some of them quite rough!), helping me to reshape them into more thorough and readable compositions. Her insightful questions and comments, her breadth and rigor of scholarship, and her strong sense of commitment to her students, colleagues, and friends have inspired my own approach to the study of Hindi literature and life in general.
Comparative Literature, Sep 1, 2019
Premchand"), written in Hindi and published in 1954, an unnamed narrator climbs into a cycle rick... more Premchand"), written in Hindi and published in 1954, an unnamed narrator climbs into a cycle rickshaw, after sending off a woman acquaintance at the local train station in a small North Indian city. Distraught, he orders the driver to cycle him to the city center a few miles away. As the driver toils to maneuver the cycle over bumpy terrain, the narrator ruminates in the back seat, roving between reflections about the woman and his own emotional state. Intermittently, the journey jars the narrator back into his present surroundings, leading him to weave observations about the setting into his stream of thought: Ahead in the east the gigantic petals of an enormous red rose began to smile in the dewy darkness. The rickshaw driver's coat began to sway this way and that in front of my eyes. The air was chilly, it seemed he should button his vest, didn't he want to? Just as he rocked side to side in the driver's seat, so too did my mind, spreading out (Yadav, "Śarat" 11). 1 I am grateful to a number of people for their generous and thoughtful feedback:
This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamine... more This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bhandari's and Chudamani's writing provides insight into literary discourses of gender equality circulating in the immediate postindependence moment. In particular, she argues that these women writers broadened the scope of feminist thought and literary expression existing at the time through their rhetorical use of a language of entitlement that universalizes feminine desire in humanist terms. They did so through the portrayal of female characters who express the desire to possess sexual freedom, economic independence, and human equality on the same terms as the male characters. Feminist scholarship has characterized the 1950s and 196...
Indian Genre Fiction, 2018
This volume maps the breadth and domain of genre literature in India across seven languages (Tami... more This volume maps the breadth and domain of genre literature in India across seven languages (Tamil, Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, Marathi and English) and nine genres for the first time. Over the last few decades, detective/crime fiction and especially science fiction/fantasy have slowly made their way into university curricula and consideration by literary critics in India and the West. However, there has been no substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages, least of all from a comparative perspective. This volume, with contributions from leading national and international scholars, addresses this lacuna in critical scholarship and provides an overview of diverse genre fictions. Using methods from literary analysis, book history and Indian aesthetic theories, the volume throws light on the variety of contexts in which genre literature is read, activated and used, from political debates surrounding national and regional identities to caste and class conflicts. It shows that Indian genre fiction (including pulp fiction, comics and graphic novels) transmutes across languages, time periods, in translation and through publication processes. While the book focuses on contemporary postcolonial genre literature production, it also draws connections to individual, centuries-long literary traditions of genre literature in the Indian subcontinent. Further, it traces contested hierarchies within these languages as well as current trends in genre fiction criticism. Lucid and comprehensive, this book will be of great interest to academics, students, practitioners, literary critics and historians in the fields of postcolonialism, genre studies, global genre fiction, media and popular culture, South Asian literature, Indian literature, detective fiction, science fiction, romance, crime fiction, horror, mythology, graphic novels, comparative literature and South Asian studies. It will also appeal to the informed general reader.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2020
The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorise the relationshi... more The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorise the relationship between literature and society in the late colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke the wider debates about tradition and modernity that these female types commonly represented without affirming the social reformist positions to which they were linked. Through the short story, Pudumaippittan dislodged his portrayals of the Indian woman from existing gender norms, prompting a shift from social realism to modernist realism within the Tamil literary sphere.
Author(s): Mani, Preetha Laxmi | Advisor(s): Dalmia, Vasudha; Hart, George | Abstract: In the wak... more Author(s): Mani, Preetha Laxmi | Advisor(s): Dalmia, Vasudha; Hart, George | Abstract: In the wake of Indian Independence, the short story emerged as the most active genre in both Hindi and Tamil literature, establishing new representations of selfhood and citizenship that would shape popular expression across India for decades to come. This genre thus provides an important window into the cultural production of enduring paradigms of Indian modernity and citizenship in the context of national efforts to create an all-Indian identity after decolonization. My dissertation is motivated by an interest in explaining how post-Independence Hindi and Tamil short stories mobilized and constructed representations of the "Indian citizen," locating them within a regionally specific cultural context, as well as the broader imaginings of a modern India. I ask: what was literature's role in establishing universal understandings of the Indian citizen in the postcolonial moment? I addr...
UCLA Center for the Study of Women, 2010
Author(s): Mani, Preetha | Abstract: In this presentation, I juxtapose the production of cultural... more Author(s): Mani, Preetha | Abstract: In this presentation, I juxtapose the production of cultural citizenship as it takes form in Hindi and Tamil short story writing of this period with the juridical production of post-Independence legal citizenship. These discursive arenas demonstrate that underlying the conceptualizations of both citizenship-as-national identity and citizenship-as-rights (Sundar Rajan 2003; see also Sinha 2006 and Yuval-Davis 1997) is an anxiety over the institution of marriage. Not only is marriage being newly defined in both arenas in this moment, but also it is through this institution that the relationships between citizens are framed. That is to say, conjugality, the principle relationship that generates Indian subjectivities in post-Independence Hindi and Tamil short story writing, is also that which confers citizens’ rights in the state-juridical sphere (see for example: Hodges 2008, Majumdar 2009, Sreenivas 2008, and Uberoi 1996). By virtue of the man-woma...
South Asia Research
'Leave the ignorance caused by sleep behind and familiarise yourself with politics and dharma. Co... more 'Leave the ignorance caused by sleep behind and familiarise yourself with politics and dharma. Consider the condition of the fallen country as your domestic work'. These few lines of poetry by Matadin Shukla, published in one of the women's journals that are the focus of Nijhawan's detailed study, in many ways encapsulate the contradictions and tensions explored here. This 'Plea to Women', in a 1917 issue of Stri Darpan, was authored by a man, but appeared in a journal written largely by and for women. In a self-advertisement, also cited by Nijhawan (p. 38), Stri Darpan described itself as '[T]he first suitable Hindi monthly paper for women and girls', containing 'articles on dharma, literature, society, reforms, and other topics'. This development is one Nijhawan identifies as crucial in the public sphere of the early twentieth century. Even if discussions around the role of women in the home and the world were 'undergirded by patriarchal assumptions on gender roles and responsibilities' (p. 69), they were now for the first time being produced and curated by women and for women's consumption. This book builds upon the work undertaken by Vasudha Dalmia and Francesca Orsini in particular, in acknowledging the central role that periodical literature played in the creation of tastes, and of new practices of-particularly solitary-reading in this period. Crucially, Nijhawan draws insights from Margaret Beetham's work on Victorian British women's journals and views them as a distinct genre: resilient, intervallic, heterogeneous and participatory. With this, she insists that we should not view women's periodical literature as 'doubly discredited', but should rather recognise the 'nature of resistance' contained therein (pp. 32-5). Thus her wide reading of the archives of five significant Hindi women's journals from the 1910s to the 1940s, namely Stri Darpan, Grihalakshmi, Arya Mahila, Madhuri, and Chand, draws our attention to This is the version of an article accepted for publication in
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationshi... more The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke the wider debates about tradition and modernity that these female types commonly represented without affirming the social reformist positions to which they were linked. Through the short story, Pudumaippittan dislodged his portrayals of the Indian woman from existing gender norms, sealing the shift from social realism to modernist realism within the Tamil literary sphere.
Ucla Center For the Study of Women, Apr 1, 2010
In this presentation, I juxtapose the production of cultural citizenship as it takes form in Hind... more In this presentation, I juxtapose the production of cultural citizenship as it takes form in Hindi and Tamil short story writing of this period with the juridical production of post-Independence legal citizenship. These discursive arenas demonstrate that underlying the conceptualizations of both citizenship-as-national identity and citizenship-as-rights (Sundar Rajan 2003; see also Sinha 2006 and Yuval-Davis 1997) is an anxiety over the institution of marriage. Not only is marriage being newly defined in both arenas in this moment, but also it is through this institution that the relationships between citizens are framed. That is to say, conjugality, the principle relationship that generates Indian subjectivities in post-Independence Hindi and Tamil short story writing, is also that which confers citizens' rights in the state-juridical sphere (see for example: Hodges 2008, Majumdar 2009, Sreenivas 2008, and Uberoi 1996). By virtue of the man-woman relationship conjugality designates, Indian subjectivity, as it manifests in both Hindi and Tamil short stories and Indian constitutional and juridical discourses, is profoundly gendered.
Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 2002
The following is an excerpt from an essay that is the common product of 12 undergraduate students... more The following is an excerpt from an essay that is the common product of 12 undergraduate students from across the United States who partici pated in the Global Climate Change and Society Program (www.colorado.edu/Research/GCCS) during the summer of2001. Through their research on issues related to global climate change, the students concluded that the core question of uncertainty does not lie within climate science, but comes instead from an inability to predict human activity. Based on that observation, this article issues a call for a much more wide-ranging discussion of the values relevant to how we live with each other and how we collectively inhabit the world.
Comparative Literature
This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which w... more This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows how the movement inaugurated a modernist realism characterized by attention to genre, rhetoric, and style on one hand, and commitment to social reality on the other. Combining rhetorical strategies—such as shifting narrative voice, allegorical descriptions of landscape, and implicit reference to authorship and the condition of postcolonial literary production—with structural and thematic tensions between form and content, this mode developed an interchangeability between author, reader, and character, which did not previously exist in Hindi literature and which reconfigured the category of the middle class in the universally recognizable terms o...