HINDI WRITING IN SHUDDH ENGLISH

Francesca Orsini

Print and Pleasure
Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India

Print and Pleasure tells the story behind the boom in commercial publishing in nineteenth-century North India.

How did the new technology of printing and the enterprise of Indian publishers make the book a familiar object and a necessary part of people’s leisure in a largely illiterate society? What genres became popular in print? Who read them and how were they read?

Our perception of North Indian culture in this period has been dominated by the notion of a competition between Hindi and Urdu, and the growth of language nationalism. Print and Pleasure argues that many other forces were also at work which, in the pursuit of commercial interests, spread quite different and much more hybrid tastes.

The importance of this major new book lies in showing, moreover, that book history can greatly enrich our understanding of literary and cultural history. Francesca Orsini mines a huge and largely untapped archive in order to reveal that popular songbooks, theatre transcripts, meanderingly seralized narratives, flimsily published tales, and forgotten poems are as much a part of colonial history as the elite novels and highbrow journals that are more frequently the subject of historical studies.

FRANCESCA ORSINI is Reader in the Literatures of North India at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her previous books include The Hindi Public Sphere: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (2002) and the edited volume Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (2006). She is currently involved in a project that seeks to rethink North Indian literary culture from a comparative and multilingual perspective. The next book to be edited by her, Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Cultures, will appear soon.

‘A sparkling and immensely readable fresh perspective on nineteenth-century popular publishing.’—Graham Shaw, eminent book historian

‘This book represents the first comprehensive attempt to gauge the impact of the popular press in Hindi and Urdu in post-1857 British North India. It charts the existence in text and performance of genres now ascribed to either Hindi or Urdu. Francesca Orsini has discovered and re-created worlds lost to us after the Hindi–Urdu divide. But she has offered us no utopias, for her book also traces the slow crystallization of Hindi as separating itself from Urdu even in popular print, first cemented in the1890s detective novel industry, and in that pleasure of all pleasures—the qissa of Chandrakanta, suitably and subtly Hinduized. Truly, Print and Pleasure is pleasure in print.'—Vasudha Dalmia, Professor of Hindi at the University of California, Berkeley

HARDBACK / 328PP / RS 695.00 / ISBN 81-7824-249-4 / WORLD RIGHTS / 2010

Comments

THE BOOK OF INDIAN ESSAYS

Indians have been writing prose for 200 years, and yet when we think of literary prose we think of the novel. The “essay” brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say Swami and Friends or The Guide . Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present. The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra • A collection of the finest essays written in English by Indians over the past two hundred years. • The Book of Indian Essays is a wide-ranging historical anthology of the Indian essay in E...

THE GREAT AGRARIAN CONQUEST by NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

BUY THE PAPERBACK FROM THE REVIEWS Review in SOCIAL HISTORY, USA by Benjamin Siegel The Great Agrarian Conquest represents a massive intervention into the contemporary historiography of South Asia, elaborating upon some conventional wisdom but upending a great deal more of it. Readers might well place this book in conversation with works like Ranajit Guha ’ s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Bernard Cohn ’ s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1997), to which The Great Agrarian Conquest owes some preliminary inspiration. Yet what Bhattacharya o ﬀ ers is a wholly original account of the transformation to agrarian colonialism . . . Few volumes in South Asian history have been more awaited than this monograph, Neeladri Bhattacharya ’ s fi rst. One of the most celebrated mentors and researchers at New Delhi ’ s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bhattacharya retired in 2017 after a decades-long career. His formal scholarl...

PARTHA CHATTERJEE: THE TRUTHS AND LIES OF NATIONALISM as narrated by Charvak

"While the Covid-19 pandemic was still raging in the autumn of 2020, I found, one evening, placed outside the door of my home in Kolkata, a sealed packet. Apparently, it had been left there sometime during the day. It did not come by post or any of the courier services that usually deliver mail because, if it had, someone would have rung the bell and I was home all day. In fact, the parcel did not bear any seal or inscription except my name and address written in English script in a confident cursive style rarely seen these days. My curiosity was aroused because the package did not look like a piece of junk mail. The thought that it might contain something more sinister did strike my mind – after all, the times were not exactly normal. But something in the look of the packet persuaded me that it should be examined. After dutifully spraying the packet with a disinfectant, I unwrapped it and found, within cardboard covers and neatly tied in red string, what looked like a manuscript...

Permanent Black

Search This Blog