(2000). Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 84-84.

Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India

Asking how the nationalist intelligentsia and Hindi literati sought to interact with and shape the new medium of radio in a period of time that witnessed the establishment of All India Radio’s Luck...

Hindi, Urdu or Hindustani? Revisiting ‘National Language’ Debates through Radio Broadcasting in Late Colonial India:

Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahabharata in the Age of the Empire

Tracing the Boundaries between Hindi and Urdu: Lost and Added in Translation between 20 th Century Short Stories . By Christine Everaert. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010. xviii, 303 pp. $169.00 (cloth).

Nationalism in the vernacular : Hindi, Urdu, and the literature of Indian freedom : an anthology

This article examines Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi’s project of literary self-determination, as articulated in two programmatic essays published in the Hindi journal Sarasvati under his editorship (1903–1920), scrutinising his construction of literature as a culturally embedded category of national consequence. His theorisation of Hindi literature as broadly inclusive in terms of its basic definition and function supported the growth of what he considered a national treasury of literature. His discussion of its historical and linguistic parameters and his emphasis on a prioritised plan of literary production, reified the notion of a modern discipline oriented towards a narrowly constructed national collective that sought to establish its sovereign identity via literature in Khari Boli Hindi. Though not explicit in its anti-colonial nationalism, this project nevertheless privileged Hindi as the projected lead language of a modern sovereign nation, with all the risks that delimitation entailed.

Sujata S. Mody

Papers

Literary Self-Determination and The Disciplinary Boundaries of Hindi Literature in the Early Twentieth Century