Language Ideologies and the Vernacular in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia

Nishat Zaidi is a professor and former head of the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She has authored/translated/edited 16 books. Some of her recent publications include Karbala: A Historical Play (translation of Premchand’s play Karbala with a critical introduction and notes) (2022), Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime (with Dilip Menon et al. 2022), Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India (with A. Sean Pue 2022), Makers of Indian Literature: Agha Shahid Ali (2016), Day and Dastan (with Alok Bhalla, 2018) and Between Worlds: The Travels of Yusuf Khan Kambalposh (with Mushirul Hasan, 2014). Hans Harder is a professor of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany. His research interests include modern literatures in South Asia, particularly Bengali, religious movements, and colonial and post-colonial intellectual history. He has written and/or edited Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Śrım̄adbhagabadgıt̄a:̄ Translation and Analysis (2001); Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of Modern Indian Languages (2010); Sufism and Saint Veneration in Contemporary Bangladesh (Routledge 2011); Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair (with Barbara Mittler, 2013) and Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular (with Charu Gupta, Laura Brueck and Shobna Nijhawan, Routledge 2021).

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Note on Transliteration

Introduction: Language Ideologies and the ‘Vernacular’: A Critical Perspective

Nishat Zaidi and Hans Harder

PART I

Ideologies of Vernaculars and English

1 Beyond Hegemonic Binaries: English and the ‘Vernaculars’ in Post-liberalization India

Javed Majeed

2 Urdu Language Ideologies and Pakistani Identity

Arian Hopf

3 “Mother English”: Savitribai Phule on Caste Patriarchy and the Ideology of the English Vernacular

Christian Lee Novetzke

4 The Location of Theory: Bhāṣa Literatures in Indian and North American Postcolonialism

Suddhaseel Sen

5 A Vernacular Archive of Sex and Sexuality: Personal Annotations

Charu Gupta

6 Political Reform, Territorialising Language: Re-casting Difference, Constitutional Categories and Developmental Goals, 1905–1950s

Veena Naregal

PART II

Lost/Found in Translation between Vernaculars and English

7 Linguistic Estrangement: When Is a Language My Own?

Sudipta Kaviraj

8 British Translators, Bhagat Singh, and ‘Atheism’: How ‘Reverse Translation’ Alters the Meaning of Philosophical Concepts

Ruth Vanita

9 Telling Lives in Forked Tongues: Reading Shanta Gokhale’s and Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s Autobiographical Writings

Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay

10 Vernacularizing Science in Colonial Bengal: A Translational Site of ‘Other’ Archives

Indrani Das Gupta

11 Multilingual Locals in Transnational Geographies: Vaijñan̄ ik Upanyas̄ and the Cosmopolitanisation of Hindi in Late Colonial North India

Ishita Singh

PART III

Language Ideology, Literature and the Vernacular Public Spheres

12 Vernacularizing Emotions: Mohammed Ali’s Comrade and Hamdard

Margrit Pernau

13 In Defence of the Prem|sāgar: Re-evaluating the Narrative of the Hindi–Urdu Split

Gautam Liu

14 Vernaculars across Texts: Modern Islam and Modern Literature in Bengal

Neilesh Bose

15 Reading Caste in Vernacular Journals

Meenakshi Yadav

16 A South Asian Vernacular Public Overseas: Tamil in the Straits Settlements, c. 1870–1942

Torsten Tschacher

Index