<p>Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.</p>

Shiv Nadar University

This article focuses on the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, founded under the aegis of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha in 1910 in Allahabad, and its active bid to establish what can be seen as the first archive of, and in, Hindi. While the Sammelan’s library functioned as a public-facing, community-serving space that housed and issued printed books, periodicals and newspapers in its reading room, the archive was imagined as an accumulation of all materials, print and manuscript, relating to Hindi, with access limited to critics and scholars. The article argues that infrastructure like the library and the archive critically contributed to the process of consolidation and legitimisation of the discourse on Hindi nationalism. It also traces the post-Independence assimilation of this library to the machinery of state bureaucracy, specifically to the institution of the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sahitya Sammelan Act, 1956, and the central government’s Hindi Sahitya Sammelan Act, 1962, which declared the Sammelan ‘an institution of national importance’. How do these acts reflect tensions between the politicisation of Hindi as the national language and democratisation in post-colonial India? Here, the article shows that Hindi was not only being monetarily patronised in the 1950s and 1960s, but was also vigilantly monitored, drawing staunch resistance from the Sammelan, which saw itself as a moral alternative to the state. It traces the history of these legislative processes which ultimately resulted in a petition against the 1962 Act in the Supreme Court in 1973, which declared it invalid. © 2020, © 2020 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.

English

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

The Hindi Library and the Making of an Archive: The Hindi Sahitya Sammelan from 1911 to 1973

The article discusses Saritā, one of the best-selling Hindi magazines of the 1950s, and the part it played in the establishment of the Hindi 'middlebrow' reader. While a rich and vibrant journal culture in Hindi had existed since the nineteenth century, what distinguishes the post-1947 Hindi popular magazine is the emergence of the middle class as a burgeoning consumer. Saritā defied prescriptions of Nehruvian state building, as well as the right-wing discourses of nationalism and national language prevalent in the post-Independence space. In addition, it reconfigured biases towards gendered reading and consumption processes, as well as encouraging increased reader participation. This article argues for Saritā's role in the creation of a middlebrow reading space in the period immediately following Independence, since it not only packaged what was deemed wholesome and educational for the family as a unit, but also, most significantly, promoted readership in segments, with a focus on each individual's reading desires. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019Â.

Modern Asian Studies

Saritā and the 1950s Hindi Middlebrow Reader

The essay focuses on the uncharacteristically good production quality of the contemporary novels of master crime writer Surender Mohan Pathak by the publishing house Raja Pocket Books since 2009. Placing his novels against the contemporary pulp fiction from the small presses, the essay argues the birth of a pulp novel as an artefact for consumption by the middle classes and the implications it has on the way crime fiction is articulated in Hindi literary and production histories. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.

Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories

From the colloquial to the ‘literary’: Hindi pulp’s journey from the streets to the bookshelves

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. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.

World University root node

Indian genre fiction: Pasts and future histories

The manifesto proposed new approaches to understanding the translations industry and the distribution and reception of genres, along with alternative ways of conceptualising genre themes and motifs, while reconstructing the historical matrix to analyse differences and similarities between genres. Rieder argues that genre fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, and horror, describes an entirely new phenomenon, which the ‘genre as narrative form’ usage/category does not capture. One such expectational outcome in the intersection of the historical and the formal is offered by the ubiquitous use of myth in genre fictionfrom India. Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay, as a pioneer of genre fiction in India, was a staunch critic of nationalism, even though he was arguably one of the foremost social reformers of the colonial period. Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories is the one of the first academic engagements on a field that deserves deeper investigation and, in doing so, brings many languages, genres, and perspectives together. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.