English Heart, Hindi Heartland: the Political Life of Literature in India
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UC Irvine FlashPoints Title English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/52k9k8xc ISBN 9780520269576 Author Sadana, Rashmi Publication Date 2012-02-01 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California English Heart, Hindi Heartland The Political Life of Literature in India Rashmi Sadana university of california press Berkeley • Los Angeles • London English Heart, Hindi Heartland flashpoints The series solicits books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplin- ary frameworks, distinguished both by their historical grounding and their theoretical and conceptual strength. We seek studies that engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucpress. Series Editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Edward Dimendberg (Film & Media Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) 1. On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant, by Dina Al-Kassim 2. Moses and Multiculturalism, by Barbara Johnson, with a foreword by Barbara Rietveld 3. The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature, by Adam Barrows 4. Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, by Michelle Clayton 5. Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, by Shaden M. Tageldin 6. Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought, by Stephanie H. Jed 7. The Cultural Return, by Susan Hegeman 8. English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India, by Rashmi Sadana English Heart, Hindi Heartland The Political Life of Literature in India Rashmi Sadana university of california press Berkeley • Los Angeles • London this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation. University of California Press, one of the most distin- guished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www .ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sadana, Rashmi. English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India / Rashmi Sadana. p. cm.—(FlashPoints ; 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–520–26957–6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Indic literature (English)—20th century— History and criticism. 2. Publishers and publishing—India—History—20th century. 3. Book industries and trade—India—History—20th century. 4. Politics and literature—India— History—20th century. 5. Postcolonialism in literature. 6. Postcolonialism—India. I. Title. PR9489.6.S26 2012 820.9'95409051—dc23 2011026588 Manufactured in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmen- tally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ansi/niso (z 39.48) requirements. For my parents and my sister Contents Acknowledgments ix Prologue: The Slush Pile xiii 1. Reading Delhi and Beyond 1 2. Two Tales of a City 29 3. In Sujan Singh Park 48 4. The Two Brothers of Ansari Road 71 5. At the Sahitya Akademi 94 6. Across the Yamuna 116 7. “A Suitable Text for a Vegetarian Audience” 136 8. Indian Literature Abroad 153 9. Conclusion 175 Notes 181 Bibliography 205 Index 215 Acknowledgments This book is about the politics of language in India’s literary field. Sev- eral key figures in that field—the publisher Ravi Dayal, the writer Nir- mal Verma, the literary scholar Meenakshi Mukherjee—passed away before it was published. I am grateful to them and to all those repre- sented in these pages who shared their experiences and insights with me. The support for the original research for this book came from For- eign Language and Area Studies fellowships, a Society of Women Ge- ographers’ Fellowship, a Robert E. Lowie Grant, and two Humanities Research Grants from the University of California, Berkeley, where I was a graduate student in anthropology. Lawrence Cohen, my advisor at Berkeley, has been with this project from beginning to end, and his support, in too many ways to recount, has been tremendous. Vasudha Dalmia has been a true mentor to me, and I must have consulted her on every aspect of this book and its publication. I can’t thank her enough. At Berkeley, I was also inspired and challenged by Stefania Pandolfo, Aihwa Ong, Raka Ray, Gene Irschick, Tom Metcalf, Sharon Kaufman, Michael Watts, Trinh Minh Ha, and Usha Jain. I first began to form some of the intellectual questions I had about Indian modernity when I took Sudipta Kaviraj’s politics seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and I was fortunate to be able to study with him again when he came to Berkeley as a visiting scholar. It was my good luck ix x | Acknowledgments that Ram Guha was also a visiting scholar around this time and taught a brilliant course on Gandhi. The period of revision and further research was made possible when I was a National Science Foundation–funded postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, in the Department of Anthropology, from 2003 to 2006, and then by a second postdoctoral fellowship in the Com- mittee on Global Thought in 2006–7. I thank Nick Dirks, Sherry Ort- ner, Brink Messick, Kate Wittenberg, Partha Chatterjee, and Akeel Bilgrami for providing the intellectual support and institutional space that made my time there so productive and enjoyable. In New York, I was also fortunate to receive encouragement and valuable feedback for this project from Robert Young and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. My revisions were helped along with the excellent comments I re- ceived from audiences when I was invited to present work at the Mellon Humanities Workshop at Stanford University, the South Asia Collo- quium in Anthropology at Yale University, the Department of English at New York University, the Departments of History and Asian Lan- guages and Cultures at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, the Women’s Studies Programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Cen- tre for Contemporary Theory in Baroda, and at Sarai / the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. Teaching in India for the past two years has been a wonderful expe- rience and has deepened my understanding of the issues of place and language that are central to this book. I thank my students, as well as V. R. Muraleedharan and Chella Rajan of the Indian Institute of Tech- nology (IIT) Madras and Amrit Srinivasan of IIT Delhi for making it possible. The Sahitya Akademi was one of my research sites, but it also became a place where I sat and wrote. I thank the staff of the library there and especially S. Padmanabham. I feel lucky to be part of the FlashPoints series and am grateful to the editorial board for its enthusiastic support of the manuscript from the start. Special thanks go to Ali Behdad of FlashPoints and Lynne Withey of UC Press for expertly shepherding the manuscript through. I also thank my two anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions for revision. I was thrilled to have Rukun Advani on board as the pub- lisher of the book in India, and credit goes to him for coming up with the book’s title. Portions of this book originally appeared in earlier versions in the following journals: “Two Tales of the City: The Place of English and the Limits of Postcolonial Critique,” in Interventions; and Acknowledgments | xi “A Suitable Text for a Vegetarian Audience: Questions of Authenticity and the Politics of Translation,” in Public Culture. The continual support of family and friends has strengthened and, in many cases, made possible this work. I thank Promilla Mathur, Veena Naregal, Sunila and Pramod Sharma, Sonia Palitana, Raj and Indra Chugh and families, who over the years in their respective homes cre- ated a base for me in Delhi, Mumbai, and Pune, one that was then hap- pily fortified by Harini Narayanan, Gautam Mody, and Alli Roshini in Delhi and Padma and R. I. Narayanan in Chennai. Veena Sadana, Suren Sadana, Ritu Sadana, Jacques Bury, Jacques-Kabir Bury, and Gitanjali Bury have given unstinting support everywhere and through it all. Meanwhile, Ambika delights as we anticipate which language her first words will be in. My co-conspirators, Falu Bakrania, Ritu Birla, Diana Blank, Anin- dita Chakrabarty, Batya Elul, Ilana Feldman, Paul Frymer, Rachel Hei- man, Poonam Joshi, Mani Lambert, Scott Morrison, Gustav Peebles, Renee Rubin Ross, Neil Safier, Shalini Satkunandanan, Miriam Tick- tin, and Ananya Vajpeyi read drafts, showed by example, and much else; Vivek Narayanan did all the above and brought the essential per- spective that had been missing for too long.