English Heart, Hindi Heartland. Rashmi Sadana
FLASHPOINTS
The series solicits books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary 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.
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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)
I. 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 environmentally 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
4. The Two Brothers of Ansari Road
7. “A Suitable Text for a Vegetarian Audience”
Acknowledgments
This book is about the politics of language in India's literary field. Several key figures in that field—the publisher Ravi Dayal, the writer Nirmal Verma, the literary scholar Meenakshi Mukherjee—passed away before it was published. I am grateful to them and to all those represented in these pages who shared their experiences and insights with
The support for the original research for this book came from Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, a Society of Women Geographers' 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