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 ContributorsAcknowledgements Note on TransliterationIntroduction: Language Ideologies and the ‘Vernacular’: A Critical Perspective Nishat Zaidi and Hans HarderPART IIdeologies of Vernaculars and English 1 Beyond Hegemonic Binaries: English and the ‘Vernaculars’ in Post-liberalization India Javed Majeed2 Urdu Language Ideologies and Pakistani Identity Arian Hopf3 “Mother English”: Savitribai Phule on Caste Patriarchy and the Ideology of the English Vernacular Christian Lee Novetzke4 The Location of Theory: Bhāṣa Literatures in Indian and North American Postcolonialism Suddhaseel Sen5 A Vernacular Archive of Sex and Sexuality: Personal Annotations Charu Gupta6 Political Reform, Territorialising Language: Re-casting Difference, Constitutional Categories and Developmental Goals, 1905–1950sVeena NaregalPART IILost/Found in Translation between Vernaculars and English 7 Linguistic Estrangement: When Is a Language My Own? Sudipta Kaviraj8 British Translators, Bhagat Singh, and ‘Atheism’: How ‘Reverse Translation’ Alters the Meaning of Philosophical Concepts Ruth Vanita9 Telling Lives in Forked Tongues: Reading Shanta Gokhale’s and Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s Autobiographical Writings Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay10 Vernacularizing Science in Colonial Bengal: A Translational Site of ‘Other’ Archives Indrani Das Gupta11 Multilingual Locals in Transnational Geographies: Vaijñan̄ ik Upanyas̄ and the Cosmopolitanisation of Hindi in Late Colonial North India Ishita SinghPART IIILanguage Ideology, Literature and the Vernacular Public Spheres 12 Vernacularizing Emotions: Mohammed Ali’s Comrade and Hamdard Margrit Pernau13 In Defence of the Prem|sāgar: Re-evaluating the Narrative of the Hindi–Urdu Split Gautam Liu14 Vernaculars across Texts: Modern Islam and Modern Literature in Bengal Neilesh Bose15 Reading Caste in Vernacular Journals Meenakshi Yadav16 A South Asian Vernacular Public Overseas: Tamil in the Straits Settlements, c. 1870–1942 Torsten TschacherIndex