<p>"This remarkable monograph beautifully crafts four micro studies of unusual and forgotten figures to recover several new horizons in late colonial north Indian history. These intimate portraits are framed within the larger domains of Hindi print culture and literary history, gender, sexuality, communism, Hindu supremacism, and the contested meanings of diverse visions of freedom—all expressed in a compelling vernacular idiom, all veering away from conventional expectations and trajectories. Charu Gupta takes us deep into the uncharted politico-cultural terrains of lived preoccupations and strife. Rather than slot her characters into fixed categories, she uncovers the fluidity, the porosity, the overlaps, and the surprises that their experiences and works express. This is a brilliant and complex book by a historian who has earlier brought together the politics of caste, gender, communalism, and literature in the Hindi-speaking world." — Tanika Sarkar, author of <i>Religion and Women in India</i></p>

Explores how four public intellectuals in North India imagined freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their writings on caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism.What did everyday Hinduism in India look like a hundred years ago? Were its practices more varied and less politically curtailed than now? Hindi Hindu Histories provides illuminating historical accounts of Hindu life through individual actors, autobiographical narratives, and genres in the Hindi print-public culture of early twentieth-century North India. It focuses on four fascinating figures: a successful woman doctor in the Indigenous medical regime, a globe-trotting Hindu ascetic who opposed Gandhi, an anticaste campaigner who spoke for sexual equality, and a Hindu communist who envisioned an egalitarian utopia in the world of labor. These public intellectuals harbored vernacular dreams of freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their vantage points of caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism. Opening up a vast and under-explored Hindi archive, this book presents a dynamic spectacle of a plural Hindi-Hindu universe of facets that coexisted, challenged each other, and comprised an idea of Hinduness far more inclusive than anything conceivable in the present moment.
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FiguresAbbreviationsNote on Translation and TransliterationAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Vernacular Freedoms and Life NarrativesMalleable Circuits of the VernacularHindi and Hindu: Negotiating Language, Literature, and ReligionSelf-Writing, Life Histories, and Sexual EmbodimentsUtopian Desires of FreedomTrajectory of ChaptersI: SANTRAM BA (1887–1988)1. Reading Self, Resisting Caste, Reimagining MarriageLife History and Caste: Self and Collective IdentitiesFamilial and Social Roots: Caste Discrimination, the Arya Samaj, and HindiA History of the JPTM and Anticaste ThoughtTransgressive Intimacies: Championing Intercaste Marriages2. Cast(e)ing and Translating Sex: Vernacular Sexology from the MarginsVernacular Print Cultures and Sexology in HindiTranslating Marginality into Authority: Marie Stopes and the Sanskrit Sex ClassicsA Heterosexual Ethics: Conjugal Desires, Brahmacharya, and Birth ControlII: YASHODA DEVI (1890–1942)3. Procreation and Pleasure: Women, Men, and AyurvedaPopular Health Literature, Biomedicine, and AyurvedaA Gendered Ayurvedic Authority on Domestic HealthA Moral Sexologist: Reproduction, Intercourse, and Masturbation4. Kitchen Pharmacy: Culinary Recipes and Home RemediesThe Politics of Food and Health in Colonial UPA Robust World of Cookbooks and Home RemediesFood Recipes and CookbooksRecipes for Home RemediesMenu for a Hindu Nation and the Ingredients of Gendered EmbodimentsThe Educated Housewife as "Ghar ka Vaid"Food for Freedom: The Political Economy of Home RemediesIII: SWAMI SATYADEV PARIVRAJAK (1879–1961)5. Fantasy, Fitness, Fascism: Masculine Vernacular Histories ofTravelTravel Writing: A Passion for HindiAdmiring the West: Beauty, Pleasure, and PhysicalityA Dialogue between East and West, Slavery, and Freedom"Perfect" Bodies: Masculinity and the Idolisation of Hitler6. Fashioning a Hindu Political Sanyasi: Autobiography and Sectarian FreedomAnatomy of a Hindu Ascetic: Sexual Constraint and Masculine VirilityEgoism and Eulogising SelfConceptualising an Exclusionary FreedomSegmented Freedom and Nationalism: Hindu Sangathan and MuslimsGandhi and GodseVindicating AssassinationIV: SATYABHAKT (1896–1985)7. A"Marginal" History ofVernacular CommunismHistorical Antecedents, Hindi and CommunismThe First Communist Conference and Satyabhakt's MarginalisationIdioms from Below and Communist Writings8. Hindu Communism: Apocalypse and Utopian Ram RajyaAn Eclectic Hindu WorldviewIndian Traditions and Hinduism in Dialogue with CommunismApocalyptic Predictions and Future PropheciesCommunism as a Utopian Ram RajyaGlossaryBibliographyIndex
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Explores how four public intellectuals in North India imagined freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their writings on caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism.

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9798855800661
Publisert
2024-12-01
Utgiver
Vendor
State University of New York Press
Vekt
671 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
404

Forfatter

Biographical note

Charu Gupta is Senior Professor of History at the University of Delhi. Her previous books include The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print and Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism.