English Heart, Hindi Heartland : the Political Life of Literature in India.

By:

Sadana, Rashmi

Material type: Text

TextSeries: Flashpoints (Berkeley, Calif.) ; 8.Publication details: Berkeley : University of California Press, 2012.Description: 1 online resource (241 pages)Content type:

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

9780520952294
0520952294
1280116722
9781280116728
9786613521019
6613521019

Subject(s):

Genre/Form:

Additional physical formats: Print version:: English Heart, Hindi Heartland : The Political Life of Literature in India.DDC classification:

891.4

LOC classification:

PK5416

Online resources:

Click here to access online

Contents:

Cover Page; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication Page; Table of Contents; Acknowledgments; Prologue: The Slush Pile; Chapter 1: Reading Delhi and Beyond; Chapter 2: Two Tales of a City; Chapter 3: In Sujan Singh Park; Chapter 4: The Two Brothers of Ansari Road; Chapter 5: At the Sahitya Akademi; Chapter 6: Across the Yamuna; Chapter 7: "A Suitable Text for a Vegetarian Audience"; Chapter 8: Indian Literature Abroad; Chapter 9: Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Summary: English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi's postcolonial literary world--its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods--in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other writers, including K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree. Sadana undertakes an ethnographic study of literary culture that probes the connections between place, language, and text in order to show what language comes to stand for in people's lives. In so doing, she unmasks a social discourse rife with questions of authenticity and cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion. English Heart, Hindi Heartland illustrates how the notion of what is considered to be culturally and linguistically authentic not only obscures larger questions relating to caste, religious, and gender identities, but that the authenticity discourse itself is continually in flux. In order to mediate and extract cultural capital from India's complex linguistic hierarchies, literary practitioners strategically deploy a fluid set of cultural and political distinctions that Sadana calls "literary nationality." Sadana argues that English, and the way it is positioned among the other Indian languages, does not represent a fixed pole, but rather serves to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways.

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Print version record.

English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi's postcolonial literary world--its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods--in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other writers, including K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree. Sadana undertakes an ethnographic study of literary culture that probes the connections between place, language, and text in order to show what language comes to stand for in people's lives. In so doing, she unmasks a social discourse rife with questions of authenticity and cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion. English Heart, Hindi Heartland illustrates how the notion of what is considered to be culturally and linguistically authentic not only obscures larger questions relating to caste, religious, and gender identities, but that the authenticity discourse itself is continually in flux. In order to mediate and extract cultural capital from India's complex linguistic hierarchies, literary practitioners strategically deploy a fluid set of cultural and political distinctions that Sadana calls "literary nationality." Sadana argues that English, and the way it is positioned among the other Indian languages, does not represent a fixed pole, but rather serves to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways.