SOAS Research Online

A Free Database of the Latest Research by SOAS Academics and PhD Students

[skip to content]

Orsini, Francesca (2017) 'Reading Together: Hindi, Urdu, and English Village Novels.' In: Ciocca, R. and Srivastava, N., (eds.), Indian Literature and the World: Multilingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 61-85.

[img]
Preview
Text - Accepted Version
Download (590kB) | Preview

Abstract

Every region of India is and has been multilingual, with speakers of different languages and speakers of multiple languages. But literary ‘multilingual locals’ are often more fragmented than we think. While multilingualism suggests interest, and proficiency, in more than one literary language and tradition, very real barriers exist in terms of written vs. oral access, mutual interaction, and social and cultural hierarchies and exclusions. What does it mean to take multilingualism seriously when studying literature? One way, this essay suggests, is to consider works on a similar topic or milieu written in the different languages and compare both their literary sensibilities and their social imaginings. Rural Awadh offers an excellent example, as the site of many intersecting processes and discourses—of shared Hindu-Muslim sociality and culture and Muslim separatism, of nostalgia for a sophisticated culture and critique of zamindari exploitation and socio-economic backwardness, as the home of Urdu and of rustic Awadhi. This essay analyses three novels written at different times about rural Awadh—one set before 1947 and the others in the wake of the Zamindari Abolition Act of 1950 and the migration of so many Muslim zamindars from Awadh, either to Pakistan or to Indian cities. The first is Qazi Abdul Sattar’s Urdu novel Shab gazida (1962), the other two are Shivaprasad Singh’s Alag alag vaitarani (1970) and the Awadh subplot in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993). Without making them representatives of their respective languages, by comparing these three novels I am interested in exploring how they frame and what they select of Awadh culture, how much ground and sensibility they share, and how they fit within broader traditions of ‘village writing’ in Hindi, Urdu, and Indian English.

Item Type: Book Chapters
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics
ISBN: 9781137545503
Copyright Statement: © The Author(s) 2017. This is the accepted manuscript of a chapter published by Palgrave Macmillan in Indian Literature and the World: Multilingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere, available online: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3_3
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3_3
Date Deposited: 19 Nov 2017 12:09
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/24827
Related URLs: https://link.sp ... 1-137-54550-3_3
Funders: European Union

Altmetric Data

Statistics

Download activity - last 12 monthsShow export options
Downloads since deposit
6 month trend
404Downloads
6 month trend
314Hits
Accesses by country - last 12 monthsShow export options
Accesses by referrer - last 12 monthsShow export options

Repository staff only

Edit Item Edit Item