Event Details

Please join us for the final Humanities Faculty Colloquium of this academic year on Thursday, April 10 for a talk by Berg Postdoctoral Fellow of History, Niharika Yadav. The presentation will be held in the Harmon Room of the DeWitt Wallace Library. Lunch, generously funded by the Provost's Office, is available at 11:45 a.m.; talks begin promptly at noon. No RSVP needed. All faculty and staff are welcome.

In the Hindi public sphere, the 1950s was a period of intense debate: the rapid expansion of state intervention created new conflicts between elites and younger claimants. Writers took to the pages of a proliferating body of Hindi publications to debate language policies, the consequences of government employment, and the merits of “realist” vs “modernist” genres. At stake in all these debates was the role of the Hindi writer, and the broader question of the relationship of literature to politics and society. My paper examines the contributions of two prominent writers: the modernist poet and editor Raghuveer Sahay and the socialist literary critic and poet Vijaydevnarayan Sahi. By reading their interventions both along and against their grain, I trace a social history of democratic ideas in postcolonial India. In so  doing, I shift the focus from literary experiments to "metaliterary discourses" of democracy (Mani 2019). As a journalist and editor, Sahay wrote extensively on the democratic merits of Hindi language policies. Meanwhile, Sahi’s quest for a “true” Marxist literary criticism aimed to define the role of the socialist writer in democratic society. As I show, democracy was the discursive terrain on which literary debates in postcolonial India were fought. Linking experimentalist literature to democracy was particularly productive for Hindi writers: it provided a new normative principle, at once Indian and modern, detached from the revanchist defense of national tradition. In effect, postcolonial democracy turned the Hindi writer into a creator of new values for Indian society and the polarized Cold War world.