My paper addresses the emergence of the discipline of Hindi literary criticism in colonial India in the 1920s and 1930s and later developments in the 1950s. I focus on the writings of three eminent scholars and writers who I believe were integral in advancing a perspective on Hindi literary and linguistic development which reflected a commitment to social levelling and harmony. As a sophisticated body of scholarship has shown, the inter-war years in India implicated language and literature within a fraught religious sectarian politics (communalism) whereby Hindi was unalloyed from its entanglements with Urdu, Braj Bhasha, and other languages and dialects. In this paper I will engage with some of the writings of Shukla, Premchand, and Sharma to interrogate how they weaved together their literary interests with ethico-political concerns. I am particularly interested in how these writers cast past traditions of Hindi: why were certain traditions such as riti and ghazal associated with the decadence of feudal paternal/patrimonial power and others such as Bhakti affirmed? While contemporary scholarship has offered a sophisticated critique of these literary movements and the narrow-mindedness of their canon making vision, I will suggest that we can discern an impulse within these writings to fashion a literature and an aesthetic code that was bent towards social harmony. Even though these writers and their literary efforts might not have been unstained by the communal politics of the time, by drawing on the writings of the later literary critic, Ramvilas Sharma, I argue that it is only by paying attention to conversations within Hindi academic discourse that we might discern and strengthen this social-ethical impulse; an impulse which might otherwise be easily usurped by Hindu right wing discourse.
It's a peculiar attempt, this 1920. Shooting in Yorkshire -- and passing a castle there as just a hansom-cab ride away from Mumbai -- the film clearly desires to replicate classic British period chillers. The man wears a three-piece suit, the woman is in modern-day approximations of what the art director mistakes for being Victorian, and they look more the exiled Baron and Baroness instead of the Thakur-Thakrain. It is as if director Vikram Bhatt -- who made watchable films a decade ago, we hear -- wanted to create a stulted period atmosphere just to show other horror-makers that his work is, indeed, different. Unlike the Ramsays, his is a mansion, not a haveli. Unlike Ram Gopal Varma, his film relies on footsteps in silence, not sound-design boos. And with scratchy gramophones and the use of western classical music, he seems to be trying to show us how international his film is, how classy. How British.
My essay is an attempt to track the long literary lineage, stretching back to the early decades of the twentieth century, of the emergent genre of the Dalit personal narrative in Hindi, which has begun to make itself more and more visible in North India since the concluding decades of the century. I shall argue that these narratives are, without a doubt, the legatees of a tradition of anticaste writing and a vibrant, though largely unremarked upon, Dalit print culture that flourished in Uttar Pradesh through the 1920s and beyond. Special reference is made, in this regard, to the literary work of Swami Achhutanand, the doyen of the anticaste movement in North India, and to his influence on later generations of undercaste writers in the so-called Hindi belt. The essay also contains some reflections on the nature of the Dalit counterpublic, which comprises the social constituency addressed by the contemporary Dalit personal narrative in Hindi.
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Bernard "Buck" Hefron piloted the first air mail flight destined for Salt Lake City on September 9, 1920. Apparently the pilot's service did not live up to the demands of his supervisors, and Buck Hefron was fired on October 15, 1920 by supervisor Dunphy.