Project description

The project aims to explore the ways in which Hindi literary cultures reflected and shaped the political and revolutionary contexts of 1960s-80s north India. It argues that the Hindi fiction produced on and during these revolutionary decades maps the complex character(s) of social justice movements related to land, adivasi (indigenous people), gender rights and anti-caste activism in the country. It further posits how Hindi language (and literature), despite its political construction(s) as the dominant (even proposed ‘national’) voice of post-independence India challenged the core of this construction by foregrounding alternative regional, linguistic sensibilities, sexual desires and sensualities, class-caste and gendered perspectives, making epistemic and aesthesic dents in the dominant perception of culture and nation-state. In doing so, it performs a decolonial praxis of living, knowing, and sensing that challenges the colonial matrix of power and allied structures of the nation-state.

Short Bio

Bharti Arora teaches at the Department of English, University of Delhi.  She earned her PhD (English) from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She was the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow (2022) at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her areas of research include Gender Studies, Women’s Fiction, Indian Literatures, Social Movements and Nation. Her articles have appeared in journals like Indian Journal of Gender Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, South Asian Review, and Society and Culture in South Asia.  She is the author of Writing Gender, Writing Nation: Women’s Fiction in Post-independence India (Routledge 2019).