This book explores the use of digital humanities (DH) to understand, interpret, and annotate the poetics of Indian literary and cultural texts, which circulate in digital forms - in manuscripts - and as oral or musical performance. Drawing on the linguistic, cultural, historical, social, and geographic diversity of Indian texts and contexts, it foregrounds the use of digital technologies - including minimal computing, novel digital humanities research and teaching methodologies, critical archive generation and maintenance - for explicating poetics of Indian literatures and generating scholarly digital resources which will facilitate comparative readings. With contributions from DH scholars and practitioners from across India, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more, this book will be a key intervention for scholars and researchers of literature and literary theory, DH, media studies, and South Asian Studies.

1) This book critically examines the socio-cultural imaginings of Gandhi in the present day. 2) It contains articles written by scholars like Simona Sawhney, Bhaswati Chatterjee, T Satyanath, and Haris Qadeer. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of Gandhian Studies, Cultural Studies and South Asian Studies across UK.

This volume critically engages with recent formulations and debates regarding the status of regional languages of the Indian subcontinent vis-à-vis English. It explores how language ideologies of the "vernacular" are positioned in relation to language ideologies of English in South Asia. The book probes into how we might move beyond the English-vernacular binary in India, explores what happened to “bhasha literatures� during the colonial and post-colonial periods, and how to position those literatures by the side of Indian English and international literature. The looks into the ways vernacular community and political rhetoric are intertwined with Anglophone (national or global) positionalities, and their role in political processes. This book will be of interest to researchers, students and scholars of literary and cultural studies, Indian Writing in English, Indian literatures, South Asian languages, and popular culture. It will also be extremely valuable for language scholars, sociolinguists, social historians and the scholars of cultural studies and those who understand the theoretical issues that concern the notion of ‘vernacularity’.

This volume critically engages with recent formulations and debates regarding the status of regional languages of the Indian subcontinent vis-à-vis English. It explores how language ideologies of the "vernacular" are positioned in relation to language ideologies of English in South Asia. The book probes into how we might move beyond the English-vernacular binary in India, explores what happened to “bhasha literatures� during the colonial and post-colonial periods, and how to position those literatures by the side of Indian English and international literature. The looks into the ways vernacular community and political rhetoric are intertwined with Anglophone (national or global) positionalities, and their role in political processes. This book will be of interest to researchers, students and scholars of literary and cultural studies, Indian Writing in English, Indian literatures, South Asian languages, and popular culture. It will also be extremely valuable for language scholars, sociolinguists, social historians and the scholars of cultural studies and those who understand the theoretical issues that concern the notion of ‘vernacularity’.

This book examines the validity of the notion of the ‘vernacular’ and the position of the so-called ‘vernaculars’ in colonial and postcolonial settings. It addresses recent formulations and debates regarding the status of regional languages of South Asia in relation to English. The authors explore the range of meanings the term has assumed and trace a history of contestation since the colonial age. They contend that though the 'vernacular' in South Asia has, since the 19th century, often operated as a hegemonic category relegating the languages thus designated to an inferior status, those languages (and other cultural formations labeled as 'vernacular') have also received empowering impulses and vested with qualities like groundedness and strength. The book highlights the need for a critical discussion of the notion of the ‘vernacular’ in the context of the ongoing rise of Anglophonia in South Asia as a whole, and post-liberalization India in particular. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary and culture studies, history, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies.

This volume studies the ways in which modernity has been conceived, practiced, and performed in Indian literatures from the 18th to 20th century. It brings together essays on writings in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and languages from Northeast India, which form a dialogical relationship with each other in this volume. The concurrence and contradictions emerging through these studies problematize the idea of modernity afresh. The book challenges the dominance of colonial modernity through socio-historical and cultural analysis of how modernity surfaces as a multifaceted phenomenon when contextualized in the multilingual ethos of India. It further tracks the complex ways in which modernism in India is tied to the harvests of modernity. It argues for the need to shift focus on the specific conditions that gave shape to multiple modernities within literatures produced from India. A versatile collection, the book incorporates engagements with not just long prose fiction but also lesser-known essays, research works, and short stories published in popular magazines. This unique work will be of interest to students and teachers of Indian writing in English, Indian literatures, and comparative literatures. It will be indispensable to scholars of South Asian studies, literary historians, linguists, and scholars of cultural studies across the globe.

This book imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category of ocean as method, it analyzes the histories of movement and traversing across connected spaces of water and land sedimented in literary texts, folklore, local histories, autobiographies, music and performance. It explores the constant flow of people, material and ideologies across the waters and how they make their presence felt in a cosmopolitan thinking of the connections of the world. Going beyond violent histories of slavery and indenture that generate global connections, it tracks the movements of sailors, boatmen, religious teachers, merchants, and adventurers. The essays in this volume summon up this miscegenated history in which land and water are ever linked. A significant rethinking of world history, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially connected history and maritime history, literature, and Global South studies.

This book explores the use of digital humanities (DH) to understand, interpret, and annotate the poetics of Indian literary and cultural texts, which circulate in digital forms - in manuscripts - and as oral or musical performance. Drawing on the linguistic, cultural, historical, social, and geographic diversity of Indian texts and contexts, it foregrounds the use of digital technologies - including minimal computing, novel digital humanities research and teaching methodologies, critical archive generation and maintenance - for explicating poetics of Indian literatures and generating scholarly digital resources which will facilitate comparative readings. With contributions from DH scholars and practitioners from across India, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more, this book will be a key intervention for scholars and researchers of literature and literary theory, DH, media studies, and South Asian Studies.

1) This book critically examines the socio-cultural imaginings of Gandhi in the present day. 2) It contains articles written by scholars like Simona Sawhney, Bhaswati Chatterjee, T Satyanath, and Haris Qadeer. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of Gandhian Studies, Cultural Studies and South Asian Studies across UK.

Ocean as Method presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and the social sciences. It explores maritime connections in social and humanistic research and puts forward an alternative to national histories and area studies. As global warming and rising sea levels ring alarm bells across the world, the chapters in the volume argue that it is time to think through oceans to realign discourses which better understand our future. The volume: * Engages with the paradigms of oceanic narratives to identify connections between continents through trade, migration, and economic processes, thinking beyond the artificial distinctions between the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans; * Discusses oceanic travel accounts by Muslim travellers to counter the idea that the colonial era was marked by European travel to Asia and Africa, without a counterflow of "native travel"; *Examines the connections between South Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia through histories of Indian indenture and the slave trade, and engages with the idea of the ocean and enforced movement; *Compares and connects recent scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities centring the ocean to break away from inherited paradigms which have shaped world history so far. As a unique transdisciplinary collaboration, this volume will be of much interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially oceanic history, historiography, critical theory, literature, geography, and Global South studies.

Ocean as Method presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and the social sciences. It explores maritime connections in social and humanistic research and puts forward an alternative to national histories and area studies. As global warming and rising sea levels ring alarm bells across the world, the chapters in the volume argue that it is time to think through oceans to realign discourses which better understand our future. The volume: * Engages with the paradigms of oceanic narratives to identify connections between continents through trade, migration, and economic processes, thinking beyond the artificial distinctions between the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans; * Discusses oceanic travel accounts by Muslim travellers to counter the idea that the colonial era was marked by European travel to Asia and Africa, without a counterflow of "native travel"; *Examines the connections between South Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia through histories of Indian indenture and the slave trade, and engages with the idea of the ocean and enforced movement; *Compares and connects recent scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities centring the ocean to break away from inherited paradigms which have shaped world history so far. As a unique transdisciplinary collaboration, this volume will be of much interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially oceanic history, historiography, critical theory, literature, geography, and Global South studies.

This book imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category of ocean as method, it analyzes the histories of movement and traversing across connected spaces of water and land sedimented in literary texts, folklore, local histories, autobiographies, music and performance. It explores the constant flow of people, material and ideologies across the waters and how they make their presence felt in a cosmopolitan thinking of the connections of the world. Going beyond violent histories of slavery and indenture that generate global connections, it tracks the movements of sailors, boatmen, religious teachers, merchants, and adventurers. The essays in this volume summon up this miscegenated history in which land and water are ever linked. A significant rethinking of world history, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially connected history and maritime history, literature, and Global South studies.

In seventh-century Arabia, Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussain, sacrificed his life and his family members and companions in the desert of Karbala, Iraq, to resist the debauched ruler Yazid. In twentieth-century India, when the communal conflict was at its peak, Premchand wrote a play about this pivotal event of Islamic history and transformed it into a nationalist narrative. This first-ever English translation of Premchand's outstanding play Karbala (1924) is an illuminating blend of historical facts and imagination. It reveals Premchand's profound understanding of the communal conflict in early twentieth-century India and his unique way of imagining the nation, in tune with Gandhian principles of communal harmony and co-existence of religions.