There is great interest in recent scholarship in the study of metropolitan cultures in India as evident from the number of books that have appeared on cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Though Hyderabad has a rich archive of history scattered in many languages, very few attempts have been made to bring this scholarship together. The papers in this volume bring together this scholarship at one place. They trace the contribution of different languages and literary cultures to the multicultural mosaic that is the city of Hyderabad How it has acquired this uniqueness and how it has been sustained is the subject matter of literary cultures in Hyderabad. This work attempts to trace some aspects of the history of major languages practiced in the city. It also reviews the contribution of the various linguistic groups that have added to the development not just of varied literary cultures, but also to the evolution of an inclusive Hyderabadi culture. The present volume, it is hoped, will enthuse both younger and senior scholars and students to take a fresh look at the study of languages and literary cultures as they have evolved in India's cities and add to the growing scholarship of metropolitan cultures in India.

This book expands the scope of understanding of the vast, albeit uneven, experience of the 1947 Partition of India by including localities and life stories from and beyond the regions of Punjab and Bengal. Building on existing research on Partition, the chapters present and analyse the consequences of Partition displacement and the resilience of communities in different parts of the nation. Regions discussed include the Chitmahals, Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, Hyderabad, Andaman Islands, and Jammu and Kashmir. The contributors show that the heterogeneity of people’s experiences reside in spaces of the family, home, neighbourhoods, villages, towns and cities refugee settlements, letters, memoirs, biographies, films, fiction, oral histories, and testimonies. The book examines the Partition’s complex effects in regions, localities and contexts and its material and psychological ramifications. This book is a unique and comprehensive contribution in enabling a more complex understanding of how Partition played out and continues to do so for groups and generations across India. It will be of interest to a multidisciplinary audience, including history, literature, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, modern Asian studies, studies of South Asia, and studies of memory and trauma.

"The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures is a compilation of scholarship on Indian literature from the 19th century to the present in a range of Indian languages. On one hand, because of reasons associated with national academic structures, publishing resources, and global visibility, English writing gets privileged over all the other linguistic traditions in the scholarship on Indian literatures. On the other hand, within the scholarship on regional language literary productions (in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, etc.), the critical works and the surveys focus only on that particular language and therefore frequently suffer from a lack of comparative breadth and/or global access. Both reflect the paradigm of monolingualism within which much literary scholarship on Indian literature takes place. This handbook instead focuses on the multilingual pathways through which modern Indian literature gets constituted. It features cutting-edge literary criticism from at least seventeen languages, and on traditional literary genres as well as more recent ones like graphic novels. It shows the deep connections and collaborations across genres, languages, nations, and regions that produce a literature of diverse contact zones, generating innovations on form, aesthetics, and technique. Foregrounding themes such as modernity and modernism, gender, caste, diaspora, and political resistance, the book collects an array of perspectives on this vast topic"--

Publisher Description

During the turbulent period prior to colonial India’s partition and independence, Muslim intellectuals in Hyderabad sought to secularize and reformulate their linguistic, historical, religious, and literary traditions for the sake of a newly conceived national public. Responding to the model of secular education introduced to South Asia by the British, Indian academics launched a spirited debate about the reform of Islamic education, the importance of education in the spoken languages of the country, the shape of Urdu and its past, and the significance of the histories of Islam and India for their present. The Language of Secular Islam pursues an alternative account of the political disagreements between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, conflicts too often described as the product of primordial and unchanging attachments to religion. The author suggests that the political struggles of India in the 1930s, the very decade in which the demand for Pakistan began to be articulated, should not be understood as the product of an inadequate or incomplete secularism, but as the clashing of competing secular agendas. Her work explores negotiations over language, education, and religion at Osmania University, the first university in India to use a modern Indian language (Urdu) as its medium of instruction, and sheds light on questions of colonial displacement and national belonging. Grounded in close attention to historical evidence, The Language of Secular Islam has broad ramifications for some of the most difficult issues currently debated in the humanities and social sciences: the significance and legacies of European colonialism, the inclusions and exclusions enacted by nationalist projects, the place of minorities in the forging of nationalism, and the relationship between religion and modern politics. It will be of interest to historians of colonial India, scholars of Islam, and anyone who follows the politics of Urdu.