Description: Explores how four public intellectuals in North India imagined freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their writings on caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism.
Brief description: Charu Gupta is Senior Professor of History at the University of Delhi. Her previous books include The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print and Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism.
Review Quotes:
"This is a timely book. Over two decades, the historian Charu Gupta has produced defining works on caste, gender and sexuality in colonial India ... Hindi Hindu Histories brings to life a dynamic social world and its deep ambiguities. They signal plural modes of Hindu being and belonging, even as their eclecticism hark at a distinctly conservative cosmopolitan. Gupta shows why we need to understand this world." -- The India Forum
"Hindi Hindu Histories by Charu Gupta is a rich, imaginative, and important contribution to our understanding of Hindi public life in colonial India. Drawing on social history, literary studies, gender debates, and political thought, Gupta makes a compelling case for rethinking how everyday Hindi print culture shaped ideas of society, freedom, and identity in the early 20th century." -- Deccan Herald
"This book attempts 'to write histories of the social through the narratives of the self'. No doubt there is something new, something different in this attempt. Here, the self and the society merge, and the narration is so lucid that the actors appear alive and kicking." -- Studies in People's History
"...[a] textured and masterful historical work..." -- Biblio
"This remarkable monograph beautifully crafts four micro studies of unusual and forgotten figures to recover several new horizons in late colonial north Indian history. These intimate portraits are framed within the larger domains of Hindi print culture and literary history, gender, sexuality, communism, Hindu supremacism, and the contested meanings of diverse visions of freedom--all expressed in a compelling vernacular idiom, all veering away from conventional expectations and trajectories. Charu Gupta takes us deep into the uncharted politico-cultural terrains of lived preoccupations and strife. Rather than slot her characters into fixed categories, she uncovers the fluidity, the porosity, the overlaps, and the surprises that their experiences and works express. This is a brilliant and complex book by a historian who has earlier brought together the politics of caste, gender, communalism, and literature in the Hindi-speaking world." -- Tanika Sarkar, author of Religion and Women in India