Alternate Realms of Authority

Chapter 5 examines two landmark Hindi short stories that contested aspects of Dwivedi’s literary agenda. In ‘Dulāīvālī’ (quilt-woman), Banga Mahila used regional and domestic women’s speech in addition to Dwivedi’s preferred standard, Khari Boli prose. Her fictional exploration of the impact of nationalist ideals on middle-class Bengali women in the Hindi-belt further challenged the patriarchal authority with which Dwivedi and other nationalists sought to shape an emergent nation. Chandradhar Sharma ‘Guleri’, in ‘Usne kahā thā’ (she had said), employed regional/ethnic speech that was also gendered, as masculine and vulgar, once again flouting Dwivedi’s preferences for an upright, Khari Boli standard. His story, featuring a Sikh soldier fighting in Europe during World War I, upheld some nationalist ideals, but also defied conventional mores. Both stories underwent extensive editorial revisions, yet there remains a record in their final published versions of their authors’ defiance, and of Dwivedi’s strategic responses to such challenges.

Prescriptive Prose

Chapter 2 examines Dwivedi’s programmatic essays, focusing on his construction of literature as a culturally embedded category of national consequence. His theorization of Hindi literature as broadly inclusive in its definition and function, though faced with some criticism from his peers, serves an immediate need: to stimulate the growth of a national body of literature. At the same time, historical and linguistic parameters and a prioritized plan of literary production reify the notion of a modern category oriented towards a narrowly constructed national collective that seeks to establish its sovereign identity via literature in only Khari Boli Hindi. Dwivedi’s prose prescribes a project of literary self-determination that privileges Indian literary activity with this variety of Hindi as the preferred lead language of the emergent nation, with all the risks that such restriction entails.

Sensationalizing Hindi

Dwivedi’s attempt to sway his public through verbal and visual rhetoric is the primary focus of Chapter 1. Resorting to scaremongering and sensationalism, Dwivedi issues a variety of warnings concerning the fate of Hindi via a series of satirical literary cartoons. His concepts for the cartoons convey a literary-visual narrative in which obstacles to Hindi loom large and, unless appropriate measures are taken, foretell its doom. Dwivedi reproaches self-serving editors, dated patrons, foolhardy critics, and pandering authors; he also identifies specific adversaries to Hindi’s advancement both within and outside his field of influence. The cartoons vividly convey Dwivedi’s vision of a disparate Hindi public riddled by threats and his preferred agenda for progress. They represent a pioneering experiment in influencing public literary sentiment via a multimedia rhetorical strategy and signal the beginning of a new era in which Hindi literature moves forward in direct collaboration with visual content.

Introduction

In this chapter, I introduce the polarizing figure of Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi (1864-1938); his literary project for an emergent nation; and Sarasvatī, the illustrated monthly journal he edited for nearly 20 years (1903–1920). A railroad man turned litterateur, Dwivedi became a leading arbiter of modernity for Hindi literature in his capacity as editor. Dwivedi engaged a variety of strategies to inspire new writing and to establish his literary authority. His strategies involved linguistic and literary initiatives, as well as cultivated interactions between literature and art. This chapter outlines some of the linguistic and literary contexts that frame my contention that literary authority in an early twentieth-century Hindi public sphere was contingent and cultivated within a realm marked by productive and restrictive tensions.

Image-Inspired Poetry and the Art of Compromise

Chapter 3 further examines Dwivedi’s visually oriented strategies to establish literary authority amidst resistance, especially from critics who publicly decried his brand of poetry as crude, and from poets who continued to publish in Braj Bhasha. Dwivedi’s response was pragmatic: he attempted to bring sophistication to Khari Boli poetry through a cultivated association with art; and he modelled poetry that adhered to a modified agenda. He authored and commissioned a series of image-poems, poetry inspired by and published alongside paintings by Ravi Varma (1848–1906) as well as other contemporary artists. Dwivedi’s limited use and sanction of Braj Bhasha’s linguistic and literary influence in these image-poems did not match his agenda in cartoons and prose. Such maneuvers defined the very substance of modern Hindi poetry in the early twentieth century and established Khari Boli as the language of modern Hindi literature.

Rise of the Modern Hindi Short Story

Chapter 4 provides an overview and history of the modern Hindi short story as it developed in Sarasvatī from 1900 to 1920, under Dwivedi’s direction. Dwivedi did not explicitly articulate his vision for short fiction; however, as editor of a journal that pioneered the modern genre in Hindi, he exerted great control over its development. Drawing inspiration from Shakespeare, Poe, and Verne to Shriharsh and Tagore, among other influences, short story writers in Hindi experimented with adventure-romance, science fiction, horror, and historical fiction but eventually settled on subject matter that was more mundane than spectacular, as per Dwivedi’s agenda for language, literature, and nation.