Hindi Hindu Histories

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.

"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

• FiguresAbbreviationsNote on Translation and TransliterationAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Vernacular Freedoms and Life NarrativesMalleable Circuits of the VernacularHindi and Hindu: Negotiating Language, Literature, and ReligionSelf-Writing, Life Histories, and Sexual EmbodimentsUtopian Desires of FreedomTrajectory of ChaptersI: SANTRAM BA (1887–1988)1. Reading Self, Resisting Caste, Reimagining MarriageLife History and Caste: Self and Collective IdentitiesFamilial and Social Roots: Caste Discrimination, the Arya Samaj, and HindiA History of the JPTM and Anticaste ThoughtTransgressive Intimacies: Championing Intercaste Marriages2. Cast(e)ing and Translating Sex: Vernacular Sexology from the MarginsVernacular Print Cultures and Sexology in HindiTranslating Marginality into Authority: Marie Stopes and the Sanskrit Sex ClassicsA Heterosexual Ethics: Conjugal Desires, Brahmacharya, and Birth ControlII: YASHODA DEVI (1890–1942)3. Procreation and Pleasure: Women, Men, and AyurvedaPopular Health Literature, Biomedicine, and AyurvedaA Gendered Ayurvedic Authority on Domestic HealthA Moral Sexologist: Reproduction, Intercourse, and Masturbation4. Kitchen Pharmacy: Culinary Recipes and Home RemediesThe Politics of Food and Health in Colonial UPA Robust World of Cookbooks and Home RemediesFood Recipes and CookbooksRecipes for Home RemediesMenu for a Hindu Nation and the Ingredients of Gendered EmbodimentsThe Educated Housewife as "Ghar ka Vaid"Food for Freedom: The Political Economy of Home RemediesIII: SWAMI SATYADEV PARIVRAJAK (1879–1961)5. Fantasy, Fitness, Fascism: Masculine Vernacular Histories ofTravelTravel Writing: A Passion for HindiAdmiring the West: Beauty, Pleasure, and PhysicalityA Dialogue between East and West, Slavery, and Freedom"Perfect" Bodies: Masculinity and the Idolisation of Hitler6. Fashioning a Hindu Political Sanyasi: Autobiography and Sectarian FreedomAnatomy of a Hindu Ascetic: Sexual Constraint and Masculine VirilityEgoism and Eulogising SelfConceptualising an Exclusionary FreedomSegmented Freedom and Nationalism: Hindu Sangathan and MuslimsGandhi and GodseVindicating AssassinationIV: SATYABHAKT (1896–1985)7. A"Marginal" History ofVernacular CommunismHistorical Antecedents, Hindi and CommunismThe First Communist Conference and Satyabhakt's MarginalisationIdioms from Below and Communist Writings8. Hindu Communism: Apocalypse and Utopian Ram RajyaAn Eclectic Hindu WorldviewIndian Traditions and Hinduism in Dialogue with CommunismApocalyptic Predictions and Future PropheciesCommunism as a Utopian Ram RajyaGlossaryBibliographyIndex