Manu V Devadevan – författare

Devanura Mahadeva’s is a powerful and influential voice in contemporary South Asian and Dalit literature. His compact oeuvre has been widely commented upon in Kannada and, occasionally, in English as well. They have changed existing views among Kannada readers on literature’s relationship with situated practices of caste, gender and politics, and humankind’s larger quest for freedom. Much of this remains unknown beyond the Kannada-speaking region. This book is a sustained engagement with Mahadeva’s work that seeks to fill this lacuna. It includes translations of select samples of Mahadeva’s fiction and nonfiction writings and some of the major responses to these works from Kannada. In addition, there are essays by leading scholars of Kannada literature and language that explore the place that Mahadeva enjoys as a public intellectual in the region, aspects of language, caste and gender in his writings, and the challenges of translating his works which borrow deeply from oral linguistic and mythopoeic conventions. Together, they place in relief Mahadeva’s life and works in a manner that underlines his significance not only for Kannada or South Asian literature and the Dalit movement, but also for the larger history of progressive movements across South Asia. Part of the Writer in Context series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Kannada literature, Dalit Literature, English literature, postcolonial studies, global south studies and translation studies.

India is generally regarded as a civilization with a set of intrinsic attributes that emerged in the age of the Vedas or, better still, in the Harappan times. In recent decades, historical studies have moved away from rigid perspectives of singularity in origin and expansion; the emphasis now is on pluralities and long-term processes spanning centuries and millennia. There is also an influential school of thought which rejects antiquity claims such as these and holds that India is a construct of the colonial and nationalist imagination. In his radical reinterpretation of India's past, Manu V. Devadevan moves away from these reifying assessments to examine the evolution of institutions, ideas and identities that are characterized, typically, as Indian. In lieu of endorsing their Indianness, he traces their emergence to specific conditions that developed in India between 600 and 1200 CE, a period which historians now call the 'early medieval'.

India is generally regarded as a civilization with a set of intrinsic attributes that emerged in the age of the Vedas or, better still, in the Harappan times. In recent decades, historical studies have moved away from rigid perspectives of singularity in origin and expansion; the emphasis now is on pluralities and long-term processes spanning centuries and millennia. There is also an influential school of thought which rejects antiquity claims such as these and holds that India is a construct of the colonial and nationalist imagination. In his radical reinterpretation of India's past, Manu V. Devadevan moves away from these reifying assessments to examine the evolution of institutions, ideas and identities that are characterized, typically, as Indian. In lieu of endorsing their Indianness, he traces their emergence to specific conditions that developed in India between 600 and 1200 CE, a period which historians now call the 'early medieval'.

This book is a pioneering attempt to understand the prehistory of Hinduism in South Asia. Exploring religious processes in the Deccan region between the eleventh and the nineteenth century with class relations as its point of focus, it throws new light on the making of religious communities, monastic institutions, legends, lineages, and the ethics that governed them. In the light of this prehistory, a compelling framework is suggested for a revision of existing perspectives on the making of Hinduism in the nineteenth and the twentieth century.