Professor Francesca Orsini is the Principal Investigator of the MULOSIGE project, and leader of the North India case study. She is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature, as well as Chair of the CCLPS. Her research interests range from modern and contemporary Hindi literature to the multiligual history of literature in early modern North India. Prior to this project, she ran the AHRC-funded “North Indian Literary Culture and History, 1450–1650” (2006–09) and a British Academy-funded international collaboration with SARAI/CSDS on Hinglish (2014–15).
Present Absence Book Circulation, Indian Vernaculars and World Literature in the Nineteenth Century
MULOSIGE is excited to share the work of Professor Francesca Orsini, the Principal Investigator of the MULOSIGE project. This essay is an output of the Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies project which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 670876.
Abstract : Present Absence Book Circulation, Indian Vernaculars and World Literature in the Nineteenth Century
More books from India in Indian languages circulated in Europe in the nineteenth century than now – partly thanks to the efforts of book importers like Trübner & Co. Trübner’s monthly American & Oriental Literary Record (1865–) shows pages and pages of imported Sanskrit books, but also books in Hindi, Hindustani, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati, Arabic, Persian, and so on. Trübner also imported Peruvian, Argentinian, Brazilian, Yucatanese and other books from Latin America. Yet this impressive circulation and presence of books did not translate into their recognition as world literature. Voluminous compendia like John Macy’s The Story of World Literature (1927) cover “Asian Literature” in merely thirteen pages (out of five hundred), and fail to mention any modern Indian writer apart from Rabindranath Tagore, damning him with faint praise. Why was this material presence and circulation of books in non-European languages in Britain and other parts of Europe matched by their absence as modern literary texts from the imagination of world literature? This essay examines the “technologies of recognition” (Shih) that made modern Indian literatures virtually invisible though materially present in Europe, and the conditions of visibility that occasionally allowed them to be seen.
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