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North India had been a major participant in the Persian cosmopolis; the older parallel expansion and cultivation of literary production in Persian and various forms of the vernacular (in multiple scripts) persisted even as in the 19th century English gradually imposed itself as the new High language and as the model of literary modernity, and Hindi and Urdu codified their own historical narratives in competition with each other. Persian literature was subsequently marginalised and the old Persian-Hindi diglossia disavowed. Despite persistent low literacy, from the 1860s publishers in north India were multilingual and active in South Asia and beyond, and a heterogeneous print culture developed consisting of joint journal-and-book-publishers, theatre chapbooks and songbooks. The English colonial library also had a large lucrative market here, and early global writers like Kipling made north India part of the “significant geography” of English literature.
The MULOSIGE Readings from North India privilege the short story, translations and literary debates on world literature in Hindi, Urdu, and English journals; “readerly contacts” with English and other foreign and Indian literatures and transculturations; and on the inclusion/exclusion of orature from literary canons.
MULOSIGE also provides extensive translations of Progressive and Modernist Urdu Poetry, as well as translated Urdu Perspectives on World Literature.
Mysteries of the Indian Jungle – Emilio Salgari’s Orientalist adventures
No Italian writer has left a deeper and more lasting imprint over Italian readers of a certain exotic image of India than Emilio Salgari (1862-1922). His adventure books spanning four continents rank among the classics of adventure/children’s literature. Indeed, were popularity alone determined membership to world literature, Salgari would count as the foremost Italian writer in the world.
A Textbook Example: How English schools shape views of Hindi Literature
Shonali Jindal investigates whether a fundamental difference exists in the treatment of Hindi and English Literature in English-medium textbooks in contemporary India.
Re-cognising Constructions of Violent ‘Truths’ in Seno Gumiro Ajidarma’s “The Incident”
Christie Cheng explores the constructions and re-constructions of violent truths in Seno Gumiro Ajidarma's short stories.
Gender and Criminality in Bangla Crime Narratives: Late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries
Gender and Criminality in Bangla Crime Narratives: Late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries examines Bangla writings related to crime in the late 19th and early 20th century Bengal in terms of gender.
Re-imagining Histories through Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War (Raghu Karnad)
Are nations created by their histories? Raghu Karnad's book 'Farthest Field' problematizes British and Indian memorialisations of WWII.
Writing Rumi in Whitman’s Image: On Coleman Barks, and the Appropriation of Rumi’s Poetry
Barks looks to create a rendition of Rumi that is intelligible to him. This endeavor manifests as a form of Orientalism, however subtle: it is Barks’ project to create Rumi and Rumi's poetry in his own image.