Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Modern North India

Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Modern North India

Dalmia, Vasudha

Paperback

Indian & South Asian History

ISBN10: 143847606X
ISBN13: 9781438476063
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Aug 1 2020
Pages: 458
Weight: 1.60
Height: 1.20 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.80
Language: English

Explains the Hindi novel's role in anticipating and creating the story of middle-class modernity and modernization in North India.

Vasudha Dalmia offers a panoramic view of the intellectual and cultural life of North India over a century, from the aftermath of the 1857 uprising to the end of the Nehruvian era. The North's historical cities, rooted in an Indo-Persianate culture, began changing more slowly than the Presidency towns founded by the British. Dalmia takes up eight canonical Hindi novels set in six of these cities-Agra, Allahabad, Banaras, Delhi, Lahore, and Lucknow-to trace a literary history of domestic and political cataclysms. Her exploration of the emerging Hindu middle classes, changing personal and professional ambitions, and new notions of married life provides a vivid sense of urban modernity. She argues that the radical social transformations associated with post-1857 urban restructuring, and the political flux resulting from social reform, Gandhian nationalism, communalism, Partition, and the Cold War shaped the realm of the intimate as much as the public sphere. Love and friendship, notions of privacy, attitudes to women's work, and relationships within households are among the book's major themes.

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