Parsi theatre was the first institutionalized attempt in colonial India to consolidate a pan-Indian theatrical public, and doing this necessitated the emergence of particular narrative, performance, and genre codes of melodrama. These productive intersections between the development of colonial national theatre, and the development of melodrama also coincided with the rise of cultural nationalism in early twentieth century colonial India. Parsi theatre therefore became the generative site for imagining, producing and circulating the ideas of a nation and national belongingness through a shared idiom of narrative and performance culture, and the shared experience of a consolidated theatrical public. This dissertation analyzes the convergence of moral reform plots, melodramatic genre, and mythological narratives in Hashra’s plays between 1910 and 1928 to show the rise of nationalist consciousness in Parsi drama, and its contribution towards cultural nationalism in early twentieth century colonial India.

The plotting strategy in Hashra’s plays, circumscribed by emergent nationalist discourse, is focussed on the narrative of individual moral reform where characters’ duty toward family take precedence over their desire for love and pleasure. Given the centrality of home and family within nationalist consciousness, the plays do not really displace, but merely subsume the task of reforming and liberating a nation; within the more urgent task of reclaiming the protagonist’s self and family. Hashra’s plays examined here belong to the Gandhian phase of nationalist mobilization, where moral reform of the flawed and fallen protagonist serves to illuminate the process by which urban middle class can participate in the project of reforming self, community, and nation. Melodrama as an aesthetic, a genre, as well as a mode emerges in these plays to heighten the emotional drama around moral regulation, and fulfill the persuasive agenda of nationalism led reform. The study shows how modern melodrama in popular Parsi theatre emerged in response to these new nationalist and reformist calibrations in colonial India.

This dissertation investigates the figure of the revolutionary in the Hindi novel by establishing its lineage in the literary tradition of the Bengali novel from the eighteen eighties to the nineteen twenties, as well

as its lineage in the historical world of the nineteen twenties in the

debate between Gandhi and the several revolutionaries who were hanged by colonial authorities. The usefulness of the Hindi novels of the nineteen thirties to the nineteen fifties is that they served as the primary site for an elaborated introspection of the aims and motivations of the revolutionaries. The novel-form yields a diversity of responses to the meaning of revolutionary action. Each of the three Hindi novelists

discussed has a singular perspective. Jainendra uses the interruption of

the apathetic middle-class household by the revolutionary to probe the

unexpected opening of political as well as sexual desire. Agyeya uses the

imminence of punitive death by the colonial authorities as an occasion for

an extended meditation on the entirety of the subjective forces that

shaped the revolutionary's brief life. Yashpal uses the revolutionary

figure to demonstrate a variety of evolving political thought in the

interwar years, especially the relation of older forms of anti-colonialism

predicated on the simple experience of injustice to the new, unabsorbed,

mutating ideas of international socialism. All three novelists extended

the bare political ideal of anti-colonial revolution into new domains of

heterosexual desire and modes of subjectivation, thus facilitating the

cross-fertilization of the novelistic form between, on the one hand,

conventional social realism and on the other hand, the many emergent and experimental modernist forms.

This dissertation "Between Text and Sect: Early Nineteenth Century Shifts in the Theology of Ram", focuses on the two primary facets of Ram devotion in North India. The cult of Ram, which is not only central to the practice of modern Hinduism but is also the lynchpin of Hindu nationalist politics, emerged as a major devotional tradition in sixteenth century North India. The Ram tradition was propelled by two primary forces - the famous devotional composition of Tulsidas, the "Ramcharitmanas" and the rapidly expanding monastic community, the Ramanandi sect. Modern scholarship on Ram devotion has either tended to treat each facet separately or has simply assumed that the text forms the theological core of the sect. My research shows that although text and sect emerged almost simultaneously in the sixteenth century, they represented distinct theologies until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when they were united under the patronage of a rising Hindu polity. My dissertation focuses on the earliest literary-theological link between the "Ramcharitmanas" and the Ramanandi sect. Through a study of early sectarian commentaries, I show how the Ramanandis shaped the contours of the Ram tradition by incorporating their distinct theology into the "Ramcharitmanas". The sectarian adoption of the devotional text, and the spurt in the production of exegetical literature among other genres, highlights the centrality of literary cultures to the formation of the Ram devotional community in early modern North India. This project thus not only makes an intervention into the history of Ram devotion, but also has wider implications for the study of the formation of modern Hindu religious traditions.

The Hindi literati of Calcutta will always boast that Bengal was the starting point of the various paths taken by Hindi prose and publishing. The admixture of colonial, orientalist, missionary, compradore, and nationalist forces gave rise to a lively Calcuttan Hindi press from the mid-nineteenth century well into the twentieth century. It remained in constant dialogue with the Hindi-speaking publics beyond Bengal, while staying grounded in the socio-economic world of Calcutta's Barabazar. However, toward the end of the twentieth century, Calcutta's Hindi legacy was by most accounts moribund; scholars lamented that the lack of institutional support and interest had desiccated Hindi literary production in Calcutta. But then, along with other upheavals and ruptures that attended the liberalization of the Indian economy beginning in 1991, a spate of Hindi novels emerged on the scene; they came from an unexpected portion of Calcutta's demographic - Marwari women. This dissertation discusses the 200 year tradition of Hindi in Calcutta, exploring the continuities from the inaugural phase to contemporary novels, and how Marwaris, who had their own language and script, and as a merchant community from Rajasthan not previously known to produce literature, had come to make the language their own and publish in it.

The first part of the dissertation (chapters 1-3) acknowledges the overlooked contribution Calcutta (Kolkata after 2001) and its diverse population made regarding the development of modern Hindi. The majority of scholarship regards Calcutta as squarely Bengali in terms of literary activity. I give special attention to the cultural and material conditions that gave rise to a confident Hindi print community. This process would play a major role in the promotion of Hindi as a national language. Print Hindi required, for its survival, the establishment of bonhomie with Marwaris and other upcountry merchants. Therefore the press called merchants to tie their fortunes to the Hindi movement for numerous reasons. It was the language of the market, the new technology of knowledge, and in time became implicated in nationalist projects to which Marwaris were summoned. The press extolled the religious virtues of switching to Nāgarī since Jain and Hindu scriptures (Prakrit and Sanskrit) were often in that script. Lastly, Marwaris could also identify with the supralocal character of Hindi, as they were themselves a diaspora with all-India ambitions.

In the first three chapters of this dissertation I explore the politico-historical and social forces that shape the Marwari community and summon its literature into existence. Part two (chapters 4-6) discusses a new wave of Hindi writing. It engages with the novels of Alka Saraogi (b. 1960), Prabha Khetan (1942-2008), and Madhu Kankaria (b. 1957), three Calcutta-based Marwari women writers. The proliferation of Hindi novels from Marwari women signals a historical and political liminality as they confront issues of identity, belonging, gender, and class in a patriarchal social and literary milieu. This spate of Hindi prose literature coincides with neoliberal economic reforms in the Indian state, compelling writers to reflect on the consequences of globalization and late-capitalism in Calcutta at the close of the twentieth century. The writing is decidedly Calcuttan and urban in themes and influences, acknowledging a shared cultural space with Bengali while presenting a sensibility of Hindi-speaking migrants. This dissertation undertakes to contextualize the significance of this writing in the broader scope of one hundred years of social reform movements, women's issues in particular, and reconciling tradition with modernity. The novels circumvent the mainstream and majoritarian narrative of Calcutta and its history, yet are nourished in the concrete environment and cultural richness of the city.

My dissertation deals with the poetry, short fiction, and critical writing of

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917-1964). In my dissertation I argue that Muktibodh's work—in

spite of or even because of its conscious affiliation to a Marxist idea of international revolution

and progress—presents a critique of postcolonial modernity rooted in the experience of the

post-Independence middle class. Through an account of the ways in which his writings were

able to bring into poetic life a range of issues—not least the imagination of an alternative

globality in the wake of Indian independence—a picture emerges of the hopes and anxieties of

an emerging lower middle class beginning to speak on a global stage. My work relies on a

methodology of close readings of Muktibodh's work with an attention to the formal qualities of

language, situated in a theoretical understanding based upon Critical and Postcolonial Theory.

In my first chapter, I discuss the life and reception of Muktibodh, who has been a central figure in Hindi literary criticism since his early death in 1964. In the first part of this chapter I examine Muktibodh's life and career, with special attention to the influence of Central India and its distinct literary culture. I then examine Muktibodh's reception, focusing on two main stages. In the first, roughly within the decade after his death, Muktibodh's works are seen as a referendum on debates over aesthetics and politics that dominated Hindi criticism in the 1950s. In the second, which takes place in the late 1970s, Muktibodh is seen as a uniquely prophetic figure, even as he is reinterpreted to fit contemporary concerns. The second chapter of my dissertation examines Muktibodh's interest in science and technology. This interest, typically overlooked in criticism of Muktibodh, brings into light Muktibodh's engagement with the discourse of science and technology in the context of the Cold War. In this chapter, through the examination of his poetry and fiction, I show how Muktibodh used the language and thematics of science and technology to raise questions about India's new relationship to the international.

The third and fourth chapters of this dissertation analyze in detail the formal evolution of Muktibodh's poetry towards the "Long Poem" for

which he is most known. By tracing the sources of the Long Poem both to the influence of the Chāyāvād [Romantic] poet Jayshankar Prasad, as well as the influence of modernist Marathi poetry on the bilingual Muktibodh, I show how Muktibodh's long poem emerges as a unique form in Hindi modernism, one rooted in the literary culture of Central India in which he worked. This chapter therefore demonstrates the complex networks through which Hindi poetry developed. In my fourth chapter, I compare ``Aṁdhere meṁ,'' which is Muktibodh's most well-known long poem, with the more obscure ``Bhaviṣyadhārā.'' This chapter shows how ``Aṁdhere meṁ,'' even as it depicts a nightmarish version of contemporary reality, takes as its subject the role of the autonomous imagination in engaging with the world. These chapters, in analyzing Muktibodh's long poem, point towards the possibilities of a formal analysis of modernist Hindi poetry, and its importance for understanding larger trends in intellectual, cultural, and literary history.

The final two chapters take up Muktibodh's views towards realism and genre, issues that are present in the discussion of the long poem, but emphasized here in an investigation of his short fiction and criticism. In the fifth

chapter, I use an analysis of several of Muktibodh's short stories in order to examine his ideas about genre, and the problem of a post-Independence reality in which social relations seemed to resist a straightforward, realist depiction. Rather than view Muktibodh's short fiction as unfinished or stagnant, I examine the moments in these stories in which fables, frame stories, and metanarrative devices interrogate ideas of realism. The final sixth chapter of my dissertation analyzes Muktibodh's criticism, showing how he used a critique of Realism to develop an aesthetics centered on the critical imagination. Through an examination of Muktibodh's criticism across his career, I show how a contradiction between narrative and the poetic image eventually develops into an critique of realism, based on readings in Marxist and romantic aesthetic theory.

My research not only contributes to an emerging scholarship of post-Independence Hindi, but also develops an understanding of the contribution of Hindi and other South Asian languages to postcolonial literature. I argue that taking account of Muktibodh's writings is crucial

towards forming a model of World Literature that accounts for the experience of India following independence, and the unique perspectives on the international developed by South Asian literatures. My dissertation therefore acts as a corrective to studies of global modernism that privilege literatures written in European languages and view non-European literatures as

fundamentally local in scope. In addition, by analyzing the unique way in which Muktibodh combined Marxism with a global Hindi internationalism, my dissertation reveals new ways of understanding the literary and intellectual history of the Cold War. Research that situates writers such as Muktibodh in an international context can thus help to illuminate networks of alternative, postcolonial modernisms in the twentieth century.

In the wake of Indian Independence, the short story emerged as the most active genre in both Hindi and Tamil literature, establishing new representations of selfhood and citizenship that would shape popular expression across India for decades to come. This genre thus provides an important window into the cultural production of enduring paradigms of Indian modernity and citizenship in the context of national efforts to create an all-Indian identity after decolonization. My dissertation is motivated by an interest in explaining how post-Independence Hindi and Tamil short stories mobilized and constructed representations of the "Indian citizen," locating them within a regionally specific cultural context, as well as the broader imaginings of a modern India. I ask: what was literature's role in establishing universal understandings of the Indian citizen in the postcolonial moment?

I address this question through an analysis of tropes of the feminine ideal in the state, public, and literary spheres in North and South India to illustrate the relationship between these tropes and popular understandings of the Indian citizen-subject. Focusing on the short stories and critical writing by six canonical post-Independence Hindi and Tamil authors, I juxtapose the tropes of the feminine ideal they invoke with those generated by state discourses on law and the public debates surrounding them. Through this juxtaposition, I show that the same tropes - such as the widow, the virgin, the concubine, and the good wife - carry saliency in all three spheres (state, public, and literary). In this way, tropes of the feminine ideal provide the platform for a cohesive articulation of modern Indian citizenship across these discursive arenas. Despite their similarity in form, however, the manner in which Hindi and Tamil short stories supply these tropes with meaning reveals fundamentally distinct regional articulations between gender, caste, and religious structures, as well as divergent points of alignment and conflict with pan-Indian struggles for equality. This comparison reveals the heterogeneous perceptions of gendered subjectivity comprising postcolonial Indian citizenship, as well as the instability of the category of "Indian Literature."