UC Santa Cruz

Against the background of immense socio-political upheaval in the wake of Indian independence in 1947 and the Partition of India and Pakistan, mid-twentieth century Hindi literature grappled with two main problems: Hindi’s supposed supremacy over other languages and its centrality to the nation on the one hand, and the generation of a literary form that was commensurate to the instability of a new nation on the other. In the same moment, nationalist and official discourses were structured by a belief in a fully formed nation and its heteronormative, patriarchal, and patriotic citizen-subjects, which were to be framed in Hindi. Thus, discourses around the Hindi language postulated the shaping of such a citizen-subject through Hindi, which would in turn evolve into a modern language through its ability to articulate the modern nation.This dissertation argues that while Hindi modernist fiction held an evasive attitude towards nation building, its emergence in a historical moment that was informed by the Partition, developmentalism, and language debates meant that the history that these texts refrained from directly engaging came to reside in their experiments with form. In the post-independence moment, language channeled the violence of nation-making, language conflict, and caste and gender oppression into narrative. I study Krishna Sobti’s (1925-2019), Nirmal Verma’s (1929-2005), and Krishna Baldev Vaid’s (1927-2020) use of a modernist Hindi to explore the instabilities and incoherencies in the nation form at the level of literary and narrative form. Sobti’s preoccupation with female desire, Verma’s attention to the silences within language, and Vaid’s existentialist despair reveal the difficulty of evading the nation when using a language that was often central to imaginaries of the nation. The inhering of nation-as-history in narrative form, I argue, is a consequence not only of the historical moment in which these texts were written, but also of the language in which they were conceived, which remains deeply entangled with the nation.Examining the opening of subjectivities, narrative trajectories, and relationalities to the queer and non-normative, I argue that in the context of attempts to nationalize Hindi in the pre- and post-independence periods in India, the use of modernist form invests Hindi with possibilities, drives, and vocabularies that its nationalized form must repress. The intense preoccupation with gender, language, and narrative form found in Hindi modernist fiction is seen as transmuting the violence of nation making and the despair of postcolonial nationhood into experiments with form and style that lead to a change in the texture of the nationalized language.Chapter 1 looks at Krishna Sobti’s constitution of a feminist Hindi in her novellas Mitro Marjani and Surajmukhi Andhere ke. Reading these novellas in relation to the female body’s instrumentalization as a site for the inscription of national and communal identity during the Partition, I argue that Sobti’s Hindi ruptures the connections between the female body, an official language, and a dominant nationhood that are situated within normative Hindi. Chapter 2 reads Nirmal Verma’s novella Ve Din (Those Days, 1968) and travelogue Cheedon par Chandni (Moonlight on Pine Trees, 1964), both of which were written during his travels in Europe. I argue that Verma’s ‘creative oeuvre’—here Ve Din and Cheedon par Chandni—sublimates the grand narrative of history into a modernist aesthetic that illuminates intimate experiences. Further, by using Hindi as a language of travel and translation in these texts, Verma creates a new idiom that is infused with an ahistorical cosmopolitanism. In Chapter 3, I analyze Krishna Baldev Vaid’s existentialist novel Bimal urf Jaayein to Jaayein Kahan as a Brechtian experiment that registers histories of the nation, masculinity, and literature at the level of form to generate a language that coagulates as it fails to move forward, even as it simultaneously injects non-reproductive pleasure into the text through the use of pornographic obscenity. Hindi thus becomes a language that is placed in the hands of a failed masculine author and that fails to write the nation as well as the masculine protagonist.Modernist experimentation, with its incumbent defamiliarization of language, draws our attention keenly to the traumas and violences already embedded in a language that can never be ‘whole’ in the ways that it is assumed to be in its standard, nationalized register. The work of mid-twentieth century modernist writers replaces Hindi as the language of Hinduism, conservatism, and nationalism with Hindi as the language of feminine autonomy, translation, empathy, cosmopolitanism, hesitancy, and pleasure. It is through the complex literary textures that these writers introduce into the “national language” that their texts begin to conjure alternative imaginaries of the nation.