Book Description

The advent of print heralded a significant chapter in the history of colonial modernity in South Asia. This book narrates the story of the emergence of a new literary culture, Utkal sahitya or Odia literature, in the context of similar but conflicting linguistic-territorial cultures of Eastern India. The book is the first cross-cultural study of the emergence of a new literary culture in Eastern India with diverse, yet cognate languages in the years between 1866 and 1919. By researching a large corpus of archival material, it traces the emergence of a new literary culture that marked significant departures from traditional practices and understanding of the “literary,” and that was subsequently called, adhunik sahitya and argues that this was facilitated mainly by the formation of a public sphere in tandem with the rapid growth of educated print-public. While the phenomenon was by no means unique to Odia, the study identifies several local factors that were distinctive about its literary sphere by looking at its imbrication with sister linguistic cultures. It traces how, under political compulsions, a new intellectual class of Odias used agents of modernity such as print, education, new sciences, travel and communication etc. to forge a new aesthetic without completely breaking with the past. It examines the role that the Odia periodical press played, and traces the course it took from the time of its emergence from local political compulsions to the defining and broadening of the scope and limits of the question of the literary. It investigates the shifting and mutating dispositions of the newly emerged Odia print culture and public sphere while highlighting major concerns such as linguistic identity, historiography, literary histories, and canon formation as well as pioneering and consolidating new aesthetic forms. This book will be an important addition to the growing body of scholarship on literary cultures of multilingual India. Rich in archival work, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of literary history, cultural history, cultural studies, literature, literary history, literary and critical theory, and languages of Asia.