Posted on 08 September 2009. Tags: Classic Cinema, Common Man, Contemporary Cinema, Directorial Debut, Humanism, India Mohandas, Kunwar, Mazhar, Parcels, Radical Ideas, Satya, Sengupta, Sonali Kulkarni, Srivastava, Technological Progress
Hindi Hub Articles Mazhar kamran, the renowned cinematographer who is infamous for his radical ideas as SATYA has teamed up with Vertika Films, in his directorial debut, to present you ‘MOHANDAS- A man lost in his own nation’. It is a Kafkaesque tale of the plight of Indian people struck in between the corruption and trafficking plagued in the entire nation. MOHANDAS the movie is a warning that the essence of humanism is not crushed out by the macabre forces of technological progress- as described by eminent Hindi poet of India, Kunwar Narain. It is a classic cinema with a bold political theme all molded flawlessly in the traditional Indian style cinematography with dance, drama and songs.
MOHANDAS the movie
Beyond the glitz and shines of the metros: exists a world where you can be sure of nothing! Nakul Vaid as Mohandas beautifully portrays the real life plight of a man who is robbed away of his own identity and is thrown away. He fights back against the gruesome world for proving his actual identity in front of the entire nation. Whereas Kasturi- Sharbani Mukherji is seen standing strong behind her husband Mohandas as a pillar of support during the time of crisis. Sonali Kulkarni as Meghna Sengupta is the key to solving the mystery of identity crisis of Mohandas. Being a strong headed woman who believes in following her own instincts in pursuit of her objectives, she doggly runs behind the trail of answers to solve this nerve wrecking puzzle of life of common man in between total corruption and crime. Along with her in this mission of justice is Harshvardhan Soni- Aditya Srivastava who is the fiery committed lawyer and a fighter till the end whose heart burns for desire of justice and forces him to pursuit the truth at all cost.
Mohandas the movie- parts and parcels of the contemporary cinemaPortrayed in the backgrounds of the typical rural base of India, Mohandas the movie drags you to the actual location so that you feel yourself face to face with the common man who struggles from morning to night against simply everything to live a decent life on the basis of truth and genuineness. With a creative and ideal team comprising some of the veterans of Indian cinema who have dedicated their entire lives and carriers towards portraying the creative themes- so real, that they always make a mark in the heart of the Indian audience “Mohandas” has already made marked acclamations in the various film festivals worldwide. The movie as a whole has a very strong theme, all soaked in the lives of common man of India living in between the patches of crime, politics, hatred, cheat, rising prices and personal problems above all. It is releasing in India in 17th of April. Go watch the movie to join hands and souls against this never ending fight of all against all evils.
Hot Hindi Stuff Online:
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAn eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.
After miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences—ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating—using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. She brings both of these experiences together seamlessly in Dreaming in Hindi, a remarkably unique and thoughtful account of self-discovery.
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAt a time when her life seemed to be crumbling, Katherine Russell Rich took on a writing assignment in India, where she was seduced by the idea of learning to speak Hindi, the language she heard swirling all around her. In a rash moment, she determined she’d go live and study in the ancient city of Udaipur. That decision lead to unexpected reclamation. In this beautiful and spirited memoir, she documents her experiences, from the bizarre to the frightening to the full-out exhilarating. Seamlessly combining her courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with reporting on the science of language acquisition, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new tongue can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, about ourselves.
Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and NationThis edited volume of translations covers the major political essays of India's first feminist Hindi poet. A devout follower and advocate of Gandhi, Mahadevi Varma is a household name in India and is a major woman of letters in the modern Hindi world. The essays collected in this volume represent some of Mahadevi Varma’s most famous writings on the “woman question” in India. The collection also includes an introduction to her life, with biographical notes, an analysis of her importance in the field of Hindi letters, as well as a selection of her poems – these latter because Mahadevi Varma made her mark in the world of Hindi literature through her poetry, and a volume of translations would be incomplete without a sampling of them. The introduction to the translated volume sketches Mahadevi Varma's life and work and her significance to both the development of modern standard Hindi as well as to the nascent women's movement underway in the 1920s in India. Little scholarly attention has been given in the academy outside of India to Varma’s numerous contributions to women’s education, to the development of modern standard Hindi, and to political thought during the Independence movement in late-colonial India. This volume of translations engages themes like language and nationalism, women’s roles as artists, the politics of motherhood and marriage—themes that continue to be relevant to women’s lives in contemporary India and to movements for women’s rights outside India as well. This volume of translations of Mahadevi Varma’s feminist political essays is the first of its kind. While some of these essays, especially those from Mahadevi Varma’s Hamari Shrinkhala Ki Kariyan collection have been translated by Neera K. Sohoni and published under the title Links in the Chain (Katha, 2003), there is no sustained treatment of Varma’s political thinking in one, accessible volume. While there is ample work on Varma in Hindi, scholars of feminism (and students of Hindi who are in the nascent stages of language acquisition) have nowhere to turn for a comprehensive sampling of her work. Mahadevi Varma is also one of the most difficult writers to access even for trained scholars of Hindi language and literature. Her highly Sanskritized diction and her stylized prose sketches make her work a pleasure to read in the original but daunting to translate into English. This volume has contributions from some of the most highly regarded Hindi experts. In the editor’s introduction to the volume of translations a brief biographical sketch followed by an analysis of the political climate of Northern India has been provided so that the reader unfamiliar with India of the 1920s-1940s will have the necessary historical context to place her work. The introduction to the volume also raises the issue of why she gave up writing poetry and turned solely to writing prose when she became involved with the movements for women’s rights and national independence. Finally, the volume provides feminist cultural historians a rich archive of how Indian women like Mahadevi Varma were actively negotiating their lives as women, activists, artists, teachers, and married women. This work will be of use to scholars of Hindi language and literature in the US/European academy and should be of interest to cultural and feminist historians of modern India. This volume will introduce Mahadevi Varma’s literary scope to an English-speaking audience, and will serve as a reference for feminist historians of the nationalist period in the Indian subcontinent.
Poetry, Politics and Culture: Essays on Indian Texts and ContextsThis book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation.
The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making.
This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.
Posted in Hindi Essay
Posted on 08 September 2009. Tags: Blog Archives, Correspondents, Difficult Decision, Margery Snyder, Movers And Shakers, Museletter, Performance Venues, Poetry Articles, Poetry Channel, Poetry Lovers, Poetry News, Poetry Newsletter, Poetry Performance, Poetry Scene, Poetry Web
Hindi Hub Articles
Juliette Torrez’ Poetry Channel & Information Network lived at About.com Poetry from November 1997 through March 1999, archived on the Web site with live links. When the Poetry Channel went dead in 1999, Poetry Guides Bob Holman and Margery Snyder put together a new network of correspondents from every part of the U.S. and around the world and created its successor, the About.com Poetry Museletter.
Every week for four years, Museletter brought news of local poetry scenes from our correspondents, announcements and notes submitted by our readers, poetry articles from all over the About.com network, and highlights of new feature stories at the About.com Poetry Web site to our subscribers’ emailboxes. Our correspondents’ guides to local poetry performance venues, profiles of poets in their areas, and interviews with local movers and shakers on the poetry scene were archived at About.com Poetry with live links that made those pages the best reference for traveling poets and poetry lovers seeking readings, poets or publications in a new place. But by the end of 2003, most of our original Museletter correspondents had moved on to other writing projects, having pretty well covered the poetry-reporting possibilities in their local regions.
Too many of the links in those old newsletters have died over the course of the years since then—so many that we found it impossible to maintain the archives, and we made the difficult decision to close them. You can still keep up with what’s going on in the poetry world and at About.com Poetry by signing up for our weekly email newsletter (no longer called “Museletter”—now it’s simply called the Poetry newsletter from About.com), but the old newsletters are no longer archived on the site. If you want to browse through past postings of poetry news, we’d suggest you visit our blog archives.
Hot Hindi Stuff Online:
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAn eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.
After miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences—ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating—using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. She brings both of these experiences together seamlessly in Dreaming in Hindi, a remarkably unique and thoughtful account of self-discovery.
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAt a time when her life seemed to be crumbling, Katherine Russell Rich took on a writing assignment in India, where she was seduced by the idea of learning to speak Hindi, the language she heard swirling all around her. In a rash moment, she determined she’d go live and study in the ancient city of Udaipur. That decision lead to unexpected reclamation. In this beautiful and spirited memoir, she documents her experiences, from the bizarre to the frightening to the full-out exhilarating. Seamlessly combining her courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with reporting on the science of language acquisition, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new tongue can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, about ourselves.
Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and NationThis edited volume of translations covers the major political essays of India's first feminist Hindi poet. A devout follower and advocate of Gandhi, Mahadevi Varma is a household name in India and is a major woman of letters in the modern Hindi world. The essays collected in this volume represent some of Mahadevi Varma’s most famous writings on the “woman question” in India. The collection also includes an introduction to her life, with biographical notes, an analysis of her importance in the field of Hindi letters, as well as a selection of her poems – these latter because Mahadevi Varma made her mark in the world of Hindi literature through her poetry, and a volume of translations would be incomplete without a sampling of them. The introduction to the translated volume sketches Mahadevi Varma's life and work and her significance to both the development of modern standard Hindi as well as to the nascent women's movement underway in the 1920s in India. Little scholarly attention has been given in the academy outside of India to Varma’s numerous contributions to women’s education, to the development of modern standard Hindi, and to political thought during the Independence movement in late-colonial India. This volume of translations engages themes like language and nationalism, women’s roles as artists, the politics of motherhood and marriage—themes that continue to be relevant to women’s lives in contemporary India and to movements for women’s rights outside India as well. This volume of translations of Mahadevi Varma’s feminist political essays is the first of its kind. While some of these essays, especially those from Mahadevi Varma’s Hamari Shrinkhala Ki Kariyan collection have been translated by Neera K. Sohoni and published under the title Links in the Chain (Katha, 2003), there is no sustained treatment of Varma’s political thinking in one, accessible volume. While there is ample work on Varma in Hindi, scholars of feminism (and students of Hindi who are in the nascent stages of language acquisition) have nowhere to turn for a comprehensive sampling of her work. Mahadevi Varma is also one of the most difficult writers to access even for trained scholars of Hindi language and literature. Her highly Sanskritized diction and her stylized prose sketches make her work a pleasure to read in the original but daunting to translate into English. This volume has contributions from some of the most highly regarded Hindi experts. In the editor’s introduction to the volume of translations a brief biographical sketch followed by an analysis of the political climate of Northern India has been provided so that the reader unfamiliar with India of the 1920s-1940s will have the necessary historical context to place her work. The introduction to the volume also raises the issue of why she gave up writing poetry and turned solely to writing prose when she became involved with the movements for women’s rights and national independence. Finally, the volume provides feminist cultural historians a rich archive of how Indian women like Mahadevi Varma were actively negotiating their lives as women, activists, artists, teachers, and married women. This work will be of use to scholars of Hindi language and literature in the US/European academy and should be of interest to cultural and feminist historians of modern India. This volume will introduce Mahadevi Varma’s literary scope to an English-speaking audience, and will serve as a reference for feminist historians of the nationalist period in the Indian subcontinent.
Poetry, Politics and Culture: Essays on Indian Texts and ContextsThis book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation.
The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making.
This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.
Posted in Hindi Essay
Posted on 08 September 2009. Tags: Arabian Sea, Bank Of India, Dadra, Industrialists, Maharashtra, Mortgagee, News Websites, Saurastra, Share Market, State Houses, State News, State Of Rajasthan, Union Territories, Varuna 2, Video Section
Hindi Hub Articles
News Site for Gujarat Local News: Browse to know it all about the State
Gujarat borders Pakistan to the north west and the state of Rajasthan to the north and northeast, Madhya Pradesh to the east, Maharashtra and the Union territories of Diu, Daman, Dadra and Nagar Haveli to the south. Historically, the North was known as Anarta, the Kathiawad peninsula, “Saurastra”, and the South as “Lata”.[1] Gujarat was also known as Pratichya and Varuna.[2] The Arabian Sea makes up the state’s western coast. Its capital, Gandhinagar is a planned city and is located near Ahmedabad, the commercial center of Gujarat. Gujarat has an area of 75,686 sq mi (196,077 km²).
Gujarat is among the most industrialized states in the country. A home to some of the most influential entrepreneurs, the state houses 1,059 industries of almost every level. It is also known as the bank of India, as Gujarat houses a list of businesses dealing in finance and mortgagee services. There are many Gujarati industrialists, who are earning fame all over the globe.
Their natural urge to remain updated about their native region introduces the need of websites such as www.patrika.com ,provide local news of Major cities in Gujrat likeAhemdabad,Surat etc.
Gujarat local news sites like www.patrika.com today answers their need. These news websites offer news in Gujarati and Hindi.
They are designed in accordance to the latest requirement. Offering every tit-bits of news, some websites also boast of offering live-feed of local news Gujarat. This is done with the help of an additional feed link in the site. If you are looking for latest videos on any issue, you may browse the video section of these sites.
Such websites offer extensive information in almost every segment, including entertainment, travel, business etc. Hence, one can easily avail info of Hollywood-Bollywood as well as share market by browsing these sites. Many Gujarat Local Hindi News websites are being run by famous local news paper agencies of the place. This is an added advantage for readers, as it lets them read news of their own area in an extensive manner.
Not only Gujarat natives but also people from outside are keeping a keen eye on Gujarat local news, as the state is becoming new heaven of Industries in India.
With the advent of the Internet it has now really become possible to get the news and happening in Indian states like Gujarat etc. at the speed of thought. Regardless of your geographical location, you can access them anytime anywhere, that too the way you like it.
Patrika.com is the best place to get Hindi News and local India news. You can also directly check out Local news Gujarat by clicking www.patrika.com.
Related Articles – Hindi News, Local news Gujarat
Hot Hindi Stuff Online:
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAn eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.
After miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences—ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating—using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. She brings both of these experiences together seamlessly in Dreaming in Hindi, a remarkably unique and thoughtful account of self-discovery.
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAt a time when her life seemed to be crumbling, Katherine Russell Rich took on a writing assignment in India, where she was seduced by the idea of learning to speak Hindi, the language she heard swirling all around her. In a rash moment, she determined she’d go live and study in the ancient city of Udaipur. That decision lead to unexpected reclamation. In this beautiful and spirited memoir, she documents her experiences, from the bizarre to the frightening to the full-out exhilarating. Seamlessly combining her courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with reporting on the science of language acquisition, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new tongue can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, about ourselves.
Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and NationThis edited volume of translations covers the major political essays of India's first feminist Hindi poet. A devout follower and advocate of Gandhi, Mahadevi Varma is a household name in India and is a major woman of letters in the modern Hindi world. The essays collected in this volume represent some of Mahadevi Varma’s most famous writings on the “woman question” in India. The collection also includes an introduction to her life, with biographical notes, an analysis of her importance in the field of Hindi letters, as well as a selection of her poems – these latter because Mahadevi Varma made her mark in the world of Hindi literature through her poetry, and a volume of translations would be incomplete without a sampling of them. The introduction to the translated volume sketches Mahadevi Varma's life and work and her significance to both the development of modern standard Hindi as well as to the nascent women's movement underway in the 1920s in India. Little scholarly attention has been given in the academy outside of India to Varma’s numerous contributions to women’s education, to the development of modern standard Hindi, and to political thought during the Independence movement in late-colonial India. This volume of translations engages themes like language and nationalism, women’s roles as artists, the politics of motherhood and marriage—themes that continue to be relevant to women’s lives in contemporary India and to movements for women’s rights outside India as well. This volume of translations of Mahadevi Varma’s feminist political essays is the first of its kind. While some of these essays, especially those from Mahadevi Varma’s Hamari Shrinkhala Ki Kariyan collection have been translated by Neera K. Sohoni and published under the title Links in the Chain (Katha, 2003), there is no sustained treatment of Varma’s political thinking in one, accessible volume. While there is ample work on Varma in Hindi, scholars of feminism (and students of Hindi who are in the nascent stages of language acquisition) have nowhere to turn for a comprehensive sampling of her work. Mahadevi Varma is also one of the most difficult writers to access even for trained scholars of Hindi language and literature. Her highly Sanskritized diction and her stylized prose sketches make her work a pleasure to read in the original but daunting to translate into English. This volume has contributions from some of the most highly regarded Hindi experts. In the editor’s introduction to the volume of translations a brief biographical sketch followed by an analysis of the political climate of Northern India has been provided so that the reader unfamiliar with India of the 1920s-1940s will have the necessary historical context to place her work. The introduction to the volume also raises the issue of why she gave up writing poetry and turned solely to writing prose when she became involved with the movements for women’s rights and national independence. Finally, the volume provides feminist cultural historians a rich archive of how Indian women like Mahadevi Varma were actively negotiating their lives as women, activists, artists, teachers, and married women. This work will be of use to scholars of Hindi language and literature in the US/European academy and should be of interest to cultural and feminist historians of modern India. This volume will introduce Mahadevi Varma’s literary scope to an English-speaking audience, and will serve as a reference for feminist historians of the nationalist period in the Indian subcontinent.
Poetry, Politics and Culture: Essays on Indian Texts and ContextsThis book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation.
The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making.
This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.
Posted in Hindi Essay
Posted on 08 September 2009. Tags: Blog, Buses, Cabs, Coming To India, Conversational Hindi, Cricket Match, Hard Earned Money, Hello Everyone, India Cricket, Intrepreter, Listener, Math, People, Podcasts, Total Population
Hindi Hub Articles
Hello everyone,
I am an Indian. I am on edufire to teach Hindi and Math. I am experienced in teaching Hindi to people from all over the world. I have also done podcast for my website and blog (www.hindiclassroom.com) or (speakhindi.wordpress.com).
I would like to share views to benefits the English speakers who visit India on vacation or for a business visit. If one know even basic Hindi before coming to India, It will save a lot of your time. You don’t need an intrepreter then.
Once a listener to my podcasts wrote to me that he wants to visit India to watch some cricket match and would like to learn Hindi as then he can avoid using an intrepreter. People have been seen crazy for learning about India and learning Hindi.
It is very useful to learn conversational Hindi before you visit India. In India you will find some states where local people speak English like in Bangalore, kerela etc, but that counts to few percent of the total population. If you want to get rid of high prices paid by you for just going 1 km away in a rikshaw then take a conversational course for 10 days or a week atleast. Imagine just by leanring it you can not only save time but your hard earned money which you loose if you dont know much in english. It is also very important when you want to visit any historical places anywhere in India as one need to commute a lot via local buses, cabs, rikshaw etc. I will post some snaps in my future articles for sure. I will continue will this article tomorrow.
Hot Hindi Stuff Online:
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAn eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.
After miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences—ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating—using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. She brings both of these experiences together seamlessly in Dreaming in Hindi, a remarkably unique and thoughtful account of self-discovery.
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAt a time when her life seemed to be crumbling, Katherine Russell Rich took on a writing assignment in India, where she was seduced by the idea of learning to speak Hindi, the language she heard swirling all around her. In a rash moment, she determined she’d go live and study in the ancient city of Udaipur. That decision lead to unexpected reclamation. In this beautiful and spirited memoir, she documents her experiences, from the bizarre to the frightening to the full-out exhilarating. Seamlessly combining her courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with reporting on the science of language acquisition, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new tongue can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, about ourselves.
Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and NationThis edited volume of translations covers the major political essays of India's first feminist Hindi poet. A devout follower and advocate of Gandhi, Mahadevi Varma is a household name in India and is a major woman of letters in the modern Hindi world. The essays collected in this volume represent some of Mahadevi Varma’s most famous writings on the “woman question” in India. The collection also includes an introduction to her life, with biographical notes, an analysis of her importance in the field of Hindi letters, as well as a selection of her poems – these latter because Mahadevi Varma made her mark in the world of Hindi literature through her poetry, and a volume of translations would be incomplete without a sampling of them. The introduction to the translated volume sketches Mahadevi Varma's life and work and her significance to both the development of modern standard Hindi as well as to the nascent women's movement underway in the 1920s in India. Little scholarly attention has been given in the academy outside of India to Varma’s numerous contributions to women’s education, to the development of modern standard Hindi, and to political thought during the Independence movement in late-colonial India. This volume of translations engages themes like language and nationalism, women’s roles as artists, the politics of motherhood and marriage—themes that continue to be relevant to women’s lives in contemporary India and to movements for women’s rights outside India as well. This volume of translations of Mahadevi Varma’s feminist political essays is the first of its kind. While some of these essays, especially those from Mahadevi Varma’s Hamari Shrinkhala Ki Kariyan collection have been translated by Neera K. Sohoni and published under the title Links in the Chain (Katha, 2003), there is no sustained treatment of Varma’s political thinking in one, accessible volume. While there is ample work on Varma in Hindi, scholars of feminism (and students of Hindi who are in the nascent stages of language acquisition) have nowhere to turn for a comprehensive sampling of her work. Mahadevi Varma is also one of the most difficult writers to access even for trained scholars of Hindi language and literature. Her highly Sanskritized diction and her stylized prose sketches make her work a pleasure to read in the original but daunting to translate into English. This volume has contributions from some of the most highly regarded Hindi experts. In the editor’s introduction to the volume of translations a brief biographical sketch followed by an analysis of the political climate of Northern India has been provided so that the reader unfamiliar with India of the 1920s-1940s will have the necessary historical context to place her work. The introduction to the volume also raises the issue of why she gave up writing poetry and turned solely to writing prose when she became involved with the movements for women’s rights and national independence. Finally, the volume provides feminist cultural historians a rich archive of how Indian women like Mahadevi Varma were actively negotiating their lives as women, activists, artists, teachers, and married women. This work will be of use to scholars of Hindi language and literature in the US/European academy and should be of interest to cultural and feminist historians of modern India. This volume will introduce Mahadevi Varma’s literary scope to an English-speaking audience, and will serve as a reference for feminist historians of the nationalist period in the Indian subcontinent.
Poetry, Politics and Culture: Essays on Indian Texts and ContextsThis book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation.
The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making.
This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.
Posted in Hindi Essay
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