""Over the past couple of decades, critics and scholars have acknowledged and studied the importance of literary networks outside of North America and Europe that influenced the development of global modernism. This history, however, has been understood through specific dominant, national languages (English, French, Japanese, etc.). Thus, any discussion of Indian modernism has ignored the importance and distinctiveness of literature written in non-English Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi. The Indian writers and dramatists, whose work came to prominence in the middle of the twentieth century were fully cognizant of the movements around the world, but also fully committed to an indigenized aesthetic that drew on classical Indian tradition, realism, and myth. In Cosmo-Modernism , Aparna Dharwadker illuminates how the intensifying cultural and political ferment of anticolonial nationalism and post-independence disenchantment triggered the qualities of rupture, rebellion, and experimentthat connect Indian modernisms to transnational modernist formations. The book examines how Indian modernism developed in ways that that demystified the imagined ideal pre-colonial past; merged realism with fantasy, nightmare, and nostalgia to give modernist expression to drives that were submerged under the mundane surface of urban life; and allowed for female collaborative efforts that represented new relations between institutional patronage, authorship, gender, text, and performance, reorienting modernism while retaining its characteristic energies. Rather than viewing non-English works as derivative of modernism or representing a ""vernacular"" modernism, Dharwadker's book places the periphery at the center.""-- Provided by publisher.
Urban theater took shape in postindependence India as a large and complex field produced in more than sixteen major languages, including Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, and Kannada. The cosmopolitan engagement of leading playwrights with modernist and postcolonial literary movements around the world created distinctly new aesthetic and political approaches to Indian myth, history, and sociocultural experience, which had become the most prominent subjects in modern Indian drama. Yet even as critics and scholars of global modernism have increasingly turned their attention beyond North America and Europe, they continue to focus on dominant world languages at the expense of multilingual cultures such as Indias. Despite their originality and significance, modernist works written in Indian languages other than English remain neglected.
In Cosmo-Modernism and Theater in India, Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker develops a new framework for understanding non-Anglophone Indian modernisms by recovering crucial theoretical concepts and using them to analyze the writing, staging, and reception of major plays in multiple languages. She argues that the output of prominent mid- to late-twentieth-century playwrights such as Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad, and Habib Tanvir registers a decisive rupture from nineteenth-century forms of colonial modernity. In representing the ancient Indian past, the postcolonial urban present, and the rich repertoire of precolonial performance traditions, these authors works became highly inventive expressions of modernist classicism, realism, and traditionalism. Dharwadker shows how a decommercialized performance economy and the incessant activity of translation further enhanced modernist production, and she connects Indian modernisms to regional, national, and transnational networks. Offering bold new insights into the theory and practice of modernist drama, this book delivers a radical remapping of global modernisms.
Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker develops a new framework for understanding non-Anglophone Indian modernisms, analyzing the writing, staging, and reception of major plays in multiple languages.
