The Patronage of Literary Criticism
Bhārtendu Hariścandra’s Critical Remarks on Bhakti Poets in the Print Sphere of the 1870s–1880s
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12797/CIS.25.2023.02.04Keywords:
Hindi print sphere, bhakti, literary criticism, Bhārtendu Hariścandra, Khadgavilas PressAbstract
The present work is inspired by previous contributions to the development of the Hindi public and print spheres in the 19th century (Dalmia 1997; Orsini 2002; Stark 2007). It aims at extending and integrating previously elaborated presentations by focusing on the patronage provided by colonial institutions to the development of Hindi literary studies in the 1870s and 1880s. The study also considers the role played by Indian sampradāys in enacting the religious and intellectual processes underwriting the expansion of this field. By moving in this direction, the article mainly builds on the investigation of some biographies (jīvnī) of the North Indian devotional poets penned by Bhārtendu Hariścandra in the 1870s. Further, it explores the relationship between these biographies and the anthologies published in the mid-1870s by the Naval Kishor Press. The final section of the contribution provides an introductory analysis of the type of patronage extended to Hariścandra and his works by the Khadgavilas Press in the 1880s. The aim is to draw a comparison between the policies of some earlier private publishing enterprises and those pursued by the new, Hindu-oriented publishing enterprises.
PlumX Metrics of this article
References
Agrawal, P. 2010. The Impact of Sectarian Lobbyism on Hindi Literary Historiography: The Fascinating Story of Bhagvadachara Ramanandi. In: H. Harder. Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of Modern Indian Languages. New Delhi: Social Science Press: 209–258.
Bevilacqua, D. 2018. Modern Hindu Traditionalism in Contemporary India: The Śrī Maṭh and the Jagadguru Rāmānandācārya in the Evolution of the Rāmānandī Sampradāya. London, New York: Routledge. Kindle edition. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315209128.
Bornstein, G. 1988. Poetic Remaking: The Art of Browning, Yeats and Pound. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Busch, A. 2011. Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India. South Asia Research. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199765928.001.0001
Caturvedī, J. (ed.). 1956. Kāvyarnirṇay. Bhikhārīdās kr̥ t. Vārāṇasī: Kalyāṇ-ḍās eṇḍ bradars.
Dalmia-Lüderitz, V. 1992. Hariścandra of Banaras and the Reassessment of Vaiṣṇava Bhakti in the Late Nineteenth Century. In: R. S. Mc Gregor (ed.). Devotional Literature in South Asia: Current Research, 1985-1988. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 281–297.
Dalmia, V. 1997. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions. Bhārtendu Hariśchandra and Nineteenth-century Banaras. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Darnton, R. 2002. Book Production in British India, 1850–1900. In: Book History 5: 239–262. https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2002.0005.
Denault, L. 2020. Akbar or Aurangzeb? Ethics, Empire, and Print Publics in Colonial India. In: Itinerario 44(2): 260–286. https://doi.org/10.1017/S016511532000025X.
Dubyanskaya, T. 2017. With Bharatendu Harishchandra through the foodbazaarof Andher Nagarī. In: C. Pieruccini, P. M. Rossi (eds). A World of Nourishment. Reflections on Food in Indian Culture. Milano: Ledizioni: 259–271.
Galewicz, C. 2019. The Missionaries in the Race for Putting the Veda to Print: Rev. John Stevenson and His ‘Threefold Science’ of 1833. In: Cracow Indological Studies 21(1): 137–164. https://doi.org/10.12797/CIS.21.2019.01.06.
Galewicz, C. 2020. Kingdoms of Memory, Empire of Ink: The Veda and the Regional Print Cultures of Colonial India. Kraków: Jagellonian University Press.
Ghosh, A. 2006. Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905. New York: Oxford University.
Gray, C. 2017. ‘Holy and pleasing to God’: a Narratological Approach to Hagiography in Jerome’s Lives of Paul and Malchus. In: Ancient Narrative 14: 103–128.
Grierson, G. A. 1889. The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan. Calcutta: Asiatic Society.
Growse, F. S. 1883. The Rámáyana of Tulsidás. Allahabad: North Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press.
Gupta, C. 2016. The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print. Seattle: University of Washington Press/Permanent Black.
Gupta, C. 2018. Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India. In: Studies in History 34(2): 141–163. https://doi.org/10.1177/0257643018762939.
Gupta, K. 1967. Saroj sarvekṣan. Ilāhābād: Hindustānī akādemī.
Harder, H. 2010. Introduction. In: H. Harder. Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of Modern Indian Languages. New Delhi: Social Science Press: 1–18.
Harder, H. 2012. Towards a Concept of Colonial Satire in South Asian Literature.
Indian Satire in the Period of First Modernity. In: M. Hortsmann (ed.). Indian Satire in the Period of First Modernity. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz: 165–181.
Hare, J. P. 2011. Garland of Devotees: Nābhādas’ Bhaktamāl and Modern Hinduism, Unpublished thesis submitted at Columbia University.
Hariścandra, B. 1987. Bhārtendu Granthāvalī. Hemant Śarma (ed.). Nāī Dillī: Hindī pracārak saṃsthān.
Kempson, M. 1877. Reports on the Publications Issued and Registered in the Several Provinces of British India during the year 1875 (Selections from the Records of the Government of India, Home Department. No. CXXXVII). National Archives of India.
King, C. 1994. One Language Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Lutgendorf, P. 1991. The Life of a Text. Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520909342.
Mangraviti, F. 2019. The Construction of a Hindu Reformer: a Diachronic Study of Tulsidas’ Moral Reception in Hindi Literary Criticism and Historiography (19th to 20th Century). In: ZIS 37: 59–95.
Milanetti, G. 2002. La tradizione inventata: in qual modo una bella lingua indiana senza un nome preciso fu chiamata hindi e trasformata in power construction. In: E. Basile and M. Torri (eds). Il subcontinente indiano verso il terzo millennio. Tensioni politiche, trasformazioni sociali ed economiche, mutamento culturale. Milano: Franco Angeli: 449–499.
Milanetti, G. 2003. Oltre le campagne, fuori dai villaggi: storia morale dei tribali indiani. In: E. Basile, G. Milanetti, M. Prayer (eds). Le campagne dell’India: economia, politica e cultura nell’India rurale contemporanea. Milano: Franco Angeli: 73–122.
Numark, M. 2021. The Emergence of Resistant Judaism in Colonial Bombay: Christian Missionaries, Cochin Jews, and the Hebraization of India’s Bene Israel Jews, 1738–1905. In: K. Preisendanz and J. Buss (eds). Transposition and Transformation, Controversy and Discovery: On the Christian Encounter with the Religions of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century India. Wien: Samlung de Nobili: 49–124.
Orsini, F. 2002. The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Orsini, F. 2004. Pandits, Printers and Others. Publishing in Nineteenth-Century Benares. In: G. Abhijit and C. Swapan (eds). Print Areas. New Delhi: Permanent Black: 103–138.
Orsini, F. 2009. Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
Orsini, F. 2015. Booklets and Sants: Religious Publics and Literary History. In: South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies, 38(3): 435–449. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1051202.
Pinch, W. R. 1996. Peasants and Monks in India. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Pinch, V. 2003. Bhakti and the British Empire. In: Past & Present, 179:159–196.
Podlasiński, O. 2021. Patronage over Literature, Translation and Print: Some Remarks on 1809 Edition of the Dabestān-e mazāheb Published in Print with the Support of the East India Company. In: Cracow Indological Studies 23(2): 119–134. https://doi.org/10.12797/CIS.23.2021.02.05.
Pollock, S. 2011. Introduction. In: S. Pollock (ed.). Introduction Forms of Knowledge in Early-Modern Asia, Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet (1500–1800). Durham: Duke University Press: 19–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw6b7.5.
Saha, S. 2007a. The Movement of Bhakti along a North-West Axis: Tracing the History of the Puṣṭimārg between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. In: International Journal of Hindu Studies 11(2): 299–318. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11407-008-9050-3.
Saha, S. 2007b. The Darbār, the British, and the Runaway Mahārāja: Religion and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Western India. In: South Asia Research 27(3): 271–291. https://doi.org/10.1177/026272800702700302.
Śarmā, R. V. 1953. Bhārtendu Hariśchandra aur hindī navjāgaraṇ kī samasyāẽ. Naī dillī: Rājkamal prakāśan.
Siṃh, D. 1986. Ādhunik hindī ke vikās mẽ khaḍgavilās pres kī bhūmikā. Patna: Bihar rāṣtrbhāṣā pariṣad.
Siṃh, P. 1884 [1870]. Bhaktakalpadrum. Lakhnaū: Naval kiśor pres.
Srivastava, S. 1991. How the British Saw the Issue. In: G. Sarvepalli (ed.). Anatomy of a Confrontation, Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India. Delhi: Penguin Books India: 38–57.
Stark, U. 2007. An Empire of Books. The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India. Delhi and Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
Śukla, M. 1875, Bhāṣā kāvya saṅgrah, Lakhnaū: Naval kiśor pres.
Wakankar, M. 2002. The Moment of Criticism in Indian Nationalist Thought: Ramchandra Shukla and the Poetics of a Hindi Responsibility. In: South Atlantic Quarterly, 101: 987–1014. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-101-4-987.
Wilson, H. H. 1846. Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus, Calcutta, Bishop’s College Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
