Hindi Hindu Histories - Caste, Ayurveda, Travel, and Communism in Early-Twentieth-Century India

Explores how four public intellectuals in North India imagined freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their writings on caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism.
What did everyday Hinduism in India look like a hundred years ago? Were its practices more varied and less politically curtailed than now? Hindi Hindu Histories provides illuminating historical accounts of Hindu life through individual actors, autobiographical narratives, and genres in the Hindi print-public culture of early twentieth-century North India. It focuses on four fascinating figures: a successful woman doctor in the Indigenous medical regime, a globe-trotting Hindu ascetic who opposed Gandhi, an anticaste campaigner who spoke for sexual equality, and a Hindu communist who envisioned an egalitarian utopia in the world of labor. These public intellectuals harbored vernacular dreams of freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their vantage points of caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism. Opening up a vast and under-explored Hindi archive, this book presents a dynamic spectacle of a plural Hindi-Hindu universe of facets that coexisted, challenged each other, and comprised an idea of Hinduness far more inclusive than anything conceivable in the present moment.

About the author

Charu Gupta is Senior Professor of History at the University of Delhi. Her previous books include The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print and Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism.

Product details

• Authors: Gupta Charu
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 02.06.2025
• EAN: 9798855800654
• ISBN: 979-8-8558-0065-4
• No. of pages: 404
• Illustrations: 11 b&w photos, 39 figures, Zahlen, schwarz-weiss Illustrationen
• Series: SUNY series in Hindu Studies
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > General, dictionaries; RELIGION / History, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / Indic, RELIGION / Hinduism / History, History of Religion, Hinduism, Literature: history & criticism, Social and cultural history, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Asian History, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Literature: history and criticism, HISTORY / Asia / South / India