Copyright by Sarah Virginia Houston Green 2008

475 Pages·2008·1.51 MB·English

by  Bill Green

Copyright
by
Sarah Virginia Houston Green
2008
The Dissertation Committee for Sarah Virginia Houston Green
certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation :

The Individual in the Nation:
Locating Identity at the Transition from Didactic Nationalism to the
Lyrical in Early Twentieth-Century Hindi Poetry

Committee:

Herman van Olphen, Supervisor

Gail Minault

Patrick Olivelle

Martha Selby

Cynthia Talbot
The Individual in the Nation:
Locating Identity at the Transition from Didactic Nationalism to the
Lyrical in Early Twentieth-Century Hindi Poetry

by
Sarah Virginia Houston Green, B.A., M.A.

Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin
May 2008
Dedication

This dissertation is respectfully and lovingly dedicated to the memory
of two fathers who lived unselfishly, with simplicity and purpose:
Ira Hansford Houston and Walter D. Green.
Their examples of strength and goodness live on.
Acknowledgements
At this point, which is both the culmination of a long process and the beginning of
a new sense of productivity, I wish to thank all who have generously offered their support
and assistance in various ways, both professional and personal. I am specifcally
mentioning only those who have been closest to the research and writing processes. But I
sincerely thank all of my teachers, mentors, colleagues, fellow graduate students, former
students at Mount Holyoke and UT, family, and friends who have contributed in many
ways.
Funding for my dissertation research in India was provided through an American
Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Junior Dissertation Research Fellowship. My gratitude
towards the AIIS goes well beyond the matter of funding to include the extraordinary
network of support that the Institute extends to all its scholars working in India. I am
particularly grateful to Purnima Mehta, current Director-General of the AIIS, and
Pradeep R. Mehendiratta, who was the Institute’s Director-General during my research
period. Without their efforts on my behalf, my research year would not have been as
successful or pleasurable as it turned out to be. I am also deeply indebted to the Director,
Sudhakar Pandey, and staff of the Nāgarī Prachāriī Sabhā of Vārāasī, which was my
affiliated research organization in India and in whose library I carried out archival
research. I also sincerely thank the College of Liberal Arts and The University of Texas
for the award of a Continuing Fellowship, and the Department of Asian Studies and the
former Center for Asian Studies (now South Asia Institute) for their support with Foreign
Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships over a period of years. I am gratified that the
U.S. Department of Education offers substantial opportuntities for students to pursue
language studies through FLAS awards. The South Asia Program Coordinator at DOED,
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Cheryl Gibbs, deserves special thanks for all she has done to facilitate the work of South
Asia National Resource Centers and language study awards. Long may the U.S.
Government continue strong support for South Asia language studies!
At UT many individuals have assisted me. I particularly wish to thank my
dissertation supervisor, Professor Herman van Olphen (whose patience is as exemplary as
his expertise in Hindi) for his tireless help with translation processes and for many years
of support and mentorship. A very special debt of gratitude and friendship is owed to
Professor Martha Ann Selby, whose wisdom and scholarly insight were my North Star in
the writing process, and to the rest of my committee for their guidance, patience, and
effort on my behalf: Gail Minault, Patrick Olivelle, and Cynthia Talbot. It is impossible
to express fully my gratitude or my admiration for them as exemplars of remarkable
scholarship and inspired teaching.
Appreciation is also due to the South Asia faculty and staff of UT’s Department
of Asian Studies (DAS); in particular, I thank Jennifer Tipton, DAS Graduate
Coordinator, for her guidance. I also extend especially warm thanks to Rupert Snell,
Akbar Hyder, and Jishnu Shankar of the DAS and Hindi Urdu Flagship Program
(HUF)—all friends with whom I have worked closely—for a wide range of
ministrations. Rupert Snell has kindly given permission to use translations of several of
Mīrābāī’s verses from his book, The Hindi Classical Tradition: A Braj Bhāā Reader.
Both he and Jishnu Shankar lent their expertise in some Khari Boli translation issues.
The exceptional understanding and patience of Darlene Bosking, staff colleague and
Program Coordinator of HUF, made my final months of writing possible. I also thank
Jonathan Seefeldt, HUF Media Coordinator, for his serendipitous appearance on the
doorstep of the South Asia Institute and his dedication to the field of Hindi language
studies. Many UT faculty members have encouraged me; I am grateful to them all. But,
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in particular, I would like to thank James Brow, Janice Leoshko, and Traude Harzer.
Fellow graduate students at UT, Ian Woolford and Peter Knapczyk, assisted with aspects
of text production; the visits of Addie Woolford were always a source of delight and
relief.
Colleagues at other institutions and fellow South Asianists have been an
invaluable source of support and assistance. Sagaree Sengupta, Bates College, provided
the initial inspiration for the dissertation’s topic, for which I am deeply grateful; and I
acknowledge her kind permission to cite unpublished materials. Susanne Mrozik,
Jonathan Lipman, and Indira Peterson of Mount Holyoke College; Modhurima Das
Gupta, Lewis and Clark College; Matthew Cook, North Carolina Central University;
Janaki Patrick of the Kathak Ensemble, New York City; Rakesh Ranjan, Columbia
University: Allison Busch, Columbia University; and Alan Wells, Medical College of
Wisconsin, have all offered their encouragement and assistance.
In particular, many close friends have generously walked with me. I truly thank
all of them for their concern, good will, and stamina, but will only mention a few by
name: Sarah Cashin, Fr. Peter Rocca, Jehan Mitchell, Rita Svjagintsev, Susan Kerr, and
Elizabeth Korves. Gardner Harris and Kristen Rudisill, also graduating from UT in
2007-2008, trod the same path as fellow dissertation writers and long-time friends .
My family, both on the Houston and Green sides have watched and waited with
care. My mother, Carolyn Inez Houston, and brothers, Sam and Dan Houston, and their
families deserve special gratitude. I also deeply appreciate the encouragement of Tom,
Glenda, and Edna Green. My children, Ira Green, Renata Green, and son-in-law, Tony
Morris, have been a source of strength and joy throughout the process. But the last is
really the first: my greatest thanks and praise is reserved for William Green, safe harbor,
best friend, and unfailing source of strength.
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The Individual in the Nation:
Locating Identity at the Transition from Didactic Nationalism to the
Lyrical in Early Twentieth-Century Hindi Poetry

Publication No._____________

Sarah Virginia Houston Green, Ph.D.
The University of Texas at Austin, 2008

Supervisor: Herman van Olphen

The Chāyāvād Era of Modern Standard Hindi (Khari Boli) poetry appeared
around 1920 as a contradiction to the poetic idiom of the previous Dvivedī Era (named
for Mahāvīr Prasād Dvivedī, 1864-1938, editor of the influential journal, Sarasvatī).
Through Sarasvatī, Dvivedī oversaw the standardization of Khari Boli Hindi as a national
poetic medium. Whereas the didactic, grammatically standardized poetry of the Dvivedī
Era emphasizes social reformist and nationalist themes, the poetic idiom developed by
the four major Chāyāvād poets—Jayśakar Prasād (1889-1937), Sumitrānandan Pant
(1900-1977), Sūryakānt Tripāhī (“Nirālā,” 1899?-1961) and Mahādevī Varmā (1902-
1987)—focuses on the interior feelings of the individual and freely transgresses
grammatical rules. This shift in the popular poetic idiom raises the dissertation’s leading
question: why did the individualistic, introverted Chāyāvād idiom appear at a moment of
social consolidation and intense nationalist activity? My query is broadly contextualized
within three theoretical areas: modernity and nationalism as Chāyāvād’s primary
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discursive contexts; identity studies; and the concept of the cultural product as a semiotic
system involving complex social reverberations. The Chāyāvād idiom’s manifestation as
a cultural product constitutes the dissertation’s major area of concern. I argue that
Chāyāvād transmitted new configurations of Indian identity primarily through two
means: the reformulation of culturally significant themes and the manipulation of
grammatical rules. I identify four semiotically potent themes, the ‘transmissional
modes,’ which served as sites of identity reformulation: dharma, in the senses of
conscience and social duty; nature; the individual in relation to society; and desire with
its corollary, suffering. On the basis that grammatical forms transmit social messages, I
argue that grammatical developments relating to the Chāyāvād idiom were integral
components in the construction of new modern-nationalist Indian identity models.
Chāyāvād utilized shifts in grammar to address issues—such as power—that are closely
connected to identity. Thus the work of Chāyāvād, carried out in relation to the processes
of modernity and nationalism through the transmissional modes and grammatical shifts,
was to transform the terms of discourse that served as the basis for modern-nationalist
identities in India.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Work of Chāyāvād......................................................................1
Questioning the Transition to Chāyāvād.........................................................1
Between Modernity and Nationalism: Gandhi and Tagore..........................10
Situating Chāyāvād in Modernity.................................................................13
Nationalism as Modernity’s Central Discourse ...........................................20
Chāyāvād and Identity .................................................................................23
Chāyāvād as a Cultural Product: The Transmissional Modes .....................25
Research Issues and Methods ......................................................................30
This Dissertation in the Context of Previous Scholarship ...........................32
Layout of the Dissertation ............................................................................37
Chapter One: The Dvivedī Yug: Identity and Poetry in the Colonial Milieu........41
Poetry and National Identity.........................................................................41
Before Chāyāvād: The Place of Poetry in the Hindi Language Movement..44
The Father of Modern Standard Hindi Prose: Bhāratendu Hariścandra......54
Defining a Modern Era: Dvivedī and the Parameters of Poetry...................65
Preeminent Nationalist Poet: Maithilīśara Gupta .....................................71
Dvivedī Era Themes in Bhārat-Bhārti .........................................................77
Modernity and Identity in Sarasvatī ............................................................79
Chapter Two: Dvivedī and the Grammar of National Identity..............................84
Dvivedī and the Grammar of Identity...........................................................84
Background: Language, Hegemony, and Identity in Gramsci and Dvivedī.88
Dvivedī on National Identity........................................................................97
Dvivedī on Language, Grammar, and the Supremacy of Khari Boli .........105
Hegemonic Hindi? .....................................................................................118
Chapter Three: From Dvivedī Yug to Chāyāvād: Shifting Models of Self and Society
.....................................................................................................................124
Modernity and the European Romantic Subject in Colonized India..........124
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