Literature, Language, and Nation Formation: The Story of a Modern Hindi Journal 1900--1920

"Literature, Language, and Nation Formation: The Story of a Modern Hindi Journal 1900-1920" is an inquiry into the cultural project of modernization taken up by the journal Sarasvati, a leading literary influence in the Hindi public sphere. Its project, spearheaded by Editor Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi (1864-1938), was the formation of a literary corpus that would establish the status of India as a nation and Hindi as its national language. Focusing on two genres (literary essays and the short story) and a period of twenty years (1900-1920), I argue in Part I of the dissertation that in Sarasvati, the push for literary and cultural modernity results in the equivalence of literature with knowledge. While the literary essays lay the groundwork for a conception of literature as a collectivity of knowledge for the nation, the short story, a new genre for Hindi fulfills this educational directive by distributing information about the emergent nation's individual subjects and their sometimes exemplary, sometimes flawed negotiation of modernity - especially through their encounters with changing social and physical landscapes. As the formation of literature and nation in Sarasvati is part of a dynamic process that takes 1 place vis-a-vis internal and external negotiation and contest, in Part II of this study, I examine some of the ways in which the journal---though as a whole it reflects the concerns of a dominant, nationalist ideology, also, through the medium of the short story, addresses the subjectivity of some of the nation's mainstream and marginalized constituents.