Hindi scholar Francesca Orsini’s work over the past three decades has been so expansive that it has proved to be difficult to present a neat introduction to her work. Contributors to this essay below offer several entry points into her scholarship through a discussion of her monographs –The Hindi Public Sphere: 1920-1940. Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (2002), Hindi translation (2010); Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India(2009); East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (2023) – and several collaborative projects. All contributors to this piece have been Orsini’s students, and teach literature, literary history, comparative literature, and performance studies in India and around the world.
‘A remarkable engagement with primary sources’Aakriti Mandhwani
It is impossible for any student of literary and print history in North India to form an informed view of the field without engaging with Francesca Orsini’s defining work on the early Hindi public sphere and popular fiction. Her wide-ranging book on the Hindi public sphere is remarkable because of its sheer engagement with primary sources – periodicals being chief among them, many of them now buried in forgotten archives. Hindi periodicals in the early 20th century literally shaped the story and image of Hindi as we know it today,...
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