Negotiating Languages

Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17830-3
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 576 g

Reihe: South Asia Across the Disciplines

Prior to the nineteenth century, South Asian dictionaries, glossaries, and vocabularies reflected a hierarchical vision of nature and human society. By the turn of the twentieth century, the modern dictionary had democratized and politicized language. Compiled "scientifically" through "historical principles," the modern dictionary became a concrete symbol of a nation's arrival on the world stage.

Following this phenomenon from the late seventeenth century to the present, Negotiating Languages casts lexicographers as key figures in the political realignment of South Asia under British rule and in the years after independence. Their dictionaries document how a single, mutually intelligible language evolved into two competing registers—Urdu and Hindi—and became associated with contrasting religious and nationalist goals. Each chapter in this volume focuses on a key lexicographical work and its fateful political consequences. Recovering texts by overlooked and even denigrated authors, Negotiating Languages provides insight into the forces that turned intimate speech into a potent nationalist politics, intensifying the passions that partitioned the Indian subcontinent.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hakala, Walter

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsNote on TransliterationChronology1. A Plot Discovered2. 1700: Between Microhistory and Macrostructures3. 1800: Through the Veil of Poetry4. 1900: Lexicography and the Self5. 1900: Grasping at StrawsConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Walter Hakala is assistant professor of South Asian languages and literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His work has been published in the Indian Economic and Social History Review, Eighteenth Century Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Modern Asian Studies.