Modernism at the Conjunctures: Marathi Multilingualisms in the 1979 Special Issue of Rucā

abstract: Despite the vaunted multiplicity of languages, cultures and backgrounds in Indian writing, there has been a persistent tendency to write unitary literary histories of these diverse works. The mapped boundaries of the linguistic states as well as monocultural notions of linguistic histories means that literary histories in turn end up invisibilizing the deep connections that crisscross the drawn lines of state and language. Taking a sample case from Marathi and Urdu literature to demonstrate the porosity of such linguistic, cultural, and geographic demarcations, this article presents a conjunctural modernism that is also an instance of "weak modernism." It shows that it is impossible to write a history of Marathi literature without accounting for its exchanges, hospitalities, and conversations with other literary and cultural worlds at the borders of the state-mandated linguistic region. In the process, it dismantles conventional notions of the parochial, the regional, and the cosmopolitan.