Hindi After Urdu: North Indian Modernisms and the Multiple Poetics of Fragmentation

abstract: This article examines the afterlife of Urdu in post-independence Hindi modernist poetry. Critics writing in Hindi presented modernist poetry as a culmination of a larger political project for a unitary national language. Attention to this modernism, however, reveals traces of a multilingual literary environment. By examining an encounter with the ghazal form, this article argues that accounts of South Asian modernisms must incorporate both global debates over realism and modernism, as well as the specific circumstances which writers confronted. Hindi modernism thus emerges as both a paradigmatic site of Cold War literary history and a profoundly post-monolingual literature.