Hindi Hindu Histories

<p><b>Explores how four public intellectuals in North India imagined freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their writings on caste Ayurveda travel and communism.</b></p><p>What did everyday Hinduism in India look like a hundred years ago? Were its practices more varied and less politically curtailed than now? <i>Hindi Hindu Histories</i> provides illuminating historical accounts of Hindu life through individual actors autobiographical narratives and genres in the Hindi print-public culture of early twentieth-century North India. It focuses on four fascinating figures: a successful woman doctor in the Indigenous medical regime a globe-trotting Hindu ascetic who opposed Gandhi an anticaste campaigner who spoke for sexual equality and a Hindu communist who envisioned an egalitarian utopia in the world of labor. These public intellectuals harbored vernacular dreams of freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their vantage points of caste Ayurveda travel and communism. Opening up a vast and under-explored Hindi archive this book presents a dynamic spectacle of a plural Hindi-Hindu universe of facets that coexisted challenged each other and comprised an idea of Hinduness far more inclusive than anything conceivable in the present moment.</p>