Hindi Hindu Histories: Caste, Ayurveda, Travel, and Communism in Early Twentieth Century India

What did everyday Hinduism in India look like a hundred years ago? Was it freer and more diverse than it is today? Were its practices more varied and less politically curtailed than now? Hindi Hindu Histories 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 - an anticaste crusader who advocated intercaste marriages and wrote on sexological matters; a pioneering woman Ayurvedic practitioner who specialised in female health and household recipes; a maverick travel writer whose work reflects early ideas of the muscular Hindu nation being forged today; and a Left journalist who sought to bridge Hinduism and communism. These public intellectuals were extremely popular in their time. They harboured vernacular dreams of freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their vantage points of caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism. Theirs are the expansive worldviews being stamped out by the narrowing channels into which Hindus are now politically shepherded. Opening up a vast and under-explored Hindi archive, and offering fresh insights into Hindu identity formation, this book shows a plural Hindi-Hindu universe of facets that coexisted, challenged each other, and comprised an idea of Hinduness far more inclusive than anything envisageable in our time. All who wish to properly comprehend the recent history of Hindu self-fashioning and propagandist creativity will want to read this book.