East of Delhi

Abstract

East of Delhi is a history of the multilingual literary culture of northern India. It takes a longue durée approach, from the beginnings of recorded vernacular literature in the late fourteenth century to its codification into separate, monolingual histories of Hindi and Urdu in the early twentieth century that syphoned off literature from folklore. It traces the languages and literary forms that circulated in and out of the region and in and across several communities of taste—courtly, devotional, and popular. In conversation with approaches of world literature, East of Delhi proposes a way of doing world literature that is attentive to texture and layers as well as circulation, to complexity and exclusions as well as canonization and reach, and to tastes and practices as well as normative ideas about literature.