Hindi Publishing in Colonial Lucknow centers on the literary activities emerging out of the publishing house Ganga Pustak Mala in colonial Lucknow in the first half of the twentieth century. Closely associated with Ganga Pustak Mala was the Hindi monthly Sudha (lit. nectar, ambrosia), a literary, social, political and illustrated periodical, in which Hindi writings in prose and poetry, including Hindi literary criticism, and other activities concerning the Hindi public sphere, such as language politics, social reforms, matters concerning lifestyle, health, arts and sciences, and the political emancipation of women and men were promoted and developed.

Building on the defining work of Gérard Genette on paratexts as well as on scholarship on text-image relationships, this book charts the literary networks established by the publishing house's proprietor and chief editor of Sudha, Dularelal Bhargava, who played a pivotal role in the emergence of Hindi literary production out of Lucknow and in the commercialization and nationalization of Hindi literature in the north Indian Hindi public sphere.

Shobna Nijhawan's profile page

Shobna Nijhawan completed her MA in classical and modern Indology at the South Asia Institut of Ruprecht-Karls Universität (Heidelberg, Germany) and her PhD in South and Southeast Asian Studies with designated emphasis on women, gender, and sexuality at the University of California (Berkeley, USA). She is associate professor of Hindi at York University (Toronto, Canada). She is the author of Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere: Periodical Literature in Colonial North India (OUP, 2012) and editor of Nationalism in the Vernacular: Hindi, Urdu, and the Literature of Indian Freedom (2010). Her research centers on Hindi periodical literature for women, men, and children published in the first half of the twentieth century.

Nijhawan has also published in the fields of transnational feminism, feminist movements, and South-South encounters in late colonial India as well as second-language acquisition and heritage-language and culture learning of Hindi-Urdu.