- Your current position:
- Research >
- B: Public Spheres >
- B1 Satire >
- Subprojects >
- Prabhat Kumar
Print this Page. Send this Page.
Prabhat Kumar: "Satirical Traditions in Modern Hindi Literature in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century"
- "The Sublime Priest", This cartoon satirizes the double-life of the hypocritical Hindu priests. It is divided into Scene 1 (left), at the brothel, and Scene 2 (right), where the priest is sitting innocently and praying.
Focusing on literary and visual satire (cartoons), which appeared in the self-professed humorous Hindi journals as well as in various other periodicals, and the ones published separately in different literary forms/genres, this study shall locate the emergence of satire as an important literary mode in modern Hindi in the wider context of the emergence of the Hindi public sphere as a heavily contested arena in the 1860s.
- "Oh Hindus, shame on you!!!" A Hindu standing unmoved in the middle, while Hindu women are taken away by the "White Goon" (the British) and the "Black Goon" (the Muslim).
This study assumes that during this period and in the coming decades when the Hindi avant-garde staked their claim as the sole and legitimate representative of public opinion of the Indian nation, satire emerged as an important literary device in questioning cultural asymmetries, framing the ‘idiom of protest’ or ‘culture of resistance’ against the existing authorities of power - the colonial as well as the traditional indigenous elite. It became a crucial literary technique, ‘a double-edged sword’ in the hands of Hindi middle class not only for demarcating and occupying the moral, social, political grounds vis-Ã -vis existing authorities of power, but to contend with the rising political and social aspirations of the Muslims and the subalterns: lower caste people and women.
Also, Satire increasingly functioned as an important literary mode caricaturing many other genres for carving out normative ideals of citizenship, nationhood, family, etc., not by directly and positively defining them, but through indirect attack on the perceived deviation from these putative norms.
