The prehistory of the popular: Caste and canonicity in Indian modernity

The growth of a nationalist consciousness in the literature of the late colonial period in India dates back to the 1880s, when both native and European Orientalists began to suggest the idea that the uniqueness of a "nation" was a function of the living cultural forms of the subaltern peoples on its margins. They sought to classify the historical and cultural diversity of a popular mass that, in its turn, continued to resist the supposed affinity between culture and nation. Drawing on criticism written in Hindi and Marathi, this dissertation uses the idea of the "vernacular" as a critical frame to examine Indian nationalist discourse for its attempts to represent this marginal sector of Indian society.; The texts analyzed operate within this unprecedented interface of Indian nationalist and regional idioms in the colonial scene. The dissertation explores the oblique techniques by which these texts register and rework their relation to the ideological framework of Orientalism, one within which the specific histories of local communities are reductively rewritten to serve the interests of a nationalism increasingly threatened by its resurgent Muslim and low-caste minorities. In this process, these texts come to inaugurate a deeply flawed, yet powerful understanding of the centrality of the very "vernacular" traditions they sometimes help push to the cultural periphery of the nation. These readings show how the literature of the colonial period responds ambivalently to this specific historical conjuncture, but also how, in each case, such critical texts evince despite their elitism a vision of the social that resonates with and finds its own critical reformulation in contemporary political struggles in untouchable communities.