Papers by Prachi Deshpande
Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, 2023
This chapter critically examines Mahārāṣhṭra Sāraswat (1898), by Vinayak Lakshman (V. L.) Bhave, ... more This chapter critically examines Mahārāṣhṭra Sāraswat (1898), by Vinayak Lakshman (V. L.) Bhave, the first comprehensive history of Marathi literature. Several regional languages across the subcontinent—glossed as deshī languages or deshbhāṣhā—were located in history via literary histories or historical linguistics over the later 19th century. Such pioneering narratives were crucial for assembling the literary field within particular languages and establishing terms of debate over genre, register, and categories of analysis. They were culminations of efforts by colonial and first-generation Western-educated Indian writers to engage with language as a historical category and to narrativize centuries of textuality in orality and manuscript as it unevenly entered print and the colonial public sphere. This chapter revisits the making of Bhave’s pioneering history and narrativization of the Marathi literary corpus for literary debates and analysis over the 20th century and the making of Marathi literary modernism. It argues that Bhave’s engagement with the idea of literariness through the category Saraswat enabled an expansive, chronological archiving of Marathi literature. In addition, his framing of Marathi’s evolutionary history and the overarching themes of authenticity and rootedness, in particular, are key to understanding the endurance of these concerns in the contemporary Marathi literary and political sphere.
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2021
Kaulnāmās were ubiquitous in early modern Marathi bureaucratic documentation. They were issued as... more Kaulnāmās were ubiquitous in early modern Marathi bureaucratic documentation. They were issued as deeds of assurance offering protection and confirming various rights, especially during warfare or invasion. Such documents were issued at different levels of the administrative hierarchy in the Adilshahi and Maratha administrations to prevent flight from troubled areas, extend cultivation, and encourage commerce. They also recorded grants of waste land to cultivators on graduated rates of taxation, or to merchants for developing market towns. This paper historicizes the kaulnāmā form from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, exploring the kinds of transactions of power, sovereignty and property it was part of. Through this focus on the trajectory of particular documentary forms, it reflects on the nature of the Persianate within Marathi bureaucratic practices, and the history of the Marathi language more broadly.
The Indian Economic & Social History Review
Christian Lee Novetzke, The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern ... more Christian Lee Novetzke, The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India, New Delhi and Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2017, 402 pp.
This article examines Marathi discourses of good writing from the seventeenth and eighteenth cent... more This article examines Marathi discourses of good writing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critical scholarship on literacy has highlighted reading and writing as historically situated practices, with complex interactions with orality. South Asian historiography on early modern scribal practices has also addressed the expansion of state power, regional historical imaginations, literary cultures and the sociology of scribal caste groups. Writing proliferated in seventeenth-century Maharashtra with the establishment of the independent Maratha state, and the spread of various religious movements, and generated diverse norms about ideal literate practices. This article closely reads a collection of accountancy manuals called 'mestak', alongside literate practices idealised by the poet-saint Ramdas in the Dāsabodha. While pointing to divergences across these bureaucratic and devotional contexts, the article teases out common emphases of moral conduct and self-fashioning between them. These overlaps, it suggests, are critical to understand the religio-political horizons of Maratha scribal communities; they also help trace a longer, complex history of language practices, history and community in western India.
मराठी शुद्धलेखनावरून दीर्घ काळापासून सुरू असलेल्या वादाचा आढावा या लेखात घेतला आहे. मराठी लेखनाच्... more मराठी शुद्धलेखनावरून दीर्घ काळापासून सुरू असलेल्या वादाचा आढावा या लेखात घेतला आहे. मराठी लेखनाच्या नियमांमध्ये एकवाक्यता यावी यासाठी स्वातंत्र्यपूर्व काळापासून प्रयत्न केले जात होते. पन्नाशीच्या दशकातही ते सुरूच राहिले. महाराष्ट्र राज्यस्थापनेनंतर १९६२ साली महाराष्ट्र सरकारने अधिकृत लेखननियमांची घोषणा केली. असे असूनही शुद्धलेखनाचे नियम हा आजही मराठी सारस्वतातला एक वादग्रस्त आणि ज्वलंत विषय आहे. १९व्या शतकात मराठी भाषेचे आधुनिकीकरण होत असताना मराठीच्या लेखनामध्ये आणि व्याकरणामध्ये महत्त्वाचे बदल घडून आले. याच बदलांतर्गत शुद्धलेखनविषयक वादांना तोंड फुटले. या लेखात बदलत्या लेखनपद्धती, व्याकरणचर्चा, आणि भाषेच्या ऐतिहासिक अभ्यासाच्या संदर्भात शुद्धलेखनवादांची चिकित्सा केली आहे. स्वरचिन्हे आणि शिरोबिंदूंवरच्या वरकरणी चर्चा फक्त लेखनप्रक्रियेशी संबंधित नसून साक्षरता, ऐतिहासिक तथ्ये आणि भाषेच्या सामाजिक-राजकीय अस्तित्वाच्या खोल आणि गुंतागुंतीच्या विषयांशी निगडित आहेत, असा तर्क या निबंधात मांडायचा प्रयत्न केला आहे. हा निबंध इंग्रजीत येथे वाचता येईल: https://www.academia.edu/attachments/42269164/download_file?st=MTQ4MDA1Njk1MywxMjUuMjIuMTA1LjUxLDk1Mjc3MQ%3D%3D&s=profile
This paper examines a long-running debate over Marathi shuddhalekhan, or orthography. Efforts to ... more This paper examines a long-running debate over Marathi shuddhalekhan, or orthography. Efforts to standardise spelling conventions for Marathi words began in the colonial period and continued through the 1950s. In 1962, the new state of Maharashtra authorised a set of rules for public use. Critics of these revised rules persist, keeping the debate perennial in the public sphere. This paper locates these orthographic debates within colonial-era transformations in Marathi print culture and grammar, and examines the idea of the social and the popular within grammar discourse to examine how and why orthography became a persistent, and controversial issue within Marathi language reform. It explores how seemingly trivial questions at first glance of vowel signs and dots gradually emerge as part of larger ones about literacy, historicity, community and the public sphere. A Marathi version of this paper is available here: https://www.academia.edu/attachments/50532199/download_file?st=MTQ4MDA1NzA0NSwxMjUuMjIuMTA1LjUxLDk1Mjc3MQ%3D%3D&s=profile
An examination of a mid-19th century Marathi scribal manual - Lekhanakalpataru. In the "Akshar Pu... more An examination of a mid-19th century Marathi scribal manual - Lekhanakalpataru. In the "Akshar Pustak" section of Vangmaya Vrutta, December 2015.
A critical feature of the early modern history of Maratha power and expansion are the voluminous ... more A critical feature of the early modern history of Maratha power and expansion are the voluminous written materials produced by the Maratha bureaucracy. Sizeable collections of these administrative records, usually designated not by the language they were in-Marathi-but by the medieval cursive script they were written in-Modi-are to be found across Maharashtra, and in different state archives across the country. This overall Modi corpus itself has been critical in shaping, symbolically as well as materially, the modern Marathi historical and historiographical imagination from the nineteenth century onwards. 1 The Modi script itself, however, is no longer taught in Marathi schools in Maharashtra as a matter of course; its usage waned over the twentieth century. It is now a handy visual symbol of the bygone Maratha era, and a specialist researchers' skill; a technological key that is necessary primarily to access the empirical history of the Maratha state through these archival materials.
A study of changing Modi scribal practices and archiving in mid-19th century Bombay Presidency, a... more A study of changing Modi scribal practices and archiving in mid-19th century Bombay Presidency, and early twentieth-century Central India.
A comparative study of the ideas of language, history and culture in the novels of Bhalchandra Ne... more A comparative study of the ideas of language, history and culture in the novels of Bhalchandra Nemade and Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Review of Prashant Bagad's short story collection, "Vivade Vishade Pramade Pravase", Shabd Public... more Review of Prashant Bagad's short story collection, "Vivade Vishade Pramade Pravase", Shabd Publications, 2012.
The American Historical Review, Jan 1, 2010
गेल्या दोन दशकात ब्रिटिश वासाहतिक सत्तास्थापनेच्या माहितीसंपादन पद्धतींवर झालेल्या "वसाहतोत्तर" स... more गेल्या दोन दशकात ब्रिटिश वासाहतिक सत्तास्थापनेच्या माहितीसंपादन पद्धतींवर झालेल्या "वसाहतोत्तर" संशोधनाचा आढावा.
Economic and Political Weekly, Jan 1, 2006
The Journal of Asian Studies, Jan 1, 2008
Indian Economic & Social History Review, Jan 1, 2004
Downloaded from 8/ pointed to multiple imaginings of what and whom 'Maratha' represented over the... more Downloaded from 8/ pointed to multiple imaginings of what and whom 'Maratha' represented over the colonial period, scholarship on the postcolonial period has often tended to project the category's current avatar unproblematically into the colonial and precolonial past. The historiographical implications of the transformation of a broad, historical category to a narrow, specific caste group have attracted less attention.
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Papers by Prachi Deshpande