This book explores the value of bhasa literature through the lens of Dipesh Chakrabarty's scholarship, offering a nuanced perspective on his passionate engagement with literature at large and with Bengali literature, in particular. These essays, dedicated to Chakrabarty, in different ways extend Chakrabarty’s preoccupation with the relationship between history and literature, and with the subject of modernity in India.

The themes covered in this book are wide-ranging: from the modern reception of Sarala Das’s Mahabharata and a revisionist reading of Ismat Chugtai’s Lihaff, to studies of agrarian representations in colonial Bengal and the printing cultures of Bareilly, including the Hindi translation of Benjamin Franklin’s biography; from early account of colonial bureaucrats’ engagement with Gujarati kavya and itihasa in compiling modern histories to the study of the formation of a sonic theology in early modern Bengal; from the genesis and reception history of Vande Mataram to an account of the evolution of a modern Bengali vocabulary which enabled vernacular geographers in the nineteenth century to represent the imperial global world. This volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers in South Asian studies, history, literary theory, and postcolonial studies.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.