As a scholar of South Asian Literary Studies with focus on the North Indian language Hindi-(Urdu), as well as Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies, I am fascinated by Hindi periodicals of the early twentieth century since it is the genre of the periodical that enabled not only professional female and male writers but also an increasing number of laypeople to participate in processes of knowledge production, dissemination and contestation.
My first monograph, Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere. Periodical Literature in Colonial North India (OUP 2012), investigates how women's and girls' periodicals became a medium for elite and middle-class women to think in new idioms and express themselves collectively in a period of social transition, political emancipation and emerging nationalist-feminist thought. The book systematically traces the development of women's and girls' periodicals in the early twentieth century and discusses writings from the periodicals (literary and non-literary) authored for and mostly also by women on literature, culture, politics and society.
My second monograph, Hindi Publishing in Colonial Lucknow. Gender, Genre and Visuality in the Making of a Literary 'Canon' (OUP 2018), revolves more broadly around Hindi literary and socio-political publishing in twentieth-century colonial North India. Fundamental to the project is the Indian publisher, poet and prose-writer Dularelal Bhargava (1895-1975), proprietor of the Lucknow-based publishing house Ganga Pustak Mala (est. 1919) and Ganga Fine Art Press (est. 1927) and editor of the Hindi literary periodical Sudha (Ambrosia, 1927-1941).
A second research interest of mine has emerged from debates around transnational feminism, to which I have been contributing with case studies of Hindi women writers, editors and activists. My focus lies on the South-South encounters of these women writers as they were establishing links to women from other colonies (Burma, Fiji) and the non-Western world (Japan, China). I have published articles on these hitherto overlooked, but pronouncedly and distinctly transnational feminist network in Journal of Asian Studies, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Women's History and Gender and History. I established a network of scholars working on similar questions through case studies from Burma, India, China, India, Korea, Malaya, Singapore and Vietnam, and we participated in academic conversations at workshops and conferences.
My research collaboration with scholars from Canada, India, Germany and the United States expands vernacular literary archives, canons and genealogies, and pushes us to theorize the nature of writing in South Asia. Out of the international workshops, symposia and conference panels that we organized, an edited volume titled Literary Sentiments: Telling Gendered Lives in Vernacular Literature (Routledge 2022) emerged. Redrawing the boundaries of literary histories, the essays explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. They are accompanied by English translations from primary source materials used by the contributors.
Hindi and Urdu writings on nationalism form the subject of an anthology I edited under the title Nationalism in the Vernacular. Hindi, Urdu, and the Literature of Indian Freedom (Permanent Black 2010). This anthology comprises a selection of literary writings in Hindi and Urdu from the second half of the nineteenth century up to Indian Independence. The fictional and non-fictional writings reflect on nationalism as a cultural ideology and political movement as it was formed in literature while also informing the political. They introduce eminent and marginalized writers from the Hindi and Urdu literary scenes, amongst them women, peasants and Dalit writers. In addition to broadening the literary archive through hitherto unknown translations in prose genres and poetry, the anthology also explores how the contested relationship between the two vernaculars was being consolidated and sealed, even as these texts were being written.
Pedagogical and didactical questions surrounding second-language acquisition, especially of less-commonly-taught languages have been a research interest of mine ever since I began teaching. I make use of technology to benefit from the variety of possibilities to deliver course content and design web-enhanced teaching materials with the aim of improving students' learning experience. I have also created workbooks for use in the Hindi-Urdu language classroom. More recently, I developed the Hindi-Urdu heritage stream that is now institutionalized at York University. Teaching transcultural competence along with linguistic competence as a means of internationalizing the curriculum along the lines of the Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum framework are particular concerns of mine and I reflect upon these in my publications on the scholarship of teaching and learning.
