Indian Modernity, Indian Modernisms

When--and what--was Indian modernism? This variant of Raymond Williams' question has been a driving force in Indian literary and art-historical discourse for over 40 years, and remains at the forefront of South Asia's critical and cultural self-examination today. My paper develops a broad historical and theoretical answer across disciplinary perspectives, offering a set of theses about the origins and formation of Indian modernity, and about the four principal modernisms that emerge from it between the late nineteenth century and the present. Vinay Dharwadker's Kabir: The Weaver's Songs (2003, 2005) won India's national translation prize in 2008, and his work for The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture (2007) received the American Culture Association's Ray and Pat Browne Award. His other publications include The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994) and Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (2001). Dharwadker is also the author of Sunday at the Lodi Gardens (poems, 1994) and Someone Else's Paradise: Poems 1972-2012 (in preparation), besides being a widely published translator of Hindi, Marathi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Sanskrit poetry. Most recently, he is the South Asia editor of the new multi-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature (2012), and the author of "Censoring the Ramayana" in PMLA (May 2012). Contact: 919-668-2603.