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Fiction and an Indian Polyglot Anthropology
- Anthropological Quarterly
- George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
- Volume 88, Number 4, Fall 2015
- pp. 1085-1099
- 10.1353/anq.2015.0052
- Article
- Additional Information
Each of the 29 officially recognized languages of India has its own script as well as oral and written traditions. In the realm of Hindi fiction, a genre called anchalik upanyasa (broadly, regional novels) has grown; it purports to narrate holistically the linguistic and cultural ethos of a region. This piece focuses on one Hindi regional novel, Adha Gaon (Half a Village), which presents the life-world of Shia Muslims in rural Uttar Pradesh in north India; the author, Rahi Masoom Raza, is himself a native of this village. Since there is no extant professional ethnography of the Shia Muslims of rural north India, I use Adha Gaon’s narrative to describe and interpret Indian Muslim ethnicity in this regional setting. My description and analysis proceed by way of contextualization and comparison, two key anthropological methods.