The Hindi Postcolonial—Categories and Configurations

By tacit Anglophone collusion, all postcolonial discourse is agreed to be written in English, the language of the colonizer, and not in a language of the colonized such as Hindi. Perhaps for that reason, it has had little impact on Hindi whereas it remains an integral part of the US academy, not always in benign manifestations. A notable recent development is the autonomy from the West that Indian writing in English has won with the rise of writers like Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi in terms of local sales and popularity, and also through deploying non-diasporic local themes and words and phrases from Hindi, etc. Nevertheless, Indian writing in English and works of Hindi literature continue to inhabit widely divergent cultural universes even when addressing similar themes with only a rare borderline foray from one into the other, and it remains debatable whether either postcolonial discourse as currently constituted or Hindi literature has anything to gain from the other.