An Idiom for India: Hindustani and the Limits of the Language Concept

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers, consequently, understand each other most of the time, but not all of the time, though they can never read each other’s texts. Their shared space, Hindustani, finds no official recognition in India or in Pakistan, but it denotes, particularly in the early twentieth century, an aspiration for Hindu–Muslim unity: the dream of a shared, syncretic culture, crafted from the speech genres of everyday life. Beginning with the colonial project of Hindustani, the essay focuses on a discussion of the works of early twentieth-century writers like Nehru, Premchand and Sa’adat Hasan Manto. I argue that the aesthetic project of Hindustani attempted to produce, not a common language, but a common idiom: a set of shared conventions, phrases and forms of address, which would be legible to Indians from all religions and all regions. By theorizing Hindustani as an idiom, and not a language, I explain its persistence in Bollywood cinema well after its abandonment in all literary and official registers. Bollywood, I argue, is Hindustani cinema, not only because of its use of a mixed Hindi–Urdu language in its dialogues, but also because of its development of a set of clearly recognizable, easily repeatable conventions that can surmount linguistic differences

Proučavanje raspodjele mnogostrukosti u cijelom faznom prostoru pri relativističkim nuklearnim sudarima

A comparative study has been made among three distributions - the negative binomial distribution (NBD), the generalised multiplicity distribution (GMD) and the distribution followed by the two mechanism model (TMM), in order to describe the multiplicity distribution of charged secondary particles produced in 200 200 A GeV 32S – AgBr interaction.Načinili smo usporedbu triju raspodjela: negativne binomijalne raspodjele, poopćene raspodjele mnogostrukosti i raspodjele prema modelu dvaju mehanizama, radi opisa raspodjela mnogostrukosti nabijenih čestica koje su bile proizvedene u sudarima iona 32S energije 200 A GeV u AgBr emulziji

Study of multiplicity distribution in full phase space in ultrarelativistic nuclear collision

This paper was published in Fizika B 6 (1997) page 37 with a typing error in the byline. The name of the fourth author was misspelled. Above is the corrected byline

Proučavanje raspodjele mnogostrukosti u cijelom faznom prostoru pri relativističkim nuklearnim sudarima

A comparative study has been made among three distributions - the negative binomial distribution (NBD), the generalised multiplicity distribution (GMD) and the distribution followed by the two mechanism model (TMM), in order to describe the multiplicity distribution of charged secondary particles produced in 200 200 A GeV 32S – AgBr interaction.Načinili smo usporedbu triju raspodjela: negativne binomijalne raspodjele, poopćene raspodjele mnogostrukosti i raspodjele prema modelu dvaju mehanizama, radi opisa raspodjela mnogostrukosti nabijenih čestica koje su bile proizvedene u sudarima iona 32S energije 200 A GeV u AgBr emulziji

Study of multiplicity distribution in full phase space in ultrarelativistic nuclear collision

This paper was published in Fizika B 6 (1997) page 37 with a typing error in the byline. The name of the fourth author was misspelled. Above is the corrected byline

Gandhian fictions : rereading 'Satyagraha in South Africa'

From 1923–24, Mahatma Gandhi wrote his recollections of South Africa from a prison cell in India. This text, Satyagraha in South Africa, was intended to be ‘helpful in our present struggle’ to liberate India, as well as ‘a guide to any regular historian who may arise in the future.’ An emphatically transnational text, Satyagraha in South Africa relies upon the mode of allegory to place South Africa and India in relation to each other. As it encourages comparison, however, it discourages common cause. Gandhi places Africans as the anterior sign in a larger system of signification: South African politics prefigures Indian anti-colonial victory to come, but the African native also represents the innocent natives of India writ large. Without the political didactics of Hind Swaraj, the journalistic interventions of Indian Opinion or even the philosophical aspirations of My Experiments with Truth, this fictionalised history has rarely been the centre of attention. Satyagraha in South Africa, however, reveals Gandhi’s understanding of imperial geography, as he places South Africa and India in a single frame but fails to imagine them as inhabiting the same historical present. This understanding is reflected in his political decisions, as he fails to connect Indian anti-colonial agitation with struggles elsewhere

Imperfect Solidarities

A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism—in India, South Africa, and Black America—used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W