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Fiction and an Indian polyglot anthropology/Ficcao e uma Antropologia Indiana Poliglota
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....
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Published in: | Anthropological quarterly 2015-09, Vol.88 (4), p.1085 |
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Main Author: | |
Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
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Online Access: | Get full text |
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Summary: | 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. |
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ISSN: | 0003-5491 1534-1518 |