Books by Preetha Mani
MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies; ACLA Rene Wellek Prize Honorable Men... more MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies; ACLA Rene Wellek Prize Honorable Mention for Best Overall Book in Comparative Literature; MSA First Book Prize Shortlist; AIIS Prize in Humanities for First Book Shortlist
Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon could be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English.
Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani —imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.
Essays by Preetha Mani
Modernism/modernity, 2026
This article demonstrates how the colonial-era depreciation of poetry and the linguistic national... more This article demonstrates how the colonial-era depreciation of poetry and the linguistic nationalism it launched made poetry unavailable as a medium for making Tamil literature modern during the interwar period. Temporarily, this genre could not advance Tamil modernism. Tamil writers’ elevation of prose opened a space for reconsidering poetry, while debates about music and language supplied the terminology for this reconsideration—leading to the recasting of poetry as suitable for postcolonial expression. A modernist poetics of sound emerged from the intersection of prose discourses about individual alienation with music debates’ framing of alienation as the separation of Tamil speakers from their language.
Keywords: Linguistic alienation, multilingualism, diglossia, genre, tradition
Modernism/modernity, 2026
Since the modernist abstraction of language does not have a mimetic relation to the circumstances... more Since the modernist abstraction of language does not have a mimetic relation to the circumstances from which it arises, we cannot look entirely to modernist language to consider language’s role in modernism’s formation. But if, as in the South Asian case, language remains unreliable, then focusing on the specificities of language is also insufficient for understanding this relation. The articles in this special issue propose inroads for sidestepping this universalism–particularism polarity by shuttling between languages and literary forms. South Asian modernist aesthetics dismantles the impulses of both area studies and global modernisms through modes of encounter that lies outside civilizational difference.
Keywords:
Scale, translation, global modernism, vernacular, area studies
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, 2023
This chapter explores a tension in postcolonial Indian literature between the monolingual form of... more This chapter explores a tension in postcolonial Indian literature between the monolingual form of the nation and the multilingual tendencies of the linguistic regions through a comparison between the Sahitya Akademi’s (India’s national academy of letters) activities and Tamil putukkavitai (new poetry) writing. By promoting translation and constructing a Sanskritic literary past, the Akademi used literature to manage multilingualism and make it compatible with the monolingualism intrinsic to the nation. Putukkavitai writing, by contrast, epitomizes the challenge of linguistic regionalism to national integration, offering a view of Indian multilingualism in less hierarchical terms than those expressed in Akademi discourses. To understand Tamil literature as Indian literature, the chapter proposes, requires taking the monolingual dimensions of the region into greater account. Tracing Tamil new poets’ engagement with new poetry in other Indian languages in the magazine Eḻuttu, the chapter argues that Indian multilingualism is built on shared experiences of linguistic alienation.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2020
The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationshi... more The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke the wider debates about tradition and modernity that these female types commonly represented without affirming the social reformist positions to which they were linked. Through the short story, Pudumaippittan dislodged his portrayals of the Indian woman from existing gender norms, sealing the shift from social realism to modernist realism within the Tamil literary sphere.
Comparative Literature, 2019
This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which w... more This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows how the Movement inaugurated a modernist realism characterized by attention to genre, rhetoric, and style on one hand, and commitment to social reality on the other. Combining rhetorical strategies—such as shifting narrative voice, allegorical descriptions of landscape, and implicit reference to authorship and the condition of postcolonial literary production—with structural and thematic tensions between form and content, this mode developed an interchangeability between author, reader, and character, which did not previously exist in Hindi literature and which reconfigured the category of the middle class in the universally recognizable terms of alienation. Using the case of the nayī kahānī, the essay offers a new literary historical approach that moves beyond sweeping accounts of a single postcolonial mode to attend to regional realisms and modernisms.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2016
This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamine... more This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bhandari's and Chudamani's writing provides insight into literary discourses of gender equality circulating in the immediate postindependence moment. In particular, she argues that these women writers broadened the scope of feminist thought and literary expression existing at the time through their rhetorical use of a language of entitlement that universalizes feminine desire in humanist terms. They did so through the portrayal of female characters who express the desire to possess sexual freedom, economic independence, and human equality on the same terms as the male characters. Feminist scholarship has characterized the 1950s and 1960s as a moment of paucity in women's writing and decline in feminist politics. Yet Bhandari's and Chudamani's distinct uses of a language of entitlement offer a deeper understanding of the role of the literary in shaping feminist thought. Their work thus provides alternative genealogies of the categories of feminism and women's writing in India.
Translations by Preetha Mani
The Playwright and the Stage, 2019
Book Reviews by Preetha Mani
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2025
A book of translations should aim for transparency and comparability. It would thus be very nice ... more A book of translations should aim for transparency and comparability. It would thus be very nice if the next edition of this book could contain bibliographical references to the Bangla originals, not just for Bengali readers, but also for the growing number of learners of Bangla who would benefit greatly from having the translations and the originals side by side.
Theses by Preetha Mani
2012. Gender, Genre, and the Idea of Indian Literature: The Hindi and Tamil Short Story, 1950-1970. PhD Dissertation, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
2004. Everyday Aesthetics: Translating the Tamil Short Story. M.A. Thesis, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
Fiction by Preetha Mani
Our Blessed Mother
Outbreath, 2000
Three of Us
Outbreath, 1999
John Gregory
Outbreath, 1999
Thin White Line
Queen's Head & Artichoke, 1999
Papers by Preetha Mani
UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Apr 1, 2010
National integration, a primary goal of the 1950s in India in both the cultural and state spheres... more National integration, a primary goal of the 1950s in India in both the cultural and state spheres, required the constitution of Indianness as a shared cultural and legal identity. Its determined outcome, Indian citizenship, thereby entailed the production of affective ties in terms of both national affiliation, as well as legal rights, in order to give coherence to the hyphen binding an already existing idea of nation to the newly formed Indian state. A driving question of the post-Independence era was thus: how can, will, and already do all Indians embody Indian citizenship vis
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Books by Preetha Mani
Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, Mani contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. In The Idea of Indian Literature, she explores the paradox that a single canon could be written in multiple languages, each with their own evolving relationships to one another and to English.
Hindi, representing national aspirations, and Tamil, epitomizing the secessionist propensities of the region, are conventionally viewed as poles of the multilingual continuum within Indian literature. Mani shows, however, that during the twentieth century, these literatures were coconstitutive of one another and of the idea of Indian literature itself. The writers discussed here—from short-story forefathers Premchand and Pudumaippittan to women trailblazers Mannu Bhandari and R. Chudamani —imagined a pan-Indian literature based on literary, rather than linguistic, norms, even as their aims were profoundly shaped by discussions of belonging unique to regional identity. Tracing representations of gender and the uses of genre in the shifting thematic and aesthetic practices of short vernacular prose writing, the book offers a view of the Indian literary landscape as itself a field for comparative literature.
Essays by Preetha Mani
Keywords: Linguistic alienation, multilingualism, diglossia, genre, tradition
Keywords:
Scale, translation, global modernism, vernacular, area studies
Translations by Preetha Mani
Book Reviews by Preetha Mani
Theses by Preetha Mani
Fiction by Preetha Mani
Papers by Preetha Mani