http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism in early-twentieth-century India
xxiii, 380 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Explores how four public intellectuals in North India imagined freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their writings on caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism.
Intro -- Contents -- Figures -- Abbreviations -- Note on Translation and Transliteration -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Vernacular Freedoms and Life Narratives -- Malleable Circuits of the Vernacular -- Hindi and Hindu: Negotiating Language, Literature, and Religion -- Self-Writing, Life Histories, and Sexual Embodiments -- Utopian Desires of Freedom -- Trajectory of Chapters -- I: Santram Ba (1887-1988) -- 1 Reading Self, Resisting Caste, Reimagining Marriage -- Life History and Caste: Self and Collective Identities -- Familial and Social Roots: Caste Discrimination, the Arya Samaj, and Hindi -- A History of the JPTM and Anticaste Thought -- Transgressive Intimacies: Championing Intercaste Marriages -- 2 Cast(e)ing and Translating Sex: Vernacular Sexology from the Margins -- Vernacular Print Cultures and Sexology in Hindi -- Translating Marginality into Authority: Marie Stopes and the Sanskrit Sex Classics -- A Heterosexual Ethics: Conjugal Desires, Brahmacharya, and Birth Control -- II: Yashoda Devi (1890-1942) -- 3 Procreation and Pleasure: Women, Men, and Ayurveda -- Popular Health Literature, Biomedicine, and Ayurveda -- A Gendered Ayurvedic Authority on Domestic Health -- A Moral Sexologist: Reproduction, Intercourse, and Masturbation -- 4 Kitchen Pharmacy: Culinary Recipes and Home Remedies -- The Politics of Food and Health in Colonial UP -- A Robust World of Cookbooks and Home Remedies -- Food Recipes and Cookbooks -- Recipes for Home Remedies -- Menu for a Hindu Nation and the Ingredients of Gendered Embodiments -- The Educated Housewife as "Ghar ka Vaid" -- Food for Freedom: The Political Economy of Home Remedies -- III: Swami Satyadev Parivrajak (1879-1961) -- 5 Fantasy, Fitness, Fascism: Masculine Vernacular Histories of Travel -- Travel Writing: A Passion for Hindi -- Admiring the West: Beauty, Pleasure, and Physicality -- A Dialogue between East and West, Slavery, and Freedom -- "Perfect" Bodies: Masculinity and the Idolisation of Hitler -- 6 Fashioning a Hindu Political Sanyasi: Autobiography and Sectarian Freedom -- Anatomy of a Hindu Ascetic: Sexual Constraint and Masculine Virility -- Egoism and Eulogising Self -- Conceptualising an Exclusionary Freedom -- Segmented Freedom and Nationalism: Hindu Sangathan and Muslims -- Gandhi and Godse -- Vindicating Assassination -- IV: Satyabhakt (1896-1985) -- 7 A "Marginal" History of Vernacular Communism -- Historical Antecedents, Hindi and Communism -- The First Communist Conference and Satyabhakt's Marginalisation -- Idioms from Below and Communist Writings -- 8 Hindu Communism: Apocalypse and Utopian Ram Rajya -- An Eclectic Hindu Worldview -- Indian Traditions and Hinduism in Dialogue with Communism -- Apocalyptic Predictions and Future Prophecies -- Communism as a Utopian Ram Rajya -- Glossary
Includes bibliographical references (pages 318-358) and index.
AAS: Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, 2026