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Over the past decade, a number of studies have sought to rethink the history of literary cultures and linguistic identities in modern India locating them in the wider context of print production, constitution of a reading public, and the interplay of different social groups. Between Empires offers the first systematic analysis of the relationship between print culture and colonial rule in Goa.
Rochelle Pinto discusses the development of print culture and its implications for larger questions of nationalism, modernity, and colonial politics. Drawing succinctly from available literature on print, reading publics, and linguistic hierarchies elsewhere in India, she offers a persuasive account of the possibilities opened by print media and the manner in which it reordered social, cultural, or political ties within Goan society.
Through a careful reading of print produced in Portuguese, Konkani, and Marathi, this book examines the contesting claims about Goa and the terrain of its politics. It shows how this highly contested public realm was deeply reflected in the novels, pamphlets, and newspapers produced by the Catholic elite, Goan migrants to Bombay, and litigants in the rural districts in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Presenting detailed studies of the emergence of various forms of print, the author discusses how questions of representation, genre, publicity, and literary history followed different trajectories among the non-elite and elite writers.
Rich in scholarship and rigorous and wide-ranging in its argumentation, this work makes an important contribution to current discussions on the emergence of print spheres in colonial India.
ISBN - 9780195690477
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