Examining questions of vernacularity and marginality, Vernacularizing Pasts explores critical concerns underlying history, time-space, modernity, and their associated discourses about Odisha. This work interrogates the idea of historicism in analytic history (History 1), whose rigid disciplinary practices stand delimited by explorations in alternative histories.

Drawing on the conceptual resources of ‘History 2’—alternative history of subaltern pasts and historical temporality—the first two sections of the volume trace the trajectory of the deshi in terms of a ‘new aesthetic of Place’. This conception of the local as produced by vernacular literary traditions of Odisha interweaves the socio-textual orientations of its community with the aesthetics of its geo-cultural region.

The problematization of the region and its identity as dependent on ideas and culture are further bolstered in the next two sections. Focusing on the complexities involved in evaluating cultural phenomena morally, epistemically, and aesthetically, these sections scrutinize the nuances of the underlying questions of region, identity and marginality. Illustrating the history of ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book brings into focus the hitherto-unexplored literary and political figures of Odisha which ushered in a regional cultural transformation within the broader nationalist movement.