Exploring Hindi literary and visual satire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Not in Jest illuminates the historical experience of colonial modernity and elucidates the social and emotional transformations wrought by British rule in India. Foregrounding a largely ignored archive, the book approaches satire as an interventionist and affective mode of public expression and questions the moralist dismissals of it as vulgar and trivial. In doing so, it underscores the significance of vernacular satirical print to recover the history of nationalist anxieties, aspirations, resolve, and failings to deal with the political, cultural and technological force of modernity in public and intimate social life. By focusing on six distinct but intersecting social historical issues—social fear and anxiety of political equality and democracy; tenacity and fragility of anti-caste nationalism; desire and despondency to reform the ‘depraved’ reader into a moral-political community; yearnings and frustrations of producing modern forms of knowledge in Indian language; allures and affordances of modern technology and infrastructure; and dilemmas of cultivating new master-servant relations in Indian household—the book delineates the making of national-modern selfhood in colonial India.

Contents

List of Plates
Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I: Political Incongruities
1. Laughing Out Caste
2. Drawing Caste into the Nation

Part II: Literary Absurdities
3. Reforming the ‘Filth-Enticed’ Reader
4. The Farcicality of Writing Itihāsa

Part III: Anxieties of Intimacy
5. The Allures and Affordances of Technology
6. Recasting Class Intimacies at Home

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index