What did everyday Hinduism in India look like a hundred years ago? Was it freer and more diverse than it is today? Were its practices more varied and less politically curtailed than now?

Hindi Hindu Histories provides illuminating historical accounts of Hindu life through individual actors, autobiographical narratives, and genres in the Hindi print-public culture of early-twentieth-century North India.

It focuses on four fascinating figures – an anticaste crusader who advocated intercaste marriages and wrote on sexological matters; a pioneering woman Ayurvedic practitioner who specialised in female health and household recipes; a maverick travel writer whose work reflects early ideas of the muscular Hindu nation being forged today; and a Left journalist who sought to bridge Hinduism and communism.

These public intellectuals were extremely popular in their time. They harboured vernacular dreams of freedom and Hindi-Hindu nationhood through their vantage points of caste, Ayurveda, travel, and communism. Theirs are the expansive worldviews being stamped out by the narrowing channels into which Hindus are now politically shepherded.

Opening up a vast and under-explored Hindi archive, and offering fresh insights into Hindu identity formation, this book shows a plural Hindi-Hindu universe of facets that coexisted, challenged each other, and comprised an idea of Hinduness far more inclusive than anything envisageable in our time.

All who wish to properly comprehend the recent history of Hindu self-fashioning and propagandist creativity will want to read this book.

Charu Gupta is Senior Professor in the Department of History, University of Delhi. The focus of her work is gender, sexuality, masculinity, caste, religious identities, and vernacular literatures in early-twentieth-century North India. Her books, as editor or as author, include Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (2002); The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (2016); Contested Coastlines: Fisherfolk, Nations and Borders in South Asia (2008); Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism (2012); Caste and Life Narratives (2019); and Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular: Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia (2021).

This remarkable monograph beautifully crafts four micro studies of unusual and forgotten figures to recover several new horizons in late colonial north Indian history: a successful woman doctor in the indigenous medical regime, a globe-trotting Hindu ascetic who opposed Gandhi, an anticaste campaigner who spoke for sexual equality, and a Hindu communist who envisioned an egalitarian utopia in the world of labour. These intimate portraits are framed within the larger domains of Hindi print culture and literary history, gender, sexuality, communism, Hindu supremacism, and the contested meanings of diverse visions of freedom – all expressed in a compelling vernacular idiom, all veering away from conventional expectations and trajectories.

Charu Gupta takes us deep into the uncharted politico-cultural terrains of lived preoccupations and strife. Rather than slot her characters into fixed categories, she uncovers the fluidity, the porosity, the overlaps, and the surprises that their experiences and works express. This is a brilliant and complex book by a historian who has earlier brought together the politics of caste, gender, communalism, and literature in the Hindi-speaking world. – TANIKA SARKAR