CONCEPT NOTE:
Yashpal is among the most prolific, unusual, and wide-ranging Hindi writers of the post-Premchand generation. Born in 1903 in Kangra, Yashpal first studied at an Arya Samaj Gurukul in Hardwar, and later at the National College, Lahore, an institution that became a center of intense nationalist study and activity. He met his future comrades Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev Thapar at the National College, and joined the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA). After the death of Chandrashekhar Azad, he was elected Commander-In-Chief of the HSRA in 1931, but arrested soon after. He started writing seriously while in prison, and continued to write and publish after his release in 1938. His novel Meri, Teri, Uski Baat won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Hindi in 1976, and he was also honored by the Padma Bhushan. His two-volume magnum opus, Jhootha Sach (1958 and 1960) is widely regarded as one of the most penetrating and revealing narratives of the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan.
What distinguishes Yashpal’s work from that of his contemporaries is his abiding sense that a reckoning with gender as a constitutively unjust system must assume a central role in socio-political thought. Neither the desire for revolutionary (foundational) change, nor the quest for a more free and equal society makes sense without such collective rethinking. Beginning with the remarkable Shail in Dada Comrade (1941), his novels and short stories repeatedly feature women whose political orientation is marked by a persistent reflection on gendered hierarchies and exclusions. This is not to say that Yashpal’s work does not, at times, betray its own attachment to patriarchal aesthetics or sensibilities. We are as interested in the horizons opened by the work, as we are in the limits it cannot overcome.
This two-day workshop aims to bring together several scholars working across disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, who have found Yashpal’s fictional or non-fictional work important for their own projects. While we have foregrounded the themes of gender, nation and revolution, we welcome papers on other aspects of Yashpal’s work or the intellectual/historical context of that work. We feel that the present conjuncture has produced an unprecedented interest in Yashpal as a writer and a member of the HSRA, in his wife Prakashvati and her own involvement in political activities, and in the larger world of Hindi letters of the mid-twentieth century. The workshop hopes to inaugurate a wide-ranging conversation between historians and literary scholars from India and abroad.
TENTATIVE LIST OF SPEAKERS
Anand, Ania Loomba, Daniel Elam, Gautam Choubey, Kama Maclean, Madhuresh, Mrityunjay Tripathi, Nikhil Govind, Pradeep Saxena, Ritu Madan, Sanjeev Kumar, Sevali Hukku, Shabnam Khan, Simona Sawhney, Snehal Singhvi, Vasudha Dalmia, Virendra Yadav
CO-SPONSORED BY:
The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT-Delhi; The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Sahitya Akademi, Delhi.
EVENT DATES & VENUE:
January 8th and 9th, 2019
IRD Conference Room, Main Building, IIT-Delhi
All are invited, but registration is required. To register, please contact Shikha Vats (huz158462@hss.iitd.ac.in) and Nazia Amin (huz168258@hss.iitd.ac.in). Last date for registration: January 4, 2019. Registration is free.
The schedule for the symposium will be available at this site in a few days.