Structured by contradictions

Hindi Hindu Histories by Charu Gupta is a rich, imaginative, and important contribution to our understanding of Hindi public life in colonial India. Drawing on social history, literary studies, gender debates, and political thought, Gupta makes a compelling case for rethinking how everyday Hindi print culture shaped ideas of society, freedom, and identity in the early 20th century. The book stands alongside landmark works like Francesca Orsini’s ​The Hindi Public Sphere, Ulrike Stark’s ​An Empire of Books,​ and Gupta’s own book Sexuality, Obscenity, Community, but it moves in a distinctive direction.

​In this book, Gupta turns the spotlight away from grand figures and canonical texts. Going beyond the division between “official” and “unofficial” archives, she draws from obscure Hindi tracts, pamphlets, popular health guides, cookbooks, sex manuals, travelogues, intelligence reports and self-published memoirs. These so-called “low” genres, she argues, were not peripheral but central to how Hindi-speaking Indians debated caste, health, gender roles, nationalism, and utopian futures.



Her close readings of these sources bring into focus figures long forgotten in the mainstream narratives of Hindi public life..Her thematic choices push this further.

Rather than focusing narrowly on legal reform or high politics, Gupta brings intercaste marriage, sexual ethics, health practices, and religious bodily regimes into the centre of political history. These concerns were not private or apolitical; they were central to how freedom, citizenship, and social order were being imagined at the time..

New exclusions.Across the chapters, Gupta shows that the figures who challenged what was the contemporary conventional also reproduced new exclusions. Santram BA emerges as a fierce critic of caste oppression, yet his advocacy for social reform remained tethered to deeply patriarchal assumptions about women’s sexuality and domestic roles.

Yashoda Devi, despite breaking barriers as a woman Ayurvedic writer, naturali​sed a model of disciplined, sacrificial womanhood that aligned closely with nationalist and patriarchal ideals. Swami Satyadev Parivrajak dreamt of muscular Hindu regeneration, but his embrace of Western modernity coexisted with sectarian violence and admiration for fascistic strength. Satyabhakt imagined a communist utopia yet fused it with Hindu apocalyptic visions that reproduced theological hierarchies under the guise of revolutionary renewal.

Together, these lives reveal that the making of modern political subjectivities in colonial India was often structured by new contradictions—where struggles against old orders simultaneously gave birth to new fantasies. .Importantly, ​the book is not a celebration of the popular for its own sake.

Gupta critically examines how vernacular modernities frequently reproduce caste hierarchies, patriarchal norms, and sectarian ideologies. She reframes, rather than simply inverts, the hierarchies of historical value..

A more representative picture.Rather than offering simple stories of resistance or progress, Gupta presents a fractured and, consequently, more representative picture of Hindi vernacular modernities. She is particularly attentive to contradictions, showing how social reform, gender politics, religious identity, and revolutionary dreams were often entangled with conservatism.

The figures she studies are presented without being romanticised, with their limitations and prejudices fully on display..The title ​​Hindi Hindu Histories immediately echoes, even if uneasily, the resonant ​and exclusionary slogan ​​“Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan”.

.Gupta does not ignore this uncomfortable proximity. Rather, ​the book ​is an invitation to the reader to think critically about it.

Instead of taking the association at face value, Gupta’s careful use of “Histories” in the plural signals a deliberate move away from homogenising nationalisms. She shows that neither Hindi nor Hindu identities were ever unified or uncontested: they were sites of intense struggle, reinvention, and contradiction. Thinking with this tension, ​I was pushed as a reader to recognise how what is today invoked as a singular civilisational ideal was, in fact, fractured, fiercely debated, and far less inevitable than later political slogans would have us believe.

.If there is a limitation, it lies in the ​book’s relatively light engagement with the structural relations within popular Hindi publishing. Commercial consideration of self-publication and low-brow publication could be better developed and integrated into the narrative.

At times, the book’s focus on individual actors risks detaching them slightly from collective movements and wider socio-economic forces..Nonetheless, ​Hindi Hindu Histories stands out for the sharpness and complexity with which it maps the vernacular political imagination.

In a field often caught between narratives of nationalist histories and communal loss, Gupta offers a harder, messier, and far more revealing picture of Hindi modernity. It is an immensely significant book that should reshape not only how scholars and readers approach Hindi print cultures but also Indian intellectual history..

The reviewer is a Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha). Views are personal..