Remaking Marathi

Abstract

Abstract This chapter critically examines Mahārāṣhṭra Sāraswat (1898), by Vinayak Lakshman (V. L.) Bhave, the first comprehensive history of Marathi literature. Several regional languages across the subcontinent—glossed as deshī languages or deshbhāṣhā—were located in history via literary histories or historical linguistics over the later 19th century. Such pioneering narratives were crucial for assembling the literary field within particular languages and establishing terms of debate over genre, register, and categories of analysis. They were culminations of efforts by colonial and first-generation Western-educated Indian writers to engage with language as a historical category and to narrativize centuries of textuality in orality and manuscript as it unevenly entered print and the colonial public sphere. This chapter revisits the making of Bhave’s pioneering history and narrativization of the Marathi literary corpus for literary debates and analysis over the 20th century and the making of Marathi literary modernism. It argues that Bhave’s engagement with the idea of literariness through the category Saraswat enabled an expansive, chronological archiving of Marathi literature. In addition, his framing of Marathi’s evolutionary history and the overarching themes of authenticity and rootedness, in particular, are key to understanding the endurance of these concerns in the contemporary Marathi literary and political sphere.