Francesca Orsini: 4 books

Print and Pleasure tells the story behind the boom in commercial publishing in nineteenth-century North India.How did the new technology of printing and the enterprise of Indian publishers make the book a familiar object and a necessary part of people’s leisure in a largely illiterate society? What...

This book analyses how a language became the instrument with which the contours of a new nation were traced. Mapping the success of formalized Hindi in creating a regional public sphere in north India in the early twentieth century, the book explores the way many educated Indians, influenced by the...

Examining materials from early modern and contemporary North India and Pakistan, Tellings and Texts brings together seventeen first-rate papers on the relations between written and oral texts, their performance, and the musical traditions these performances have entailed. The contributions from some...

Based on a workshop on 'Intermediary Genres in Hindi and Urdu', Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture is an attempt to rethink aspects of the literary histories of these two languages.Today, Hindi and Urdu are considered two separate languages, each with its own script, history, literary...