This book explores the ways in which Hindi literary cultures reflected and shaped the political and revolutionary contexts of 1960s–80s north India. It argues that Hindi fiction from these transformative decades maps the complex character of social justice movements related to land, adivasi rights, gender equality, and anti-caste activism. Thereby, it performs a decolonial practice of living that reaches out to the ruling representatives of the nation state to make them more responsive towards the citizens. Centered on an analysis of select fiction, the book explores pluralistic perspectives on the nation and its lived realities as experienced by marginalised populations – peasants, adivasis, women, and Dalits – through the lens of decoloniality. This approach interrogates the conventional understanding of the state as an all-powerful bureaucratic apparatus, highlighting instead how the claim-making from below discursively re-constructs the state as a symbolic and cultural terrain of meaning-making endeavours. In this sense the book attempts to frame decolonial aesthesis as deeply entwined with intersubjective ethics of relationalities anchored in non-dominant socialities. The book contributes significantly to scholarship on literature and decoloniality, drawing on a vital segment of Indian literary tradition. It will be invaluable to students and scholars of Indian literatures, Hindi literature, decoloniality, social movements, and South Asian studies.
