Vernacular Encounters: Politics and Possibilities

This book offers new insights into the debates of vernacularity, language ideologies, and the decolonial turn. It identifies ’vernacular encounters’ as nuanced interactions of languages that are often termed as ’local’ with culture and power, across varied media and temporalities.

Drawing from rich literary and cultural productions across various geopolitical contexts, the book reveals how vernacular expressions serve as powerful vehicles for political negotiation and cultural transformation. It explores how vernacular encounters actively challenge power structures at various levels by asserting their own cultural authority, thereby creating spaces for alternative perspectives within dominant discourse and challenging hegemonic forces. It also illuminates the role of language as more than just a communication tool, arguing that it also functions as a vital marker of identity and cultural continuity that actively resists homogenization and erasure. This resistance, in the case of the vernacular languages of India, challenges both colonial and global hegemonic forces and sets the tone for affirming diverse cultural narratives.

The volume offers a historically grounded analysis that traces the resilience, adaptation and negotiations of vernacular languages across changing socio-political landscapes. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of language, literature, linguistics, literary and cultural studies, Indian literature, translation studies, and to those with an interest in South Asian history, culture, politics and society.

Nishat Zaidi is Honorary Director, Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies and Professor of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Kashish Dua is an Assistant Professor of English at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. She was a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.