Gregory Goulding

I am a scholar primarily of the literatures of northern India. While my current work looks at Hindi in the twentieth century, I am interested in the long term in thinking of Hindi as part of the larger literary ecosystem of north India, including its interactions with other modern literary cultures, as well as the various ways in which it is in conversation with pre-modern literatures. I work primarily with sources in Hindi, Marathi, and Urdu, with the goal of working with Sanskrit and Bangla in the future.

My current book project, titled Cold War Genres: Local and International in Hindi Literature, investigates the interplay between post-independence Hindi literature and Nehruvian India's internationalism during the early Cold War and non-aligned movement era. The project explores questions of genre and form across various literary cultures, in the context of debates over realism and modernism in the 1950s and 1960s. It takes as its central example the work of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–1964), a left-oriented writer known primarily for his long, fantastic poems. Cold War Genres waspublished by SUNY University Press in Fall 2024.

My second book project, tentatively titled India’s Asias: Pan-Asianism as an Imagination of the Past, will deal with conceptions of space and transregional geographies of Central and East Asia in the 1940s, just prior to and following India’s independence. Rather than view the imagination of the international as an affect either of an effect of colonial networks or of integration within international revolutionary politics, this project will argue for a historicized imagination of India’s perceived territoriality, and of the extraterritorial places that were crucial to this conception. The project will focus on the works of figures, such as the Hindi historian and novelist Hazariprasad Dwivedi and the Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder, whose historical fictions of Buddhist and Hellenistic pasts presented a powerful model of regional connection in post-partition South Asia. The project will also include known travelers to India such as Russian emigré painter Nicholas Roerich, whose writings and paintings, inflected with ideas of theosophy and Buddhism, shaped ideas of pan-Asian affiliation. This project will engage with questions of race and caste and their role in the imagination of pre-modern Asia, and will utilize a new archive of travelogue and literary history, along with historical and speculative fiction.

My other research interests, developed in articles under development and future projects, include new histories of regional literary formations in a borderlands context; the history of meter and free verse in South Asian literatures; science fiction and fantastic literatures—and their tense relations with discourses of realism; intersections between Hindi and Urdu, especially following independence; and developing new methodologies of thinking about South Asian literary cultures in comparative frameworks.