Translating Modernities: Language, Selfhood, and Literary Futures in Asia

This proposed panel explores how modernities across Asia have been shaped not only through contact with the West but through acts of translation-linguistic, cultural, and epistemic-within and across Asian languages. It asks how writers and thinkers, negotiating between vernaculars and global idioms, forged new vocabularies of selfhood and community that redefined what it meant to be "modern."

My own paper examines the Hindi novelist Agyeya, whose writing) emerged from a self-conscious and uneasy relationship with Hindi itself. Reading his writing as an experiment in self-translation, I argue that Agyeya's estrangement from his chosen language enabled a radical reimagining of both subjectivity and literary form. His struggle mirrors wider Asian experiences of writing from linguistic in-betweenness, where the vernacular becomes a site of invention rather than inheritance.

I invite scholars working on multilingual modernisms, translation practices, and vernacular reformations across Asia, whether in literature, print culture, intellectual history, or performance, to join this conversation. Papers might address how translation mediates modernity, how colonial encounters reshaped local idioms, or how contemporary artists reanimate older linguistic negotiations in new media.

If you're interested in contributing to this panel, please reach out with a brief abstract or expression of interest at shubham.gupta_phd21@ashoka.edu.in. I'd be delighted to discuss potential alignments and work together.