2026/05/27 by Sankat Mochan Jha · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #South Asian Studies and Diaspora #Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies #Indian History and Philosophy
paper · doi:10.1080/30684781.2026.2679055
openalex publication_date 2026/05/27 · openalex created_date 2026/05/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
This article problematises the institutional and largely uncritical positioning of Hari Mohan Jha as a representative of liberal modernity within postcolonial scholarship on bhasha literatures. This article reviews the existing scholarship on Jha, largely framed by postcolonial approaches, identifies its critical blind spots, and advances a decolonial reading attentive to social contexts beyond the text and the negotiation and suppression of caste in his writings. Through close readings of Kanyadaan (KD) and Khattar Kakak Tarang (KKT), the article exposes their internal tensions and offers a socio linguistic analysis of the Maithili employed by Jha, highlighting the relative absence of overtly caste inflected language in his texts. It argues that this silence reflects a broader erasure of caste critique within dominant narratives of colonial modernity. It further suggests that Jha’s support for women’s education, shaped by colonial modernity, remains hesitant and compromised. The argument proceeds through a sustained critical engagement with key themes and textual moments in Jha’s work in order to foreground the limitations of existing interpretations. It thus advances a re-reading that foregrounds the limits of prevailing institutional understandings of Jha as a literary figure of the Mithila region in North Bihar.