With a formal training in literary studies and a formidable range of linguistic skills, Ulrike Stark has negotiated with aplomb the maze of languages and scripts which dominate north India. Working at the intersection of Hindi and Urdu, her landmark research has enriched Indian print history. Stark, who is a professor at the University of Chicago, has also translated novels from Hindi into English. In an email interview with Murali Ranganathan, she discusses her work and research interests
Jatindra Kumar Nayak has played a prominent role in a variety of literary and educational institutions in the state of Odisha and his translations, essays and lectures have been instrumental in presenting Odia literature to the larger world. For the last four decades, he has been exploring the print culture of Odisha. In this free-wheeling conversation with Murali Ranganathan, Nayak talks about how he has engaged with print Jatindra Kumar Nayak
How did your engagement with print get stimulated?
My father, Kashinath Nayak, was a writer of textbooks and books for children and managed the printing press owned by the Primary Teachers’ Federation at Puri. I was fascinated by the work of compositors and printers at this press. My father also used to take me along to the offices of some of his publishers in Cuttack during Dussehra. As a student at Ravenshaw College, Cuttack in the 1970s, I was actively involved in the publication of
Print History: Isabel Hofmeyr - The View from Africa printweek.in - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from printweek.in Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Abhijit Gupta is one of the leading practitioners of book history in twenty-first century India. He looks back at the work done in the past twenty years and considers the challenges ahead in a conversation with Murali Ranganathan
When did you realise that you had evolved into a book historian from a professor of English literature? How did the evolution happen?
It happened the other way around. I started teaching in an English department in 1999 and prior to that I had completed a PhD during 1994-96 on the publishing histories of some women novelists in late 19th-century England. But when I started my doctoral research in 1994, I was not even aware that a discipline called book history existed. So you could say that this was a classic instance of speaking prose without knowing it.