Wolfson Governing Body Fellow, Imre Bangha, awarded Leverhulme grant

Wolfson College would like to congratulate Governing Body Fellow, Prof Imre Bangha on being awarded a Lerverhulm grant. Professor Bangha specialises in early Hindi literature from its emergence in the 14th century until the advent of western type modernity in the 19th century.

This grant will support a project to study the earliest vernacular literary works from the Hindi Belt. The century between roughly 1350 and 1450 left behind Jain, Sufi and Hindu narratives in closely related linguistic and metrical forms, of which the Ćāndāyan (1379) of the Sufi poet Dā’ūd and the Ramayana and Mahabharata translations by Viṣṇudās of Gwalior (fl. 1435-1442) have drawn considerable scholarly attention in the past half century.

Bangha’s earlier research identified archaisms in Viṣṇudās’s epics and discovered earlier Jain compositions, the Pradyumna-ćarit (1354) and the Siya-pañćamī (1366), where the same features were rather the rule than the exception. This project will juxtapose all six available longer works from this period and explore how their language served as a link between cosmopolitan Apabhramsha and the vernacular Classical Hindi. Since two of the compositions lack critical edition, the project will edit them on the basis of all accessible sources.

Through a combination of a philology, historical sociolinguistics and concepts of literary vernacularisation, the project aims to present a new theorisation of the emergence of vernacular literature in the Hindi Belt through a linguistic and literary study of a wider range of material than any book before.