Narrative Ethics and Moral Imagination in Indian Literature: Exploring Empathy and Human Values through Storytelling

Abstract

Francesca Orsini’s The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism explores the transformation of Hindi into a powerful medium of literary, cultural, and political expression during a period of intense nationalist activity. Drawing on Habermas’s concept of the “public sphere,” Orsini examines how Hindi journals, literary associations, education, and print culture fostered debates on identity, language, and modernity. The work highlights how Hindi intellectuals sought to create a unified national culture through literature while simultaneously negotiating issues of class, gender, and linguistic hierarchy. Women’s journals, nationalist writings, and popular literature offered new voices within this emerging sphere, even as exclusion and control persisted. The thesis reveals that the Hindi literary public sphere reflected both a democratic impulse and a conservative cultural order, embodying the contradictions of colonial modernity and nationalist reform. Ultimately, Orsini demonstrates that Hindi’s rise as a national language was both an intellectual triumph and a site of enduring contestation.