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100 _aGoulding, Gregory
_943275
245 _aA tale of a tyre: National space, infrastructure, and narration in S. H. Vatsyayan’s ‘Parśurām se tūrxam’
260 _aModern Asian Studies
300 _a57(5), Sep, 2023: p.1530-1550
520 _aThe Second World War, although rarely an explicit topic in Hindi literature, was a crucial moment not only in articulating the politics of the nationalist movement, but in imagining new configurations of national and international space. This article considers a brief travelogue by the poet and novelist S. H. Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ that describes a journey from Assam to the borders of Afghanistan. Although purportedly a description of travel across a historical and mythic landscape of then-undivided India, Are yāyāvar rahegā yād? [Oh Wanderer, will you Remember?] unfolds in the final moments of the war effort in India in 1945. Agyeya, who, uniquely among major literary figures, joined the British Army despite being arrested for terrorism in the 1930s, was tasked with leading a convoy of jeeps from Parshuram, Assam, to Torkham, on what is today the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, the majority of the route, through landscapes both of mythology and history as well as fuel depots and off-duty American soldiers, is narrated by the tyre of one of these jeeps. ‘Are Yayavar’ thus reveals a tense interrelationship between the unified, religio-historical space of India which the text presents the reader, and the world of international mobilization created by the war. Ultimately, Agyeya’s travelogue shows how Hindi writers engaged with the Second World War, and the ideas of space that it created, as ways of imagining the interrelations between national and international space in the first years of independence. – Reproduced https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/tale-of-a-tyre-national-space-infrastructure-and-narration-in-s-h-vatsyayans-parsuram-se-turxam/1230C8396142E6986FA53BFBB4454504
773 _aModern Asian Studies
942 _cAR