Glossaries of Hindi Texts

This site offers glossaries and brief introductions for some enjoyable and important Hindi texts suitable for advanced students. Several famous short stories and poems by the greats of twentieth century Hindi literature are represented as well as nineteenth century pieces that are significant for our understanding of the development of modern Hindi literature. We hope that by providing this material online, educators can use it as a resource to develop courses and students can use the texts for independent study. For each text, the original Hindi is provided as a PDF document so that everything needed to study these texts can be found in one place.

The texts on this site were taught in Autumn 2007 and Spring 2008 as part of “Readings in Hindi Literature I & II” (MDES W4610 and W4611) at Columbia University. Students typically take the course in their third year of learning Hindi, but some of the texts are suitable for advanced second year students or for even more advanced students. The courses were conceived and taught by Allison Busch, Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. The material has been prepared for this website by Arthur Dudney, a graduate student in the department. Please contact him with any queries or suggestions.

Students in the courses used a wiki (defined here) to prepare glossaries for the texts collaboratively. Students were assigned pages of the reading to prepare by identifying unfamiliar words, looking up the definitions and entering what they came up with into a wiki, which was typically to be finished two days before the class session in which the text would be read. Students were encouraged to note words or expressions they could not understand or find in a dictionary. As other students viewed the wiki, they could offer corrections and fill in some of the blanks. The instructor would also do a definitive round of corrections the night before the class session as well as marking key terms that would appear on quizzes. We believe this approach balances the needs of students and the instructor by providing the benefits of having a Hindi-English glossary for uncommonly taught texts without the heavy burden on the instructor of preparing the glossaries herself. By sharing the labor among all the students in the class, each student would only have to look up all of the unfamiliar words on a page or two each week. Students were thus able to concentrate on the meaning of the texts rather than, as a teacher of mine once said, “mindlessly thumbing the lexicon.”

Although the entries were corrected by the students themselves and by Professor Busch, we cannot guarantee their accuracy. All materials are provided as is, although we welcome your comments and any corrections at the contact email noted above. We are placing these materials in the public domain in the hope that they will be useful to both students and teachers. However, we request that any materials used will be credited to this site.

The dictionary consulted by most of the students was the Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, edited by R.S. McGregor. It is the best all-purpose Hindi-English dictionary available but it is rather expensive. Another indispensible resource is Platt's Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English, which is available online for free. For further practice with Hindi readings, the student is advised to consider Christopher Shackle and Rupert Snell's Hindu and Urdu Since 1800: A Common Reader (which is unfortunately out of print) and Usha Jain and Karine Schomer's Intermediate Hindi Reader, some of which is suitable for advanced students despite its title.

Texts

Nineteenth century prose

Twentieth century short stories

Twentieth century poetry

• Selection from the critical essay “Kalpnā ke kānan kī rānī” in Chāyāvād by Namwar Singh
• “Vishva chavi” by Sumitranand Pant
• Nīrajā by Mahadevi Varma (selection)

Technical help

To view the original Hindi text of the stories, you'll need to download the free Acrobat Reader.