Science journalism in Hindi originated in the late nineteenth century. Hindi literary periodicals provided the first platform for science to be discussed along with literature. The onset of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable advance in Hindi literary writing, and science writing also flourished with this advance. A remarkable overlap and a complementary relationship between the development of Hindi literature and Hindi commentaries on sciences is evident. Equally important in this context was the backdrop provided by a politically contentious process of evolution of a ‘modern’, ‘standard’ Hindi, and by the anti-colonial freedom movement, yoked to the idea of cultural and economic nationalism. The article surveys certain popular periodicals that regularly published essays and commentaries on science and scientific subjects. These periodicals were instrumental in shaping the popular discourses on science. The article also underlines an overwhelming effort by the intelligentsia to seek a philosophical commensurability between modern science and ‘traditional’ schools of thought. It concludes that the predominance of these characteristics in Hindi science journalism was a reflection of the agenda of the Hindi intelligentsia, shaped by linguistic nationalism framed alongside or in conjunction with a revivalist perspective.
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