Doctoral Candidate Sophie Dieckmann
Contact: sophie.dieckmann@stud.uni-heidelberg.de
Sophie Dieckmann is a doctoral student at the South Asia Institute. In her dissertation project, she is researching the domesticity discourse within the Hindi journal landscape of the influential Mārwāṛīs in colonial Calcutta. She completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Leipzig. Her thematic focus includes modern South Asian literatures, Hindi journal culture, (post-)colonial travel literature from and about South Asia, urban and cultural history of Kolkata, and transnational history.
As a student assistant, Sophie was involved in the archive project MIDA (Das moderne Indien in deutschen Archiven 1706-1989); in the winter semester of 2023/2024, she also led a seminar on South Asian travel literature at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. In addition to her academic work, Sophie works as a translator, lecturer, and project assistant for the Goethe-Institut Kolkata and teaches German as a foreign language in Leipzig.
Doctoral Research
Project Title: Hindi in colonial Calcutta. The Mārwāṛī public and “domesticity” as reflected in the journal landscape of the early 20th century
Summary: The PhD research examines hitherto neglected Hindi journals from early twentieth-century Calcutta, which were published by and for members of the Marwari community. Amongst other things, topics on domesticity – including women's emancipation, marriage, love, household, and family – were brought to the attention of the Hindi public. Calcutta's journal landscape at that time was extremely dynamic; newspapers and magazines served as venues for the most important political and cultural discussions, reached a very broad audience and were thus an essential component and driver of public socio-political and cultural discourses in India.
The PhD project focuses on both the discourse of domesticity and questions of gender constructions within the Marwari community in colonial Calcutta, which are placed in a broader cultural-historical context. This re-centering of the existing (literary) history of Calcutta during the British colonial period and of the Marwaris as a culturally emerging ethnic community opens a new way of looking beyond purely political events in the context of the Indian independence movement. This proves that previously privatized issues around household, women, and family within the community were important means of establishing identity and self-definition in an ethnically, religiously, linguistically, and culturally complex metropolis like Calcutta. It also shows that the discourses about Indian women at the time did not take place in a vacuum but were specifically used by different population groups – especially male actors – for different motives. At the same time, self-portrayals and journalistic contributions by Hindi-speaking women authors in magazines from the 1920s to 1940s are analyzed and evaluated for their relevance to the discourse on domesticity. In this way, the doctoral thesis contributes to an expansion of existing research on modern Indian women, Hindi literature, and the history of the Marwaris in Calcutta.