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AbstractThis article draws attention to the provincial city of Allahabad at the turn of the century as the site of a prolific and multilingual print culture. While publishing trends in this city were shaped by the intertwined histories of political culture and cultural politics, specific journals responded to these forces in ways that remain unexamined. Taking the Indian Press—established in 1884 and arguably the city's most important multilingual publishing house—and four prominent journals that it produced (Saraswatī, Prabāsī, The Modern Review, and Adīb) as case study, I analyse the entanglements between print culture and debates on the contentious issues of languages and identities in a divided public sphere. Based on an extensive analysis of several decades of publishing trends for Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, I argue that the continued thriving of many languages, or multilingualism, cannot be read simply as evidence for the proliferation of syncretism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a detailed reading of this complex field of cultural production, I show that while multilingual publishing thrived, cultural discourse led by middle-class and elite intellectuals was increasingly becoming homogeneous and insular, pushing a milieu of multilingual readers and publishers towards a narrow nationalist and majoritarian ideal. Thus, upon close analysis, multilingualism as a cultural value in the era of colonial modernity mirrored the fractures within the public sphere.

In the world of work at large, domestic workplace constitutes an altogether different space for hitherto labour jurisprudence and more so in the given age of liberalization-privatization-globalization worldwide. The way workforce used to get together at workplace and thereby unionized to form trade union in factory, mine, plantation and other establishments cannot take place anyway in case of domestic workplace. No wonder that the same attracts attention of relevant stakeholders on several counts, for example, labour on the one side and management on the other side. The author explores peculiarity of such workplace, issues involved therein along with means and methods to address major hurdles for management and labour studies to grapple with one among the least explored workplaces of the world. The forthcoming paragraphs are meant to grapple with relative (read comparative) vulnerability for members of the workforce inside a space otherwise meant for private individual use, albeit with the potential for abuse to gross detriment of the workforce and, at times, of the management as well. With recent focus of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the labour wing of the UN administration and one among the oldest institutions meant for global governance since the League of Nations regime, a unique trajectory of labour jurisprudence is on its wise to save stakeholders of the workplace from drudgery, if not vagary, of injustice with impunity. The hitherto private space is thereby increasingly converted to public space during its working hours in technical sense of the term and thereby subjected to the rule of law genre available elsewhere outside.