The annual holiday season in India is in October/November when the festival of Diwali is celebrated across the country. In the state of Maharashtra, among the Marathi speaking communities, for over a century now there is a unique tradition of this festival being celebrated with the reading of the “diwāḷī aṅka” (the Diwali issue) of various periodicals, both high literary and middlebrow. Along with the excitement of new clothes, rich food, gifts, and family gatherings, in this Marathi culture there is also the eager wait for the Diwali issues of journals and magazines. As these Diwali issues of journals are much anticipated, they form the central topic of conversation among family, friends, and colleagues during this time of the year. These Diwali specials are also issues that, in the past, have featured some of the best writing of that year in literature, the arts, and popular culture. The hope is that what we have here in the most recent issue of Modernism/modernity will recreate some of that magic of the Marathi “diwāḷī aṅka” and will generate excitement and conversations in our holiday season here.

Multilingualism has been at the foundation of modernist thought and studies of multilingualism in modernist writing is a thriving and growing field—there is a new journal dedicated to multilingualism, there are clusters here on Print Plus dedicated to this study, anthologies and monographs that look at this topic from multiple angles. The discussion of multilingualism is not a new one. But it gains urgency in the context of the history and politics of the Global South, particularly in the Indian subcontinent, where language becomes as potent a site of identity as religion.

The current special issue, expertly guest-edited by Preetha Mani and Jennifer Dubrow, stands at the intersection of two urgencies prompting the current work at Modernism/modernity: the global purview and the multilingual vision. Despite the expansion of the publications beyond Anglo-European literature and art, somehow much of the discussion still seems to falter at the geographical thresholds of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. This special issue is also an attempt to balance the discussions in that respect.

The September 2025 issue of Modernism/modernity is a relatively rare one for the journal for multiple reasons—it is a special issue, the first one in many years (the huge backlog of essays has meant that we have not been able to commission special issues for a while now). This special issue has been in the works for a long time too—it was accepted during the editorial stint of Christopher Bush and Anne Fernald, then steered through the review process by Stephen Ross and me, and then produced for publication by the Rutgers desk that includes the invaluable team of Paisley Conrad and Rudrani Gangopadhyay. The expectation is that the particularities of multilingual writing and the challenge of language that is featured here will find resonance with the ongoing conversations about linguistic modernisms and modernities across other regions of the globe. Rebecca Walkowitz’s afterword (which will be presented here as a teaser essay in a couple of days) provides crucial direction for the start of such conversations.

These essays come together with a range of diverse book reviews put together by the reviews editors, Martin Harries and Stefanie Sobelle. A teaser review by Edward Mitchell will be published here next week. On Print Plus, thanks to the work of our digital editor, Harrington Weihl, as well as Rudrani Gangopadhyay, we have two fascinating new pieces: one by Claire Bracken, Laurel Harris, and Marissa Stinson, and the other by Jane Frances Dunlop.

Following upon the great issue edited by Faye Hammill and the Glasgow desk for April 2025, I hope this special issue will expand the conversation about global modernisms that are at the heart of the project at the journal.

Happy holidays and hope you enjoy the reading!

—Anjali Nerlekar