Download or read book Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal written by Rosinka Chaudhuri and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extensive historical research and a detailed examination of the English poetry written by Indians in the nineteenth century in its social, historical, and political contexts, reveals the engagement of the colonized with one of the implements of colonization the English language. This study shows how the intertextuality that existed between this body of verse and concurrent Orientalist scholarship on the ancient Indian heritage resulted, ultimately in a complex appropriation, by the Indians, of British scholarship on India for nationalist, literary, social, and personal issues, such as its anticipation of the formation of the modern Indian identity. A thorough examination of the correlation between the poetry and its background uncovers certain startling differences between current perceptions of colonial relations and actual historical records. For example, the common belief that English education was imposed upon the colonized is reversed through an examination of the Indians own initiative in this field long before the missionaries or Macaulay s famous minute. Similarly, the claim that all English education in India was a vehicle for the Christianizing of natives is refuted through the personal reminiscences of David Hare, eminent educationist, who opposed it vehemently. The author examines works by Henry Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghosh, Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, the Dutt family, and, in conclusion, the poems of Toru Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore. Refuting a simple equation of the exploitation of knowledge as power between the colonizer and the colonized, the author argues for a more nuanced approach, positing that the complexities of the situation meant also an active appropriation of Orientalist scholarship by Indians for their own ends: they tended to take just that which they found good and liked best . This would grant an agency to the colonial Indian subject which has so far gone unrecognized, and place a whole body of colonial verse in the situational flux of interchange and assimilation. This work asserts that it is time now to listen to what the orient made of its interaction with the West, and to lend an ear to what the colonized said. Rosinka Chaudhuri is a scholar of literary criticism and history from Oxford, who specializes in nineteenth-century Bengal. She is a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her articles have appeared in several journals and anthologies.

Download or read book Shakespeare Studies in Colonial Bengal written by Hema Dahiya and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare Studies in Colonial Bengal: The Early Phase represents an important direction in the area of historical research on the role of English education in India, particularly with regards to Shakespeare studies at the Hindu College, the first native college of European education in Calcutta, the capital city of British India during the nineteenth century. Focusing on the developments that led to the introduction of English education in India, Dr Dahiya’s book highlights the pioneering role that the eminent Shakespeare teachers at Hindu College, namely Henry Derozio, D.L. Richardson and H.M. Percival, played in accelerating the movement of the Bengal Renaissance. Drawing on available information about colonial Bengal, the book exposes both the angular interpretations of Shakespeare by fanatical scholars on both sides of the cultural divide, and the serious limitations of the present-day reductive theory of postcolonialism, emphasizing how in both cases such interpretations led to distorted readings of Shakespeare. Offering a comprehensive account of how English education in India came to be introduced in an atmosphere of clashing ideas and conflicting interests emanating from various forces at work in the early nineteenth century, Shakespeare Studies in Colonial Bengal places, in a normative perspective, the part played by each major actor in this highly-contested historical context, including the Christian missionaries, British orientalists, Macaulay’s Minute, the secular duo of Rammohan Roy and David Hare, and, above all, the Shakespeare teachers at Hindu College, the first native institution of European education in India.

Download or read book A History of Indian Poetry in English written by Rosinka Chaudhuri and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Indian Poetry in English explores the genealogy of Anglophone verse in India from its nineteenth-century origins to the present day. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the legacy of English in Indian poetry. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse of such diverse poets as Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Rabindranath Tagore, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Kamala Das, and Melanie Silgardo. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of imperialism and diaspora in Indian poetry. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Indian poetry in English and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

Download or read book Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India 1780 1913 written by Mary Ellis Gibson and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-15 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Mary Ellis Gibson establishes accurate texts for such well-known poets as Toru Dutt and the early nineteenth-century poet Kasiprasad Ghosh. The anthology brings together poets who were in fact colleagues, competitors, and influences on each other. The historical scope of the anthology, beginning with the famous Orientalist Sir William Jones and the anonymous “Anna Maria” and ending with Indian poets publishing in fin-de-siècle London, will enable teachers and students to understand what brought Kipling early fame and why at the same time Tagore’s Gitanjali became a global phenomenon. Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913 puts all parties to the poetic conversation back together and makes their work accessible to American audiences.With accurate and reliable texts, detailed notes on vocabulary, historical and cultural references, and biographical introductions to more than thirty poets, this collection significantly reshapes the understanding of English language literary culture in India. It allows scholars to experience the diversity of poetic forms created in this period and to understand the complex religious, cultural, political, and gendered divides that shaped them.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion written by Jeffrey W. Barbeau and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life in the British Romantic period.

Download or read book Elementary Aspects of the Political written by Prathama Banerjee and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-04 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Elementary Aspects of the Political Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action in the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal.

Download or read book Mapping the Nation written by Sheshalatha Reddy and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing specifically on the poetic construction of India, ‘Mapping the Nation’ offers a broad selection of poetry written by Indians in English during the period 1870–1920. Centering upon the “mapping” of India – both as a regional location and as a poetic ideal – this unique anthology presents poetry from various geographical nodal points of the subcontinent, as well as that written in the imperial metropole of England, to illustrate how the variety of India’s poetical imagining corresponded to the diversity of her inhabitants and geography.

Download or read book Science Fiction in Colonial India 18351905 written by Mary Ellis Gibson and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2019-03-30 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905" shows, for the first time, how science fiction writing developed in India years before the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The five stories presented in this collection, in their cultural and political contexts, help form a new picture of English language writing in India and a new understanding of the connections among science fiction, modernity and empire. [NP] Speculative fiction developed early in India in part because the intrinsic dysfunction and violence of colonialism encouraged writers there to project alternative futures, whether utopian or dystopic. The stories in "Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905," created by Indian and British writers, responded to the intellectual ferment and political instabilities of colonial India. They add an important dimension to our understanding of Victorian empire, science fiction and speculative fictional narratives. They provide new examples of the imperial and the anti-imperial imaginations at work.

Download or read book Merchants and Colonialism written by Amiya Kumar Bagchi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amiya Kumar Bagchi’s Merchants and Colonialism is a landmark work in economic history and sociology. The author shows us how colonial rule put traders and manufacturers under immense pressure, forcing them to look for survival strategies in a changed economic environment. This resulted in long-term de-industrialization and irreversible damage to traditional modes of production, which had far-reaching economic consequences for India after Independence.

Download or read book Anglophone Indian Women Writers 1870 1920 written by Ellen Brinks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The result of extensive archival recovery work, Ellen Brinks's study fills a significant gap in our understanding of women's literary history of the South Asian subcontinent under colonialism and of Indian women's contributions and responses to developing cultural and political nationalism. As Brinks shows, the invisibility of Anglophone Indian women writers cannot be explained simply as a matter of colonial marginalization or as a function of dominant theoretical approaches that reduce Indian women to the status of figures or tropes. The received narrative that British imperialism in India was perpetuated with little cultural contact between the colonizers and the colonized population is complicated by writers such as Toru Dutt, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Sarojini Naidu. All five women found large audiences for their literary works in India and in Great Britain, and all five were also deeply rooted in and connected to both South Asian and Western cultures. Their works created new zones of cultural contact and exchange that challenge postcolonial theory's tendencies towards abstract notions of the colonized women as passive and of English as a de-facto instrument of cultural domination. Brinks's close readings of these texts suggest new ways of reading a range of issues central to postcolonial studies: the relationship of colonized women to the metropolitan (literary) culture; Indian and English women's separate and joint engagements in reformist and nationalist struggles; the 'translatability' of culture; the articulation strategies and complex negotiations of self-identification of Anglophone Indian women writers; and the significance and place of cultural difference.

Download or read book The Novel in Nineteenth Century Bengal written by Sunayani Bhattacharya and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-07-13 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a reader learn to read an unfamiliar genre? The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal answers this question by looking at the readers of some of the first Bengali novelists, including Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Mir Mosharraf Hossain. Moving from the world of novels, periodicals, letters, and reviews to that of colonial educational policies, this book provides a rich literary history of the reading lives of some of the earliest novel readers in colonial India. Sunayani Bhattacharya studies the ways in which Bengalis thought about reading; how they approached the thorny question of influence; and uncovers that they relied on classical Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic literary and aesthetic models, whose attendant traditions formed not a distant past, but coexisted, albeit contentiously, with the everyday present. Challenging dominant postcolonial scholarship, The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal engages with the lived experience of colonial modernity as it traces the import of the Bengali reader's choices on her quotidian life, and grants access to 19th-century Bengal as a space in which the past is to be found enmeshed with the present.

Download or read book Madly After the Muses written by Alexander Riddiford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the use of Graeco-Roman samplings in the Bengali works of Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873). Riddiford introduces new texts and contexts to the fields of classical reception and postcolonial scholarship, offering a surprising early chapter in the story of the dissemination and reception of the Graeco-Roman classics in India.

Download or read book A History of Modern India written by Ishita Banerjee-Dube and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-27 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an interpretive and comprehensive account of the history of India between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, a crucial epoch characterized by colonialism, nationalism and the emergence of the independent Indian Union. It explores significant historiographical debates concerning the period while highlighting important new issues, especially those of gender, ecology, caste, and labour. The work combines an analysis of colonial and independent India in order to underscore ideologies, policies, and processes that shaped the colonial state and continue to mould the Indian nation.

Download or read book Print and Publishing in Colonial Bengal written by Tapti Roy and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconstructs the history of print and publishing in colonial Bengal by tracing the unexpected journey of Bharat Chandra’s Bidyasundar, the first book published by a Bengali entrepreneur. The introduction of printing technology by the British in Bengal expanded the scope of publication and consumption of books significantly. This book looks at the developments and the parallel publishing initiatives of that time. It examines local enterprises in colonial Bengal engaged in producing and selling books and explores the ways in which they charted out a cultural space in the 19th century. The work sheds fresh light on book production and the culture of print, and narrates the processes behind the printing of books to understand the multi-layered literary practices they sustained. A valuable addition to the history of publishing in India, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of South Asian and Indian history, Bengali literature, media and cultural studies, and print and publishing studies. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of Bengal and the Bengali diaspora.

Download or read book Minds Without Fear written by Nalini Bhushan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minds Without Fear is an intellectual and cultural history of India during the period of British occupation. It demonstrates that this was a period of renaissance in India in which philosophy--both in the public sphere and in the Indian universities--played a central role in the emergence of a distinctively Indian modernity. This is also a history of Indian philosophy. It demonstrates how the development of a secular philosophical voice facilitated the construction of modern Indian society and the consolidation of the nationalist movement. Authors Nalini Bhushan and Jay Garfield explore the complex role of the English language in philosophical and nationalist discourse, demonstrating both the anxieties that surrounded English, and the processes that normalized it as an Indian vernacular and academic language. Garfield and Bhushan attend to both Hindu and Muslim philosophers, to public and academic intellectuals, to artists and art critics, and to national identity and nation-building. Also explored is the complex interactions between Indian and European thought during this period, including the role of missionary teachers and the influence of foreign universities in the evolution of Indian philosophy. This pattern of interaction, although often disparaged as "inauthentic" is continuous with the cosmopolitanism that has always characterized the intellectual life of India, and that the philosophy articulated during this period is a worthy continuation of the Indian philosophical tradition.

Download or read book Making India Colonialism National Culture and the Afterlife of Indian English Authority written by Makarand R. Paranjape and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-09-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compared to how it looked 150 years ago at the eve of the colonial conquest, today’s India is almost completely unrecognizable. A sovereign nation, with a teeming, industrious population, it is an economic powerhouse and the world’s largest democracy. It can boast of robust legal institutions and a dizzying plurality of cultures, in addition to a lively and unrestricted print and electronic media. The question is how did it get to where it is now? Covering the period from 1800 to 1950, this study of about a dozen makers of modern India is a valuable addition to India’s cultural and intellectual history. More specifically, it shows how through the very act of writing, often in English, these thought leaders reconfigured Indian society. The very act of writing itself became endowed with almost a charismatic authority, which continued to influence generations that came after the exit of the authors from the national stage. By examining the lives and works of key players in the making of contemporary India, this study assesses their relationships with British colonialism and Indian traditions. Moreover, it analyzes how their use of the English language helped shape Indian modernity, thus giving rise to a uniquely Indian version of liberalism. The period was the fiery crucible from which an almost impossibly diverse and pluralistic new nation emerged through debate, dialogue, conflict, confrontation, and reconciliation. The author shows how the struggle for India was not only with British colonialism and imperialism, but also with itself and its past. He traces the religious and social reforms that laid the groundwork for the modern sub-continental state, proposed and advocated in English by the native voices that influenced the formation India’s society. Merging culture, politics, language, and literature, this is a path breaking volume that adds much to our understanding of a nation that looks set to achieve much in the coming century.

Download or read book Colonial and Postcolonial Literature written by Elleke Boehmer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-10-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonial and Postcolonial Literature is the leading critical overview of and historical introduction to colonial and postcolonial literary studies. Highly praised from the time of its first publication for its lucidity, breadth, and insight, the book has itself played a crucial part in founding and shaping this rapidly expanding field. The author, an internationally renowned postcolonial critic, provides a broad contextualizing narrative about the evolution of colonial and postcolonial writing in English. Illuminating close readings of texts by a wide variety of writers - from Kipling and Conrad through to Kincaid, from Ngugi to Noonuccal and Naipaul - explicate key theoretical terms such as 'subaltern', 'colonial resistance', 'writing back', and 'hybridity'. This revised edition includes new critiques of postcolonial women's writing, an expanded and fully annotated bibliography, and a new chapter and conclusion on postcolonialism exploring keynote debates in the field relating to sexuality, transnationalism, and local resistance.