Download or read book Hungry Bengal written by Janam Mukherjee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the interconnected events including World War II, India's struggle for independence, and a period of acute scarcity that lead to mass starvation in colonial Bengal.
Download or read book In Bengal written by Muhammad Ibn Battuta and published by . This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the distant regions visited by the intrepid 14th century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta was East Bengal. At that time what is now Bangladesh comprised parts of three different kingdoms, Bengal, Lakhnauti and Kamrup. After a brief stay in Bengal proper Ibn Battuta proceeded to what is now Sylhet, in Kamrup, to visit the renowned Muslim saint Sheikh Jalaluddin Tabrizi (nowadays known as Hazrat Shah Jalal). This book, which is primarily intended for English-speaking students of Arabic, contains the pages of Ibn Battuta's travel memoirs which cover his time in East Bengal. Included in the book are the original Arabic text, a transcription in Roman characters, a translation and a comprehensive Arabic-English glossary.
Download or read book Crossing the Bay of Bengal written by Sunil S. Amrith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indian Ocean was global long before the Atlantic, and today the countries bordering the Bay of Bengal—India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia—are home to one in four people on Earth. Crossing the Bay of Bengal places this region at the heart of world history for the first time. Integrating human and environmental history, and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil Amrith gives a revelatory and stirring new account of the Bay and those who have inhabited it. For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and then as a battleground for European empires, all while being shaped by the monsoons and by human migration. Imperial powers in the nineteenth century, abetted by the force of capital and the power of steam, reconfigured the Bay in their quest for coffee, rice, and rubber. Millions of Indian migrants crossed the sea, bound by debt or spurred by drought, and filled with ambition. Booming port cities like Singapore and Penang became the most culturally diverse societies of their time. By the 1930s, however, economic, political, and environmental pressures began to erode the Bay’s centuries-old patterns of interconnection. Today, rising waters leave the Bay of Bengal’s shores especially vulnerable to climate change, at the same time that its location makes it central to struggles over Asia’s future. Amrith’s evocative and compelling narrative of the region’s pasts offers insights critical to understanding and confronting the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.
Download or read book Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta written by Debjani Bhattacharyya and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.
Download or read book Tantra in Bengal written by Sures Chandra Banerji and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849 1905 written by Meredith Borthwick and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Basing her work on Bengali-language sources, such as women's journals, private papers, biographies, and autobiographies, Meredith Borthwick approaches the lives of women in nineteenth-century Bengal from a new standpoint. She moves beyond the record of the heated debates held by men of this period—over matters such as widow burning, child marriage, and female education—to explore the effects of changes in society on the lives of women and to question assumptions about "advances" prompted by British rule. Focusing on the wives, mothers, and daughters of the English-educated Bengali professional class, Dr. Borthwick contends that many reforms merely substituted a restrictive British definition of womanhood for traditional Hindu norms. The positive gains for women—increased physical freedom, the acquisition of literacy, and limited entry to nondomestic work—often brought unforeseen negative consequences, such as a reduction in autonomy and power in the household. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book History of the Portuguese in Bengal written by Joachim Joseph A. Campos and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Revelry Rivalry and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal written by Rachel Fell McDermott and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annually during the months of autumn, Bengal hosts three interlinked festivals to honor its most important goddesses: Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri. While each of these deities possesses a distinct iconography, myth, and character, they are all martial. Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri often demand blood sacrifice as part of their worship and offer material and spiritual benefits to their votaries. Richly represented in straw, clay, paint, and decoration, they are similarly displayed in elaborately festooned temples, thronged by thousands of admirers. The first book to recount the history of these festivals and their revelry, rivalry, and nostalgic power, this volume marks an unprecedented achievement in the mapping of a major public event. Rachel Fell McDermott describes the festivals' origins and growth under British rule. She identifies their iconographic conventions and carnivalesque qualities and their relationship to the fierce, Tantric sides of ritual practice. McDermott confronts controversies over the tradition of blood sacrifice and the status-seekers who compete for symbolic capital. Expanding her narrative, she takes readers beyond Bengal's borders to trace the transformation of the goddesses and their festivals across the world. McDermott's work underscores the role of holidays in cultural memory, specifically the Bengali evocation of an ideal, culturally rich past. Under the thrall of the goddess, the social, political, economic, and religious identity of Bengalis takes shape.
Download or read book From Little London to Little Bengal written by Daniel E. White and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-12-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How literary and religious traffic between Bengal and Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries impelled a complex and contested cosmopolitan imperial culture. From Little London to Little Bengal traces the traffic in culture between Britain and India during the Romantic period. To some, Calcutta appeared to be a “Little London,” while in London itself an Indianized community of returned expatriates was emerging as “Little Bengal.” Circling between the two, this study reads British and Indian literary, religious, and historical sources alongside newspapers, panoramas, religious festivals, idols, and museum exhibitions. Together and apart, Britons and Bengalis waged a transcultural agon under the dynamic conditions of early nineteenth-century imperialism, struggling to claim cosmopolitan perspectives and, in the process, to define modernity. Daniel E. White shows how an ambivalent Protestant contact with Hindu devotion shaped understandings of the imperial mission for Britons and Indians during the period. Investigating global metaphors of circulation and mobility, communication and exchange, commerce and conquest, he follows the movements of people, ideas, books, art, and artifacts initiated by writers, publishers, educators, missionaries, travelers, and reformers. Along the way, he places luminaries like Romantic poet Robert Southey and Hindu reformer Rammohun Roy in dialogue with a fascinating array of lesser-known figures, from the Baptist missionaries of Serampore and the radical English journalist James Silk Buckingham to the mixed-race prodigy Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. In concert and in conflict, these cultural emissaries and activists articulated national and cosmopolitan perspectives that were more than reactions on the part of marginal groups to the metropolitan center of power and culture. The British Empire in India involved recursive transactions between the global East and West, channeling cultural, political, and religious formations that were simultaneously distinct and shared, local, national, and transnational.
Download or read book Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India written by Robert Travers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-19 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the apparent anomaly of a European trading company acting as an Indian ruler. Responding to a prolonged crisis of imperial legitimacy, British officials in Bengal tried to build their authority on the basis of an 'ancient constitution', supposedly discovered among the remnants of the declining Mughal Empire. In the search for an indigenous constitution, British political concepts were redeployed and redefined on the Indian frontier of empire, while stereotypes about 'oriental despotism' were challenged by the encounter with sophisticated Indian state forms. This highly original book uncovers a forgotten style of imperial state-building based on constitutional restoration, and in the process opens up new points of connection between British, imperial and South Asian history.
Download or read book Bengal written by J. N. Nanda and published by Concept Publishing Company. This book was released on 2005 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Book Critically Analyses The Various Historical Events Which Led To Bengal`S Political, Cultural And Religious Developments Over The Centuries. Going Deep Into The Renaissance That First Dawned In Bengal, It Discusses In Detail Its Arts And Crafts, Literature, Trade And Industry, Religious Harmony And Adventourous Spirit. Further Highlighting The Nationalist Activities Of Bengal, The Book Also Takes Note Of Contributions Made By Bengali Intellectuals In The Fields Of Art, Literature, Education, Political Awareness And Social Reforms.
Download or read book Marriage and Modernity written by Rochona Majumdar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-13 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, “ancient” social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an “Indian” tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced “traditions”—the extended family and arranged marriage—entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new “marketplace” for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India. Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.
Download or read book Life and Food in Bengal written by Chitrita Banerji and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the author invites the reader, to absorb and feel Bengal.
Download or read book The Last Prince of Bengal written by Lyn Innes and published by Saqi Books. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nawab Nazim was born into one of India's most powerful royal families. Three times the size of Great Britain, his kingdom ranged from the soaring Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. However, the Nawab was seen as a threat by the British authorities, who forced him to abdicate in 1880 and permanently abolished his titles. The Nawab's change in fortune marked the end of an era in India and left his secret English family abandoned. The Last Prince of Bengal tells the true story of the Nawab Nazim and his family as they sought by turns to befriend, settle in and eventually escape Britain. From glamourous receptions with Queen Victoria to a scandalous Muslim marriage with an English chambermaid; and from Bengal tiger hunts to sheep farming in the harsh Australian outback, Lyn Innes recounts her ancestors' extraordinary journey from royalty to relative anonymity. This compelling account visits the extremes of British rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exposing complex prejudices regarding race, class and gender. It is the intimate story of one family and their place in defining moments of recent Indian, British and Australian history. 'I was captivated and surprised by this bitter-sweet history as it twists and turns down three generations, through many astonishing changes of fame and fortune, from a glittering Bengal palace to an Australian sheep farm. Lovingly researched and meticulously told, The Last Prince of Bengal is notable for its candid revelations of British colonial attitudes and hypocrisies across two centuries. A rich, delightful and unexpectedly thought-provoking saga.' -- Richard Holmes Lyn Innes explores her ancestors' history in moving detail, capturing the tragic story of the dethroned princes of Bengal who had to make their lives in foreign lands, marked forever by the harsh legacy of Empire.'-- Shrabani Basu, author of Victoria and Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant
Download or read book Churchill s Secret War written by Madhusree Mukerjee and published by Penguin Random House India Private Limited. This book was released on 2018-03-21 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winston Churchill has been venerated as a resolute statesman and one of the great political minds of the last century. But, as Madhusree Mukerjee reveals in this groundbreaking historical investigation, his deep-seated bias against Indians precipitated one of the world's greatest man-made disasters -- the Bengal Famine of 1943 -- resulting in the deaths of over four million Indians. Combining meticulous research with a vivid narrative, Churchill's Secret War places this overlooked tragedy into the larger context of World War II, India's freedom struggle and Churchill's legacy.
Download or read book The Legacy of Vai avism in Colonial Bengal written by Ferdinando Sardella and published by . This book was released on 2019-02-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a focused examination of the Bengali Vaiṣṇava tradition in its manifold forms in the pivotal context of British colonialism in South Asia. Bringing together scholars from across the disciplines of social and intellectual history, philology, theology, and anthropology to systematically investigate Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal, this book highlights the significant roles--religious, social, and cultural--that a prominent Hindu devotional current played in the lives of wide and diverse sections of colonial Bengali society. Not only does the book thereby enrich our understanding of the history and development of Bengali Vaiṣṇavism, but it also sheds valuable new light on the texture and dynamics of colonial Hinduism beyond the discursive and social-historical parameters of an entrenched Hindu "Renaissance" paradigm. A landmark in the burgeoning field of Bengali Vaiṣṇava studies, this book will be of interest to scholars of modern Hinduism, religion, and colonial South Asian social and intellectual history.
Download or read book Nightrunners of Bengal written by John Masters and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 1951 with total page 3 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
