Download or read book Notions of Nationhood in Bengal Perspectives on Samaj c 1867 1905 written by Swarupa Gupta and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-06-24 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reopens the debate on colonial nationalisms, going beyond ‘derivative’, ‘borrowed’, political and modernist paradigms. It introduces the conceptual category of samaj to demonstrate how indigenous socio-cultural origins in Bengal interacted with late-colonial discourses to produce the notion of a nation. Samaj (a historical society and an idea-in-practice) was a site for reconfiguring antecedents and negotiating fragmentation. Drawing on indigenous sources, this study shows how caste, class, ethnicity, region and community were refracted to conceptualise wider unities. The mapping of cultural continuities through change facilitates a more nuanced investigation of the ontology of nationhood, seeing it as related to, but more than political nationalism. It outlines a fresh paradigm for recalibrating postcolonial identities, offering interpretive strategies to mediate fragmentation.
Download or read book Cultural Constellations Place Making and Ethnicity in Eastern India c 1850 1927 written by Swarupa Gupta and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cultural Constellations, Place-Making and Ethnicity in Eastern India, c. 1850-1927, Swarupa Gupta outlines a fresh paradigm moving beyond stereotypical representations of eastern India as a site of ethnic fragmentation. The book traces unities by exploring intersections between (1) cultural constellations; (2) place-making and (3) ethnicity. Centralising place-making, it tells the story of how people made places, mediating caste / religious / linguistic contestations. It offers new meanings of ‘region’ in Eastern Indian and global contexts by showing how an interregional arena comprising Bengal, Assam and Orissa was forged. Using historical tracts, novels, poetry and travelogues, the book argues that commonalities in Eastern India were linked to imaginings of Indian nationhood. The analysis contains interpretive strategies for mediating federalist separatisms and fragmentation in contemporary India.
Download or read book Culinary Culture in Colonial India written by Utsa Ray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book utilizes cuisine to understand the construction of the colonial middle class in Bengal who indigenized new culinary experiences as a result of colonial modernity. This process of indigenization developed certain social practices, including imagination of the act of cooking as a classic feminine act and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. The process of indigenization was an aesthetic choice that was imbricated in the upper caste and patriarchal agenda of the middle-class social reform. However, in these acts of imagination, there were important elements of continuity from the pre-colonial times. The book establishes the fact that Bengali cuisine cannot be labeled as indigenist although it never became widely commercialized. The point was to cosmopolitanize the domestic and yet keep its tag of 'Bengaliness'. The resultant cuisine was hybrid, in many senses like its makers.
Download or read book Reclaiming Karbala written by Epsita Halder and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-18 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysing an extensive range of texts and publications across multiple genres, formats and literary lineages, Reclaiming Karbala studies the emergence and formation of a viable Muslim identity in Bengal over the late-19th century through the 1940s. Beginning with an explanation of the tenets of the battle of Karbala, this multi-layered study explores what it means to be Muslim, as well as the nuanced relationship between religion, linguistic identity and literary modernity that marks both Bengaliness and Muslimness in the region.This book is an intervention into the literature on regional Islam in Bengal, offering a complex perspective on the polemic on religion and language in the formation of a jatiya Bengali Muslim identity in a multilingual context. This book, by placing this polemic in the context of intra-Islamic reformist conflict, shows how all these rival reformist groups unanimously negated the Karbala-centric commemorative ritual of Muharram and Shī‘ī intercessory piety to secure a pro-Caliphate sensibility as the core value of the Bengali Muslim public sphere.
Download or read book Pilgrimage and Politics in Colonial Bengal written by Imma Ramos and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviving Sati's corpse: Mother India tours and Hindutva in the twenty-first century -- Bibliography -- Index
Download or read book Empire and Leprosy in Colonial Bengal written by Apalak Das and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leprosy, widely mentioned in different religious texts and ancient scriptures, is the oldest scourge of humankind. Cases of leprosy continue to be found across the world as the most crucial health problem, especially in India and Brazil. There are a few maladies that eventually turn into social disquiets, and leprosy is undoubtedly one of them. This book traces the dynamics of the interface between colonial policy on leprosy and religion, science and society in Bengal from the mid-nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth centuries. It explores how the idea of ‘degeneration’ and the ‘desolates’ shaped the colonial legality of segregating ‘lepers’ in Indian society. The author also delves into the treatments of leprosy that were often transfigured from ‘original’ English texts, written by American or British medical professionals, into Bengali. Rich in archival resources, this book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Indian history, public health, social history, medical humanities, medical history and colonial history.
Download or read book The Changing World of Caste and Hierarchy in Bengal written by Sudarshana Bhaumik and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-26 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the prevalent assumptions of caste, hierarchy and social mobility in pre-colonial and colonial Bengal. It studies the writings of colonial ethnographers, Orientalist scholars, Christian missionaries and pre-colonial literary texts like the Mangalkavyas to show how the concept of caste emerged and argues that the jati order in Bengal was far from being a rigidly reified structure, but one which had room for spatial and social mobility. The volume highlights the processes through which popular myths and beliefs of the lower caste orders of Bengal were Sanskritized. It delineates the linkages between sedantized peasant culture and the emergence of new agricultural castes in colonial Bengal. Moreover, the author discusses a wide spectrum of issues like marginality and hierarchy, the spread of Brahmanical hegemony, the creation of deities and the process of Sanskritization, popular Saivism, the cult of Manasa in Bengal and the revolt of 1857 and the caste question. Rich in archival sources, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of colonial history, Indian history, political sociology, caste studies, exclusion studies, cultural studies, social history, cultural history and South Asian studies, especially those interested in undivided Bengal.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism Volume 2 Nationalism s Fields of Interaction written by Cathie Carmichael and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 951 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. In volume II, leading scholars in their fields explore the dynamics of nationhood and nationalism's interactions with a wide variety of cultural practices and social institutions – in addition to the phenomenon's crucial political dimensions. The relationships between imperialism and nationhood/nationalism and between major world religions and ethno-national identities are among the key themes explained and explored. The wide range of case studies from around the world brings a truly global, comparative perspective to a field whose study was long constrained by Eurocentric assumptions.
Download or read book Women Speak Nation written by Panchali Ray and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-07-24 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics. The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Akshay Kumar Dutta and Public Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal written by Sumit Chakrabarti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Locates Akshay Kumar Datta as one of the foundational figures of intellectual refashioning in nineteenth-century Bengal.
Download or read book Words of Her Own written by Maroona Murmu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Words of Her Own situates the experiences and articulations of emergent women writers in nineteenth-century Bengal through an exploration of works authored by them. Based on a spectrum of genres—such as autobiographies, novels, and travelogues—this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the dawn of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors at that time. Murmu explores the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, and religion in these works. Reading these texts within a specific milieu, Murmu sets out to rectify the essentialist conception of women’s writings being a monolithic body of works that displays a firmly gendered form and content, by offering rich insights into the complex world of subjectivities of women in colonial Bengal. In attempting to do so, this book opens up the possibility of reconfiguring mainstream history by questioning the scholarly conceptualization of patriarchy being omnipotent enough to shape the intricacies of gender relations, resulting in the flattening of self-fashioning by women writers. The book contends that there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tastes set by male literati, thereby creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.
Download or read book A Hygienic City Nation written by Nabaparna Ghosh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Calcutta, the centre of British imperial power in India, figures in scholarship as the locus of colonialism and the hotbed of anti-colonial nationalist movements. Yet, historians have largely ignored how the city shaped these movements. A Hygienic City-Nation is the first academic work that examines everyday urban formations in the colonial city that informed the broad global forces of imperialism, nationalism, and urbanism, and were, in turn, shaped by them. Drawing on previously unexplored archives of the Calcutta Improvement Trust and neighbourhood clubs, the author uncovers hidden stories of the city at the everyday level of neighbourhoods or paras, where kinship-like ties, caste, religion, and ethnicity constituted new urban modernity. Ghosh focuses on an emergent discourse on Hindu spatial hygiene that powered nationalist pedagogic efforts to train city dwellers in conduct fit for the city-nation. In such pedagogic efforts, upper-caste Bengalis were pitted against the lower-caste working poor and featured as ideal inhabitants of the city: the citizen.
Download or read book The Curious Trajectory of Caste in West Bengal Politics written by Ayan Guha and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-09-26 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Curious Trajectory of Caste in West Bengal Politics: Chronicling Continuity and Change critically engages with the political dynamics of caste in West Bengal and explores the reasons for the relative insignificance of caste as a political category in the state.
Download or read book The Mortal God written by Milinda Banerjee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores how colonial India imagined human and divine figures to battle the nature and locus of sovereignty.
Download or read book The Idea of Creativity paperback written by Karen Bardsley and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-03-25 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventeen philosophers, scientists and artists consider questions about the intriguing idea of creativity: Is creativity essentially mysterious? Is creativity essentially inspirational or rationalistic? What role does skill play in creativity? What are the criteria of creativity? Should we assign logical priority to creative persons, creative processes, or creative products? How do forms of creativity relate to different domains of human activity? How does creativity relate to self-transformation? How does our knowledge of the circumstances of creativity effect our appreciation of its products? Can a recipient of a creative work also be a creator of it? Contributors include: Margaret Boden, Larry Briskman, John M. Carvalho, David Davies, Berys Gaut,Rom Harré, Carl R. Hausman, Albert Hofstadter, Arthur Koestler, Michael Krausz, Peter Lamarque, Thomas Leddy, Paisley Livingston, Michael Polany, Dean Keith Simonton, and Francis Sparshott.
Download or read book Imperial Technology and Native Agency written by Aparajita Mukhopadhyay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the impact of railways on colonial Indian society from the commencement of railway operations in the mid-nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. The book represents a historiographical departure. Using new archival evidence as well as travelogues written by Indian railway travellers in Bengali and Hindi, this book suggests that the impact of railways on colonial Indian society were more heterogeneous and complex than anticipated either by India’s colonial railway builders or currently assumed by post-colonial scholars. At a related level, the book argues that this complex outcome of the impact of railways on colonial Indian society was a product of the interaction between the colonial context of technology transfer and the Indian railway passengers who mediated this process at an everyday level. In other words, this book claims that the colonised ‘natives’ were not bystanders in this process of imposition of an imperial technology from above. On the contrary, Indians, both as railway passengers and otherwise influenced the nature and the direction of the impact of an oft-celebrated ‘tool of Empire’. The historiographical departures suggested in the book are based on examining railway spaces as social spaces – a methodological index influenced by Henri Lefebvre’s idea of social spaces as means of control, domination and power.
Download or read book Global Tantra written by Julian Strube and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beyond introducing the subject matter and critically surveying the state of scholarship, this introduction offers a substantial theoretical and methodological elucidation of the book's approach that is also relevant for readers not strictly interested in the specialized subject. Combining perspectives from religious studies, global history, South Asian studies, and the study of esotericism, the foundations of global religious history are discussed both in abstraction and in light of the source material. This especially considers historiographical challenges such as (post)colonialism, Eurocentrism, or Orientalism, as well as issues such as the blurry meaning of "global connections" and differentiations between the global, regional, and local. Leading themes such as the contested meaning of tradition, revival, reform, and modernity are scrutinized, as are the relationship and meanings of religion, science, esotericism, and nationalism that remain the subject of scholarly debate. Global religious history makes proposals for resolving such debates by eliding disciplinary boundaries"--
