Download or read book Emergence of Modern Bengali Elite written by Dipak Kumar Aich and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India written by Eleanor Newbigin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1955 and 1956 the Government of India passed four Hindu Law Acts to reform and codify Hindu family law. Scholars have understood these acts as a response to growing concern about women's rights but, in a powerful re-reading of their history, this book traces the origins of the Hindu law reform project to changes in the political-economy of late colonial rule. The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India considers how questions regarding family structure, property rights and gender relations contributed to the development of representative politics, and how, in solving these questions, India's secular and state power structures were consequently drawn into a complex and unique relationship with Hindu law. In this comprehensive and illuminating resource for scholars and students, Newbigin demonstrates the significance of gender and economy to the history of twentieth-century democratic government, as it emerged in India and beyond.
Download or read book Nationalism written by John Hutchinson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2000 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive collection of articles on the subject of nationalism. It covers concepts and definitions, forms of nationalism worldwide, and nationalism and culture, and feminism and politics.
Download or read book A Story of Ambivalent Modernization in Bangladesh and West Bengal written by Pranab Chatterjee and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book details the evolution of Bengali culture (in both Bangladesh and West Bengal) since antiquity and argues for its modernization. Originally peripheral to Hindu civilization based in North India, Bengali culture was subjected to various forms of Sanskritization. Centuries of invasions (1204-1757) resulted most notably in the Islamization of Bengal. Often there were conflicts between Sanskritization and Islamization. Later colonization of Bengal by Britain (1757) led to a process of Anglicization, which created a new middle class in Bengal that, in turn, created a form of elitism among the Bengali Hindu upper caste. After British rule ended (1947), Bengali culture lost its elitist status in South Asia and has undergone severe marginalization. Political instability and economic insufficiency, as reflected by many quantitative and qualitative indicators, are common and contribute to pervasive unemployment, alienation, vigilantism, and instability in the entire region. A Story of Ambivalent Modernization in Bangladesh and West Bengal is appropriate not only for Bengali intellectuals and scholars but for sociologists, political scientists, cultural anthropologists, historians, and others interested in a case study of how and why a given culture becomes derailed from its path toward modernization.
Download or read book History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self written by Aparna Devare and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the contentious debates surrounding historical evidence and history writing between secularists and Hindu nationalists as a starting point, this book seeks to understand the origins of a growing historical consciousness in contemporary India, especially amongst Hindus. The broad question it poses is: Why has ‘history’ become such an important site of identity, conflict and self-definition amongst modern Hindus, especially when Hinduism is known to have been notoriously impervious to history? As modern ideas regarding notions of history came to India with colonialism, it turns to the colonial period as the ‘moment of encounter’ with such ideas. The book examines three distinct moments in the Hindu self through the lives and writings of lower-caste public figure Jotiba Phule, ‘moderate’ nationalist M. G. Ranade and Hindu nationalist V. D. Savarkar. Through a close reading of original writings, speeches and biographical material, it is demonstrated that these three individuals were engaged with a modern historical and rationalist approach. However, the same material is also used to argue that Phule and Ranade viewed religion as living, contemporaneous and capable of informing both their personal and political lives. Savarkar, the ‘explicitly Hindu’ leader, on the contrary, held Hindu practices and traditions in contempt, confining them to historical analysis while denying any role for religion as spirituality or morality in contemporary political life. While providing some historical context, this volume highlights the philosophical/ political ideas and actions of the three individuals discussed. It integrates aspects of their lives as central to understanding their politics.
Download or read book Mapping the Nation written by Gopal Balakrishnan and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In nearly two decades since Samuel P. Huntingdon proposed his influential and troubling ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, nationalism has only continued to puzzle and frustrate commentators, policy analysts, and political theorists. No consensus exists concerning its identity, genesis, or future. Are we reverting to the petty nationalisms of the nineteenth century or evolving into a globalized, supranational world? Has the nation-state outlived its usefulness and exhausted its progressive and emancipatory role? Opening with powerful statements by Lord Acton and Otto Bauer—the classic liberal and socialist positions—Mapping the Nation presents a wealth of thought on thisissue: the debate between Ernest Gellner and Miroslav Hroch; Gopal Balakrishnan’s critique of Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjeeon the limitations of the Enlightenment approach to nationhood; and contributions from Michael Mann, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn, and Jürgen Habermas.
Download or read book Popular Cinema in Bengal written by Madhuja Mukherjee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry. The book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geo-political transformations, the book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialised over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding 'regional' cinema as a category, in relation to 'national' cinema models, and trace the non-linear journey of the popular via multiple (media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial change, spaces of consumption, and cinema’s meandering directions through global circuits and low-end networks. Highlighting the ever-changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of film studies and South-Asian popular culture. The chapters were originally published in the journal South Asian History and Culture.
Download or read book The Nation and Its Fragments written by Partha Chatterjee and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the prominent theorist Partha Chatterjee looks at the creative and powerful results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa that are posited not on identity but on difference with the nationalism propagated by the West. Arguing that scholars have been mistaken in equating political nationalism with nationalism as such, he shows how anticolonialist nationalists produced their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before beginning their political battle with the imperial power. These nationalists divided their culture into material and spiritual domains, and staked an early claim to the spiritual sphere, represented by religion, caste, women and the family, and peasants. Chatterjee shows how middle-class elites first imagined the nation into being in this spiritual dimension and then readied it for political contest, all the while "normalizing" the aspirations of the various marginal groups that typify the spiritual sphere. While Chatterjee's specific examples are drawn from Indian sources, with a copious use of Bengali language materials, the book is a contribution to the general theoretical discussion on nationalism and the modern state. Examining the paradoxes involved with creating first a uniquely non-Western nation in the spiritual sphere and then a universalist nation-state in the material sphere, the author finds that the search for a postcolonial modernity is necessarily linked with past struggles against modernity.
Download or read book Empire and Nation written by Partha Chatterjee and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-10 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Partha Chatterjee is one of the world's greatest living theorists on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of nationalism. Beginning in the 1980s, his work, particularly within the context of India, has served as the foundation for subaltern studies, an area of scholarship he continues to develop. In this collection, English-speaking readers are finally able to experience the breadth and substance of Chatterjee's wide-ranging thought. His provocative essays examine the phenomenon of postcolonial democracy and establish the parameters for research in subaltern politics. They include an early engagement with agrarian politics and Chatterjee's brilliant book reviews and journalism. Selections include one never-before-published essay, "A Tribute to the Master," which considers through a mock retelling of an episode from the classic Sanskrit epic, The Mahabharata, a deep dilemma in the study of postcolonial history, and several Bengali essays, now translated into English for the first time. An introduction by Nivedita Menon adds necessary context and depth, critiquing Chatterjee's ideas and their influence on contemporary political thought.
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 The New Social Theory Reader written by Steven Seidman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first anthology to thematize the dramatic upward and downward shifts that have created the new social theory, and to present this new and exciting body of work in a thoroughly trans-disciplinary manner. In this revised second edition readers are provided with a much greater range of thinkers and perspectives, including new sections on such issues as imperialism, power, civilization clash, health and performance. The first section sets out the main schools of contemporary thought, from Habermas and Honneth on new critical theory, to Jameson and Hall on cultural studies, and Foucault and Bourdieu on poststructuralism. The sections that follow trace theory debates as they become more issues-based and engaged. They are: the post-foundational debates over morality, justice and epistemological truth the social meaning of nationalism, multiculturalism and globalization identity debates around gender, sexuality, race, the self and post-coloniality. This new edition provides more ample biographical and intellectual introductions to each thinker, and substantial introductions to each of the major sections. The editors introduce the volume with a newly revised, interpretive overview of social theory today. The New Social Theory Reader is an essential, reliable guide to current theoretical debates.
Download or read book Recasting the Region written by Neilesh Bose and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an analysis of Muslim political mobilization in the late 20th century, arguing that it emerged out of a sustained engagement with Bengali intellectual and literary traditions rather than from north Indian calls for a separatist Muslim state.
Download or read book Exploring South Asian Urbanity written by Suchandra Ghosh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the typologies of cities and ideas of urbanity. Focusing specifically on cities in South Asia, it analyses the unique planning concepts, archaeology, art, culture, life, and philosophy of various cities of ancient and modern South Asia. The book explores the concept of urbanity and the idea of an ideal city; it interrogates general notions of urbanity by juxtaposing city life in various periods and geographies of South Asia. By analysing the demography, architecture, rituals, and culture of various cities, it looks at the different spatialities of these places in terms of their size, population, commerce, and philosophy as well as the reasons behind the transformation of these places into urban centres. Drawing from various archeological and literary sources, the volume includes rich details about heterogeneity, rituals, festivals, social stratification, penal systems, famines, and insurrections in ancient cities as well as modern cities like Lahore, Dhaka, and Calcutta, among many others in South Asia. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of ancient and modern history, archaeology, urban studies, urban and town planning, urban sociology, urban geography, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, ancient and medieval architecture, heritage studies, conservation studies, and South Asian studies.
Download or read book Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century written by Debashish Banerji and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore's relevance for postmodern and postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century. The volume includes contributions by leading contemporary scholars on Tagore and analyses Tagore's literature, music, theatre, aesthetics, politics and art against contemporary theoretical developments in postcolonial literature and social theory. The authors take up themes as varied as the implications of Tagore’s educational vision for contemporary India; new theoretical interpretations of gender, queer elements, feminism and subalternism in Tagore's literary and social expressions; his language use as a vehicle for a dialogue between positivism, Orientalism and other constructs in the ongoing process of globalization; the nature of the influence of Tagore's music and literature on national and cultural identity formation, particularly in Bengal and Bangladesh; and intersubjectivity and critical modernity in Tagore’s art. This volume opens up a space for Tagore’s critique and his creative innovations in present theoretical engagements.
Download or read book The Politics of Soft Hindutva written by Amod Damle and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-16 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the rise of two contrasting variants of Hindu nationalism—the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) divisive cultural nationalism and the softer, less threatening variant of Hindutva espoused by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Trinamool Congress (TMC). Historically, the overlaps between Hinduism and Islam bolstered the narrative that the Muslims were culturally inferior to the Hindus and that Hinduism was India’s unifying tradition. As a result, for many Hindus, emphasizing the distinctiveness of a minority group, especially the Muslims, represents a threat to Hindu superiority and India’s cultural integrity. With the rise of the BJP, AAP, and TMC, we witness a tussle between two strains of Hindu nativism. The BJP attempts to attract the Hindu vote by heightening the differences between Hindus and Muslims and portraying itself as the restorer of national integrity. The AAP and TMC revive a much older form of cultural nativism by downplaying the separateness of the Muslims, indicating that India is already a Hindu nation and that there is no need to persecute religious minorities. Comparing the two variants of cultural nationalism provides valuable insights into how culture matters in Indian politics.
Download or read book History and Social Development Elites in modern India written by B. M. Bhatia and published by Delhi : Vikas Publishing House. This book was released on 1974 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History of India, 18th-20th centuries.
Download or read book Literature Music and Cosmopolitanism written by Robert Fraser and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-10 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the twin arts of literature and music, supporting the notion that cosmopolitanism is the natural condition of all the arts, and that all culture - without exception - is migrant culture. It draws on examples ranging from the first to the twenty-first centuries AD, on locations as remote as Alexandria and Australia, on writers as different as Virgil and V.S.Naipaul, Arnold and Achebe, and on musicians as diverse as Bach and Bartok, Purcell and Steve Reich. Across thirteen chapters, the study explores the interpenetration of all forms of human expression, the fallacy of 'national' traditions and limiting conceptions of regional character. The result is an exploration of artistic and intellectual endeavour that is particularly welcome in the current political climate, encouraging us to view history in ways informed by our contemporary demographic and cultural concerns. Taken either as a series of interrelated case studies, or else as an evolving and sequential argument, this book is vital reading for scholars of music, literature, and cultural and social history.
