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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.
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.
This book serves as the corridor to one’s ‘self’. It began as a humble attempt to interrogate the performance history of Swadeshi Bengal. The burgeoning public space and audibility of voices hitherto unheard presented a two-way problem, for the colonisers, as well as for the colonised. The thinking mind that hid behind a facade of obedience suddenly appeared before all. The transparent veil separating the hidden from the manifest was torn apart. In the context of swadeshi and boycott agitation, performative spaces like theatre, jatra, and songs did not just serve as a forum for disseminating the notions of nationhood put forward by the intellectuals. The ideas gained a life of their own once they were placed in the performative space. Encompassing both the performer and the audience/recipient of the ideas, the notion underwent a change at various planes of consciousness. The notion of nation, as disseminated by the performances, acquired a different meaning at the level of enactment, and attained an entirely new substance when received by the audience. None of these exchanges occurred in complete passivity of any one party present in the performative space. Consequently, the emergent emotion of nationhood developed as a nuanced image of ‘self’. This book has tried to locate the beginning of that emotion of national ‘self’.
This volume serves as the corridor to one's 'self'. It began as a humble attempt to interrogate the performance history of Swadeshi Bengal. The burgeoning public space and audibility of voices hitherto unheard presented a 2-way problem, for the colonisers, as well as for the colonised.
Articles with reference to Bengal, India, and erstwhile East Bengal (Pakistan), now Bangladesh.
This work claims that there were many different nationalisms in colonial Bengal. It shows that Bengali Muslims were not opposed to Hindu-Muslim unity, but keen to work on this unity on a regional level. It also shows that Bengali Hindu nationalism was also not a homogeneous body of thought.
One of the principal claims of the nationalist ideology in colonial India was to unite various groups and interests into a singular political and ideological system in order to create a common national platform against the British. However, the nationalist agenda faced a grave dilemma on this count, because the real or perceived elements of 'difference' within the society constantly challenged the ideas of a singular nation-hood. Nationalist discourse and politics, therefore, suffered from the tension between the indivisibility of the national interest on the one hand, and the disparateness of various community, class or caste interests on the other. Focusing mainly on religious differences, my thesis explores this dilemma in the context of Bengali nationalism between the Swadeshi movement (1905) and the Independence and Partition (1947). Through a study of the ideological formulations and political experimentations of the Bengali Muslims and Bengali Hindus, I show that the nationalist predicament is to be understood in terms of the controversies around the questions of national sovereignty and the principles of representation for a national-democratic society. As a consequence of the contesting ideas on these key issues, there emerged multiple visions of the nation, which continued to negotiate throughout this era. The nation envisaged by C.R. Das, Fazlul Huq, Abul Hashim and many other Bengali political and intellectual leaders was different from the Congress notion of a centralized nation-state of India. The Pakistan movement in Bengal was primarily based on such alternative ideas of the post-colonial state, with a demand for greater decentralization and fair representation of different communities and groups at all levels of the state and society. Central to these alternative nationalisms was a strong sense of regional patriotism, which actually opened up negotiating grounds for resolving the riddles of representation and sovereignty in Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century.
This work explores some of the constitutive elements in the life and mind of Bengal in the twentieth century. The author addresses some frequently unasked questions about the history of modern Bengal. In what way was twentieth-century Bengal different from 'Renaissance' Bengal of the late-nineteenth century? How was a regional identity consciousness redefined? Did the lineaments of politics in Bengal differ from the pattern in the rest of India? What social experiences drove the Muslim community's identity perception? How did Bengal cope with such crises as the impact of World War II, the famine of 1943 and the communal clashes that climaxed with the Calcutta riots of 1946? The author has chosen a significant period in the history of the region and draws on a wealth of sources archival and published documents, mainstream dailies, a host of rare Bengali magazines, memoirs and the literature of the time to tell his story. Looking closely at the momentous changes taking place in the region's economy, politics and socio-cultural milieu in the historically transformative years 1920-47, this book highlights myriad issues that cast a shadow on the decades that followed, arguably till our times.