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This paper investigates some key questions regarding the socio-cultural implications of a relatively understudied print media, the literary miscellany, its production and consumption in early twentieth century British Bengal. Through a study of Ramananda Chattopadhyay's Prabāsī, a major literary journal that set the trend of sacitra māsik patrikā or illustrated monthly magazine in Bāṅglā, its literary innovations and editorial interventions, this paper explores how periodical reading and the notions of aesthetics and culture that it cultivated became intimately tied up with questions of middle class identity and class differentiation. It shows how this pioneering sacitra patrikā came to command a literary and visual space that, by the time of the Swadeshi years, was conceived as co-extensive with the future sovereign nation. Problematizing notions of a quotidian practice like leisure-reading that had become integral to the lifestyles of an expanding middle class, this study shows how Prabāsī not only lent new meanings to ideas of sustained interest and participation in public life amongst its readers, but that it also represented a self-consciously, high-brow cultural sensitivity that the Bengali bhadralok were to claim and safeguard as their own. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The creation of Assam as a new province in 1874 and the transfer of Sylhet from Bengal to Assam provided a new twist in the shaping of the northeastern region of India. Sylhet remained part of Assam from 1874 to 1947, which had significant consequences in this frontier locality. This paper re-examines archival sources on political mobilization, rereads relevant autobiographical texts, and reviews oral evidence to discover the ‘experienced’ history of the region as distinct from the ‘imagined’ one. The sub-text of partition (Sylhet) is more intriguing than the main text (Bengal), because events in Sylhet offer us a micro-level study. Generations of historians—writing mostly in Bengali and relying on colonial archives—have tended to overlook the mindset of the people of Sylhet. This paper, on the basis of an examination of combined sources, argues that the new province was implicated in overlapping histories, across Bengal-Assam borders. The voice of the indigenous—mostly Hindus but partly Muslim—elites were dominant from 1874 onwards. However, the underdogs—particularly ‘pro-Pakistani’ dalits (lower-caste Hindus) and madrasa-educated ‘pro-Indian’ maulvis—emerged as crucial players in the referendum of 1947. Hardly any serious study, however, has focused on the Sylhet referendum—a defining moment in the region. This study of the Sylhet referendum will reveal a new dimension to the multiple responses to these issues and provide a glimpse of the ‘communal psyche’ of the people in this frontier district, rather than a binary opposition between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ forces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines themes related to cooking, food, nutrition, and the relationship between dietary practice and health in late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century Bengal, and argues that food and cuisine represented a vibrant site on which a complex rhetorical struggle between colonialism and nationalism was played out. Insofar as they carried symbolic meanings and 'civilisational attributes', cooking and eating transcended their functionality and became cultural practices, with a strong ideological-pedagogical content. The Bengali/Indian kitchen, so strongly reviled in European colonialist discourses as a veritable purgatory, became a critically important symbolic space in the emerging ideology of domesticity during the colonial period. The gastronomic excesses of gluttonous British officials--crucial in asserting the physical superiority of a 'masculine' Raj--became an object of ridicule in Bengali culinary texts, signifying the grossness of a materialistic . The cooking and eating of food thus became deeply implicated in the cultural politics of bhadralok nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]