Search

This paper explores the culture of taste in the production of an urban, Hindu, Bengali middle class in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Bengal/India. It analyzes how the Bengali middle class, the bhadralok, attempted to construct a "doxa" of gastronomy in order to subsume a dominant position for itself and to classify hierarchically other classes and social groups. The aspirations of this class as the future guardians of an incipient nation were in reality a politics of self-identity, which was based on ideas of a cultural exclusivity. This politics of self-identity for the Bengali middle class were inextricably inter-woven with issues of modernity, nationalism, and colonialism. Through my analysis, I stress the importance of the "historical" or the "collective", particularly in the context of formation of the bhadralok, as a dominant class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the meanings, consequences, and emergent issues that arise from the 1947 Partition of Bengal as viewed through the analytic of displacement. The central themes addressed include state formation and nation building as the Partition was concurrent with an anti-colonial struggle that led to the establishment of two independent states, India and Pakistan. Highlighting the place of Bengal at this historical juncture, I show how East Bengali refugees in Calcutta complicate state and nation formation by unsettling notions of religious and ethnic identification and experiences of belonging. Their shared language, syncretic Bengali traditions, involvement in a collective nationalist struggle, and often common experiences, unmask the contradictions of the state and nation-making projects. These contradictions make processes of exclusion and inclusion, social rights, and boundary maintenance key sites of negotiation and part of a process that is not completed with the political establishment of nation-state boundaries. The interpretation offered here suggests that varied negotiations, networks, and pathways of displacement shape loss, resettlement, and rehabilitation among different classes of migrant and that national subject formation is a contingent process that did not, and cannot, depend upon fixed identities and identifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to understand ways in which gender and racially defined communal ideologies worked simultaneously to produce Muslim women in colonial Bengal as invisible within nationalist historiography. It argues that the negative representations of Muslim women underpinned the construction of other identity categories in colonial Bengal, and highlights the participation of Hindu/Brahmo women writers in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]