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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]

Through the work of amateur archaeologist Kalidas Datta, this paper explores an alternative view of archaeology in India. Datta's writings, produced between the late 192os and the early 196os, reconstruct the regional history of the Sundarbans, a region lying in the south 24 Parganas, West Bengal, in eastern India. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the crystallization of a nationalist reaction against British colonial rule. Datta's publications, produced outside the institutional structure of the Archaeological Survey of India, the University of Calcutta, and the local societies dedicated to promoting Bengali history and archaeology, can be used to reveal how a geographical region was transformed into a cultural entity in pre- and post-independent Bengal. This paper explores whether this transformation led to the formation of a distinct regional identity and to what extent this regional identity was important when considering the professional institutional efforts to create an overarching Bengali history and identity. These queries are situated in the backdrop of early twentieth-century developments in the intellectual milieu of Bengal. Although framed in regional terms, these developments have wider implications for understanding Indian nationhood, during a period when nation states in much of Asia and the Middle East were emerging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), urban Bengali Muslim educator and writer, placing her in the wider context of women organising themselves in associations to create social change through education for women, in the province of undivided Bengal in colonial India, from c. 1900 to c. 1932. A subject of the British Indian Empire, Rokeya, and many of her colleagues, wrote back to the empire against both colonialism and patriarchy, and created innovative educational discourses and practices. The history of education is inscribed not merely in the formal school that Rokeya founded, but in her larger career as writer and builder of women's associations. An analysis of the enmeshing of women's writing and women's networks thus yields a creative, nuanced history of women's education. This paper also connects micro-histories and macro-histories of women's education, correlating macro-level data about Indian non-governmental agency in advancing female education with the work of individual figures such as Rokeya. The paper analyses Rokeya's novella Padmarag (“The Ruby”), showing that the integrated paradigm of women's educational and welfarist work found here has many similarities with the actual educational-welfarist work done by women such as Ramabai, Sarala Ray, or Abala Bose. Through her activities and writing, often made in alliance with other educating women such as Sarala, Rokeya gave voice to ideologies and views widely at variance with conservative Indian nationalists and hegemonic British colonial officialdom. The paper also shows that women of different races and religions formed networks and alliances, in the transnational British Empire, to further women's emancipation and education, in bodies such as All India Women's Conference and Bengal Women's Education League. The paper recognises how much women such as Rokeya were able to actually be and actually do in achieving social change in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the assumptions and processes involved in identifying historically distinctive plant identities by their Latin botanical names. By following late-colonial efforts to identify a medicinal herb mentioned in some versions of the Ramayana, this paper argues for a historicist analysis of the process of “retro-botanizing.” In so doing, it also distinguishes between two different forms of “tradition,” the “factualized” and “embedded.” Finally, it blurs the allegedly watertight distinction between historical and mythic pasts. Instead of trying to distinguish these pasts ontologically, I argue that it is more productive to see specific pasts in relation to the sorts of futures they produce, that is, their respective historicities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]