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Ecotourism, the nature based travel with emphasis on education, management, development of sustainable tourism product and activity and wellbeing of the local people is not simply a marginal activity to finance protection of the environment but it has proved to be an engine of growth in many economies of the world. Eco tourism has been recognized as the backbone of economies of many countries. North Bengal being the northern territory of West Bengal of India is fortunate for its rich ecotourism destinations. The present paper will explore the ecotourism landscape of this tract of India. It will also reflect an overview of its impact on the regional economy with six case studies. The paper will be concluded with some problems and management strategies of ecotourism activity of the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was undoubtedly a remarkable intellectual and social reformer of her time, and in recent decades, her work has rightfully found its place among writings by "exceptional," "early feminist" women from colonial India. This paper is an attempt to situate Rokeya's contribution as a writer and reformer within the larger context of debates over the "woman question" as it unfolded in discussions of Muslim intellectuals in late colonial Bengal. It proceeds from the premise that without such contextualisation, Rokeya and her work is too often cast as "out of" or "ahead of" her time, when in fact Muslim intellectuals - a number of women among them - were engaged in vibrant debates over a range of social and political issues in the first half of the twentieth century that has been marginalised within normative histories of that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of body in India is an ambiguous discursive process and this paper attempts to answer the following key questions clinched in the colonial monthly Bengali magazine Nara-Naree[Man-Woman]: What was the relationship of knowledge, power and sexuality among genders in colonial India? How was gender difference constituted in colonial Bengal? How did cloth define the disparity between nature and culture? How were the objects of consciousness regarding genders developed in social contexts? How did the surveillance and control over the body construct the "ideal sexual behavior"? How were the paradigms of health, psychology, nature, culture, science, morality, modernity, tradition and history integrated into the gender framework which assert the reconstruction of femininities, masculinities and sexualities? How did the rhetoric of body and sexuality in colonial Bengal become contested site of discourses as well as a device to construct a national and cultural identity? How did body become a tool of control and a territory for inscribing critical observations, the content to be evaluated and a device to reform the structure and boundary between imperial and national binaries? How did the subcultures and trans gender identities form new sexual attitudes subverting the homogeneous and hegemonic hierarchy in the east-west relations and transnational settings? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]