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The article discusses the pan-Asianist predilections and anti-nationalist of Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore and the transformation of Bengali towards a vernacular literature in China. Topics include the vernacular comparativism observed by Tagore during his visit in the country in 1924, his story about literature and language, and the categories he used in his 1917 essay.

A literary criticism of several works by writer Jhumpa Lahiri is presented. The article includes the book "The Namesake" and the short stories "Going Ashore" and "Once in a Lifetime." It explores the nature, meanings, and effects of death among the diasporic Bengali characters in her fiction. Details related to the themes of naming, burial, and memory are presented. Other topics include migration and tombstones.

This paper explores the nature and understandings of history, or itihasa/Purana, in eighteenth-century India using two Mangalkabya narratives. These materials belong to a large genre of performance narratives, usually devoted to eulogizing various deities, that were produced in Bengal for several centuries. The paper illustrates how a "traditional" genre such as the Mangalkabya was effectively used to articulate contingent political and cultural preoccupations. The narratives studied here show that the historical experiences and contexts mirrored in them were derived from Mughal rule over Bengal and large parts of India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The paper seeks to historicize and contextualize the shifts noticeable in these narratives and to engage with the notion that premodern, precolonial India lacked a sense of history molded by contemporary material and cultural imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To situate the argument it is important to look at women's literature linked to the reform of Muslim domestic space in colonial India. In a much-cited work, writer Partha Chatterjee shows how Bengali nationalists sought to close the domestic space to colonial penetration through constructing the categories of home and the world. He argues that the issue of "female emancipation" disappears from the public agenda of nationalist discourse because the nationalists refused to negotiate with the colonial power on the women's question and the "inner" space. But as much as Indian nationalists resisted the penetration of the inner space by colonial discourse, the changes they advocated were always a reflection of the outer public domain.