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This article explores the relationship between historical consciousness and colonial Bengali religious thought, arguing that though critical historical consciousness may be considered unique to the colonial period, it did not seize Bengali bhadraloka religious thought as comprehensively as it is often believed to have done. It does so by examining the thought of Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinod, a prominent Bengali bhadraloka Vaiṣṇava leader of the period. In his earliest major Vaiṣṇava work, the Kṛṣṇa-saṁhitā, we find Bhaktivinod addressing the modern concern for history and its relation to the mythical narratives of purānic texts. By highlighting (i) evident tensions within the text, and (ii) significant revisions made to a later edition of the text, the article attempts to problematise the notion that critical historical consciousness is a definitive marker of rupture between pre-colonial and colonial religious thought in Bengal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By referencing Nikolai Gogol's ‘The Overcoat’ (1842) in her 2003 novel The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri suggests a further level to her work that has not yet been uncovered by critics, who have written chiefly of her depictions of the difficult Bengali immigrant experience. Both Gogol and Lahiri share a similar preoccupation with the notion of the ‘inbetween’. For Lahiri's characters, exile from one's birth or traditional culture results in a state of limbo that is not necessarily a negative condition, but can be one of potential freedom. For Gogol's Akakii, exiled from life (i.e. a ghost), limbo also turns out to be particularly liberating, a state of (uncanny) power that allows him to take revenge on those who tormented him while he was still alive. This notion of inbetweenness has some parallels with the Lacanian notion of Antigone's condition of being ‘entre-deux-morts’, a powerful interstitial state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Empirical analysis of any natural language needs to be substantiated with the statistical findings because without adequate knowledge from statistics any linguistic study can fall into the quicksand of mistaken data handling and false observation. Recent introduction of various sub-disciplines (computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, forensic linguistics, applied linguistics, lexicology, stylometrics, lexicography, and language teaching, etc.) requires various statistical results of language properties to understand the language as well as to design sophisticated tools and software for language technology. Keeping this in mind, we present here some simple frequency counts of characters found in the Bangla text corpus. Also, we empirically evaluate their functional behaviours in the language with close reference to the corpus. Here we verify previously made observations, as well as make some new observations required for various works of language technology in Bangla. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines levels of physical and mental health and the relationship between them among elderly Bengalis and Somalis living in Tower Hamlets, London, England. Determinants of anxiety, depression and life satisfaction; Prevalence of chronic health problems; Disability in activities of daily living; Physical health as determinants of psychological well-being among elderly people.