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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.

This paper details the history of the concept of Pakistan as debated by Bengali intellectuals and literary critics from 1940–1947. Historians of late colonial South Asia and analysts of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab along with colonial Indian ‘Muslim minority’ provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual aspects of Bengali conceptions of the Pakistan idea. When Bengal has come into focus, the spotlight has centred on politicians like Fazlul Huq or Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy. This paper aims to provide a corrective to this lacuna by analyzing Bengali Muslim conceptualizations of the idea of Pakistan. Bengali Muslim thinkers, such as Abul Mansur Ahmed, Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, and Farrukh Ahmed, blended concepts of Pakistan inside locally grounded histories of the Bengali language and literature and worked within disciplines of geography and political economy. Many Bengali Muslim writers from 1940 to 1947 creatively integrated concepts of Pakistan in poetry, updating an older Bengali literary tradition begun in earlier generations. Through a discussion of the social history of its emergence along with the role of geography, political thought, and poetry, this paper discusses the significance of ‘Pak-Bangla’ cultural nationalism within late colonial South Asian history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes how the construction of a national ideology in Bangladesh has been achieved through a style of majoritarianism based on “positional dominance.” This has resulted in the construction of a national identity that is based on a particular form of Bengali identity that subsumes and indeed delegitimizes other claims to identity within the state, including claims made by indigenous communities to their own distinctive, place-based identity. Although a formal peace treaty has been signed, peace remains elusive due to the cultural hegemony of Bengalis over the indigenous peoples in the name of the supremacy of the national state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, the history of modern Indian wrestling – or kushti – has begun to receive scholarly attention. Most accounts agree that the last decades of the nineteenth century saw the coming of the modern form of this ancient Indian sport, with Indian wrestlers emerging from the confines of their akharas and fighting with their Western counterparts. But while there are some scholarly accounts of north Indian wrestling, and Gama in particular, the rest of the country has not fared well. What has also been lacking is a perspective that considers wrestling as one of the many cultures of the body which characterised the nationalist phase in Indian history, dating from roughly the end of the nineteenth century till the third decade of the twentieth. During this time, a kind of muscular nationalism was beginning to gain ground in Bengal. Fed up of being stigmatised as a ‘frail and effeminate’ race, Bengalis – both men and women – began to participate in various kinds of physical cultures, ranging from martial arts to gymnastics, trapeze acts to hot-air ballooning. With the rise of the swadeshi movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, akharas or gymnasiums mushroomed all over north Calcutta. In this paper, I will survey the history of such cultures in colonial Bengal, with particular reference to the figure of the wrestler Gobor Guha, who still remains the only Indian to win a world heavyweight title in wrestling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Translation involves reading and interpretation, and a translation can be seen as the reader/translator's reading of a particular text. Using the Sanskrit aesthetic concept of the sahrdaya, or the ideal reader, I argue that the translator is primarily a reader and interpreter. The paper examines three English translations of the Bengali novel Anandamath made in the same culture at different times. The first two were done at different junctures in the context of colonialist oppression - one in 1909 when the incipient nationalist movement was in its militant phase, and the other in 1941 when the movement was at its peak and eagerly awaiting the dawn of independence. The third translation was published in 2005, from a postcolonial academic location. I place the translator in the Indian context primarily as a reader (sahrdaya), and the act of translation as an individualist reading that evokes an emotional response (rasa) similar to the one evoked by the source text. These translators become 'visible' as their translations are readings that bear the stamp of their personalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging the longstanding consensus that Satyajit Ray's work is largely free of ideological concerns and notable only for its humanistic richness, this article shows with reference to representations of British colonialism and Indian nationhood that Ray's films and stories are marked deeply and consistently by a distinctively Bengali variety of liberalism. Drawn from an ongoing biographical project, it commences with an overview of the nationalist milieu in which Ray grew up and emphasizes the preoccupation with colonialism and nationalism that marked his earliest unfilmed scripts. It then shows with case studies of Kanchanjangha (1962), Charulata (1964), First Class Kamra (First-Class Compartment, 1981), Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991) and Robertsoner Ruby (Robertson's Ruby, 1992) how Ray's mature work continued to combine a strongly anti-colonial viewpoint with a shifting perspective on Indian nationhood and an unequivocal commitment to cultural cosmopolitanism. Analysing how Ray articulated his ideological positions through the quintessentially liberal device of complexly staged debates that were apparently free, but in fact closed by the scenarist/director on ideologically specific notes, this article concludes that Ray's reputation as an all-forgiving, 'everybody-has-his-reasons' humanist is based on simplistic or even tendentious readings of his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the notions of “home,” “nation” and “the world” among the Bengali-speaking families in Singapore. The forces of globalization have played a significant role in making the Bengali-speaking families transnational, first by uprooting them from Bengal, a territory now shared between Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, and then re-linking them to a complex web of relationships redefining the contours of community. The Bengali-speaking families in Singapore belong to two distinct “communities”: Bengalis from West Bengal, India who are predominantly Hindus, and Bengalis from Bangladesh who are predominantly Muslims. They formed two different “communities” not simply on the basis of differences in religion but also in terms of social networks and ties. Common language, similar food habits and love for certain cultural practices like cricket and adda, are not enough to bring them into the fold of a common Bengali community. The division in the Bengali-speaking community is influenced not so much by religion but nationalism. Nationalism, however imagined, continues to play a powerful role in the globalized world, especially among transnational communities. Yet, the two “communities,” one from Bangladesh and the other from West Bengal, are not antagonistic to one another by any means; their relationship is an ambivalent one based on a tacit principle of “civil inattention.” The situation changed in the 1990s when Bengali was introduced as a second language in Singapore, and a Bengali language school was set up thereafter. The two communities were drawn into a common physical space and a new set of social ties and networks began to emerge, opening and redrawing the boundaries of community. The paper demonstrates how nations separate a people who share a common notion of home, as well as how cosmopolitan world-views redraw the contours of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of a goddess being used to inspire young men to throw bombs may at first seem far-fetched. But what if that goddess is Kāli? Fierce Kāli - who stalks proudly through the Bengali imagination, dripping blood, scantily clad in tiger-skin and severed human body parts, slaying and devouring countless demons? Early in the twentieth century, Bengali philosopher and activist Aurobindo Ghosh (1872-1950), a key figure in the development of Indian nationalism, glimpsed the potential of Kāli-worship as a potential tool of political mobilisation to promote revolutionary terrorism, and forged a movement around the fearsome Tantric goddess that culminated in a rash of revolutionary terrorist acts against the ruling British colonial regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the way in which football as a social mirror reflected the articulation of race and nation in colonial Calcutta, India in a period of clearest nationalist upsurge against colonial rule. Explanation on how football came to represent a cultural nationalism of the Bengali people; Character, pattern and forms of footballing nationalism.

This paper takes up the discussion of a nineteenth-century theory of science-that of biological evolution-among members of the Indian National Council of Education, and in the pages of an important journal called The Dawn, publicshed from Calcutta between 1897 and 1913. it discusses how, toward the turn of the century, science was legitimated as a morally worthy endeavour among the Bengali Bhadralok community. The debate pursued in The Dawn was representative of the anxieties and aspirations of that community, which had embarked upon the project of modernity, and was the first on the Indian continent to take modern Western science seriously. The socio-political context of the debate is important, in that the nationalist struggle for freedom from British rule was gathering momentum, and received notions of progress and social evolution were open to questioning and challenge. While colonialism is a backdrop for this study, the paper's main focus is the act of cultural redefinition of modern science in a non-Western context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]