Datte's deft intermingling of western and eastern literary traditions brought about a sea change in South Asian literature. His masterpiece is now accessible to readers of English in this translation, complete with introduction, notes and a glossary.
Bangla (Bengali), an Eastern Indo-Aryan Language, is the national language of Bangladesh with 150 million speakers and the state language of Paschim Banga (West Bengal) in India with 90 million speakers. There are sizeable communities of Bengalis scattered all over the world. Altogether, the number of native speakers make Bangla the fifth or sixth largest language in the world. Like Hindi and other South Asian languages, Bangla has subject-object-verb word order, postpositions, causative and compound verbs. Unlike Hindi it has no gender. This volume presents a systematic overview of the language, from the sound system to parts of speech, syntactic categories to reduplicative features and some short text passages. The book is written in transliteration throughout to provide ease and convenience to non-Bengali as well as to Bengali linguists and students. In order to connect linguistic analysis with the living language, the book is furnished with plenty of real language examples, demonstrating the spirit, grace and wit of the Bangla language.
A unique autobiography that provides an incomparable insight into the mind of a genius The Renaissance man of modern India, Rabindranath Tagore put his country on the literary map of the world when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. My Life in My Words is, quite literally, Tagore on Tagore. Uma Das Gupta draws upon the vast repertoire of Tagore’s writings to create a vivid portrait of the life and times of one of India’s most influential cultural icons. The result is a rare glimpse into the world of Tagore: his family of pioneering entrepreneurs who shaped his worldview; the personal tragedies that influenced some of his most eloquent verse; his groundbreaking work in education and social reform; his constant endeavour to bring about a synthesis of the East and the West and his humanitarian approach to politics; and his rise to the status of an international poet. Meticulously researched and sensitively edited, this unique autobiography provides an incomparable insight into the mind of a genius.
This book critically examines the cultural desire for anglicisation of the Indian middle class in the context of postcolonial India. It looks at the history of anglicised self-fashioning as one of the major responses of the Indian middle class to British colonialism. The book explores the rich variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings that document the attempts by the Indian middle class to innovatively interpret their personal histories, their putative racial histories, and the history of India to appropriate the English language and lay claim to an “English” identity. It discusses this unique quest for “Englishness” by reading the works of authors like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Cornelia Sorabji, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Dom Moraes, and Salman Rushdie. An important intervention, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, Indian English literature, South Asian studies, cultural studies, and English literature in general.
This Volume, The First To Appear In The Ten Volume Series Published By The Sahitya Akademi, Deals With A Fascinating Period, Conspicuous By The Growing Complexities Of Multilingualism, Changes In The Modes Of Literary Transmission And In The Readership And Also By The Dominance Of The English Language As An Instrument Of Power In Indian Society.