The Gopal-Rakhal Dialectic
The Gopal-Rakhal Dialectic

Author: Śibājī Bandyopādhyāẏa

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789382381556

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Literature for children is a distinctive achievement of the Bengali language. In it, we get numerous illustrations of primers that are meant to initiate reading and writing among children, poems and nursery rhymes, fables and fairy tales, prose pieces and stories, plays and novels, all of which are unique in their style and content, exceptional in their taste and flavor. Innumerable books have been produced, countless magazines have been printed and the annual Puja compilations have been put together year after year. Even when we assess the nature of ideas and beliefs, Bengali children's literature does not pall. In fact, it is a contentious site of trends and counter-trends that can be charted within inventive writings for children. Its multifarious potential was quite manifest in the colonial era and a few decades post independence. The Gopal-Rakhal Dialectic: Colonialism and Children's Literature in Bengal offers an evaluation of the strengths and possibilities of this very literature.

Bengal Muslims and Colonial Education, 1854–1947
Bengal Muslims and Colonial Education, 1854–1947

Author: Nilanjana Paul

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-03-17

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13: 1000559238

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This book examines the impact of British education policies on the Muslims of Colonial Bengal. It evaluates the student composition and curriculum of various educational institutions for Muslims in Calcutta and Dacca to show how they produced the educated Muslim middle class. The author studies the role of Muslim leaders such as Abdul Latif and Fazlul Huq in the spread of education among Muslims and looks at how segregation in education supported by the British fueled Muslim anxiety and separatism. The book analyzes the conflict of interest between Hindus and Muslims over education and employment which strengthened growing Muslim solidarity and anti- Hindu feeling, eventually leading to the demand for a separate nation. It also discusses the experiences of Muslim women at Sakhawat Memorial School, Lady Brabourne College, Eden College, Calcutta, and Dacca Universities at a time when several Brahmo and Hindu schools did not admit them. An important contribution to the study of colonial education in India, the book highlights the role of discriminatory colonial education policies and pedagogy in amplifying religious separatism. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, religion, education, Partition studies, minority studies, imperialism, colonialism, and South Asian history.

An Anthology of Contemporary Bengali Plays by Bratya Basu
An Anthology of Contemporary Bengali Plays by Bratya Basu

Author: Bratya Basu

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-06-15

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1350289442

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This anthology of six selected plays, written between 2000 and 2020 by Bratya Basu, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2021, is the first collection of Bengali plays that blends avant-garde, pop and traditional cultures with contemporary dramatic themes. The six plays, freshly translated into English, each bring a uniquely Bengali and Indian perspective to the intermingling of past and present, global and local, and magical and real in a postmodern pastiche about India today. The collection is divided into three thematic sections: 1) 'Poignant Challenges, Soulful Remorse' examines power in Indian politics, religion, and family. 2) '(In)visible Boundaries, (Un)democratic Choices' explores the relationship among democracy, nation building, and the role of women in intergenerational political struggle. 3) 'Intimately Political, Politically Intimate' navigates queer identity, mental health and the fabulation of modern Bengali life in a 21st-century India straddling the progressive politics that removed section 377 and Hindu nationalisms that stoke new conservatisms.

The Girl Child in the Life, Lore and Literature of Bengal
The Girl Child in the Life, Lore and Literature of Bengal

Author: Nivedita Sen

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-21

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1040172288

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Contemporary children’s literature in Bangla celebrates irreverent, defiant and deviant boys whose subversive doings critique the parenting and schooling they go through, while the girl child is neglected and marginalised. The rare fictional girls who show resilience and demand a normal childhood are consciously silenced, or contained and assimilated within unwritten masculinist norms. This book –a compilation of translated works of the author, critic and academic, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay –focuses on gender and childhood in Bengal. The book includes a translation of his Bangla Shishusahityer Chhoto Meyera (Little Girls in Bangla Children’s Literature), as well as a translated essay on Thakurma’ Jhuli (Grandma’s Sack), a collection of Bangla folk tales and fairytales from early twentieth century that underscores the subaltern role of adolescent female characters with hardly any agency or voice in the oral legends and folklore of Bengal. The translation of the piece ‘An Incredible Transition’ from Bandyopadhyay’s Abar Shishushiksha (On Children’s Education Again) applauds the role of Indian social reformers and British educationists in initiating women’s education in Bengal, while questioning the erasure of protagonists who are girls in the nineteenth-century primers. Interrogating gendered constructions in diverse genres of literature while revisiting the subject of female education, this book will be of interest to students of children’s literature, comparative literature, popular literature, gender studies, translation studies, culture studies and South Asian writings.

The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore
The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore

Author: Sukanta Chaudhuri

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-06-04

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 110848994X

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Discusses Tagore's uniquely varied output across literature, music, art, philosophy, history, politics, education and public affairs.

Making the 'Woman'
Making the 'Woman'

Author: Sutapa Dutta

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-13

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1003817173

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The book examines the representation of women, their agency and subjectivity and gender relations in 18th- and 19th-century India. The chapters in the volume interrogate notions and discourses of ‘women’ and ‘gender’ during the period, historically shaped by multiple and even competing actors, practices and institutions. They highlight the ‘making of the woman’ across a wide spectrum of subject areas, regions and roles and attempt to understand the contradictions and differences in social experiences and identity formations of women. The volume also deals with prevalent notions of masculinity and femininity, normative and non-conformist expressions of gender and sexual identity and epistemological concerns of gender, especially in its intersectional interplay with other axes of caste, class, race, region and empire. Presenting unique understandings of our gendered pasts, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, gender studies and South Asian studies.

Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance
Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance

Author: Abanindranath Tagore

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-06-09

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0199092176

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Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance presents two masterpieces of Bengali literature by Rabindranath Tagore’s nephews, Abanindranath Tagore and Gaganendranath Tagore. The Make-Believe Prince is the delightful story of a king, his two wives, a trickster monkey, a witch, and a helper from another world who is not a ‘fairy godmother’. Abanindranath deploys traditional children’s rhymes and paints exquisite word-pictures in his original rendering of a tale which has its roots in Bengali folktale materials in various genres. Toddy-Cat the Bold sees a group of brave comrades seek help from a young boy to rescue the son of their leader from the Two-Faced Rakshasa of the forest. Here, a more numinous supernatural helper appears. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, it presents a comic, exciting, and mysterious journey quite unlike Carroll’s, with many traditional local touches and an unexpected ending.

Hindutva as Political Monotheism
Hindutva as Political Monotheism

Author: Anustup Basu

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-08-17

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1478012498

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In Hindutva as Political Monotheism, Anustup Basu offers a genealogical study of Hindutva—Hindu right-wing nationalism—to illustrate the significance of Western anthropology and political theory to the idea of India as a Hindu nation. Connecting Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's notion of political theology to traditional theorems of Hindu sovereignty and nationhood, Basu demonstrates how Western and Indian theorists subsumed a vast array of polytheistic, pantheistic, and henotheistic cults featuring millions of gods into a singular edifice of faith. Basu exposes the purported “Hindu Nation” as itself an orientalist vision by analyzing three crucial moments: European anthropologists’ and Indian intellectuals’ invention of a unified Hinduism during the long nineteenth century; Indian ideologues’ adoption of ethnoreligious nationalism in pursuit of a single Hindu way of life in the twentieth century; and the transformations of this project in the era of finance capital, Bollywood, and new media. Arguing that Hindutva aligns with Enlightenment notions of nationalism, Basu foregrounds its significance not just to Narendra Modi's right-wing, anti-Muslim government but also to mainstream Indian nationalism and its credo of secularism and tolerance.

Indigenous Vanguards
Indigenous Vanguards

Author: Ben Conisbee Baer

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-03-26

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0231548966

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Anticolonial struggles of the interwar epoch were haunted by the question of how to construct an educational practice for all future citizens of postcolonial states. In what ways, vanguard intellectuals asked, would citizens from diverse subaltern situations be equally enabled to participate in a nonimperial society and world? In circumstances of cultural and social crisis imposed by colonialism, these vanguards sought to refashion modern structures and technologies of public education by actively relating them to residual indigenous collective forms. In Indigenous Vanguards, Ben Conisbee Baer provides a theoretical and historical account of literary engagements with structures and representations of public teaching and learning by cultural vanguards in the colonial world from the 1920s to the 1940s. He shows how modernizing educative projects existed in complex tension with impulses to indigenize national liberation movements, and how this tension manifests as a central aspect of modernist literary practice. Offering new readings of figures such as Alain Locke, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, D. H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Baer discloses the limits and openings of modernist representations as they attempt to reach below the fissures of class that produce them. Establishing unexpected connections between languages and regions, Indigenous Vanguards is the first study of modernism and colonialism that encompasses the decisive way public education transformed modernist aesthetics and vanguard politics.