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This rich cultural history set in Punjab examines a little-studied body of popular literature to illustrate both the durability of a vernacular literary tradition and the limits of colonial dominance in British India. Farina Mir asks how qisse, a vibrant genre of epics and romances, flourished in colonial Punjab despite British efforts to marginalize the Punjabi language. She explores topics including Punjabi linguistic practices, print and performance, and the symbolic content of qisse. She finds that although the British denied Punjabi language and literature almost all forms of state patronage, the resilience of this popular genre came from its old but dynamic corpus of stories, their representations of place, and the moral sensibility that suffused them. Her multidisciplinary study reframes inquiry into cultural formations in late-colonial north India away from a focus on religious communal identities and nationalist politics and toward a widespread, ecumenical, and place-centered poetics of belonging in the region.

In Periodicals, Readers and the Making of a Modern Literary Culture: Bengal at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Samarpita Mitra studies literary periodicals as a particular print form, and reveals how their production and circulation were critical to the formation of a Bengali public sphere during the turn of the twentieth century. Given its polyphonic nature, capacity for sustaining debates and adaptability by readers with diverse reading competencies, periodicals became the preferred means for dispensing modern education and entertainment through the vernacular. The book interrogates some of the defining debates that shaped readers' perspectives on critical social issues and explains how literary culture was envisioned as an indicator of the emergent nation. Finally it looks at the Bengali-Muslim and women's periodicals and their readerships and argues that the presence of multiple literary voices make it impossible to speak of Bengali literary culture in any singular terms.

Age of Entanglement explores the connections that linked German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century through the Second World War as they shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another's worlds. But, as Kris Manjapra shows, transnational intellectual entanglements are not inherently liberal or conventionally cosmopolitan.

During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines-like Delhi Press's Saritā -and the first paperbacks in Hindi-Hind Pocket Books-North Indian middle classes cultivated new reading practices that allowed them to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen. Rather than focusing on individual sacrifices and contributions to national growth, this new print culture promoted personal pleasure and other narratives that enabled readers to carve roles outside of official prescriptions of nationalism, austerity, and religion. Utilizing a wealth of previously unexamined print culture materials, as well as paying careful attention to the production of commercial publishing companies and the reception of ordinary reading practices-particularly those of women- Everyday Reading offers fresh perspectives into book history, South Asian literary studies, and South Asian gender studies.

This volume seeks to revise the Saidian analytical framework which dominated research on the subject of colonial knowledge for almost two decades, which emphasized colonial knowledge as a series of representations of colonial hegemony. It seeks to contribute to research in the field by analyzing knowledge in colonial India as a dynamic process.

This book reopens the debate on colonial nationalisms, going beyond 'derivative', 'borrowed', political and modernist paradigms. It introduces the conceptual category of samaj to demonstrate how indigenous socio-cultural origins in Bengal interacted with late-colonial discourses to produce the notion of a nation. Samaj (a historical society and an idea-in-practice) was a site for reconfiguring antecedents and negotiating fragmentation. Drawing on indigenous sources, this study shows how caste, class, ethnicity, region and community were refracted to conceptualise wider unities. The mapping of cultural continuities through change facilitates a more nuanced investigation of the ontology of nationhood, seeing it as related to, but more than political nationalism. It outlines a fresh paradigm for recalibrating postcolonial identities, offering interpretive strategies to mediate fragmentation.

At the turn of the twelfth-century into the thirteenth, at the court of King Laksmanasena of Bengal, Sanskrit poetry showed profound and sudden changes: a new social scope made its definitive entrance into high literature. Courtly and pastoral, rural and urban, cosmopolitan and vernacular confronted each other in a commingling of high and low styles. A literary salon in what is now Bangladesh, at the eastern extreme of the nexus of regional courtly cultures that defined the age, seems to have implicitly reformulated its entire literary system in the context of the imminent breakdown of the old courtly world, as Turkish power expanded and redefined the landscape. Through close readings of a little-known corpus of texts from eastern India, this ambitious book demonstrates how a local and rural sensibility came to infuse the cosmopolitan language of Sanskrit, creating a regional literary idiom that would define the emergence of the Bengali language and its literary traditions.

Some postcolonial theorists argue that the idea of a single system of belief known as \"Hinduism\" is a creation of nineteenth-century British imperialists. Andrew J. Nicholson introduces another perspective: although a unified Hindu identity is not as ancient as some Hindus claim, it has its roots in innovations within South Asian philosophy from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. During this time, thinkers treated the philosophies of Vedanta, Samkhya, and Yoga, along with the worshippers of Visnu, Siva, and Sakti, as belonging to a single system of belief and practice. Instead of seeing such groups as separate and contradictory, they re-envisioned them as separate rivers leading to the ocean of Brahman, the ultimate reality. Drawing on the writings of philosophers from late medieval and early modern traditions, including Vijnanabhiksu, Madhava, and Madhusudana Sarasvati, Nicholson shows how influential thinkers portrayed Vedanta philosophy as the ultimate unifier of diverse belief systems. This project paved the way for the work of later Hindu reformers, such as Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and Gandhi, whose teachings promoted the notion that all world religions belong to a single spiritual unity. In his study, Nicholson also critiques the way in which Eurocentric conceptslike monism and dualism, idealism and realism, theism and atheism, and orthodoxy and heterodoxyhave come to dominate modern discourses on Indian philosophy.

The contributors consider what the case of Bengal says about the workings of Western modernity in a colonial setting. Contributors: Pradip Kumar Bose, Keya Dasgupta, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Tapti Roy, Ranabir Samaddar.

This book brings together the political thought of Gandhi and Tagore to examine the relationship between politics, truth and conscience. It explores truth and conscience as viable public virtues with regard to two exemplars of ethical politics, addressing in turn the concerns of an evolving modern Indian political community. The comprehensive and textually argued discussion frames the subject of the validity of ethical politics in inhospitable contexts such as the fanatically despotic state and energised nationalism. The book studies in nuanced detail Tagore's opposition to political violence in colonial Bengal, the scope of non-violence and satyagraha as recommended by Gandhi to Jews in Nazi Germany, his response to the complexity of protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and the differently constituted nationalism of Gandhi and Tagore. It presents their famous debate in a new light, embedded within the dynamics of cultural identification, political praxis and the capacity of a community to imbibe the principles of ethical politics. Comprehensive and perceptive in analysis, this book will be a valuable addition for scholars and researchers of political science with specialisation in Indian political thought, philosophy and history. Gangeya Mukherji is Reader in English at Mahamati Prannath Mahavidyalaya, Mau-Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, India.