An Experiential Study of ‘Conditional Agency’ of Bengali Widows with Reference to the Autobiographies of Saradasundari Devi and Rassundari Devi

Revolutionary Violence and the Rise of the Art Novel

The Grounds and Implications of Social Order: A Qualitative Study of NAJA Staffs

This article reveals the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore and the Bauls against the backdrop of the politics of nationalism between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century in Bengal. Tagore’s works – including novels (Gora and Ghare Baire), plays (Phalguni), and songs composed between 1900 and 1920 – are thoroughly influenced by the ideologies of Bauls, whose liminal identities (of being in the world and yet outside of it) play a significant part in the formation of his political, philosophical and spiritual identity. Tagore’s subsequent popularity amongst the middle-class bourgeois Bengalis, in turn, shapes the representation of Bauls more as political rather than merely spiritual, musical or cultural performers of Bengal. From a marginal and ‘shameful’ social positionality, Tagore’s portrayal of Bauls transforms them into political figures and agents of self-reflection, reform and covert resistance to hegemonic powers of control and domination through their world view, performance and lifestyle.

Reviewed by: Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940 Derek R. Peterson Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940. By Christopher Gray. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002. The cultural and political history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Africa is being composed as a history of colonial encounters. Sandra Greene’s recently published Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) explores how the landscaping of colonialism reworked Anlo people’s conceptions of sacred space. Sean Hawkins’ Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the LoDagaa and “the World on Paper” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) illuminates how colonial courts and British anthropology reduced the negotiable LoDagaa “world of experience” to a set of rules on paper. Christopher Gray’s study partakes of this academic discourse on the colonial encounter. In the second half of the nineteenth century, says Gray, “two very different cognitive maps confronted each other in Southern Gabon” (2). The diverse people who lived south of the Ogooué river practiced a social definition of territory: their political order rested on the control over people, not on the control over geographic space. French colonialism sought to anchor people, as members of ethnic groups, to specific tracts of land, the better to govern them. In the early twentieth century, the precolonial order was destroyed, as French colonists used censuses, maps, labor camps, and roads to rearrange people according to an administrative logic. But elements of the precolonial cognitive system survived, says Gray, making the legacies of colonial territoriality decidedly ambiguous. The strength of Gray’s book is his sensitive analysis of precolonial social order. The standard approach is to treat pre-colonial history schematically, as a static backdrop against which the effects of colonialism can be studied. Gray, in contrast, illuminates the flexible, dynamic nature of precolonial territoriality. While patrilocal villages were the basic unit of residence, matrilineal clans drew people from disparate regions together as descendants of a common female ancestor. Political communities, therefore, were socially defined: they revolved around kinship rather than residence. Districts were the largest political units that people recognized. Organized around trading routes, rivers, or ecological zones, districts were flexible alliances of villages and clans, brought together by intermarriage and sharing a commitment to self-defense. Gray is emphatic that nothing about this precolonial social order revolved around ethnicity. Speakers of different languages lived alongside one another, intermarried, and formed kinship alliances. In the latter half of the book, Gray documents how this social definition of territory was replaced by a territorial definition of society. Paul Du Chaillu, Savorgnan de Brazza, and other European explorers crisscrossed the region in the late nineteenth century, mapping rivers, streams, and mountains. Smallpox followed in their wake, killing tens of thousands of people. But more than demographic disaster, European exploration brought modern conceptions of territory to bear on the people of this region. Gray follows Mary Louise Pratt in noting how explorers appropriated space through their maps, emptying territory of its prior, unwritten significance. The Ogooué River, for example, was not known as a geographic feature before Europeans mapped it. Local people named rapids and pools, or categorized portions of the river as “upstream” or “downstream.” European observers, in contrast, applied concrete names to geographic features that their maps revealed. Colonial censuses similarly appropriated and transformed space. When French officials began counting people in the early twentieth century, they categorized them as members of ethnic groups, as “Eshira,” “Mitsogo,” or “Bapunu.” These ethnic categories were fabrications, products of the French imagination. But they took on real life, as administrators used invented categories to organize and govern people. Road building played a particularly important role in the colonial reorganization of social order. When the state first began to build roads in the 1910s, work gangs were organized on an ethnic basis, giving social form to fictional identities on paper. By the 1920s and 30s, the colonial army was routing people out of their rural homes to live in artificial villages beside new roads. Bound to the land, people could be taxed, policed...

This chapter discusses certain theoretical prospects in film adaptation, addressing the question of narration in fiction and in film by commenting on the differences in approach between Geoffrey Wagner and Dudley J. Andrew and the significance of Brian McFarlane's theory of adaptation from fiction into film. To this end, the chapter offers a structural reading of the narrative using Satyajit Ray's Charulata, which is based on Rabindranath Tagore's novella ‘Noshto Neerh’ (1901), at the level of textual praxis. Andrew emphasizes the sociological significance of adaptation, while Wagner describes three possible modes of adaptation on the basis of Bela Balaz's thesis: transposition, commentary, and analogy. By taking into account both Andrew's socio-cultural and Millicent Marcus's ‘sum total of encounters’, this chapter proves that it is possible to analyse in detail the internal and external dynamics of narration, ideology, and intertextuality in an adaptation.

In a well-known passage from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God the elderly ex-slave Nanny explains to Janie, her adolescent and newly sexually awakened granddaughter, the plight of African American women and families under slavery. She emphasizes the necessary, corrective force of sexual repression within nascent free-black communities. Nanny wants Janie to understand why the benefits of Janie's financially stable, virtually asexual marriage to a man three times her age outweigh the prospects of a romantic union and sexual gratification with a man Janie likes. Nanny tells Janie that us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come around in queer ways (16). What Nanny's pronouncement reveals is that slavery had the effect of corrupting and contorting the most basic familial relationships. Not only did the institution deny slaves basic claims to familial, spousal, and hereditary bonds, insidiously it also assaulted their sexuality, robbing them of the basic rights of bodily autonomy and sexual choice. (1) Through Nanny, Hurston describes this violating, soul-shattering feature of slavery and its cumulative generational effects on black identity formation even after slavery's formal abolition is queer. This essay reads literary renderings of black enslavement as founding articulations of a plausible connection between the institutionalization of sexual violence and racial subordination in slavery and modern theories of sexual difference. Tracing certain modern epistemologies of sexuality to the era before the late nineteenth century--their acknowledged moment of formal entrance into the ideological order--I suggest that representations of sexual perversity under conditions of enslavement have contributed to notions of sexual alterity and to the ideologies by which aberrant sexual practices were named, domesticated, and policed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Many scholars, including Lisa Duggan, Siobhan Somerville, and Sander Gilman, note that the development of discrete sexual categories in the late nineteenth century coincided with the discursive and legislative deployment of racial theories to support coercive regimes of race-based social stratification between black and white citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. (2) Discourses of racial and sexual pathology contributed significantly to juridical measures (like legal segregation) and acts of racial terrorism (like lynching) that prevented black Americans from accessing the full entitlements of citizenship after slavery's formal end. Here I show that the era, institution, and literary representation of slavery helped to shape emergent models of sexual difference. The entwinement of violent racial separatism, sexual regulation, and the discursive production of bodily difference that characterizes the late nineteenth century may be usefully traced back to the institutional patterns of slavery and to the theories of black inferiority promulgated by its proponents and practitioners. This paper reads Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to analyze the interrelation of sexuality, race, identity, and social order in the middle of the nineteenth century. As canonical exemplars of the slave narrative form, Douglass's Narrative and Jacobs's Incidents not only evidence the material history of slavery but also manifest the power of literature to shape the cultural construction of identity, fantasy, and ideology. That the written testimonies of Douglass and Jacobs grapple at all with the relation of nonheteronormative sexual practices to (sexual and racial) identity formation suggests that we may productively extend modern theorizations of sexual identity to an earlier historical moment and locate them, at least partially, in the sexual deviance and sexual violence of the slave plantation. (3) This paper contends, then, that the brutal enslavement of black people, their legal definition as three-fifths human, and the social economic, and legislative practices of slavery helped to institute not only whiteness but the very notions of the person, the citizen, the normal and the heterosexual as well. …

Immortalised in Rabindranath Tagore’s short story ‘The Kabuliwala’, the Afghan moneylender has appeared in many studies about rural and urban India as an unwanted interloper. This article presents an alternative picture. From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, Afghans regularly visited the financial frontiers of British India where they offered collateral-free loans with high interest rates to urban and rural communities on the fringes of respectable creditors, such as banks, cooperative societies and banking networks. More than simply predatory, Afghan moneylenders provided a micro-financial service when and where no one else would. As a result, Afghan moneylending operations, considered as a whole, provide insight into the cosmopolitan nature of credit relationships among the working poor in the colonial era and how social and cultural notions informed not only those relationships but also how the imperial government and its allies understood them. Beginning with the Great Depression, novel legal regimes emerged around the subcontinent aimed at eradicating Afghan moneylending and solving the social problems associated with it. In the process, the intrusion of the state into informal finance via regulation hampered deep historical patterns of interregional social connectivity and redefined the cosmopolitanism of credit relations in the informal sectors of the economy.

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather

Nurturing ideology: Representations of motherhood in contemporary Australian adolescent fiction

Rabindranath Tagore , the first Asian Nobel Laureate, remains a towering figure in world literature, philosophy, and cultural reform.Among the diverse concerns that permeate his writings, the condition of women in colonial Bengal emerges as a crucial subject.The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a paradoxical situation for women in Bengal: on the one hand, reform movements led by figures like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar campaigned for the abolition of regressive customs such as sati and child marriage; on the other hand, patriarchal norms continued to dominate women's lives, restricting their access to education, mobility, and self-expression.Tagore's creative oeuvre-spanning novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and essaysarticulates a nuanced feminist philosophy that critiqued these limitations and imagined a world where women could assert freedom and selfhood.This paper explores Tagore's feminist philosophy through five dimensions: (1) his critique of patriarchy and tradition; (2) his portrayal of female subjectivity in fiction; (3) his vision of education as a tool of liberation; (4) his redefinition of marriage and relationships; and (5) his cultural interventions through plays and poetry.By situating these within the socio-political context of colonial Bengal, the paper argues that Tagore's humanist and feminist insights anticipated many concerns of modern feminist thought.Though he may not be called a feminist activist in the contemporary sense, Tagore's writings remain deeply relevant to discourses on gender, freedom, and identity.

At a time when the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has once again laid bare that the impact of the pandemic is neither uniform nor homogeneous across cultures, it is important to acknowledge that different literary and cultural traditions have responded differently to the condition of the pandemic, and these responses have been mediated by historical and cultural specificities. In accordance with the proposed theme of this collected edition, this essay focuses on Tagore's novella Chaturanga (1915) with a view to locating how cultural responses to the pandemic have been historically shaped by an interpellation of literary, political and scientific discourses. I will particularly focus on how the narrative intervenes into the modern discourses and approaches to contagious diseases in society with respect to colonial Calcutta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and, within this context, how the plague emerges as a crucial instrument for staging a larger cultural debate on colonial modernity through fiction. The novella, originally written and published in 1915, is partly set in the backdrop of the Calcutta plague of 1898–1899, and although this pandemic is not central to the plot of the novella, it plays an important role within the textual space in highlighting the prejudices regarding class, caste and religion in the urban Bengali society at the turn of the twentieth century. While it is hardly in doubt that contagious diseases cut across different social and communal boundaries, Tagore held the position that pandemics such as the plague do not only disproportionately affect marginalised and impoverished communities, but also that these communities are often discriminated against in the face of the pandemic and branded as carriers of filth and disease. Writing with the awareness of how emergent discourses on public sanitation, social hygiene and clinical pathology had considerably refashioned the understanding of contagious diseases not only in Western Europe but also among the English educated intelligentsia in the major colonial centres such as Calcutta, Tagore situates the pandemic within the dialectic of endogenous tradition and colonial modernity at a particular moment in history through the contrasting perceptions of the plague in the characters of Jagmohan and Harimohan and their contradictory responses to it. The narrative, through the episode of the plague outbreak and the consequent crisis in the society, highlights how neither the combativeness of Jagmohan's radicalism nor the conservatism in Harimohan offer any space for the reconciliation of these conflicts inherent within the public intellectual sphere at the time and instead puts forward Tagore's notion of a "modernity" attained through samanjasya (balance/synthesis) and purnata (completion and/or fulfilment).

Reviewed by: Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance. Abanindranath Tagore: The Make-Believe Prince; Gaganendranath Tagore: Toddy-Cat the Bold by Sanjay Sircar Hans Harder FANTASY FICTIONS FROM THE BENGAL RENAISSANCE. Abanindranath Tagore: The Make-Believe Prince; Gaganendranath Tagore: Toddy-Cat the Bold. Translated and annotated by Sanjay Sircar. Oxford University Press New Delhi, 2018, 339 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-948675-5 Sanjay Sircar's Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance is many things at once. Overtly, it presents English translations of two Bengali "fantasy fictions" or Kunstmärchen from the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, by two authors of the famous Tagore family of Calcutta. One is Kṣīrer putul, "The Make-Believe Prince," (1893) by Rabindranath Tagore's nephew, the painter and writer Abanindranath Tagore, and the other Bhõḍaṛ bāhādur, "Toddy-Cat the Bold," (1923) by the latter's brother, cartoonist Gaganendranath Tagore. Both these texts—"The Make-Believe Prince" more so than "Toddy-Cat the Bold"—are modern classics of Bengali literature and have seen many editions, reprints, and translations. Sanjay Sircar convincingly shows that the texts stand in need of being translated anew, and proves his point by furnishing reliable, creative, and immensely enjoyable English versions of them. Sircar has embedded the texts in what I would call extensive interpretative essays rather than mere introductions, exceeding the texts themselves greatly in length. He also provides a general introduction of their historical context, the so-called Bengal Renaissance, the period of heated activities in various spheres of culture in and around Calcutta during the high time of British colonialism in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Furthermore, Sircar's book contains an abundance of annotations, references, bibliographical lists, and other resources, making this book a mine of information about the texts in question, their genesis, publication record, the history of the various literary genres (regional and international) they draw on, and the interaction between high and popular/ folk culture at the time. Taken together, interpretative essays and annotations amount to more than two hundred pages of a book of 339. The book goes under the name of the two Tagores's texts, "translated and annotated by Sanjay Sircar," but its title is a misnomer for what is actually an extensive study of the texts and their historical context. Kṣīrer putul, "The Make-Believe Prince," tells the story of a king with two queens, the younger one greatly favored and the elder truly loving but utterly neglected. The favorite queen is spoiled and shuns the precious gifts the king brings her from a long voyage, whereas the monkey the elder queen had asked for turns out to be her well-wisher and helper. The trickster animal declares that the queen is bearing the king a prince, thus allowing her to win back the king's favor, and forbids the king to see the (nonexistent) boy for the first ten years of his life until after his wedding. When the time comes, the monkey has a "puppet of kheer" (kṣīr, [End Page 103] or thickened milk; the literal title of the book) dressed up as the prince and arranges that the puppet is eaten by hungry goddess Shashthi, bestower and protector of children. Catching her in the act of stealing, he then blackmails her to replace the puppet with by a real boy from her private kingdom of children, which solves the successor-less king's plight and ends the elder queen's sorrow. In the essay unravelling this narrative, Sircar identifies it as belonging to Aarne-Thompson's tale type AT 459, spread over India, Persia, and Palestine, and explores in great detail its motifs and narrative features. In particular, Sircar goes to great lengths in teasing out the cultural, religious, ritualistic, material, and culinary templates the text uses and manipulates. The integration of numerous chaṛās, nursery rhymes, as Sircar shows, adds to the density of folk references in what has become a crossover juvenile text, equally read by adults. The second text, Bhõdaṛ bāhādur, or "Toddy-Cat the Bold," is a dream story in some ways reminiscent of Carroll's...

Liberty has long been a fundamental concept in political theory, symbolizing the individual's right to act freely within society. From ancient political thought to modern democratic frameworks, liberty has been interpreted in various ways depending on historical, cultural, and philosophical contexts. Some have seen it as freedom from external control, while others view it as the capacity to live according to one's values within a just society 1. While liberty has long been a central ideal in Western political theory, seeing it through a global lens exposes new, equally interesting views. Thinkers from various cultural and religious origins have defined freedom in ways that reflect their distinct historical and philosophical settings. This paper investigates conflicting views of liberty from the perspectives of Isaiah Berlin, Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as how different civilizations address issues of authority, individual rights, and moral duty. Such a comparative approach is critical in a world where liberal values are argued, updated, and even challenged across borders. Engaging with these three thinkers tells us that liberty can be considered not merely a political arrangement, but also a spiritual, moral, and communal goal. This paper explores these dimensions of liberty through the perspectives of three major political thinkers, examining how their ideas contribute to our understanding of freedom, authority, and the social order.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a liberal humanist who wanted a new social order where women are not bound by shackles of patriarchy. Born into a progressive family, he had observed closely the stifling condition of 19th-century Bengal. His creativity captured the multifaceted torture on women in a conservative socio-cultural milieu. This paper is an exploration of Tagore’s advocacy of women’s cause in ‘Streer Patra’, the feminist perspective reflected in Tagore’s ‘Streer Patra’, analyze the concept of emancipation of women in 19th century Bengal and discuss the struggle of a woman to achieve emancipation from confinement. The issues of child marriage, forced arranged marriage, poor condition of childbirth room, subordination of women, and women’s helplessness in a joint family are all vehemently criticized with poignancy and insight. A woman would better embrace death like Bindu in ‘Streer Patra’ than live a life of ignominy and disgrace. Death is here symbolic of redemption from worldly cares and suffering. He also advocates another escape route of breaking the shackles of traditional roles of a woman to emerge victorious, just as Mrinal is emancipated in the story.

Heinrich Winkler’s two volume history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth century is titled Der lange Weg nach Westen. For him, ‘nach Westen’ means becoming a Western democracy, like England, France and the US. How did they do it? Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, in their book Violence and Social Orders: a Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (2009), take up the question of how countries make such a transition. The framework is that of limited and open access orders (LAO/OAO), as explained in Steven Webb’s article in this issue. Although they intend the framework for universal application, most of the North, Wallis, and Weingast book focuses on the economic and political history of England, the US, and France from early modern times up to the end of the nineteenth century—the times when these three countries became Western capitalist democracies as we think of them today. Violence and Social Orders does not discuss the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or the cases of Germany and Russia, the other big players in modern European history. The articles here apply the limited and OAO framework to the history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for two purposes. First, they shed new light on the German political and economic history by looking through a comparative lens. Was Germany’s evolution so unique—a Sonderweg—or was it a later variant on similar themes? Second, the articles show how the framework needs augmenting to take account of an important case like that of Germany. For instance, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while it was still a limited access order, the German economy was able to grow as fast or faster than the main OAO economies of the time and to surpass them on many technological frontiers, which is contrary to the prediction implicit in Violence and Social Orders. Also, the