Inheritance and the Idea of ‘the East’ in Banglaphone Thought in the Era of Decolonisation

Abstract

Recent research on intellectual histories of the Global South explore the nature of inheritance and the incorporation of ideas from diverse places into colonial and post-colonial histories. Though research into the histories of science, liberalism and nationalism have multifaceted reference points in the discipline of history, histories of intellectuals in conversation with the history of decolonisation remain a missing link in the history of the twentieth century. Through engagement with the ‘Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project’ (BIOHP), this paper argues that intellectuals from West Bengal, India, maintained a complex vector of inheritance with Western social thought when contrasted with their East Bengali/Pakistani/Bangladeshi counterparts. The primary interlocutors of eastern Bengali intellectuals were not ‘the West’, but were western Bengal, inside a regional, as opposed to an increasingly global, audience and marketplace of Indian intellectuals.