This work examines in detail the world of travelogues of a highly interesting culture-universe: the Bengali bhadralok. A travelogue is usually a crucial political/aesthetic text. Its very fabric is structured in space and power - it creates, relates, compares and contrasts spaces and powers. Bengalis travelling to Europe in the colonial period felt compelled to produce such texts. An analysis of these works from a historian's angle provides crucial windows to the colonised mind striving fo...

A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY THROUGH JAPAN'S MULTI-FACETED CUSTOMS AND CULTURE'An excellent book for anyone with an interest in Japanese culture' Sunday Telegraph'Takes in everything from the mythical roots of sumo to the ubiquity of Shinto shrines' The TimesAlan Macfarlane first encountered Japan full of certainty, confidence and unexamined assumptions. He soon found his preconceptions challenged on every front - as generations of visiti...

From Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, a memoir about home, belonging, inequality, and identity, recounting a singular life devoted to bettering humanity.A towering figure in the field of economics, Amartya Sen is perhaps best known for his work on poverty and famine, as inspired by events in his boyhood home of West Bengal, India. But Sen has, in fact, called many places “home,” from Dhaka in modern Bangladesh to Trinity College, Cambridge. In Home in the World

Ranajit Guha is arguably the Indian historian whose writings have had a massive and formative impact on contemporary scholarship in several disciplines throughout the world: on postcolonial studies in literature, in anthropology, in history, in cultural studies, in art history.Guha first became known as the practitioner of a critical Marxism that ran parallel to the work of British and French Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s but which, instead of recreating a history from below, soug...

Kaiwan Mehta takes the reader for a walk through the streets and past the buildings of the ‘native town’ of colonial Bombay, reading their histories and excavating their memories, while continuing to negotiate their present context. This historic neighbourhood of Mumbai, fondly referred to as Bhuleshwar, has remained a residential and religious hub as before, while thriving as the city’s essential commercial marketplace today. It retains a complex history of migration and community, which ...

This book is a brilliant historicisation and scathing critique of many of the dominant concepts by which Indians generally, and north Indian Hindus more specifically, think and live today. Historians, sociologists, political scientists and serious readers who wish to understand how the immediate past has shaped Indias life will value this incisive work of a major historian.

The book presents excerpts from Nehrus major works such as An Autobiography, The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History as well as from his important speeches and statements. The purpose is to acquaint the reader with the many-faceted personalities of Nehru: the private man, the historian, the philosopher, the statesman, the lover of wildlife and adventure etc.

In South India, the categories ‘Brahmin’ and ‘non-Brahmin’ are frequently treated as self-evident, both within contemporary Tamil politics and in mainstream academic discourses. Departing from this political and academic ‘common sense’, the present book historicizes the complex processes by which these categories came into being and acquired political power over the past century. Using archival, regional-language, and unconventional sources, M.S.S. Pandian unsettles the ‘self-evident’ quality...

Looking back now, I am more than ever aware of the part that [Satyajit] Ray played in shaping the imaginary universe of my childhood and youth. I see this even in such details as my interest in science and science fiction; in ghost stories and the fantastical…When I saw Agantuk [The Stranger], in which the main character is an anthropologist, I began to wonder whether my interest in anthropology too, owed something,perhaps subconsciously, to Ray…, ruminates Amitav Ghosh in this book. Ghosh...

Tanika Sarkars writings on women, religion, and nationhood in the context of colonial Bengal have been pathbreaking. In this new book of connected essays, she gives a new direction to the same themes, this time by focusing on some of the key historical texts within which these identities were given shape. The colonial universe outlined in this book centres around woman as both defiled and deified (woman as widow, woman as goddess); the nation as woman-goddess within a country comprising plura...

The book is a collection of essays that examine the biography as a source for historical information. Further, the biographies include those of people `in the middle merchants, writers, religious leaders and marginalized groups such as actresses, and other women.

The first autobiography in Bengali was written by an upper-caste rural housewife called Rashundari Debi (18091899). Published when she was 88 years old, Amar Jiban (My Life) is a fascinating first-hand account of life for women in Bengal at that time. Mother to eleven children, Debi reflects on her experiences and her spiritual development across almost an entire century. Words to Win incorporates translations of major sections of this remarkable autobiography. Tanika Sarkar studies th...