This work explores the early twentieth-century trends which shaped the life and mind of Bengal for decades later. Bengal as we know it today emerged in the years between the 1920s and the twin events of Independence and Partition in 1947. It is one of the arguments in this book that in the
twenties there began a redefinition of Bengal's identity that distinguishes twentieth-century Bengal from the past, the era of the "Renaissance" and its climactic moment, the movement against the Partition of Bengal.
In the 1920s there were signs of a new "Bengali Patriotism" of the
bhadralok elite. At the same time, there emerges a new bhadra-mahila, with a critique of conventional notions like chastity, and along with it the entry of women in politics and the public sphere. As for the so-called lower castes and the Muslim community, the fault-lines in the old social order are
increasingly manifested in the discourse of Muslim identity in Bengali journals. This work argues that the activities of political parties were only an external manifestation of the root cause, a deep-seated division that appeared in quotidian life and social exclusion. As regards politics, the
keynote is Bengal's engagement in Gandhian politics along with a contrarian search for alternatives to the Gandhian path, for example, the Swarajya party, biplabi or revolutionary nationalism, and the Left as an alternative to Gandhism. The 1940s witnessed a series of crises: price inflation during
World War II, corruption in public life, the great famine (1943), and finally the communal riot in Calcutta (1946) signalling an irreparable rupture between two communities.
The book concludes with a depiction of the political process leading to independence and the second partition of
Bengal. That was the outcome of the decades-long negotiation between regional patriotism and an overarching Indian nationalism.
Abbreviations
1. Reinventing Bengal: the 1920s
2. The Gender Question and the New Bhadra-Mahila
3. Affinity and Its Denial: Caste and Communal Identities
4. The Logic of Fission: Muslim Identity and Its Contestation
5. Gandhian Politics and Its Alternatives: 1920-1935
6.
The Politics of Exclusion: 1936-1946
7. The Warning Signals: the Crises of the 1940s
8. 'The Edge of a Volcano': 1946-1947
9. 'Division of Hearts': Last Days of United Bengal
Bibliography
About the Author
Index
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Sabyasachi Bhattacharya is Tagore National Fellow, Ministry of Culture, Government of India. He was earlier Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, and Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Writing History - William Kelleher Storey and Towser Jones
Partitioned Lives - Edited by Haimanti Roy
Behind the Mask - Anindita Mukhopadhyay
Recasting the Region - Neilesh Bose