Locates Akshay Kumar Datta as one of the foundational figures of intellectual refashioning in nineteenth-century Bengal.

This book examines interactions between Britain and India through the analytical framework of the production and circulation of knowledge throughout the long eighteenth century. Disciplined Subjects is one of the first works to analyse the imperial school curriculum, and the ways in which it shaped and influenced Indian subjectivity. The author focuses on the endeavours of the colonial government, missionaries and native stakeholders in determining the physical, material and intellectual content of institutional learning in India. Further, the volume compares the changes in pedagogical practices, and textbooks in schools in Britain and colonial Bengal, and its subsequent repercussions on the psyche and identity of the learners. Drawing on a host of primary sources in the UK and India, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern history, education, sociology and South Asian studies.

The present work is an interdisciplinary study cutting across the disciplines of translation studies, genre studies, literary history and cultural history. It primarily deals with a phase of transition in the socio-cultural history of Bengal but has implications for the study of Indian literature as a whole. It takes the view that “translation” does not merely relocate the text in the target language, but negotiates several sets of relationships between the two cultures involved, altering the nature of relations between them. The study considers the mediating and shaping agency of “genre” in this context. Not only are works translated but genres are translated too, and assume striking and unprecedented shapes in the linguistic culture of the target audience.

A comprehensive and authoritative overview of the diversity, range and impact of the newspaper and periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain.

This book chronicles travel writings of Bengali women in colonial India and explores the intersections of power, indigeneity, and the representations of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in these writings. It documents the transgressive histories of these women who stepped out to create emancipatory identities for themselves. The book brings together a selection of travelogues from various Bengali women and their journeys to the West, the Aryavarta, and Japan. These writings challenge stereotypes of the 'circumscribed native woman’ and explore the complex personal and socio-political histories of women in colonial India. Reading these from a feminist, postcolonial perspective, the volume highlights how these women from different castes, class and ages confront the changing realities of their lives in colonial India in the backdrop of the independence movement and the second world war. The author draws attention to the personal histories of these women, which informed their views on education, womanhood, marriage, female autonomy, family, and politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Engaging and insightful, this volume will be of interest to students and researchers of literature and history, gender and culture studies, and for general readers interested in women and travel writing.

An often surprising and always sure-footed survey of the magic of yoga and Calcutta's role in bringing it to the world' JOHN ZUBRZYCKI 'Interweaving historical facts with Armstrong's own experiences ... the result is a book which is neither an autobiography nor a purely scientific work - quite a unique mixture ... it moves me' CLAUDIA GUGGENBÜHL 'I wish I was doing what he is doing [in Calcutta Yoga]' BISHWANATH GHOSH The epic story of how Buddha Bose, Bishnu Ghosh and Yogananda took yoga from Calcutta to the rest of the world. In Calcutta Yoga, Jerome Armstrong deftly weaves the multi-generational story of the first family of yoga and how they modernized the ancient practice. The saga covers four generations, the making of a city, personal friendships, and shines light on the remarkable people who transformed yoga and made it a truly global phenomenon. Along the way, we also meet the people who founded the schools of yoga that are so well known today. Enriching the cast of characters are the internationally renowned B. K. S. Iyengar, Mr Universe Monotosh Roy, even as the book uncovers the truth about Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram Yoga. We follow them and others from the streets of Calcutta to the United States, London, Tokyo and beyond, where they perform astounding feats and help revise Western perceptions of yoga. Cleverly researched and enjoyably anecdotal, Calcutta Yoga gives a holistic picture of the evolution of yoga, and pays homage to yogic heroes previously lost from history, while highlighting the pivotal early role the city of Calcutta played in redefining the practice. A culmination of rigorous fieldwork and numerous interviews, this book is as much about yoga as it is about history, relationships and human nature.

How does a reader learn to read an unfamiliar genre? The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal answers this question by looking at the readers of some of the first Bengali novelists, including Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Mir Mosharraf Hossain. Moving from the world of novels, periodicals, letters, and reviews to that of colonial educational policies, this book provides a rich literary history of the reading lives of some of the earliest novel readers in colonial India. Sunayani Bhattacharya studies the ways in which Bengalis thought about reading; how they approached the thorny question of influence; and uncovers that they relied on classical Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic literary and aesthetic models, whose attendant traditions formed not a distant past, but coexisted, albeit contentiously, with the everyday present. Challenging dominant postcolonial scholarship, The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal engages with the lived experience of colonial modernity as it traces the import of the Bengali reader's choices on her quotidian life, and grants access to 19th-century Bengal as a space in which the past is to be found enmeshed with the present.