This book explores the philosophical and political roots of the United Bengal movement of 1947 that emerged as a final bid to keep the province united against Partition. Through Abul Hashim, one of its architects, it explores the idea of an independent Bengali nation in the years preceding Independence and examines the underlying tensions of the concept of a Muslim-led independent Bangalistaan and its repercussions on a sizeable Hindu minority. Focusing on Hashim’s writings and political contributions, this monograph highlights his vision of an aesthetic identity rooted within religious principles as well as civic ideals in a new united Bengal, where common law underwritten through religious ideals did not need to be necessarily opposed to western discourses of a modern state. A major, new intervention, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, especially the Partition, politics, and South Asian studies.

"This book explores the philosophical and political roots of the United Bengal movement of 1947 that emerged as a final bid to keep the province united against Partition. Through Abul Hashim, one of its architects, it explores the idea of an independent Bengali nation in the years preceding Independence and examines the underlying tensions of the concept of a Muslim-led independent Bangalistaan and its repercussions on a sizeable Hindu minority. Focusing on Hashim's writings and political contributions, the monograph highlights his vision of an aesthetic identity rooted within religious principles as well as civic ideals in a new united Bengal, where common law underwritten through religious ideals did not need to be necessarily opposed to western discourses of a modern state. A major, new intervention, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, especially the Partition, politics and South Asian studies"--

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual. With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines – history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory – this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cinema has been adopted as a popular cultural institution in Bangladesh. At the same time, this has been the period for the articulation of modern nationhood and cultural identity of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh. This book analyses the relationship between cinema and modernity in Bangladesh, providing a narrative of the uneven process that produced the idea of "Bangladesh cinema." This book investigates the roles of a non-Western "national" film industry in Asia in constructing nationhood and identity within colonial and postcolonial predicaments. Drawing on the idea of cinema as public sphere and the postcolonial notion of formation of the "Bangladesh" nation, interactions between cinema and middle-class Bengali Muslims in different social and political matrices are analyzed. The author explores how the conflict among different social groups turned Bangladesh cinema into a site of contesting identities. In particular, he illustrates the connections between film production and reception in Bangladesh and a variety of nationalist constructions of Bengali Muslim identity. Questioning and debunking the usual notions of "Bangladesh" and "cinema," this book positions the cinema of Bangladesh within a transnational frame. Starting with how to locate the "beginning" of the second Bengali language cinema in colonial Bengal, the author completes the investigation by identifying a global Bangladeshi cinema in the early twenty-first century. The first major academic study on this large and vibrant national cinema, this book demonstrates that Bangladesh cinema worked as different "public spheres" for different "publics" throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Filling a niche in Global Film and Media Studies and South Asian Studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students of these disciplines.

This book expands the sociological canon by introducing non-Western and female voices, and subjects the existing canon itself to critique. Including chapters on both the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology and neglected thinkers it highlights the biases of Eurocentrism and androcentrism, while also offering much-needed correctives to them. The authors challenge a dominant account of the development of sociological theory which would have us believe that it was only Western European and later North American white males in the nineteenth and early twentieth century who thought in a creative and systematic manner about the origins and nature of the emerging modernity of their time. This integrated and contextualised account seeks to restructure the ways in which we theorise the emergence of the classical sociological canon. This book’s global scope fills a significant lacuna and provides a unique teaching resource to students of classical sociological theory.

Annually during the months of autumn, Bengal hosts three interlinked festivals to honor its most important goddesses: Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri. While each of these deities possesses a distinct iconography, myth, and character, they are all martial. Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri often demand blood sacrifice as part of their worship and offer material and spiritual benefits to their votaries. Richly represented in straw, clay, paint, and decoration, they are similarly displayed in elaborately festooned temples, thronged by thousands of admirers. The first book to recount the history of these festivals and their revelry, rivalry, and nostalgic power, this volume marks an unprecedented achievement in the mapping of a major public event. Rachel Fell McDermott describes the festivals' origins and growth under British rule. She identifies their iconographic conventions and carnivalesque qualities and their relationship to the fierce, Tantric sides of ritual practice. McDermott confronts controversies over the tradition of blood sacrifice and the status-seekers who compete for symbolic capital. Expanding her narrative, she takes readers beyond Bengal's borders to trace the transformation of the goddesses and their festivals across the world. McDermott's work underscores the role of holidays in cultural memory, specifically the Bengali evocation of an ideal, culturally rich past. Under the thrall of the goddess, the social, political, economic, and religious identity of Bengalis takes shape.