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This volume contributes to understanding Bangladesh's growth story, as it celebrates 50 years of independence. The fastest growing South Asian state is being recognised as an important partner and model case study with increasing global relevance by world powers. Sreeradha Datta reviews many of its critical bilateral relationships, as well as its expanding influence in the region and world beyond, enabling an understanding of how Bangladesh's growth trajectory complements and informs its foreign policy aims. The volume has a mixture of thematic and bilateral chapters, and includes the active Bangladeshi diaspora population and its influence on the country's unfolding narrative. Datta features the viewpoints of key Bangladeshi policy makers; expert takes on how the world is engaging with Bangladesh; and covers the growing salience of Bangladesh's foreign policy, reflecting its new acquired economic status.

This volume is a critical reader, focusing on the continuities and discontinuities, confirmations and confrontations, crossovers and collisions, appropriations, adaptations and assimilations in the cultural transitions between British and Bangla vernacular modernist fiction within the context of the imperial modernity of the first half of the 20th century.The volume, consisting of critical essays aspires to illuminate, from multiple but intersecting perspectives, those thematic and structural areas where these two kinds of literary modernism, each aesthetically diverse, historically segmented by onslaughts of wars and other outbreaks of suffering and violence, and ideologically convoluted, but conditioned in many ways by common socio-historical catastrophes and promises, interact with each other to constitute an 'aesthetics of motion and dissonance'.Essays cut across literary criticism to employ interdisciplinary approaches, as they blur the boundaries between histories, biographies and fictional narratives, between individual ethics in and outside the fictional world, between imagined and living communities, between real and generic politics, between the home and the world, and between the corporeal and the cultural. These essays interrogate the mastery in literary techniques, narrative motives and dualities, 'major' and 'minor' genres, (de)formations of canons in respect of the 'worldliness' formed by the textual incorporation of the intricate imperial relationships between the United Kingdom and Bangla.

This book elaborates the politico-ideological viewpoints of Aurobindo, as displayed when he reigned as one of the major nationalist leaders defining Indian nationalism. Bidyut Chakrabarty examines Aurobindo's politico-ideological ideas during the period (1893-1910) when he was an active participant in the 'New Nationalist' or 'Democratic Nationalist' campaign, which started with the bifurcation of the Indian National Congress between the Moderates and Extremists (also known as the Revolutionary Nationalists) in its 1907 annual session, held at Surat.Chapters cover Aurobindo's distinctive ideas of nationalism, which he evolved in collaboration with his colleagues, especially Lal-Bal-Pal (Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Bipin Chandra Pal), and how he redefined the practice of nationalism. The book also demonstrates that unlike his predecessors, the Moderates, Aurobindo set out many strategies - including boycott and passive resistance - to execute the distinctive plan he designed to attain his politico-ideological goal. Other topics include the relatively less discussed aspect of Aurobindo's socio-political ideas, namely his unique model of education as an antidote to many of the crippling socio-cultural prejudices, and the importance of Bhagavad Gita in shaping Aurobindo's politico-ideological priorities.

This book explores narratives of nationalism in the Hindi novel (1940s-80s), engaging with mainstream, populist, political conceptualisation of a postcolonial nation and local, cultural, often marginalised fictional parallels and alternatives to it.Analysing processes of nation-formation and nationalism(s) via experiments with the novel form and versions of realism in Hindi, conversations between the political and the cultural, rural/borders and the urban/central spaces, individual subjectivity and social structures, and the challenges Hindi novels' internal linguistic diversity poses to formalised Hindi's hegemony, Imagining a Postcolonial Nation: Hindi Novels and Forms of India (1940s-80s) traces Hindi fiction's history of postcolonial India. The multiplicity of realisms indicates significant responses to postcolonial nationalism, idealistic, critical, regional, satirical and psychological.Looking at indigenous narrative methods employed by authors to critically evolve Western ideas of the nation and novel, the book explores the simultaneous convergences and divergences between literary and political understandings of ideological, religious and linguistic nationalisms. Surveying the broad sentiments of idealism, enchantment and disenchantment with freedom and postcoloniality, it studies the possibilities of fiction embodying national history without an outright commitment to mainstream nationalism or nationalist literary canon formation.It also briefly tries to understand the repercussions of nationalism as a masculinist project and its gendered nature affecting a section of writing, novels by women authors, to present counter-narratives to both national and literary canons. Choosing a fairly broad historical timeframe, the book reveals the radical potential of narratives that have over the years been critically categorised as canonical. It reopens discussions around nationalism within novels that have been often canonised as apparently uncritically nationalist.

Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi constitute the key pillars of Indian nationalist thought. In this book Bidyut Chakrabarty demonstrates how Tagore and Gandhi drew on each other as they articulated their unique mode of thinking, which led to an innovative discourse. Tagore and Gandhi agreed on many ideas but also had serious differences on quite a few, for instance, on whether to support the British during the Boer War.Confluence of Thought brings out the compatibility as well as the differences in their thoughts by asserting that both of them, despite their differences in approach, are essentially informed and shaped by Western and indigenous discourses as well as by colonial rule.The chapters in the volume dwell on their views on nationalism, civilisation, religion, rural construction and religion. These ideas and arguments moulded the freedom struggle and shaped the future of a free India.

Human interventions with living entities have had to be in a constant state of negotiating space necessary for co-habitation with animals, birds, trees, plants, grasslands, forests, hills, water bodies in the creation of villages and other settlements. The book argues that negotiating this space meant sharing, which impacted economic strategies, religious experiences, cultural interactions and oral performances that humans have strategized and preserved. This intersectional theme, through individual case studies, ultimately provides us the civilizational ethos of the Indian sub-continent on how human non-human relations informed it. The book provides a window on how this relationship was represented in a variety of material and literary texts, visual representations, archival records, folklore and oral testimonies. It brings to the fore these narratives over the longue durée to explicate the complex and delicate relationships in region specific ecological settings and thus give readers a perspective that crosses disciplinary and conceptual boundaries.

Leisure is a corollary to pleasure. While modern sociologists locate and relate leisure with the notion of work, time and entertainment emerging as a prominent status marker with modernity; this historical exploration, traces how leisure and recreation were often imagined and celebrated during premodern times, spanning from the ancient to the precolonial period.The book takes into account the differential access to leisure and pleasure based on class and gender where masculinity is projected through manly sports and femininity though beauty and indulgence in projection of recreation, entertainment and luxury. The counter-discourse representing labour for those who cater for this leisure is invisibilized as is their transactional nature.The volume dwells on the attitudes, prescribed and proscribed, and brings to the fore the differences across religious ideologies Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jaina and Muslim in various periods. Further it looks at leisure in the various classes and cultural spaces like the elite, women, the king in the bedchamber, and the court with dancing girls, public such as orchards, garden and performance spaces.

In this volume of writings from Bangla and Urdu literature, editors Rakhshanda Jalil and Debjani Sengupta raise issues of language, identity, nationhood and varied aspects of feminism and women's writings in the Indian subcontinent. Both the languages have lived a life across political borders and are spoken, read and loved by people across diverse geographical sites, including a large diaspora. They have had an afterlife after 1947 that helped them to refashion their cultural spheres in a divided land. Women's Writings from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh brings these languages together, to speak to each other and to showcase their strengths. By creating a platform for contemporary literary works, especially by women, it provides a new, radical view of the ways in which these languages have shaped women's creative universes.

Celebrated as the national poet of Bangladesh and fondly commemorated in India as the 'Rebel Poet', Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) is widely known for his poetry and music, although his political philosophy and anti-colonial revolutionary sentiments are best expressed in his journalistic writings.Nazrul's journalistic career spans across three key newspapers: Nabajug, Dhumketu and Langol. Editorials in Nabajug addressed a diverse range of subjects, including untouchability, racial discrimination, power structure and the importance of communal harmony. Dhumketu, perhaps the most signifi­cant amongst Nazrul's revolutionary contributions, became a testimonial to the reclamation of India's complete freedom, which eventually proved perilous for Nazrul. Langol, the mouthpiece of the Labour Swaraj Party, was the ­first Bengali paper speci­fically for and by the working class. It provided voice to the labourers and peasants, speaking self-reflexively about the nation's agro-economy.Kazi Nazrul Islam's Journalism brings together for the fi­rst time in English Nazrul's editorials published in the colonial Indian subcontinent and showcases Nazrul's far-reaching views on subjects close to his heart. By critically examining these essays, Arka Deb establishes Nazrul's relevance in the current times.

Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature interweaves the personal journey of an academic into reflections around self, language and translation with an eye on the intangibly available category of experience. It dwells on quieter modes of being political, of making knowledge democratic and of seeing gendered language in the everyday. In an unusual combination of real-life incidents and textual examples, it provides a palimpsest of what it is to be in a classroom; in the domestic sphere, straddling the 'manyness' of language and, of course, in a constant mode of translation that remains incomplete and unconcluded. Through both a poignant voice and rigorous questions, Kothari asks what it is to live and teach in India as a woman, a multilingual researcher and as both a subject and a rebel of the discipline of English. ­She draws from multiple bhasha texts with an uncompromising eye on their autonomy and intellectual tradition. ­The essays range from questions of knowledge, affect, caste, shame and humiliation to other cultural memories. Translation avoids the arrogance of the original; it has the freedom to say it and not be held accountable, which can make it both risky and exciting. More importantly, it also speaks after (anuvaad) rather than only for or instead, and this ethic informs the way Kothari writes this book, breaking new ground with gentle provocations.

After a brief interlude following the Cold War, nuclear weapons have regained their prominent place in world affairs. Yet our current nuclear age will not be a replay of the Cold War. New technologies, changing political contexts and the death of old arms-control agreements mean that today's nuclear strategists have to navigate unchartered waters filled with fresh perils. Unfortunately, the consequences of failure in the nuclear world can be catastrophic. The immediate imperative today is to lower the possibility of nuclear weapons use during a crisis or conflict involving nuclear powers. While deliberate or pre-emptive nuclear use is less likely, the rising danger of our time is that nuclear weapons will be employed due to some combination of miscommunication, misjudgment, misperception and sheer accident.The Sheathed Sword: From Nuclear Brink to No First Use is a collection of essays by leading scholars and practitioners on the role of nuclear weapons in global security. The contributors examine how individual states view nuclear weapons, the devastating effects of nuclear war on the world's climate and the issues around nuclear no first use. They also debate the feasibility and desirability of a global no-first-use (GNFU) agreement.

Appreciating Melodrama: Theory and Practice in Indian Cinema and Television seeks to identify and appreciate the continual influence of the ancient Sanskrit drama treatise, the Natyashastra, and its theory of aesthetics, the rasa theory, on the unique narrative attributes of Indian cinema.This volume of work critically engages with a representative sample of landmark films from 100 years of Indian film history across genres, categories, regions and languages. This is the first time a case study-based rigorous academic review of popular Indian cinema is done using the Indian aesthetic appreciation theory of rasa (affect/emotion). It proposes a theoretical model for film appreciation, especially for content made in the melodramatic genre, and challenges existing First World/Euro-American film criticism canons and notions that privilege cinematic 'realism' over other narrative forms, which will generate passionate debates for and against its propositions in future studies and research on films.This is a valuable academic reference book for students of film and theatre, world cinema and Indian cinema studies, South Asian studies and culture, Indology and the 'Sociology of Cinema' studies. It is a must-have reference text in the curriculum of both practical-oriented acting schools, as well as courses and modules focusing on a theoretical study of cinema, such as film criticism and appreciation, and the history of movies and performance studies.

'There is none like Uttam and there will be no one to ever replace him. He was and he is unparalleled in Bengali, even Indian cinema.'-Satyajit Ray, Oscar-winning Indian film-makerActor and screen icon Uttam Kumar (1926-1980) is a talismanic figure in Bengali public life. Breaking away from established codes of onscreen performance, he came to anchor an entire industry and led the efforts to reimagine popular cinema in mid-20th-century Bengal. But there is pitifully less knowledge about Uttam Kumar in the learned circles-be it about his range of style and performance; the attractions and problems of his cinema; his roles as a producer and patriarch of the industry; or his persona, stardom and legacy.The first definitive cultural and critical biography of this larger-than-life figure engages meaningfully with his life and cinema, revealing the man, hero and actor from various, often competing, vantages. The conceptual aim is to locate a star figure within a larger historical and cultural context, and to enquire into how a towering image was mobilised for an ever-greater, wholesome, popular and even, at times, radical and progressive entertainment. A complimentary métier of this work is to explore why and how this star persona would go on to reconstitute the bhadrolok Bengali visual and cultural world in the post-Partition period.But above all, this is the story of a clerk who became an actor, an actor who became a star, a star who became an icon and an icon who became a legend.

The plethora of commentary from highly respected voices in a broad cross-section of academic disciplines, which V. S. Naipaul's death on 11 August 2018 elicited, ranged so widely, both cognitively and emotionally, that if a student of literature, unfamiliar with the Naipaulian era, read it all, they would have failed to make sense of the divergences.Allegations included that he 'was a cruel man', 'a scarred man', 'the darkest dungeons of colonialism incarnate: self-punishing, self-loathing, world-loathing, full of nastiness and fury', 'a ventriloquist for the nastiest cliches European colonialism had devised to rule the world with arrogance and confidence' and so on. On the other hand, writers referred to Naipaul as a 'brilliant writer's writer', one 'who holds a mirror of imagination unto society to capture a certain view of reality' and one who 'has turned the genre of the travelogue into an art form'.Debates aside, many of us appreciate the value of Naipaul's writing to the deepest possible comprehension of the imperial impulse and the myriad reasons it manifested as colonialism. The First Naipaul World Epics is the first in a series of critical collections that aim to demonstrate this value. At the same time, the series seeks to help the new student through the quagmire of divergent opinions his personality and writing have generated.

The New Normal explores the relation between the subject and the state after the events of 9/11 that left the world stunned. It looks at this relation through the lens of trauma for the mind, biopolitics for the body and visuality for the body politic. This interpretive frame helps examine how the 9/11 violence created a moment where the mind, body and body politiccould be redefined after 9/11. In an important theoretical intervention into 21st-century American Studies, it asks what the relation between the state and those it expels from its citizenry is. It makes a special mention of sites of incarceration such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as 9/11 phenomena. While referring to sources as diverse as 9/11 poetry, political and presidential speeches, journalistic accounts, atrocity photographs, and theories of trauma, biopolitics and visuality, the book argues for the presence of a new normal.

Horror Fiction in the Global South: Cultures, Narratives, and Representations believes that the experiences of horror are not just individual but also/simultaneously cultural. Within this understanding, literary productions become rather potent sites for the relation of such experiences both on the individual and the cultural front. It's not coincidental, then, that either William Blatty's The Exorcist or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude become archetypes of the re-presentations of the way horror affects individuals placed inside different cultures. Such an affectation, though, is but a beginning of the ways in which the supernatural interacts with the human and gives rise to horror. Considering that almost all aspects of what we now designate as the Global North, and its concomitant, the Global South - political, historical, social, economic, cultural, and so on - function as different paradigms, the experiences of horror and their telling in stories become functionally different as well. Added to this are the variations that one nation or culture of the east has from another. The present anthology of essays, in such a scheme of things, seeks to examine and demonstrate these cultural differences embedded in the impact that figures of horror and specters of the night have on the narrative imagination of storytellers from the Global South. If horror has an everyday presence in the phenomenal reality that Southern cultures subscribe to, it demands alternative phenomenology. The anthology allows scholars and connoisseurs of Horror to explore theoretical possibilities that may help address precisely such a need.

Today there is a new battle going on over the 'idea of India', with some groups questioning if there ever was any real nation called 'India' prior to the British rule. Challenging this notion are those who claim that India has a profound national and cultural heritage since ancient times and was one of the main centres of civilization in the world, with its own characteristic ideals and practices born of dharma and yoga. The Constitution speaks of India that is Bharata, proclaiming this ancient name for the country. If we look at India as Bharata, the idea of the country and its unique identity and history become clear. Awaken Bharata is a plea for that eternal India to awaken and reclaim its esteemed place as the guru of nations, expressing once more its vast civilizational ethos. The book encourages a new vision of the country, linking its magnificent past with a more brilliant future. It emphasizes the role of a new 'intellectual kshatriya'-intellectual warriors of dharma-to challenge the inimical forces seeking to deny or displace India's great civilization.

Creativity is considered one of the most valuable skills to possess in today's volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. However, it is also often thought of as a skill or talent a person is born with. Dispelling this myth through a compelling narration that combines personal anecdotes with history and neuroscience, the author helps us understand that creativity is well within the reach of each and every one of us. Not stopping at that, this book offers a powerful method of enhancing creativity through simple step-by-step practices of mindfulness meditations and methods. A guide, a workbook and a manual rolled into a simple, easy-to-follow and practical format, Creativity Unleashed is an essential read for professionals from different fields, students and, in fact, anyone who wishes to expand their creative potential. With an engaging and playful narrative, this is a faithful companion, a fantastic bedside read and a guide that works to unleash your hidden talent well beyond the 48 days of the programme in the book.

For thousands of years, philosophers have been struggling to prove God. To modern atheists, these are monumental failures. Atheism, then, is the rational position. Or is it? By combining the most sophisticated philosophies (falsification, scientific method, confirmation holism) with the most advanced sciences (quantum, relativity, evolution theories), "Confessions Of A Dying Mind" takes a fresh look at this oldest and profoundest anxiety of man. Uniquely, the book is a novelized nonfiction - indeed, "the first philosophical novel on God". The story is set in the near-death experience of the atheistic protagonist, Albert Dyers. Its central plot proceeds as an adventurous investigation, argument after argument ... till a certain conclusion becomes inescapable. "Confessions" is laced with novel ideas found nowhere else. It is narrated in a highly readable language for all educated laypersons to comprehend with relative ease. The book is therefore a must-read for theists, atheists, and everyone else interested in exploring the relationship of God and science, in light of leading developments.

Today, we are leading our lives in mindless pursuit, unable even to articulate what we are pursuing. We are unhappy even after achieving what we desire. Happiness is all we want! suggests that the source of peace and happiness is within us, if we know the secret. The book's objective is to help us unlock that secret and attain a high level of overall well-being in order to lead a happy and fulfilling life and be the healthiest we can be, mentally and physically. A wide variety of tools and techniques are explained in simple language. Many real life experiences of the author as well as other people are interspersed through the book. Demystifying the spiritual aspect of wellbeing, this book integrates it with your life objectives. You can immensely improve not only the peace and happiness in your life but your beauty and appearance as well.

A lot of us are caught up in the race of acquiring and multiplying wealth. Often, this comes at the cost of harmony in relationships, health and emotional well-being. We fail to strike the right balance in life and believe that life is meant to be such. Then, there are others who believe that it's impossible to be materially successful and yet have peace and joy-believing that prosperity and peace cannot coexist. Hence, they either resort to the life of a recluse or lose themselves in material indulgence.Busting these myths related to money, Discover Your Real Wealth guides you to your true wealth of consciousness. It explains how your thoughts and emotions affect your consciousness and provides various techniques to retain and raise it. If you safeguard this wealth everything else will fall into place.The book explains the art of functioning in a relaxed state, enabling you to assuredly watch how all your wishes come to fruition, instead of struggling and hankering after them. A calming read during cacophonous times, the teachings of Sirshree will help you enjoy all the riches of the world and lead the path to the ultimate state of peace, success, harmony and abundance.

Islam does not discriminate between men and women. The Quran promises as much reward for a roza (fast), a Hajj or an act of charity for a woman as a man. At nearly 60 places, it asks both men and women to establish prayer, as opposed to merely offering prayer. Establishing prayer, scholars agree, is done through congregation. Men do it by praying in mosques. But what about women? They are denied the right to enter mosques across the Indian subcontinent. Women in Masjid aims to give voice to those women who have been denied their due by our patriarchal society. It tells the reader that Prophet Muhammad clearly permitted women to enter a mosque. It is a permission well respected in mosques across West Asia, Europe and America. Yet, in an overwhelming majority of mosques across India, women are virtually barred from entry. No explicit ban, just a tacit one. Drawing its arguments from the Quran and Hadiths, the book exposes the hypocrisy of men who deny women their right to pray in mosques in the name of religion, thus revealing entrenched patriarchal beliefs masquerading as faith.