As a young man, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a series of letters to his niece during what he described as the most productive period of his life. By turns contemplative and playful, gentle and impassioned, Tagore s letters abound in incredible insights from sharply comical portrayals of English sahibs to lively anecdotes about family life, from thoughts on the nature of poetry to spiritual contemplation and inner feeling. And coursing through all these letters, like a ceaseless heartbeat, is Tagore s deep love for the natural splendour of Bengal. In this manner, this volume also serves as a prose companion to his magnificent work Gitanjali. Letters from a Young Poet shimmers with wit and warmth, and offers unforgettable vignettes of the young poet in those happy days before extraordinary fame found him.

Letters From A Young Poet: 1887-1895

Biographies & Memoirs

Chaudhuri, Rosinka

Arts & Literature

India Penguin

The nineteenth century in Bengal has been identified and then reviled as a period of renaissance or false renaissance. This study moves beyond those sterile parameters to provide a new understanding of the interactive, living, and cataclysmic nature of events. Analysing certain cultural turning points in the history of Bengali literature, it investigates the place of the aesthetic, the political, and the collective in the composition of a literary culture to show the relevance and significance of this sphere to our self-making as Indians. Focusing on the local and the marginal, the study reflects that it is often the periphery that informs the central developments of a culture. The literary debates generated around the works dealt with in this book, the issues involved in their formulation of a literary culture for Bengal, and the political implications of the cultural space of literature in this period are grasped in their historical density to reveal how this unique period, from 1831 to 1881, was one in which an answer to the question of the shape of the Indian modern in part lies.

The Literary Thing: History, Poetry, and the Making of a Modern Literary Culture

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

Part of the "Occasional Papers" series of CSSSC, this essay is a brief, and sharply posed, exchange between Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Das Gupta on working class consciousness in Bengal. it posits that this consciousness is not a mechanical outcome of the capitalist mode of production, itis not a thing but a process; that even failure must be taken on board in order to flesh out that process; that not only was the working class present (and therefore conscious) of its own making, but drew from rich pre-capitalist cultural traditions of dissent, rebellion and republicanism.The essay asks pertinent questions about the morality of labour, history of peasant revolts, capitalist intervention, religious discrimination among labourers etc.

Some Aspects of Labour History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century: Two Views (Social Science Acrosss Disciplines)

Business & Money

Chakrabarty, Dipesh

Dasgupta, Ranajit

Economics

Merchants and Colonialism is part of the Occasional Papers series circulated by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. Amiya Bagchi provides a historiographic account of the traditional role of merchants in pre colonial India and identifies how these roles were different from therole of the capitalist in post-colonial India. In general, the behaviour of merchants in precapitalist societies was, according to Bagchi, widely different from that of capitalists in developed capitalist societies. In developed capitalist societies, capitalists, generally with state support, playeda very important part in modifying techniques of production and seeking ways of expanding their markets. By contrast, the pace of modification of techniques of production was slower in precapitalist societies and owners of capital did not play a significant role in such modification.

Merchants and Colonialism (Social Science Across Disciplines)

Bagchi, Amiya

The devotional Bhakti movement, or more specifically, the Vaisnava Bhakti movement, in Bengal is a subject on which much has been written since the time of its founder, Chaitanya.Within this long tradition of discussion and debate, some academic scholars, such as Jadunath Sarkar, Dineshchandra Sen, Bimanbihari Majumdar, Bhupendranath Dutta and Sashibhushan Dasgupta, have made notable contributions on various aspects of the movement since its beginning in the period of the Bengal sultans. Each of these scholars had a distinct approach, focusing on specific themes. In line with these earlier approaches, Hitesranjan Sanyal (1940-1988) tried to spell out his own distinctive opinion regarding Vaisnavism in Bengal. His work remained unfinished because of his untimely death. This is his seminal paper on the Bhakti Movement and Vaishnavism in Bengal.

Trends of Change in Bhakti Movement in Bengal

History

Sanyal, Hitesranjan

Asia

The imponderable value of the literary to critical discourse is given pre-eminence in this study of cultural turning points in the history of Bengali literature, so that we might investigate the place of the aesthetic in the composition of a literary culture without denuding it of its significance and aura or, for that matter, its historicity. Mapping a fifty-year period that is fundamental to any understanding of nineteenth-century Bengal – 1831 to 1881 – this book focuses on literary debates generated around the works of Iswarchandra Gupta, Rangalal Bandyopadhyay, Madhusudan Datta, Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, Nabinchandra Sen, and Rabindranath Tagore. It thereby investigates the place of the aesthetic, the political, and the collective in the making of a modern cultural sphere and the relevance and significance of the literary to our self-making as readers today. Providing a new understanding of the interactive, living, and cataclysmic nature of events of the period which has been identified and then reviled as a period of renaissance or false renaissance, The Literary Thing reveals how this unique period holds the key to understanding the shape of the Indian modern.

The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere

Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

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