Journal articles on the topic 'Bengali language movement'

The breakup of Pakistan in 1971 can be explained in pt by a failure of understanding on the part of the West Pakistani leadership of Pakistan, a seeming inability to recognize what the meaning of Pakistan was for Bengalis, and thus the cause of the demand for Bengali as a state language equal to Urdu. Exploration of the language issue in the period before and afterndependence helps to illuminate the divergence of belief about the form of the new state and the meaning of parity in representation between east and west wings of the country. The final tragedy of the attempted crushing of the movement for an autonomous Bangladesh is also in part an outcome of this pattern of belief, in particular the belief about the role of Hindus in the expression of Bengali identity.

Muslims in Bengal constitute a distinct ethnic group in terms of language, culture and history. After the Arabs, Bengali Muslims constitute the second largest Muslim ethnic group in the world. This article is based on a historical and ethnographic study of an Islamic reform movement that emerged in colonial Bengal. It was initiated by late Abu Bakr Siddique (d. 1939) and presently is linked with his shrine at Furfura Sahreif, West Bengal. The movement was an offshoot of tariqa-e-muhammadiya movement that came up in the early nineteenth century northern India and had an important impact on the social–religious landscape of colonial Bengal. This article attempts to illustrate how modern Islamic reform movements with its emphasis on scriptural purity and abhorrence towards any localised ways of practicing Islam interact with its cultural and historical context. This problematises any neat distinction between the ‘scriptural’ or ‘textual’ Islam understood in terms of great Islamic traditions against the localised or lived Islam. Second, it highlights the various ways through which the reform movement is sustained by exploring the dynamic interface between religious reform, popular piety and the role of the post-colonial state in shaping Muslim subjectivities.

The years 1948-1952 were pivotal for the history of Bangladesh. The question of what would be the state language was raised by the people of this country. Muslim leaders in Pakistan, at the time, believed that Urdu should be the state language because it had become recognized as the cultural symbol of sub-continental Muslims. However, most of Pakistan’s population, the Bengalis of eastern Pakistan, to whom Urdu was a foreign language, considered it a ploy by the West Pakistanis to colonize East Pakistan. Protests erupted across East Pakistan after the then Prime Minister of Pakistan replaced Bangla as the state language with Urdu. On February 21, 1952, a student protest resulted in the deaths of some students by police. The language movement drew Bengalis’ attention to their collective aspirations to create a new nation and nationalist identity, leading them to fight for an imagined sovereign state, Bangladesh. Against the backdrop of our language movement, Fagun Haway (In Spring Breeze, 2019), a film by Tauquir Ahmed, captures the anecdotes of Pakistani repression towards Bengalis by portraying the nationalist consciousness and identity approaches of this nation. Employing the concept of nationalism and the historical development of our identity approaches, this paper shows that Ahmed displays the coexistence of Bengali and Muslim identity approaches as well as the contentious relationship between these two approaches inside our nationalism at that time. Besides, Bengaliness is viewed as the dominating approach when the debate over the state language turns into a divisive political one and a fight for our very existence. Social Science Review, Vol. 40(2), December 2023 Page: 39-58

This paper examines the influence of age of immersion and proficiency in a second language on speech movement consistency in both a first and a second language. Ten monolingual speakers of English and 20 Bengali–English bilinguals (10 with low L2 proficiency and 10 with high L2 proficiency) participated. Lip movement variability was assessed based on bilingual participants’ production of four real and four novel words embedded in Bengali (L1) and English (L2) sentences. Lip movement variability was evaluated across L1 and L2 contexts for the production of real and novel words with trochaic and iambic stress pattern. Adult bilinguals produced equally consistent speech movement patterns in their production of L1 and L2 targets. Overall, speakers’ L2 proficiency did not influence their movement variability. Unlike children, the speech motor systems of adult L2 speakers exhibit a lack of flexibility which could contribute to their increased difficulties in acquiring native-like pronunciation in L2.

Designing an embedded system to convert sign language to sound forms to communicate with the outside world can be a challenging yet rewarding project, especially for mute people. To convey a speaker's thought through sign language, hand shapes, hand orientation and movement, and facial expressions must be combined concurrently. This research is intended to design a system that translates sign language into sound forms to establish communication with the outside world for people who are deaf, those who can hear but cannot physically speak, or have trouble with spoken languages due to some other disabilities. They can thus receive prompt assistance and stay out of uncomfortable circumstances. Additionally, this system incorporates a tracking system that uses a global system for mobile communications (GSM)/ global positioning system (GPS) module to locate a person using a tracking device and send the location to previously saved emergency contact numbers so that someone nearby can quickly locate and assist the person. Typically, each nation has its own native sign language. This project will create a few essential and typical sentences and phrases in Bengali.

Language is a crucial aspect of human communication and identity, and conflicts between different inhabitants of regional spoken languages can be detrimental to a nation's unity and integrity. Pakistan, created based on religious demand, disintegrated due to regional language issues, which provided a platform for separatists. The Bangladesh freedom war can be traced back to the historical background of East Pakistan, which was not only due to geographical and economic factors but also a lack of sightedness on the part of political parties and leadership. The government believed that the demand for the Bengali language was driven by Hindus and fifth columnists. The language movement, which began in 1947 and culminated in the separation of East and West Pakistan in 1971, provided a foundation for Bengali nationalism. The government's misinterpretation of ground realities allowed separatists to divert patriotism and anti-Pakistanism. The current paper highlights the linguistic controversy responsible for the disintegration of Pakistan.

In this article, I juxtapose the ways the “father of modern Sinhala drama,” John De Silva, and the Sinhala language reformer, Munidasa Cumaratunga, utilized music for different nationalist projects. First, I explore how De Silva created musicals that articulated Arya-Sinhala nationalism to support the Buddhist Revival. Second, I investigate how Cumaratunga, who spearheaded the Hela-Sinhala movement, asserted that genuine Sinhala song should be rid of North Indian influence but full of lyrics composed in “pure” Sinhala. The purpose of this comparison is to critique Partha Chatterjee's notion of the inner domain. Chatterjee focused on Bengali cultural nationalism and its complex relation to Western hegemony. He considered Bengal, the metropolis of the British Raj, to be representative of colonized nations. This article reveals that elsewhere in South Asia—Sri Lanka—one cultural movement sought to define the nation not in relation to the West but in opposition to North India.

This article delves into the complex issue of script selection for the Kokborok language in Tripura, where the imposition of the Bengali script against the desires of the indigenous people has ignited a profound struggle. We explore how this decision holds implications that extend far beyond language preservation, encompassing the preservation of indigenous identity, cultural rights, and resilience against cultural assimilation. It is argued that the movement advocating for the adoption of the Roman script for Kokborok exemplifies the unwavering determination of the indigenous Tipra people to safeguard their linguistic heritage. The Roman script, widely understood regionally and globally, not only transcends linguistic barriers but also fosters a sense of communal cohesion and empowerment. This movement is part of a broader narrative of resistance against the erosion of indigenous languages and cultures, resonating with similar struggles worldwide. The successful adoption of the Roman script not only validates cultural rights but also contributes to a more inclusive and compassionate world where linguistic diversity is celebrated and preserved for generations to come.

This essay both pits Anik Datta's movie Meghnadhbodh Rohoshya against other literary works dealing with the Naxal question and examines its intertextuality to understand the multifaceted theme of political betrayal that subsumes the armed insurgency. On May 25, 1967, a group of trival sharecroppers in an Indian village called Naxalbari under the state of West Bengal resisted landowners from getting their yield. The protest got 11 villagers killed and spun off into a violent insurgency aimed at the annihilation of the people's enemy, and eventually exposed the Marxist/Maoist divide in the Communist Party of India. Released on the fiftieth year of the Naxalbari Movement, Anik Datta's movie tackles some of the unresolved conflicts of the past by giving them human faces. He uses the genre of mystery films to attempt an "objective" analysis of nuanced truth behind one symbolic betrayal that failed the movement. Datta narrates the story of a defector who left his idealist activism to settle for a comfortable and successful life abroad. The protagonist's defection serves as a parallel to the way the Bengali renaissance figure Michael Madhusudan Dutt left his religion, country and language for Europe and wrote in English. Anik Datta, however, focuses on Madhusudan on Meghnadhbodh Kavya , where the heroic code of a warrior clan is betrayed, and uses it as a temporal frame to negotiate with the present. This article critiques the multiplicity of exchanges between Madhusudan's epic and a contemporary tale of betrayal as found in the Anik Datta's film to comment on the culture and political components of the Naxalite movement and the nostalgia assiciated with it.

Adaptation, a complex bilingual and bicultural process, is further problematised in a colonial scenario inflected by burgeoning nationalism and imperialist counter-oppression. Nagendranath Bose’s Karnabir (1884/85), the second extant Bengali translation of Macbeth was written after the First War of Indian Independence in 1857 and its aftermath – the formation of predominantly upper and middle class nationalist organisations that spearheaded the freedom movement. To curb anti-colonial activities in the cultural sphere, the British introduced repressive measures like the Theatre Censorship Act and the Vernacular Press Act. Bengal experienced a revival of Hinduism paradoxically augmented by the nationalist ethos and the divisive tactics of British rule that fostered communalism. This article investigates the contingencies and implications of domesticating and othering Macbeth at this juncture and the collaborative/oppositional strategies of the vernacular text vis-à-vis colonial discourse. The generic problems of negotiating tragedy in a literary tradition marked by its absence are compounded by the socio-linguistic limitations of a Sanskritised adaptation. The conflicted nature of the cultural indigenisation evidenced in Karnabir is explored with special focus on the nature of generic, linguistic and religious acculturation, issues of nomenclature and epistemology, as well as the political and ideological negotiations that the target text engages in with the source text and the intended audience.

The article examines how the Eastern traditional theatre responded to the Western theatre in the context of the British colonial regime in the Indian subcontinent. From this point of view, the dialogue between cultures was practically not considered. Hence, this study is devoted to understanding the synthesis of European theatre and traditional theatre, which began to be considered a rural art form by the early twentieth century, meaning something simple or low. In contrast, urban theatre of the European type was perceived as something refined or high. Rabindranath Tagore had not been fully successful in synthesizing heterogeneous theatrical traditions in his lyrical plays. The Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), an all-India organization of progressive writers-artists-activists, was established in Mumbai (Bombay) in 1943, played a significant role in creating the new cultural expression in the map of colonial Bengali theatre. Also, after obtaining independence in 1971, the theatre artists of Bangladesh sought a new language of performance in the urban theater, which would embody the people’s lives, hopes, and dreams. Eventually, the national cultural movement emerged in the decade of 90s in the last century. The movement was called the “Theatre of Roots”, which attempted to synthesize the traditional elements with the Western forms and enjoyed great popularity. Therefore, the article analyzes the play Wheel by Selim Al Deen, directed by Syed Jamil Ahmed, the most significant examples of the “Theatre of Roots” movement. In the study of this production, an analysis of the artistic process of synthesis of traditions in the modern urban theatre of Bangladesh is carried out.

Nationalism and religion have always been at the centre of political contestation in Southeast Asia. In fact, religion was the determinative factor in the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent, where India was for the Hindus and East and West Pakistan for the Muslims. The emergence of a national identity based on religion let loose unanticipated violence and bloodshed, which led to massive migration as religious minorities—Muslims from India, and Hindus from both sides of Pakistan—crossed borders to be with co-religionists. However, the Urdu-speaking Muslims known as “Biharis,” who migrated to East Pakistan from India during and after the 1947 partition, faced a perilous situation in the wake of the Liberation War of Bangladesh. The rise of the Bengali nationalistic movement and the war resulted in the formation of a new nation-state, but it left the Biharis without a nation or national identity. This paper, highlighting the plight of the half-Bihari protagonist in Ruby Zaman’s Invisible Lines (2011), brings to the surface the ambivalent existence of the Biharis. Applying the theoretical framework of Benedict Anderson, Partha Chatterjee, and Ashis Nandy, the paper further demonstrates how the convoluted ties between religion, nationalism, and national identity problematize the inclusion of the Biharis, thereby displacing them forever, first from their homeland and then from Bangladesh. Even after they were granted citizenship in Bangladesh in 2008, the precarity of their national identity and belongingness still pervades as the country continues to eye them with suspicion and contempt for varied reasons.

Context: Canada hosts thousands of newcomers from disadvantaged economies. Because of cultural non-essentialism and stigma, newcomer women in Canada embrace multi-level barriers to express their everyday discrimination and trauma experienced at home. Language creates another level of challenge. To understand the under-expressed domestic violence and the level of their trauma, this study added an arts-based evidence-generation technique followed by healing strategies by expressive arts modalities for this implementation research. Methodology: This mixed-method implementation research adopted an outcome-harvesting approach. Peer researchers conducted a collaborative review of the literature to find the best arts practices for identifying violence (type, bases, frequency, and severity), sort out the best modalities of expressive arts therapy (EAT) for such a vulnerable population group, and efficient measures to evaluate the intervention findings. Intervention: After screening for eligible participants (not in a crisis state) and their preparedness, a series of twelve sessions of EAT were conducted by a registered therapist on a closed group of newcomer participants. In a pilot phase, therapies are completed with three linguistic newcomer women groups- Arabic, Farsi/Dari, and Bengali. Three more groups (women speaking Tigrinya, newcomer women living in a shelter, and members of the LGBTQ2S+ communities) are selected for the next therapy sessions. The three sequential modalities were movement and discussion, storytelling and cognitive, and visual art and journaling. The key procedures were psychoeducation, self-regulation, co-regulation, strength-based, cognitive/tactile, and collective painting. The peer researcher conducted a 1-to-1 telephone interview with every participant for wellness and vulnerability checks three months after the last session. A Focus Group Discussion (FGD) is done for every group six months after the last session to assess sustainability and emerging challenges. Call into action: After triangulation of quantitative, qualitative, and arts-based evaluation findings, the study team prepares a scalable culturally appropriate practice guideline, a resource navigation toolkit for the survivors, and a policy advocacy document for necessary legislative amendment.

Sign language is the primary means of communication for people having speaking and hearing impairment. This language uses a system of manual, facial, and other body movements as the means of communication, as opposed to acoustically conveyed sound patterns. This paper uses image processing and fuzzy logic to develop an intelligent system to recognize Bengali Sign Language. The proposed system works in two phases. In the first phase, the fuzzification methods are defined. Then in the next phase, the raw images are processed to identify the fuzzy rules. A detailed implementation procedure of the proposed system is demonstrated by describing the recognition process of four Bengali characters.

Subsequent to the Partition of Bengal in 1905, the consolidation of linguistic identities and movements emerged as an important assertion of core democratic values, positing that governance must be in a language intelligible to the majority. Like other linguistic movements in late-colonial India, the Karnataka Ekikarana (Karnataka unification) movement did not proceed with a spatially uniform logic nor followed a uniform temporality in realising its objectives of uniting Kannada speakers from disparate sub-regions. Attempting to reconcile elite literary ambitions, popular aspirations and political differences, the movement shifted gears through several phases as it worked across multiple territorial jurisdictions and political systems, including the demarcations of British India and princely India. Focussing on the period between 1860 and 1938, the present article examines the heterogeneous nature of the unification movement across British-Karnataka and two Kannada-speaking princely states, namely, Mysore in the south and Jamakhandi in the north. It explores the ways in which the ruling family of ‘model’ Mysore sought legitimacy in embracing their Kannada heritage; in contrast, the Jamakhandi rulers resisted any concession to Kannada linguistic sentiments. The article shows how, in arriving at monolingually indexed territorial entities, the bridging of ‘internal’ frontiers across these divergent political and linguistic contours proved just as crucial as the claiming of dominance over other language groups within an intensely polyglot world.

Bangabandhu (1920-1795) Seikh Mujibur Rahman, the architect of Bangladesh and the Father of the nation, was born on 17 March 1920, in the village of Tungipara of patagati union under the Gopalganj district. His parents used to affectionately call him ‘Khoka’. He spent his childhood in Tungipara. Seikh Mujib married Seikh Fazilatunnesa at the age of 18. In 1940, he joined “All India Muslim Students Federation”. Before that in 1938, he was introduced with Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy while he came to visit the Gopalganj Missionary school. After the partition of India, he founded “East Pakistan Muslim Chhatra League” on 04 January 1948. He was elected joined secretary of “Awami Muslim League” on June 23, 1949, at the age of 29. He had great contribution in language movement in 1952, to establish Bangla as the state language of Pakistan. He was elected Secretary General of “East Pakistan Awami Muslim League” on July 9, 1953. Seikh Mujib achieved a great victory in Gopalganj constituency on 10 March, 1954, while “United Front” secured 223 seats out of 237 (Awami League143). Seikh Mujib took the charge of Agriculture and Forest Ministry. But the Central government dissolved that cabinet. Seikh Mujib presents the historic 6 point in Lahore on 5 January, 1966, demanding autonomous government in East Pakistan. Seikh Mujib was publicly declared as “Bangabandhu” on 23 February, 1969. Bangabandhu Seikh Mujib achieved a landslide victory in the general election of 1970. In the great war of Independence during the nine month the Pakistan Army surrendered to the allied forces made of Mukti Bahini and Indian Army on 16 December, 1971. As a result, Bangladesh became independent in the history of the world. Bangabandhu Seikh Mujibur Rahman was elected as the prime minister of the country. He along with his family members and personal staffs were assassinated by a group of Bangladesh rebellious Army on 15 August, 1975. He would practice Islamic values in his personal life. He used to pray his prayers with Maulana Bhasani and Mr. Fazlul Huq. when they had finished their evening prayers the Maulana would discuss about religion from the holy Qur’an. This became a regular routine in the prison life. He also recites verses from the holy Qur’an every day. He had Bengali translation of the holy Qur’an in several volumes. While he was in Dhaka jail he had taken Muhammed Ali’s English translation of the holy Qur’an and had read it regularly. But his philosophy in the state life is as follows: He was always wishing to make Bangladesh a country of peace for all religions. He was interested to give importance to all citizens equally. He has contributed to establishing religious tolerance in Bangladesh. His outstanding contribution was to spread Islamic values through Islamic Foundation and other religious institutions. However, the Article tries to highlight that Bangabandhu respects Islamic values in his personal life, and his attitude was to reduce the extremism, and build a peaceful Bangladesh in-between various cultures and religions.

In this article, I foreground the granular movements that determine the ubiquitous nature of India’s new media economy created by the advent of streaming media platforms and the emergence of regional online content creators in India. I argue that the increasing preference of Indian audiences to consume online content in their own language has led to a demand for ‘regional’ content, whereby streaming platforms and online creators are increasingly investing in ‘non-Hindi’ and ‘non-English’ language content to cater to the linguistically and culturally diverse Indian population. Through a primary focus on online content creation practices in Bengali and Marathi languages, the article explores their ‘local’, ‘regional’, ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ appeal, and subsequent blurring of boundaries between ‘regionalization’ and ‘localization’. The remainder of the article focuses on the emerging diaspora of regional online content creators who are adopting distinct content strategies to develop relationships with online communities based on commonalities of language and culture.

This article explores the reception of discourses about land and property in Islamic jurisprudence in colonial Bengal. I argue that Hanafifiqhprovided a sophisticated conceptual repertoire for framing claims to property that agrarian political actors in Muslim Bengal drew upon. Yet the dominant framework for understanding property claims in postclassical jurisprudence was ill-fitted to claims of the kind that agrarian movements in colonial Bengal were articulating. As a result, twentieth-century agrarian movements in the region spoke the language offiqh, but nonetheless inhabited the ideological landscape of a much broader twentieth-century world of political aspirations and norms.

After a short span of achieving statehood on basis of religious identity, the Bengali Muslims redefined their identity and once again demanded a separate state on basis of linguistic identity. Hobsbawm believe that identity formation in terms of nationhood is a result of deliberate ideological engineering. Economic factors serve as tangible signposts to cultural subjugation. Though many historians owe the Bengali nationalism and claims of statehood to linguistic and cultural difference that proved detrimental for state and nation making in pre 1971 Pakistan, the prime argument of this paper is that nationalist discourse is a discursive formation and a sort of language game rooted in material socio economic phenomenon of inequality and disparity. The concept of inequality and disparity essentially employ that a binary exists, and a group is feeling excluded, marginalized and at disadvantageous position in respect to some other group. The feeling of victimhood is at base of the nationalist movements and (re)definition of identity. Employing the concept of Subaltern Realism given by Mohammed Ayoob and the toolkit of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, and taking discourse as a combination of material and discursive formations, influencing human subjectivities and conditions of existence; the paper will examine the material economic conditions of existence in pre 1971 Pakistani federation and discursive responses as claims of self-determination and separatist nationalism. One of the key findings of paper is that ethnic Bengali nationalism was a derivative phenomenon of economic exclusion and uneven development.

AbstractThe expansion of the colonial public sphere in India during the 1930s and 1940s saw the nation's English-language press increasingly serve as a key site in the struggle for freedom despite British censorship. This article examines the journalistic career of T. G. Narayanan, the first Indian war correspondent and investigative reporter, to understand the role of English-language newspapers in India's quest for independence. Narayanan reported on two major events leading to independence: the Bengal famine of 1943 and the Second World War. Drawing on Michael Walzer's concept of the ‘connected critic’, this research demonstrates that Narayanan's journalism fuelled the Indian nationalist movement by manoeuvring around British censors to publicize and expand Mahatma Gandhi's criticism of British rule, especially in light of the famine and war. His one departure from the pacifist leader, however, was his support of Indian soldiers serving in the Indian National Army and British Army.

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the main architect of the state of Bangladesh. He was born in a respectable Muslim family on 17 March 1920. He dedicated his valuable time of his life for independence of Bangladesh. He started his political life when he was a student of Gopalganj Missionary School in 1939. In 1940 Sheikh Mujib joined All India Muslim Students Federation and elected as a counselor for one year. Bangabandhu was involved actively in struggle for Pakistan state in 1942 when he was studying at Kolkata Islamic Collage. He played significant role in protecting Muslim community during the violence between Hindu and Muslim after separation of India and the birth of Pakistan in 1947. Bangabandhu established "East Pakistan Muslim Student League" on 4th January 1948 when he was studying at the University of Dhaka and he proposed All party State Language movement Council. He played a key role in 1952 from the central jail when he was a prisoner and he demanded recognition of Bangla as the state language of East Pakistan. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was elected General Secretary of East Pakistan Awami Muslim League at its council on 9th July 1953. Bangabandhu won in the first General Election of East Bengal Legislative Assembly held on 10 March from Gopalganj. Bangabandhu took charge of the ministry of Agriculture and Forests on 15th March. He proposed historical six-point Charter of demand at a national convention of the opposition parties at Lahore on 5th February 1966. On 1st March 1966 Bangabandhu was elected the president of Awami League. On 23 February 1969 the central Student Action Council arranged a meeting at the Racecourse and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was publicly honored as "Bangabandhu" at this meeting of one million people. On 5th December, Bangabandhu declared East Pakistan would be called Bangladesh. His historical speech on 07 March 1971 was a clear declaration of independence.

Muslim movements in the twentieth century have sought to develop new reading and listening publics attuned to the messages of reform and renewal. Across Asia and the Middle East, scholars, poets, and activists have created distinctive vernacular genres intended to make the words of scripture widely available. Newspaper columns, quickly printed tracts, and popular poetry have been shaped to the task of tafsīr, the interpretation of scripture. International networks of printers, booksellers, and, more recently, television producers have extended the reformist's reach far beyond older networks of scholarship and communication (Metcalf 1990; Eickelman 1992). Often modernist writers have signaled their break with past scholarly traditions by writing in vernaculars, sometimes developing new vernaculars. They wrote in Turkish, Urdu, Bengali, or Indonesian, rather than the traditional religious and literary languages of Arabic, Persian, and Javanese (Anderson 1990; Freitag 1988; Mardin 1989).

AbstractThe movement of the Hughli River in 1804-5 resulted in the deposition of alluvion along Calcutta’s river banks which unfolded as an ownership crisis for the East India Company. The Company responded by developing new legal categories and administrative language to manage these newly formed lands and thereby fashioning itself as a public agent of Calcutta’s land and landed property. Focusing on specific legal aspects of colonial hydrology that arose in the making of property in these amphibious spaces, the article argues that the soaking ecology of Bengal became a site for productive law-making by creating open-ended possibilities for taking land. It demonstrates how the Company used this new land formation to gradually institute a legal architecture regulating alluvion and dereliction and subsequently subjecting these soaking ecologies to an intricate documentary regime with the aim of disciplining the existing landed property relations in Calcutta. Documenting the haphazard extension and enactment of these new legal doctrines in a mobile landscape illuminates a particular history of the colonial regime of property and the Company-State’s early articulations of a particular type of quasi-eminent domain as a manner of taking land. Pushing a new direction in legal geography, the piece shows how the legal arena became a productive site for geographical knowledge production and legal experimentation in the colony.

The rich cultural past of the Rajbangshi people is reflected in the historiography of Rajbangshi literature, which offers an engrossing tale. This paper intends to investigate the historical growth and evolution of Rajbangshi literature, highlighting the various socio-cultural influences that have influenced its course.The Rajbangshi people are an indigenous group that is mostly found in the Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, and Bangladesh. They have their own distinctive language and culture. Poetry, folk ballads, folk tales, dramas, and novels are just a few of the many genres represented in their literature, all of which offer insights into their social, historical, and political realities. The development of Rajbangshi literature and its interaction with local, linguistic, and colonial factors are critically examined in this historiography. It explores the early oral traditions and folklore idioms that formed the basis for Rajbangshi literary productions. The paper studies the contributions of significant Rajbangshi writers and focuses on their ideological viewpoints, stylistic advances, and subject interests. The study also examines how Rajbangshi literature promotes cultural identity, questions societal norms, and addresses current concerns including immigration, language assimilation, and land rights. It also looks at how important literary movements, including the Bengal Renaissance, impacted the growth of Rajbangshi literature and its interaction with more general literary currents in the area. It aims to contribute to the greater conversation on underrepresented literary traditions by highlighting the socio-cultural importance of Rajbangshi literature within the broader framework of regional literature. This study aims to promote awareness and acknowledgment for this unique literary legacy by providing light on the historical and cultural aspects of Rajbangshi literature. It also emphasises how crucial it is to keep Rajbangshi literature alive and well for future generations in order to maintain the literary landscape's overall richness.

Assam is the home of different ethnic groups with a variety of cultures and speaking different languages and dialects. The population of Assam consists of the inhabitants who migrated into the region at various periods of history from Tibet, Burma, Thailand and Bengal etc. Over time they got integrated as a population and have given birth to the greater Assamese nation. The amalgamated Assamese identity was initiated by the Great Saint Mahapurush Srimanta Sankardeva with his Neo-Vaishnavite Movement. The movement evolved new institutions of Satra and Namghar which began to serve not only as the instrument spreading the faith, but also helped to sustain and to stabilize Vaishnavism by making it a part and parcel of Assamese social and cultural life.Though Neo Vaishnavism was a religious movement but it has defined the culture of Assam & has its bearing on the livelihood. As the doyen of cultural renaissance and harbinger of Bhakti Movement, Sankardeva took on the orthodox elements of the society and introduced cultural initiatives like Bhaonas & Borgeet etc which had in actual defined the Assamese identity With its dynamic philosophy of inclusiveness Sankardeva’s Neo-Vaishnavism has given birth to a new Cultural Nationalism focused on a national identity shaped by cultural traditions and language, not on the concept of common ancestry or race. The Cultural Nationalism was brought forward to the indigenous people with the help of Satras and Namghar which has a major role to play in the preservation and development of the indigenous culture of the region.The paper is an attempt to study the role of the institutions of Neo Vaishnavism, the Satra & Namghar in the evolution of genesis of Assamese identity and its inclusiveness in nation building. The managerial structure and operations of the Satra shall also be explored in the perspective of its position in the modern Assamese Society in the study. The paper shall go in toe area wherein in the genesis of the Assamese Identity, the Namghar is one of the major pole bearers, playing the multi-faceted role of Cultural Centre, Proto-type Panchayat, and Forum for Decentralized Planning and Decision-making.The paper is also an attempt to understand the impact of Neo-Vaisnavism on the Economic Organization of the society along with the role of women and their empowerment for the sustainable development of a progressive & egalitarian Assamese. Key Words- Cultural Renaissance, Inclusiveness, NationDOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ijssm.v2i2.12143 Int. J. Soc. Sci. Manage. Vol-2, issue-2: 108-113

The article considers one of the classical Indian medieval texts written by Vaishnava thinker Rupa Goswami (1493– 1564), a follower of the Bengal branch of Vishnuism, an influential Indian religious and philosophical movement. The text "Upadeshamrita" (“Nectar of Instruction”) is one of the basic textbooks for the systematic study of Gaudiya Vishnuism since it not only sets out a concise form of philosophy but also is a practical guide to its application. The study analyzes its structure and content of the text, estimates its role and significance for Bengal Vishnuism. The authors consistently substantiate the relevance of this research, citing references to the works of domestic and foreign scientists and links to comments on this source in various languages. The article provides the history of the treatise and outlines its structure. The article also analyzes the verse meters of the Upadeshamrita. There are multiple approaches within the theoretical basis of Vishnuism to considering the structure of the text because it can derive the various meaning of the content. This analysis of the connections between the verses of the "Upadeshamrita" defined the functionality of the manuscript and presented a few interpretations of the structure. The authors demonstrate how transforms the essence of the message embedded in the text of the work, depending on the spiritual "portrait" of the reader. Therefore, according to the results of the research, the authors concluded that "Upadeshamrita" is a particularly important contribution to Vishnuism learning so it considers as a historical and philosophical source.

There have been revolutionary changes in the arts, literature and culture of Bengal during the post-Polasshey battle period. As the British interfered with the rule and government system, the then Muslims left no stone unturned to protect the so-called religious values cherished by Muslims. During this time the British brought about a lot of administrative reformation by passing and enacting newer laws in order to ensure their power long lasting. Although the British started ruling the Bengal with the purpose of trade and commerce at the beginning, later on they started ruling for political gains. They formulated laws that were suited to the existing society and culture and so the influence of newer forms of culture increased gradually. Although the local Muslims rejected the arts, education and culture of the British merchants, the Hindu community soon accepted them and became successful in attaining the satisfaction and favourism of the British. Thus, the Hindus solely succeeded in playing a great role in influencing the administration. After a further deterioration of the Muslims in the administrative role in the 19th century, the Muslim leaders realized the situation and they took some timely decisions. As a result, an introduction to Muslim renaissance started along with the changes of their previous negligence. By that time, the youths of the Hindu community, patronized by the British merchants and ruling community, have gained sole control in most of the social indexes including trade and commerce, education and job sectors. During this period, there arose a complicated proximity in the relationship between the Hindus and the Muslims and a result, a great change went through the socio-cultural aspects. The Muslims participated in some minor to significant rebellious movements against the British to get rid of the antagonistic/contradictory behavior, discrimination and exploitation of the British. These movements, although were not completely successful outwardly, paved the way for preparing a strong foundation of nationalistic movements later on. Thus, there arose a new context in which the study of language, arts, literature and gaining knowledge got a new dimension which paved the way for a new culture amidst the repudiation of the British elements.

Indian folk art has its own recognition in universal context. It transmits from generation to generation having their own experience. Religious ceremonies and ritual acts are necessary for achieving psychological refinement. The folk culture moves around the elements of nature. The shapes are often symbolic and come out from their observations in simple pictorial language. The ritual paintings are generally created on wall, paper, cloth, and floor. The figures of human beings, animal, along with the daily life scene, mythological and rituals are created in rhythmic pattern with regional essence. Folk peoples express themselves in vivid styles through the paintings, this was the only means of transmission and inculcation of the culture through folk lore to a populace those who are not familiar with the written word. The traditions of folk culture are surviving in Odissa, Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Kerala are the unique representation of the region. Yet the changes with the time are noticed but characteristically folk art is not influenced by the time of change in academic or fine art circles and movements of Era.

Millions of Muslims from around the world including Bangladesh pour perform Hajj every year. Being the largest gathering of the Muslims, the Hajj has got immense socio-economic and cultural impacts on every Muslim society as well as Bangladesh. Hajj develops a unique symbol of unity, equality, universality, co-existence, brotherhood, indiscrimination, peace and tolerance, through performing common rituals, among the individuals, societies and nations belonging to different races, castes, ethnicities, colors, and languages, which create differences in everyday life of human beings. Bangladeshi Hajjis’ views towards women are more positive as gender interaction is a natural part of Hajj, while it is uncommon in the country. The positive teachings of Hajj particularly of pure Aqidah, produced several revolutionary movements in Bengal such as the Faraidi movement of Hajji Shariatullah with the aim of purifying Muslim society from superstitious Aqidah and practices. Hajj works as a social platform of getting together for Bangladeshi people at Makkah and Madinah. Hajj has developed the private tour operating industries in Bangladesh to facilitate the Hajjis. Transaction of billions of dollars takes place commercially during Hajj, while many commodities are exchanged informally. The Hajjis enjoy a very special dignity and status in the society of Bangladesh. Hajj creates an inter-cultural amalgamation combining various elements of different cultures particularly of Arabian. Hajj increases knowledge of the Hajjis both experimental and theoretical through various means. Bangladeshi Hajjis consider Hajj as the preparation for death; and thus try to remain isolated from the worldly activities and observe the religious duties strictly. This transformative property enables the Hajjis to pursue a more purified life and they become a model of spirituality and religiosity. Hajj not only moulds the Hajjis into sincere and practicing Muslims, but also the society at large with their honesty and piety. Thus, Hajj brings immense impacts on the society, economy, education, religiosity and culture of Bangladesh. This chapter is aimed at analyzing the socio-economic and religio-cultural impacts of Hajj on the society of Bangladesh. It also included the perspectives of the society with a view to better understanding the influence of Hajj on the Hajjis, non-Hajjis and the society at large.

Air-writing refers to virtually writing linguistic characters through hand gestures in three dimensional space with six degrees of freedom. In this paper a generic video camera dependent convolutional neural network (CNN) based air-writing framework has been proposed. Gestures are performed using a marker of fixed color in front of a generic video camera followed by color based segmentation to identify the marker and track the trajectory of marker tip. A pre-trained CNN is then used to classify the gesture. The recognition accuracy is further improved using transfer learning with the newly acquired data. The performance of the system varies greatly on the illumi nation condition due to color based segmentation. In a less fluctuating illumination condition the system is able to recognize isolated unistroke numerals of multiple languages. The proposed framework achieved 97.7recognition rate in person inde pendent evaluation over English, Bengali and Devanagari numerals, respectively. Object tracking is considered as an important task within the field of Computer Vision. The invention of faster computers, availability of inexpensive and good quality video cameras and demands of automated video analysis has given popularity to object tracking techniques. Generally, video analysis procedure has three major steps: firstly, detecting of the object, secondly tracking its movement from frame to frame and lastly analysing the behaviour of that object. For object tracking, four different issues are taken into account; selection of suitable object representation, feature selection for tracking, object detection and object tracking. In real world, Object tracking algorithms are the primarily part of different applications such as: automatic surveillance, video indexing and vehicle navigation etc. The generated text can also be used for various purposes, such as sending messages, emails, etc. It will be a powerful means of communication for the deaf. It is an effective communication method that reduces mobile and laptop usage by eliminating the need to write. Key Words: Air Writing, Character Recognition, Object Detection, Real-Time Gesture Control System, Computer Vision , Hand tracking.

A different name than English literature, ‘Anglo-Indian Literature’, was given to the body of literature in English that emerged on account of the British interaction with India unlike the case with their interaction with America or Australia or New Zealand. Even the Indians’ contributions (translations as well as creative pieces in English) were classed under the caption ‘Anglo-Indian’ initially but later a different name, ‘Indo-Anglian’, was conceived for the growing variety and volume of writings in English by the Indians. However, unlike the former the latter has not found a favour with the compilers of English dictionaries. With the passage of time the fine line of demarcation drawn on the basis of subject matter and author’s point of view has disappeared and currently even Anglo-Indians’ writings are classed as ‘Indo-Anglian’. Besides contemplating on various connotations of the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ the article discusses the related issues such as: the etymology of the term, fixing the name of its coiner and the date of its first use. In contrast to the opinions of the historians and critics like K R S Iyengar, G P Sarma, M K Naik, Daniela Rogobete, Sachidananda Mohanty, Dilip Chatterjee and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak it has been brought to light that the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ was first used in 1880 by James Payn to refer to the Indians’ writings in English rather pejoratively. However, Iyengar used it in a positive sense though he himself gave it up soon. The reasons for the wide acceptance of the term, sometimes also for the authors of the sub-continent, by the members of academia all over the world, despite its rejection by Sahitya Akademi (the national body of letters in India), have also been contemplated on. References Alphonso-Karkala, John B. (1970). Indo-English Literature in the Nineteenth Century, Mysore: Literary Half-yearly, University of Mysore, University of Mysore Press. Amanuddin, Syed. (2016 [1990]). “Don’t Call Me Indo-Anglian”. C. D. Narasimhaiah (Ed.), An Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry. Bengaluru: Trinity Press. B A (Compiler). (1883). Indo-Anglian Literature. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. PDF. Retrieved from: https://books.google.co.in/books?id=rByZ2RcSBTMC&pg=PA1&source= gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false ---. (1887). “Indo-Anglian Literature”. 2nd Issue. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. PDF. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/60238178 Basham, A L. (1981[1954]). The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the History and Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent before the Coming of the Muslims. Indian Rpt, Calcutta: Rupa. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/TheWonderThatWasIndiaByALBasham Bhushan, V N. (1945). The Peacock Lute. Bomaby: Padma Publications Ltd. Bhushan, V N. (1945). The Moving Finger. Bomaby: Padma Publications Ltd. Boria, Cavellay. (1807). “Account of the Jains, Collected from a Priest of this Sect; at Mudgeri: Translated by Cavelly Boria, Brahmen; for Major C. Mackenzie”. Asiatick Researches: Or Transactions of the Society; Instituted In Bengal, For Enquiring Into The History And Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia, 9, 244-286. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.104510 Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary [The]. (1971). Bombay et al: Allied Publishers. Print. Chatterjee, Dilip Kumar. (1989). Cousins and Sri Aurobindo: A Study in Literary Influence, Journal of South Asian Literature, 24(1), 114-123. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40873985. Chattopadhyay, Dilip Kumar. (1988). A Study of the Works of James Henry Cousins (1873-1956) in the Light of the Theosophical Movement in India and the West. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Burdwan: The University of Burdwan. PDF. Retrieved from: http://ir.inflibnet. ac.in:8080/jspui/bitstream/10603/68500/9/09_chapter%205.pdf. Cobuild English Language Dictionary. (1989 [1987]). rpt. London and Glasgow. Collins Cobuild Advanced Illustrated Dictionary. (2010). rpt. Glasgow: Harper Collins. Print. Concise Oxford English Dictionary [The]. (1961 [1951]). H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler. (Eds.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 4th ed. Cousins, James H. (1921). Modern English Poetry: Its Characteristics and Tendencies. Madras: Ganesh & Co. n. d., Preface is dated April, 1921. PDF. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/ 2027/uc1.$b683874 ---. (1919) New Ways in English Literature. Madras: Ganesh & Co. 2nd edition. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.31747 ---. (1918). The Renaissance in India. Madras: Madras: Ganesh & Co., n. d., Preface is dated June 1918. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.203914 Das, Sisir Kumar. (1991). History of Indian Literature. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Encarta World English Dictionary. (1999). London: Bloomsbury. Gandhi, M K. (1938 [1909]). Hind Swaraj Tr. M K Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf. Gokak, V K. (n.d.). English in India: Its Present and Future. Bombay et al: Asia Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460832 Goodwin, Gwendoline (Ed.). (1927). Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, London: John Murray. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176578 Guptara, Prabhu S. (1986). Review of Indian Literature in English, 1827-1979: A Guide to Information Sources. The Yearbook of English Studies, 16 (1986): 311–13. PDF. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3507834 Iyengar, K R Srinivasa. (1945). Indian Contribution to English Literature [The]. Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/ indiancontributi030041mbp ---. (2013 [1962]). Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sterling. ---. (1943). Indo-Anglian Literature. Bombay: PEN & International Book House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/IndoAnglianLiterature Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. (2003). Essex: Pearson. Lyall, Alfred Comyn. (1915). The Anglo-Indian Novelist. Studies in Literature and History. London: John Murray. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet. dli.2015.94619 Macaulay T. B. (1835). Minute on Indian Education dated the 2nd February 1835. HTML. Retrieved from: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/ txt_minute_education_1835.html Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. (2003). An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Delhi: Permanent Black. ---. (2003[1992]). The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford U P. Minocherhomji, Roshan Nadirsha. (1945). Indian Writers of Fiction in English. Bombay: U of Bombay. Modak, Cyril (Editor). (1938). The Indian Gateway to Poetry (Poetry in English), Calcutta: Longmans, Green. PDF. Retrieved from http://en.booksee.org/book/2266726 Mohanty, Sachidananda. (2013). “An ‘Indo-Anglian’ Legacy”. The Hindu. July 20, 2013. Web. Retrieved from: http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/an-indoanglian-legacy/article 4927193.ece Mukherjee, Sujit. (1968). Indo-English Literature: An Essay in Definition, Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English. Eds. M. K. Naik, G. S. Amur and S. K. Desai. Dharwad: Karnatak University. Naik, M K. (1989 [1982]). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, rpt.New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles [The], (1993). Ed. Lesley Brown, Vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Naik, M K. (1989 [1982]). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, rpt. Oaten, Edward Farley. (1953 [1916]). Anglo-Indian Literature. In: Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. 14, (pp. 331-342). A C Award and A R Waller, (Eds). Rpt. ---. (1908). A Sketch of Anglo-Indian Literature, London: Kegan Paul. PDF. Retrieved from: https://ia600303.us.archive.org/0/items/sketchofangloind00oateuoft/sketchofangloind00oateuoft.pdf) Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. (1979 [1974]). A. S. Hornby (Ed). : Oxford UP, 3rd ed. Oxford English Dictionary [The]. Vol. 7. (1991[1989]). J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, (Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed. Pai, Sajith. (2018). Indo-Anglians: The newest and fastest-growing caste in India. Web. Retrieved from: https://scroll.in/magazine/867130/indo-anglians-the-newest-and-fastest-growing-caste-in-india Pandia, Mahendra Navansuklal. (1950). The Indo-Anglian Novels as a Social Document. Bombay: U Press. Payn, James. (1880). An Indo-Anglian Poet, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 246(1791):370-375. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/gentlemansmagaz11unkngoog#page/ n382/mode/2up. ---. (1880). An Indo-Anglian Poet, Littell’s Living Age (1844-1896), 145(1868): 49-52. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/livingage18projgoog/livingage18projgoog_ djvu.txt. Rai, Saritha. (2012). India’s New ‘English Only’ Generation. Retrieved from: https://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/indias-new-english-only-generation/ Raizada, Harish. (1978). The Lotus and the Rose: Indian Fiction in English (1850-1947). Aligarh: The Arts Faculty. Rajan, P K. (2006). Indian English literature: Changing traditions. Littcrit. 32(1-2), 11-23. Rao, Raja. (2005 [1938]). Kanthapura. New Delhi: Oxford UP. Rogobete, Daniela. (2015). Global versus Glocal Dimensions of the Post-1981 Indian English Novel. Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 12(1). Retrieved from: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/4378/4589. Rushdie, Salman & Elizabeth West. (Eds.) (1997). The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947 – 1997. London: Vintage. Sampson, George. (1959 [1941]). Concise Cambridge History of English Literature [The]. Cambridge: UP. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.18336. Sarma, Gobinda Prasad. (1990). Nationalism in Indo-Anglian Fiction. New Delhi: Sterling. Singh, Kh. Kunjo. (2002). The Fiction of Bhabani Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (2012). How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Sturgeon, Mary C. (1916). Studies of Contemporary Poets, London: George G Hard & Co., Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.95728. Thomson, W S (Ed). (1876). Anglo-Indian Prize Poems, Native and English Writers, In: Commemoration of the Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to India. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., Retrieved from https://books.google.co.in/ books?id=QrwOAAAAQAAJ Wadia, A R. (1954). The Future of English. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Wadia, B J. (1945). Foreword to K R Srinivasa Iyengar’s The Indian Contribution to English Literature. Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/ details/indiancontributi030041mbp Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. (1989). New York: Portland House. Yule, H. and A C Burnell. (1903). Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. W. Crooke, Ed. London: J. Murray. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/ details/hobsonjobsonagl00croogoog Sources www.amazon.com/Indo-Anglian-Literature-Edward-Charles-Buck/dp/1358184496 www.archive.org/stream/livingage18projgoog/livingage18projgoog_djvu.txt www.catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001903204?type%5B%5D=all&lookfor%5B%5D=indo%20anglian&ft= www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.L._Indo_Anglian_Public_School,_Aurangabad www.everyculture.com/South-Asia/Anglo-Indian.html www.solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?fn=search&ct=search&initialSearch=true&mode=Basic&tab=local&indx=1&dum=true&srt=rank&vid=OXVU1&frbg=&tb=t&vl%28freeText0%29=Indo-Anglian+Literature+&scp.scps=scope%3A%28OX%29&vl% 28516065169UI1%29=all_items&vl%281UIStartWith0%29=contains&vl%28254947567UI0%29=any&vl%28254947567UI0%29=title&vl%28254947567UI0%29=any www.worldcat.org/title/indo-anglian-literature/oclc/30452040

During the period 1947-48, student movements started in various areas of Bangladesh demanding to make Bengali one of the state languages. Through participation in these movements, political awareness among the girls of Bengal increased. So in the final stages of the 1952 language movement, the massive participation of girls can be noticed. The girls of Dhaka and the girls of different districts and sub-divisional cities of Bangladesh took an active part in the 1952 language movement. In addition to school-college girls, various members of various women's organizations such as Shishuraksha Samiti, Wari Mahila Samiti, and others actively take part in the 1952 language movement. Therefore, the role of Bengali women in the Bengali language movement was unforgettable. Apart from men, women also acted as supporting forces of the language movement in various ways from their position. Therefore, the idea which Bengali women are just helpless, helpless is not correct. In this article, we have analyzed the role of women in the Bengali language movement.

The Bengal Renaissance (Bengali: বাংলার নবজাগরণ — Banglar Navajagaran), also known as the Bengali Renaissance, was a cultural, social, intellectual, and artistic movement that took place in the Bengal region of the British Raj, from the late 18th century to the early 20th century.Historians have traced the beginnings of the movement to the victory of the British East India Company at the 1757 Battle of Plassey, as well as the works of reformer Raja Rammohan Roy, considered the "Father of the Bengal Renaissance," born in 1772.[2] Nitish Sengupta stated that the movement "can be said to have … ended with Rabindranath Tagore," Asia's first Nobel laureate. Print language and literature played a vital role in shaping ideas and identities in colonial Bengal from the 18th century onwards. With its adoption by the ruling class and the indigenous population, Bengali marked a site that also oversaw contests for domination across a broad social spectrum. For the latter moreover, the language also defined their cultural identity, as part of the attempt to create a new literary prose Bengali to distinguish it from earlier colloquial forms. The new Bengali became an essential tool for the urban, educated upper middle classes to establish their power over lesser privileged groups - women, the lowly classes and poor Muslims. However, commercial print cultures that emanated from numerous cheap presses in Calcutta and its suburbs disseminated wide-ranging literary preferences that afforded a space to different sections of the Bengali middle classes to voice their own distinctive concerns.

The emergence of Bangladesh as a nation is a culmination of long drawn out struggles faced by the Bengalis of the region, which has been portrayed in a vast body of Bengali literature. The West Pakistani suppression of young Bangla speaking voices in 1952 is resisted back through powerful and symbolic returns of the dead in the play Kobor (Grave) by Munier Choudhury, which was first written and produced in jail in 1953 in the context of the Language Movement of 1952. This paper explores Kobor to address the conflicts, power dynamics and resolution of conflicts that have been at the centre of Bengali identity formation and recognition during Pakistani rule. Conflict theory examines tensions that arise due to cultural, political and racial differences and the subsequent intensity of conflicts that concomitantly increases with the degree of unity in the resistant groups. A critical analysis of Kobor from the perspectives of conflict theory reveals inter-state ideological conflicts which were fuelled by the cultural, linguistic, political and other socioeconomic differences and disparities between the two wings of Pakistan. Spectrum, Volume 16, June 2021: 40-52

Pakistan and India were bloomed as independent countries in 1947 on the basis of two nation theory of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He promulgated two nation theories in light of religious dogmatism. Pakistan had been divided into two parts namely East and West Pakistan considering the distance of 1200 km between two territories. There was no resemblance between these two parts except religious similarities. Later, Bengali nationalism had gradually been developed in West Pakistan through various events i.e., language movement in 1952, United Front election in 1954, 6-point movement in 1966, and the election of 1970. The duration of united Pakistan was the history of exploitation, oppression, and deprivation of the East by the West. The present paper attempts to explore how fanatical nationalism had been decaying during the regime of Pakistan. Additionally, the study tries to search out the core consequences of the election of 1970 towards the liberation movement. This paper also provides the evaluation of present politics viewing the historical events as well. Finally, this present study gives some remedial recommendations against the Socio-political problem relevant to the findings.

NorthEast India, with its unique geographic location in the midst of the Himalayas and Bay of Bengal, has served as a passage for the movement of modern humans across the Indian subcontinent and East/Southeast Asia. In this study we look into the population genetics of a unique population called the Khasi, speaking a language (also known as the Khasi language) belonging to the Austroasiatic language family and residing amidst the Tibeto-Burman speakers as an isolated population. The Khasi language belongs to one of the three major broad classifications or phyla of the Austroasiatic language and the speakers of the three sub-groups are separated from each other by large geographical distances. The Khasi speakers are separated from their nearest Austroasiatic language-speaking sub-groups: the “Mundari” sub-family from East and peninsular India and the “Mon-Khmers” in Mainland Southeast Asia. We found the Khasi population to be genetically distinct from other Austroasiatic speakers, i.e. Mundaris and Mon-Khmers, but relatively similar to the geographically proximal Tibeto Burmans. The possible reasons for this genetic-linguistic discordance lie in the admixture history of different migration events that originated from East Asia and proceeded possibly towards Southeast Asia. We found at least two distinct migration events from East Asia. While the ancestors of today’s Tibeto-Burman speakers were affected by both, the ancestors of Khasis were insulated from the second migration event. Correlating the linguistic similarity of Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Tibetan languages of today’s East Asians, we infer that the second wave of migration resulted in a linguistic transition while the Khasis could preserve their linguistic identity.

This essay is an exploration of the contingent nature of identity formation in late colonial India. In the wake of the 1912 separation of Bihar and Orissa from Bengal, two distinct conceptions of the region of Mithila and Maithila identity gained prominence. First, the Darbhanga Maharaja viewed Mithila as a bastion of brahmanical orthodoxy, and this underpinned the claims for Mithila to be converted to a native state with its own ruling chief. Second, by the 1930s we see the consolidation of a movement which proposed the Maithili language as the marker of a Maithila people, one that did not make brahmanical orthodoxy or Hinduism a prerequisite to belonging. Both these discourses accepted the mythic conception of Mithila, and its traditional puranic geography, yet the Darbhanga Maharaja embraced all-India markers of belonging by emphasising Hinduism and presenting himself as the leader of brahmanical orthodoxy in India. The local, in this discourse, found validation by embracing national markers, even as the nation itself remained colonised. On the other hand, the Maithili language movement, which gained momentum in the twilight of colonial rule and in post-independence India, emphasised and embraced the local. This essay therefore charts the gradual shift in the conception of Maithila identity where language displaces religion and brahmanical orthodoxy, as championed by the Darbhanga Maharaja, to become the marker of local identity.

05–486Balnaves, Edmund (U of Sydney, Australia; ejb@it.usyd.edu.au), Systematic approaches to long term digital collection management. Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford, UK) 20.4 (2005), 399–413.05–487Barwell, Graham (U of Wollongong, Australia; gbarwell@uow.edu.au), Original, authentic, copy: conceptual issues in digital texts. Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford, UK) 20.4 (2005), 415–424.05–488Beech, John R. & Kate A. Mayall (U of Leicester, UK; JRB@Leicester.ac.uk), The word shape hypothesis re-examined: evidence for an external feature advantage in visual word recognition. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.3 (2005), 302–319.05–489Belcher, Diane (Georgia State U, USA; dbelcher1@gsu.edu) & Alan Hirvela, Writing the qualitative dissertation: what motivates and sustains commitment to a fuzzy genre?Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 4.3 (2005), 187–205.05–490Bernhardt, Elisabeth (U of Minnesota, USA; ebernhar@stanford.edu), Progress and procrastination in second language reading. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 25 (2005), 133–150.05–491Bishop, Dorothy (U of Oxford, UK; dorothy.bishop@psy.ox.ac.uk), Caroline Adams, Annukka Lehtonen & Stuart Rosen, Effectiveness of computerised spelling training in children with language impairments: a comparison of modified and unmodified speech input. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.2 (2005), 144–157.05–492Bowey, Judith A., Michaela McGuigan & Annette Ruschena (U of Queensland, Australia; j.bowey@psy.uq.edu.au), On the association between serial naming speed for letters and digits and word-reading skill: towards a developmental account. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.4 (2005), 400–422.05–493Bowyer-Crane, Claudine & Margaret J. Snowling (U of York, UK; c.crane@psych.york.ac.uk), Assessing children's inference generation: what do tests of reading comprehension measure?British Journal of Educational Psychology (Leicester, UK) 75.2 (2005), 189–201.05–494Bruce, Ian (U of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand; ibruce@waikato.ac.nz), Syllabus design for general EAP writing courses: a cognitive approach. Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 4.3 (2005), 239–256.05–495Burrows, John (U of Newcastle, Australia; john.burrows@netcentral.com.au), Who wroteShamela? Verifying the authorship of a parodic text. Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford, UK) 20.4 (2005), 437–450.05–496Clarke, Paula, Charles Hulme & Margaret Snowling (U of York, UK; CH1@york.ac.uk), Individual differences in RAN and reading: a response timing analysis. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.2 (2005), 73–86.05–497Colledge, Marion (Metropolitan U, London, UK; m.colledge@londonmet.ac.uk), Baby Bear or Mrs Bear? Young English Bengali-speaking children's responses to narrative picture books at school. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.1 (2005), 24–30.05–498De Pew, Kevin Eric (Old Dominion U, Norfolk, USA; Kdepew@odu.edu) & Susan Kay Miller, Studying L2 writers' digital writing: an argument for post-critical methods. Computers and Composition (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 22.3 (2005), 259–278.05–499Dekydtspotter, Laurent (Indiana U, USA; ldekydts@indiana.edu) & Samantha D. Outcalt, A syntactic bias in scope ambiguity resolution in the processing of English French cardinality interrogatives: evidence for informational encapsulation. Language Learning (Malden, MA, USA) 55.1 (2005), 1–36.05–500Fernández Toledo, Piedad (Universidad de Murcia, Spain; piedad@um.es), Genre analysis and reading of English as a foreign language: genre schemata beyond text typologies. Journal of Pragmatics37.7 (2005), 1059–1079.05–501French, Gary (Chukyo U, Japan; french@lets.chukyo-u.ac.jp), The cline of errors in the writing of Japanese university students. World Englishes (Oxford, UK) 24.3 (2005), 371–382.05–502Green, Chris (Hong Kong Polytechnic U, Hong Kong, China), Profiles of strategic expertise in second language reading. Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics (Hong Kong, China) 9.2 (2004), 1–16.05–503Groom, Nicholas (U of Birmingham, UK; nick@nicholasgroom.fsnet.co.uk), Pattern and meaning across genres and disciplines: an exploratory study. Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 4.3 (2005), 257–277.05–504Harris, Pauline & Barbara McKenzie (U of Wollongong, Australia; pharris@uow.edu.au), Networking aroundThe Waterholeand other tales: the importance of relationships among texts for reading and related instruction. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.1 (2005), 31–37.05–505Harrison, Allyson G. & Eva Nichols (Queen's U, Canada; harrisna@post.queensu.ca), A validation of the Dyslexia Adult Screening Test (DAST) in a post-secondary population. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.4 (2005), 423–434.05–506Hirvela, Alan (Ohio State U, USA; hirvela.1@osu.edu), Computer-based reading and writing across the curriculum: two case studies of L2 writers. Computers and Composition (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 22.3 (2005), 337–356.05–507Holdom, Shoshannah (Oxford U, UK; shoshannah.holdom@oucs.ox.ac.uk), E-journal proliferation in emerging economies: the case of Latin America. Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford, UK) 20.3 (2005), 351–365.05–508Hopper, Rosemary (U of Exeter, UK; r.hopper@ex.ac.uk), What are teenagers reading? Adolescent fiction reading habits and reading choices. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.3 (2005), 113–120.05–509Jarman, Ruth & Billy McClune (Queen's U, Northern Ireland; r.jarman@qub.ac.uk), Space Science News: Special Edition, a resource for extending reading and promoting engagement with newspapers in the science classroom. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.3 (2005), 121–128.05–510Jia-ling Charlene Yau (Ming Chuan U, Taiwan; jyau@mcu.edu.tw), Two Mandarin readers in Taiwan: characteristics of children with higher and lower reading proficiency levels. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.2 (2005), 108–124.05–511Justice, Laura M, Lori Skibbel, Andrea Canning & Chris Lankford (U of Virginia, USA; ljustice@virginia.edu), Pre-schoolers, print and storybooks: an observational study using eye movement analysis. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.3 (2005), 229–243.05–512Kelly, Alison (Roehampton U, UK; a.m.kelly@roehampton.ac.uk), ‘Poetry? Of course we do it. It's in the National Curriculum.’ Primary children's perceptions of poetry. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.3 (2005), 129–134.05–513Kern, Richard (U of California, Berkeley, USA; rkern@berkeley.edu) & Jean Marie Schultz, Beyond orality: investigating literacy and the literary in second and foreign language instruction. The Modern Language Journal (Malden, MA, USA) 89.3 (2005), 381–392.05–514Kispal, Anne (National Foundation for Educational Research, UK; a.kispal@nfer.ac.uk), Examining England's National Curriculum assessments: an analysis of the KS2 reading test questions, 1993–2004. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.3 (2005), 149–157.05–515Kriss, Isla & Bruce J. W. Evans (Institute of Optometry, London, UK), The relationship between dyslexia and Meares-Irlen Syndrome. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.3 (2005), 350–364.05–516Lavidor, Michal & Peter J. Bailey (U of Hull, UK; M.Lavidor@hull.ac.uk), Dissociations between serial position and number of letters effects in lateralised visual word recognition. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.3 (2005), 258–273.05–517Lee, Sy-ying (Taipei, Taiwan, China; syying.lee@msa.hinet.net), Facilitating and inhibiting factors in English as a foreign language writing performance: a model testing with structural equation modelling. Language Learning (Malden, MA, USA) 55.2 (2005), 335–374.05–518Leppänen, Ulla, Kaisa Aunola & Jari-Erik Nurmi (U of Jyväskylä, Finland; uleppane@psyka.jyu.fi), Beginning readers' reading performance and reading habits. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.4 (2005), 383–399.05–519Lingard, Tony (Newquay, Cornwall, UK; tonylingard@awled.co.uk), Literacy Acceleration and the Key Stage 3 English strategy–comparing two approaches for secondary-age pupils with literacy difficulties. British Journal of Special Education32.2, 67–77.05–520Liu, Meihua (Tsinghua U, China; ellenlmh@yahoo.com) & George Braine, Cohesive features in argumentative writing produced by Chinese undergraduates. System (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 33.4 (2005), 623–636.05–521Masterson, Jackie, Veronica Laxon, Emma Carnegie, Sheila Wright & Janice Horslen (U of Essex; mastj@essex.ac.uk), Nonword recall and phonemic discrimination in four- to six-year-old children. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.2 (2005), 183–201.05–522Merttens, Ruth & Catherine Robertson (Hamilton Reading Project, Oxford, UK; ruthmerttens@onetel.net.uk), Rhyme and Ritual: a new approach to teaching children to read and write. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.1 (2005), 18–23.05–523Min Wang (U of Maryland, USA; minwang@umd.edu) & Keiko Koda, Commonalities and differences in word identification skills among learners of English as a Second Language. Language Learning (Malden, MA, USA) 55.1 (2005), 71–98.05–524O'Brien, Beth A., J. Stephen Mansfield & Gordon E. Legge (Tufts U, Medford, USA; beth.obrien@tufts.edu), The effect of print size on reading speed in dyslexia. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.3 (2005), 332–349.05–525Pisanski Peterlin, Agnes (U of Ljubljana, Slovenia; agnes.pisanski@guest.arnes.si), Text-organising metatext in research articles: an English–Slovene contrastive analysis. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 24.3 (2005), 307–319.05–526Rilling, Sarah (Kent State U, Kent, USA; srilling@kent.edu), The development of an ESL OWL, or learning how to tutor writing online. Computers and Composition (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 22.3 (2005), 357–374.05–527Schacter, John & Jo Booil (Milken Family Foundation, Santa Monica, USA; schacter@sbcglobal.net), Learning when school is not in session: a reading summer day-camp intervention to improve the achievement of exiting First-Grade students who are economically disadvantaged. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.2 (2005), 158–169.05–528Shapira, Anat (Gordon College of Education, Israel) & Rachel Hertz-Lazarowitz, Opening windows on Arab and Jewish children's strategies as writers. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK) 18.1 (2005), 72–90.05–529Shillcock, Richard C. & Scott A. McDonald (U of Edinburgh, UK; rcs@inf.ed.ac.uk), Hemispheric division of labour in reading. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.3 (2005), 244–257.05–530Singleton, Chris & Susannah Trotter (U of Hull, UK; c.singleton@hull.ac.uk), Visual stress in adults with and without dyslexia. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.3 (2005), 365–378.05–531Spelman Miller, Kristyan (Reading U, UK; k.s.miller@reading.ac.uk), Second language writing research and pedagogy: a role for computer logging?Computers and Composition (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 22.3 (2005), 297–317.05–532Su, Susan Shiou-mai (Chang Gung College of Technology, Taiwan, China) & Huei-mei Chu, Motivations in the code-switching of nursing notes in EFL Taiwan. Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics (Hong Kong, China) 9.2 (2004), 55–71.05–533Taillefer, Gail (Toulouse U, France; gail.taillefer@univ-tlse1.fr), Reading for academic purposes: the literacy practices of British, French and Spanish Law and Economics students as background for study abroad. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.4 (2005), 435–451.05–534Tardy, Christine M. (DePaul U, Chicago, USA; ctardy@depaul.edu), Expressions of disciplinarity and individuality in a multimodal genre. Computers and Composition (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 22.3 (2005), 319–336.05–535Thatcher, Barry (New Mexico State U, USA; bathatch@nmsu.edu), Situating L2 writing in global communication technologies. Computers and Composition (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 22.3 (2005), 279–295.05–536Topping, Keith & Nancy Ferguson (U of Dundee, UK; k.j.topping@dundee.ac.uk), Effective literacy teaching behaviours. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.2 (2005), 125–143.05–537Torgerson, Carole (U of York, UK; cjt3@york.ac.uk), Jill Porthouse & Greg Brooks, A systematic review of controlled trials evaluating interventions in adult literacy and numeracy. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.2 (2005), 87–107.05–538Willett, Rebekah (U of London, UK; r.willett@ioe.ac.uk), ‘Baddies’ in the classroom: media education and narrative writing. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.3 (2005), 142–148.05–539Wood, Clara, Karen Littleton & Pav Chera (Coventry U, UK; c.wood@coventry.ac.uk), Beginning readers' use of talking books: styles of working. Literacy (Oxford, UK) 39.3 (2005), 135–141.05–540Wood, Clare (The Open U, UK; c.p.wood@open.ac.uk), Beginning readers' use of ‘talking books’ software can affect their reading strategies. Journal of Research in Reading (Oxford, UK) 28.2 (2005), 170–182.05–541Yasuda, Sachiko (Waseda U, Japan), Different activities in the same task: an activity theory approach to ESL students' writing process. JALT Journal (Tokyo, Japan) 27.2 (2005), 139–168.05–542Zelniker, Tamar (Tel-Aviv U, Israel) & Rachel Hertz-Lazarowitz, School–Family Partnership for Coexistence (SFPC) in the city of Acre: promoting Arab and Jewish parents' role as facilitators of children's literacy development and as agents of coexistence. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK) 18.1 (2005), 114–138.

MALAYALAM CINEMA FROM POLITICS TO POETICSINDIA IS the leading producer of films in the world with over 1000 films per year. The tiny south-western state of Kerala where a language called Malayalam is spoken has surpassed West Bengal as a major centre of art films. Its most important filmmaker, Adoor Gopalakrishnan is hailed as the living Satyajit Ray. Since the beginning of the 1970s, with the strong film society movement supported by the literary traditions of the state, Malayalam cinema has excelled in politically engagé films with artistic inclinations. When the Golden Age of Tamil and Telugu movies ended, Kannada and Malayalam cinemas came to the fore. Although, they too had their share of stars, the director came to be recognized as the most important person behind a film. The "new cinema" distinguished itself from the outset for its thematic excellence. Even the mediocre films initiated by...

The article shows how Satyajit Ray’s women resist the sexism that comes from colonialism and reach back into a more sex-positive Indian heritage, particularly Chakras and Tantric philosophy of life. This is particularly important in correcting the way imperialist ideology misrepresented gender relations in India to justify British rule and how the misrepresentation has continued in the name of nationalist movements in post-independent India. The article focuses on a selection of Ray’s films. It stresses the themes (and their deviation from their original sources) used by Ray to make his point obvious and, at the same time, not very shocking to the traditional Bengali audience of his time. This article also focuses on how the sex positivity of ancient India is manipulated by the colonial hangover and the confusing nationalist ideas that have developed of late into limiting the sexual and social rights of women and how Ray’s cinema resists it in a delicate yet bold manner by visualising the markedly conflicts in both of his female and male characters by awakening their sexuality to the ancient Hindu vision of life.

The current ecological crisis in India must be traced back to its origins because, similar to Western beliefs and practices, colonization of the natural world is fostered and justified. Materialistic creed, techno-culture, enlightenment principles of human progress, and industrial developments successfully exploit the resources of nature and threaten the existence of rivers, lands, and their flora and fauna. As a result, the lower sections of society, including the deprived and marginalized tribes, bear the inevitable outcome of this exploitation of nature, and the tribal are pushed into socio-cultural and economic decline. The condition of the tribal people and their environment find best expression in the works of Mahasweta Devi, one of the most famous journalists, social activists, and creative writers of West Bengal. After witnessing the pitiful condition of the tribes of Western, Central, and North-East India, she decides to delineate their livelihood, and naturally their relationship with nature comes into discussion. Her writings trace the ecological history of India, and for this she cites incidents from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and thus her narratives encompass the journey of the tribes from forest life to industrial life. The lost ecological histories of the tribals are again shown in The Book of the Hunter. The close bond between nature and men is given the fullest expression here, and their ecological wisdom should be followed and embodied to avert the current ecological crisis. The recreation of the tribal history of the Mundas, historical events of the Ulgulan, and ecological movements are portrayed in Aranyer Adhikar and Chotti Munda and his Arrow. In the same way, in her short stories like Seeds, The Hunt, Little Ones and Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha, she not only depicts the ecological equilibrium of tribal culture, but also the subjugated condition of the tribal and their lands, forests, and surroundings, so this paper delineates the ecological history of the tribes in the selected works of Mahasweta Devi.

Wife (1975) is a novel ostensibly about immigration, but it is also about gender, ethnicity, and power. Bharati Mukherjee's well-known essay, "An Invisible Woman" (1981), describes her experience in Canada as one that created "double vision" because her self-perception was put so utterly at odds with her social standing (39). She experienced intense and horrifying racism in Canada, particularly in Toronto, and claims that the setting of Wife, her third novel, is "in the mind of the heroine...always Toronto" (39). Mukherjee concludes the article by saying that she eventually left Toronto, and Canada, because she was unable to keep her "twin halves" together (40). In thinking about "mixing," Mukherjee’s work provides entry points into "mixed" or interlocking structures of domination; the diasporic female subject in Mukherjee’s Wife struggles to translate this powerful "mix" in her attempt to move across and within national borders, feminisms, and cultural difference. "An Invisible Woman", in many ways, illuminates the issues that are at stake in Mukherjee's Wife. The protagonist Dimple Dagsputa, like Mukherjee, experiences identity crisis through the cultural forces that powerfully shape her self-perception and deny her access to control of her own life. I want to argue that Wife is also about Dimple's ability to grasp at power through the connections that she establishes between her mind and body, despite the social forces that attempt to divide her. Through a discussion of Dimple's negotiations with Western feminisms and the methods by which she attempts to reclaim her commodified body, I will rethink Dimple's violent response as an act of agency and resistance. Diasporic Feminisms: Locating the Subject(s): Mukherjee locates Wife in two very different geographic settings: the dusty suburbs of Calcutta and the metropolis of New York City. Dimple’s experience as a diasporic subject, one who must relocate and find a new social/cultural space, is highly problematic. Mukherjee uses this diasporic position to bring Dimple’s ongoing identity formation into relief. As she crosses into the space of New York City, Dimple must negotiate the web created by gender, class, and race in her Bengali culture with an increasingly multiple grid of inseparable subject positions. Avtar Brah points out that diaspora is useful as a "conceptual grid" where "multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed" (208). Brah points to experience as the site of subject formation; a discursive space where different subject positions are inscribed, repeated, or contested. For Brah, and for Mukherjee, it is essential to ask what the "fields of signification and representation" are that contribute to the formation of differing subjects (116). Dimple’s commodification and her submission to naming in the Bengali context are challenged when she encounters Western feminisms. Yet Mukherjee suggests that these feminisms do little to "liberate" Dimple, and in fact serve as another aspect of her oppression. Wife is concerned with the processes which lead up to Dimple’s final act of murder; the interlocking subject positions which she negotiates with in an attempt to control her own life. Dimple believes that the freedom offered by immigration will give her a new identity: "She did not want to carry any relics from her old life; given another chance she could be a more exciting person, take evening classes perhaps, become a librarian" (42). She is extremely optimistic about the opportunities of her new life, but Mukherjee does not valourize the New World over the Old. In fact, she continually demonstrates the limited spaces that are offered on both sides of the globe. In New York, Dimple faces the unresolved dilemma between her desire to be a traditional Indian wife and the lure of Western feminism. Her inability to find a liveable place within the crossings of these positions contributes to her ultimate act of violence. At her first party in Manhattan, Dimple encounters the diaspora of Indian and Pakistani immigrants who provide varying examples of the ways in which being "Indian" is in conversation with being "American." She hears about Ina Mullick, the Bengali wife whose careless husband has allowed her to become "more American than the Americans" (68). Dimple quickly learns that Amit is sharply disapproving of women who go to college, wear pants, and smoke cigarettes: "with so many Indians around and a television and a child, a woman shouldn’t have time to get any crazy ideas" (69). The options of education and employment are removed from Dimple’s grasp as soon as she begins to consider them, leaving her wondering what her new role in this place will be. Mukherjee inserts Ina Mullick into Dimple’s life as a challenge to the restrictions of traditional wifehood: "Well Dimple...what do you do all day? You must be bored out of your skull" (76). Ina has adopted what Jyoti calls "women’s lib stuff" and Dimple is warned of her "dangerous" influence (76). Ina engagement with Western feminisms is a form of resistance to the confines of traditional Bengali wifehood. Mukherjee, however, uses Ina’s character to demonstrate the misfit between Western and Third World feminisms. Although the oppressions experienced in both geographies appear to be similar, Mukherjee points out that neither Ina nor Dimple can find expression through a feminism that forces them to abandon their Indianess. Western feminist discourse has been much maligned for its Eurocentric construction of a monolithic Third World subject that ignores cultural complexity. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s "Under Western Eyes" (1988) is the classic example of the interrogation of this construction. Mohanty argues that "ethnocentric universality" obliterates the differences within the varied category of female (197), and that "Western feminist writings on women in the third world subscribe to a variety of methodologies to demonstrate the universal cross-cultural operation of male dominance and female exploitation" (208-209). Mukherjee addresses these problems through Ina’s struggle; Western feminisms and their apparent "liberation" fail to provide Ina with a satisfying sense of self. Ina remains oppressed because these forms of feminism cannot adequately deal with the web of cultural and social crossings that constitute her position as simultaneously "Indian" and "American." The patriarchy that Ina and Dimple experience is not simply that of the industrialized first world; they must also grapple with the ways in which they have been named by their own specific cultural context. Mohanty argues that there is no homogenous group called "women," and Mukherjee seems to agree by demonstrating that women's subject positions are varied and multi-layered. Ina’s apparently comfortable assimilation is soon upset by desperate confessions of her unease and depression. She contrasts her "before" and "after" self in caricatures of a woman in a sari and a woman in a bikini. These drawings represent, "the great moral and physical change, and all that" (95). Mukherjee suggests, however, that the change has been less than satisfactory for Ina, "‘I think it is better to stay a Before, if you can’...’Our trouble here is that we imitate badly, and we preserve things even worse’" (95). Ina’s confession alludes to her belief that she is copying, rather than actually living, a life which might be empowering. She has been forced to give up the "before" because it clashes with the ideal that she has constructed of the liberated Western woman. In accepting the oppositions between East and West, Ina pre-empts the possibility of being both. Though Dimple is fascinated by the options that Ina represents, and begins to question her own happiness, she becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the absolutes that Ina insists upon. Ina’s feminist friends frighten Dimple because of their inability to understand her; they come to represent a part of the American landscape that Dimple has come to fear through her mediated experience of American culture through the television and lifestyle magazines. Leni Anspach’s naked gums, "horribly pink and shiny, like secret lips, only more lecherous and lethal, set themselves up as enemies of decent, parsimonious living" (152). Leni’s discourse threatens to obliterate any knowledge that Dimple has of herself and her only resistance to this is an ironic reversal of her subservient role: "After Leni removed her cup Dimple kept on pouring, over the rim of Leni’s cup, over the tray and the floating dentures till the pregnant-bellied tea pot was emptied" (152). Dimple’s response to the lack of accommodation that Western feminism presents is tied to her feeling that Ina and Leni live with unforgiving extremes: "that was the trouble with people like Leni and Ina who believed in frankness, happiness and freedom; they lacked tolerance, and they abhorred discussions about the weather" (161). Like Amit, Ina offers a space through her example where Dimple cannot easily learn to negotiate her options. The dynamic between these women is ultimately explosive. Ina cannot accept Dimple’s choices and Dimple is forced to simplify herself in a defence that protects her from predatory Western feminisms: I can’t keep up with you people. I haven’t read the same kinds of books or anything. You know what I mean Ina, don’t you? I just like to cook and watch TV and embroider’...’Bravo!’ cried Ina Mullick from the sofa where she was sitting cross legged. ‘And what else does our little housewife do? ‘You’re making fun of me,’ Dimple screamed. ‘Who do you think you are?’ (169-170. Dimple lacks the ability to articulate her oppression; Ina Mullick can articulate it but cannot move outside of it. Both women feel anger, depression, and helplessness, but they fail to connect and help one another. Mukherjee demonstrates that women from the Third World, specifically those who come into contact with the diaspora, are not homogenous subjects; her various representations of negotiation with processes of identity constitution show how different knowledges of self are internalized and acted out. Irene Gedalof’s recent work on bringing Indian and Western feminisms into conversation proceeds from the Foucauldian notion that these multiple discursive systems must prevail over the study of woman or women within a single (and limiting) symbolic order (26). The postcolonial condition of diaspora, Gedalof and other critics have pointed out, is an interesting position from which to begin talking about these complex processes of identity making since it breaks down the oppositions of South and North, East and West. In crossing the South/North and East/West divide, Dimple does not abandon her Indian subject position, but rather attempts to keep it intact as other social forces are presented. The opposition between Ina and Dimple, however, is dissolved by the flux that the symbol "woman" experiences. This process emphasizes differences within and between their experiences in a non-hierarchical way. Rethinking the Mind/Body Dichotomy: Dimple’s Response This section will attempt to show how Dimple’s response to her options is far more complex than the mind/body dichotomy that it appears to be upon superficial examination. Dimple’s body does not murder in an act of senseless violence that is divorced from her mental perception of the world. I want to rethink interpretations like the one offered by Emmanuel S. Nelson: "Wife describes a weak-minded Bengali woman [whose]...sensibilities become so confounded by her changing cultural roles, the insidious television factitiousness, and the tensions of feminism that, ironically, she goes mad and kill her husband" (54-55). Although her sense of reality and fantasy become blurred, Dimple acts in accordance with the few choices that remain open to her. In slowly guiding us toward Dimple’s horrifying act of violence, Mukherjee attempts to examine the social and cultural networks which condition her response. The absolutes of Western feminisms offer little space for resistance. Dimple, however, is not a victim of her circumstances. She reclaims her body as a site of inscription and commodification through methods of resistance which are inaccessible to Amit or her larger social contexts: abortion, vomiting, fantasies of mutilating her physical self, and, ultimately, through using her body as a tool, rather than an object, of violence. These actions are responses to her own lack of power over self representation; Dimple creates a private world in which she can resist the ways her body has been encoded and the ways in which she has been constructed as a divided object. In her work on the body in feminist discourse, Elizabeth Grosz argues that postructuralist feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Judith Butler conceptualize female bodies as: "crucial to understanding women’s psychical and social existence, but the body is no longer understood as an ahistorical, biologically given, acultural object. They are concerned with the lived body, the body insofar as it is represented and used in specific ways in particular cultures" (Grosz 18). In emphasizing difference within the sexes, these postructuralist thinkers reject the Cartesian dualism of mind and body and do much for Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s project of considering the ways in which "woman" is a heterogenously constructed and shifting category. Mukherjee presents Dimple’s body as a "social body": a "social and discursive object, a body bound up in the order of desire, signification and power" (Grosz 18-19). Dimple cannot control, for example, Amit’s desire to impregnate her, to impose a schema of patriarchal reproduction on her body. Yet, as I will demonstrate, Dimple resists in ways that she cannot articulate but she is strongly aware that controlling the mappings of her body gives her some kind of power. This novel demonstrates how the dualisms of patriarchal discourse operate, but I want to read Dimple’s response as a reclaiming of the uncontrollable body; her power is exercised through what Deleuze and Guattari would call the "rhizomatic" connections between her body and mind. Their book, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), provides a miscellany of theory which, "flattens out the relations between the social and the psychical," and privileges neither (Grosz 180). Deleuze and Guattari favour maps and rhizomes as conceptual models, so that all things are open, connectable, and subject to constant modification (12). I want to think of Dimple as an assemblage, a rhizomatic structure that increases in the dimensions of a multiplicity that changes as it expands its connections (8). She is able to resist precisely because her body and mind are inseparable and fluid entities. Her violence toward Amit is a bodily act but it cannot be read in isolation; Mukherjee insists that we also understand the mental processes that preface this act. Dimple’s vomit is one of the most powerful tropes in the novel. It is a rejection and a resistance; it is a means of control while paradoxically suggesting a lack of control. Julia Kristeva is concerned with bodily fluids (blood, vomit, saliva, tears, seminal fluid) as "abjections" which necessarily, "partake of both polarized terms [subject/object, inside/outside] but cannot be clearly identified with either" (Grosz 192). Vomiting, then, is the first act that Dimple uses as a means of connecting the mind and body that she has been taught to know only separately. Vomiting is an abjection that signifies Dimple's rhizomatic fluidity; it is the open and changeable path that denies the split between her mind and her body that her social experiences attempt to enforce. Mukherjee devotes large sections of the narrative to this act, bringing the reader into a private space where one is forced to see, smell, and taste Dimple’s defiance. She initially discovers her ability to control her vomit when she is pregnant. At first it is an involuntary act, but she soon takes charge of her body’s rejections: The vomit fascinated her. It was hers; she was locked in the bathroom expelling brownish liquid from her body...In her arrogance, she thrust her fingers deep inside her mouth, once jabbing a squishy organ she supposed was her tonsil, and drew her finger in and out in smooth hard strokes until she collapsed with vomiting (31) Dimple’s vomiting does contain an element of pathos which is somewhat problematic; one might read her only as a victim because her pathetic grasp at power is reduced to the pride she feels in her bodily expulsions. Mukherjee’s text, however, begs the reader to read Dimple carefully. Dimple acts through her body, often with horrible consequences, but she is resisting in the only way that she is able. In New York, as Dimple encounters an increasingly complicated sociocultural matrix, she fights to find a space between her role as a loyal Indian wife and the apparent temptations of the United States. Ina Mullick’s Western feminism asks her to abandon her Bengali self, and Amit asks her to retain it. In the face of these absolutes, Dimple continues to attempt her resistance through her body, but it is often weak and ineffectual: "But instead of the great gush Dimple had hoped for, only a thin trickle was expelled. It gravitated toward the drain, a small slimy pool full of bubbles. She was ashamed of it; it seemed more impersonal than a cooking stain" (150). Mukherjee asks us to read Dimple through her abjections--through both mind and body (not entirely distinct entities for Mukherjee)--in order to understand the murder. We must gauge Dimple's actions through the open and connectable relationships of body and mind. Her inability to vomit "pleasurably" signifies a growing inability to locate a space that is tolerable. Vomiting becomes a way for Dimple to tie her multiple subject positions together: "Vomiting could be pleasurable; thinking of all the bathrooms she had vomited in she felt nostalgic, almost middle-aged" (149). This moment at the kitchen sink occurs when Leni and Ina have fractured her sense of a stable Indian identity. In an interview, Mukherjee admits that Dimple’s movement to the United States means that she begins to ask questions about her oppression; she begins to ask herself questions about her own happiness (Hancock 44). These questions, coupled with Leni and Ina’s challenging presence, leads to Dimple to desire a reconnection and a sense of control. Undoubtedly, Dimple’s act of murder is misguided, but Mukherjee sensitively demonstrates that Dimple has very little choice left. Dimple does not simply break down into a body and mind that are unaware of their connections, rather she begins to operate on several levels of consciousness. Shen Mei Ma interprets Dimple’s condition as schizophrenic, and explores this as a prominent trope in Asian diaspora literatures. She uses R.D. Laing’s classic explanation of schizophrenia as a working definition: The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world, and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself...Moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as ‘split’ in various ways, perhaps a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on (Ma 43) Ma analyses this condition (which can be seen, like gender and race, as a socially constructed state of being), as a "defense mechanism" against an unbearable world; the separation in space and memory that the diasporic subject experiences results in a schizophrenic, or divisive, tendency. I agree with Ma's use of Laing's definition of schizophrenia in the sense that this understanding is certainly more useful than Emmanuel Nelson's insistence on Dimple's "madness." Reading Dimple's response with an interest in Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual rhizomes, however, leads me to resist using a definition that is linked to mental illness. This may be a prominent trope in Asian diaspora literature, but it is also necessary, and perhaps more useful, to recognize that Dimple's act of violence and her debatable "madness" are ultimately less important than reading her negotiation as a means of survival and her response as an act of resistance. Many critics interpret the final act of murder as "an ironic twist of Sati, the traditional self-immolation of an Indian wife on the funeral pyre of her husband" (Ma 58). This suggestion draws up Dimple’s teenage desire to be like Sita, "the ideal wife of Hindu legends" who walks through fire for her husband (6). The violence perpetrated against women who naturalize Sita’s tradition is wrenched into an act in which Dimple is able to exercise some control over her fate. The act of murder is woven with the alternate text of industrial/commercial culture in a way that demonstrates Dimple’s desperate negotiation with the options available to her: The knife stabbed the magical circle once, twice, seven times, each time a little harder, until the milk in the bowl of cereal was a pretty pink and the flakes were mushy and would have embarrassed any advertiser, and then she saw the head fall off - but of course it was her imagination because she was not sure anymore what she had seen on TV and what she had seen in the private screen of three A.M. (212-213) The tragedy of this conclusion surely lies in the events that are left unsaid: what is Dimple’s fate and how will society deal with her violent choice? Ma’s article on schizophrenia points to the most likely outcome--Dimple will be declared insane and "treated" for her illness. Yet my reading of this act has attempted to access a careful understanding of how Dimple is constructed and how this can contribute to rethinking her violent response. Dimple's mind is not an insane one; her body is not an uncontrollable, hysterical one. Murder is a choice for Dimple--albeit a choice that is exercised in a limited and oppressive space. "Mixing" is an urgent topic; as globalization and capitalist homogenization make the theorization of diaspora increasingly necessary, it is essential to consider how gendered and raced subject positions are constituted and how they are reproduced within and across geographies. This novel is important because it forces the reader to ask the difficult questions about "mixing" that precede Dimple’s act of spousal violence. I have attempted to address these questions in my discussion of Dimple’s negotiations and her resistance. Much has been written about this novel in terms of Dimple’s "split," but very few critics have tried to examine Dimple’s character in ways that penetrate our limited third person access to her. Mukherjee’s own writing in "An Invisible Woman" suggests the urgency of rethinking characters like Dimple and the particular complexities of immigration for non-English speaking housewives. Mukherjee’s relative position of privilege has given her access to far more choices than Dimple has, but notably, she avoids turning Dimple’s often suicidal violence inward. Instead, Mukherjee shows how the inward is inescapable from the outward: in murdering Amit, the violence Dimple perpetrates is, after all, a rearticulation of the violence from which her limited subject position cannot completely escape. Footnote: In thinking about Dimple's response, it is important to note that, of course, her actions and her words are always conditioned by the position that she has naturalized. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"(1988) argues that the subaltern subject cannot "speak" because no act of resistance occurs that can be separated from the dominant discourse that provides the language and the conceptual categories with which the subaltern voice speaks (Ashcroft et al 1998 217-218).The violence of Dimple's response must be seen as an ironic subversion of a television world that enforces patriarchal norms. References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998. Brah, Avtar.Cartographies of Diaspora - Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980. Gedalof, Irene. Against Purity - Rethinking Idenity With Indian and Western Feminisms. London: Routledge, 1999. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies - Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Ma, Sheng-mei. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures. Albany: State U of NY P, 1998. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams, eds. NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 196-220. Mukherjee, Bharati. Wife. Toronto: Penguin, 1975. -- "An Invisible Woman." Saturday Night 1981, 96: 36-40. Nelson, Emmanual S. Writers of the Indian Diaspora - A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams, eds. NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 196-220.