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Journal articles on the topic 'Bengali Songs'
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1
Mahmud, Nazia B. "The Aesthetic Asceticism of the Mad." COMPASS 3, no. 1 (September 29, 2023): 8–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.29173/comp68.
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The Bauls of Bangladesh, West Bengal, and other parts of India are a distinct ascetic sect that practices spirituality through songs, music, and poetry that were passed down orally from a teacher (Guru) to a disciple (Shirsha). Their ideology is a mix of yogic-tantric practices of Buddhist Sahajiya, Vaishnavism Sahajiya, and later Sufi thoughts. Bauls are often called a heretic sect because of their rejection of institutionalized religion, consumerism, society, and, for many Bauls, even marriage. Baul songs and spirituality emphasize the search for the connection between man and the Divine and love and symbolize the Bengali folk identity. In this paper, placing Baulism within the Anthropology of Art vs. Aesthetics discourse, I show how Baul songs, and their lifestyle can be both. I discuss the rising appropriation of Baul folk music and aesthetics by modern media and in capitalist spaces and how it started to gain traction when the elite society started to acknowledge Bengali folk music. Baul giti (song) is an established genre of music, and they tend to mediate between both art while providing aesthetic appreciation. With the rise of village core aesthetics and romanticization, their music, style, and philosophy have found new spaces in media, fashion, and business.
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Tagore, Pramantha. "Songs for the Empress: Queen Victoria in the Music History of Colonial Bengal." Victorian Literature and Culture 52, no. 1 (2024): 61–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000827.
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In the final decades of the nineteenth century, music significantly occupied the cultural and social life of the Bengali people. As the epicenter of British political and economic influence in the subcontinent, Calcutta witnessed the emergence of schools offering instruction in Indian and Western art music. The flourishing city housed private and public printing presses, which ensured the circulation and distribution of large numbers of songbooks, manuals, and theoretical treatises on music. The city was also home to a diverse assortment of hereditary music practitioners and occupational specialists illustrative of a variety of musical traditions spread across Bengal and North India. Around the 1870s, Bengali musicians, patrons, and connoisseurs began to take up music as an intellectual activity, examine its history as a source for social and political substance, and view musical instruments as material objects for disciplinary study. This emerging interest in musicology, broadly conceived, coincided with the proclamation of Victoria as queen and empress of India, considerably transforming Bengal's political fabric and cultural worldview. The pioneering musicologist Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1840–1914) was among the many authors who published works celebrating Queen Victoria's ascension as empress of India. In this article, I examine Tagore's songbooks dedicated to the queen, reading them as cultural artifacts representing a richly nuanced historical and musical legacy: a textual and aural archive demonstrating how Bengali musicians used sound to mediate the effects of colonization.
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Dimock, Edward C. "Levertov and the Bengali Love Songs." Twentieth Century Literature 38, no. 3 (1992): 283. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/441521.
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Suma, Salma Pervin, and Md Ziaul Haque. "Metaphysical Approach to Lalon’s Song." Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature 6, no. 1 (June 30, 2019): 59–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.18034/ajhal.v6i1.350.
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The objective of this paper is to find out the trends and tendencies of metaphysical endeavor in Lalon’s song. Lalon shah popularly known as Lalon Fakir (1774-1890), was a Bengali mystic folk poet and singer as well as philosopher and humanist. Most of his songs were composed in orally and sung at the time of travelling. His songs dealt with the themes of love, religion, caste, faith, soul, god, death etc which can be viewed from the metaphysical point of view. The way he dealt his various issues in his songs demands our special concentration to investigate how ornamentally his songs were composed using metaphysical conceit, incongruous imagery, complexity and subtlety of thought, frequent use of paradox, and often by deliberate harshness or rigidity of expression. So, this study will try to shed lights on the theme, philosophy and style of Lalon’s song through the metaphysical perspective.
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Khalid, Hina. "Responding to the Call of God: The Motif of Devotional Love in the Poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam." Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies 8, no. 1 (May 2023): 58–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/jims.00004.
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Abstract: This article explores several thematic synergies across Hindu and Muslim devotional sensibilities through an analysis of selected songs from two influential Bengali poet-thinkers: Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976). This study offers an exploratory engagement with these songs in the form of new translations from the original Bengali and reflections that suggest fertile theological parallels between their verses. Through a close reading of these selected songs, certain common themes are discernible, such as the paradoxes of intimacy and painful distance as constitutive of the divine-human relation, the world as suffused with the creative word(s) of God, and the illumination of the heart as key to the spiritual life. These themes can be organized under the broader relational rubric of "call-and-response:" God's call to humanity is voiced in various ways in the world, eliciting a reciprocal response that is both devotional and loving. While these songs are marked by distinctive scriptural imageries, including references to both the Upanishads and the Qur'ān, their mutual resonances speak to shared sensibilities that are modulated by characteristically Bengali idioms and symbolisms.
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Lorea, Carola Erika. "“Playing the Football of Love on the Field of the Body”: The Contemporary Repertoire of Baul Songs." Religion and the Arts 17, no. 4 (2013): 416–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685292-12341286.
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Abstract This article analyzes the contemporary repertoire of a very popular genre of Bengali folk songs, performed by itinerant singers and practitioners of an esoteric cult known as Bauls. Considering the recent popularization and commercialization of Baul songs and their interference with the urban milieu, the discourse on the authenticity of Baul songs is explored from an inter-disciplinary perspective that embraces orality-literacy studies as well as social studies on cultural tourism, underlining the limits of previous academic works on the subject. This article offers, as an original contribution, the first results of ongoing fieldwork among the disciples of a śākta saint and composer of Baul songs known as Bhaba Pagla. Through discussion of the lyrics of songs performed in contemporary Baul festivals, this article argues that the contamination of Baul songs by urban élites and middle-class audiences, far from deteriorating the oral tradition, may enrich the vocabulary of the compositions and reinforce the underlying belief system. Contrarily to the popular and academic view of today’s Bauls, that labels the entertaining performer as a corrupted ally of show business, the priority of gānsādhanā (singing as a practice for self-realization) may be interpreted as an efficient way to conceal heterodox esoteric rituals vis-à-vis the increasing interest of cultural tourists in Baul culture and performances, protecting the secrecy of the tradition through an innovative and negotiated version of sandhyā-bhāṣā (twilight-language), the literary device that has accompanied Bengali esoteric songs since their origins.
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Mukherjee, Dhrubaa. "Singing-in-between spaces: Bhooter Bhabisyat and the music transcending class conflict." Studies in South Asian Film & Media 12, no. 1 (February 1, 2021): 3–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/safm_00034_1.
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This article analyses Bhooter Bhabisyat, a Bengali political horror satire, as a counter-narrative to Bengali cinema’s monocultural bhodrolok branding. The article argues that Bhooter Bhabisyat is radical in its refusal to follow hegemonic homogenizing musical styles classified into genres such as folk, popular, traditional and modern, which tend to be ethnocentric and class based with serious value judgments about the superiority of certain musical forms over others. Instead, Bhooter Bhabisyat uses a variety of distinct Bengali musical traditions to problematize the historic role of capitalist media that work to homogenize and popularize the dominant culture of the ruling classes. The hybrid songs of the film disrupt a sense of homogeneous bhodrolok class position that Bengali cinema has historically sustained. Through the strategies of musical pastiche, Bhooter Bhabisyat offers a meta-historic narrative about Bengali cinema, which makes possible a critical investigation of the cultural discourses and historical narratives that are discursively embedded within the history of filmic production, circulation and consumption. If film histories are produced by repressing differences between social groups and constructing universal identification, then foregrounding film songs as decolonial storytelling methods that reemphasize local voices and subject matters can lead to an effort to read history from below. The vulgar representation of time as a precise and homogeneous continuum has […] diluted the Marxist concept of history. (Giorgio Agamben) The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (Karl Marx)
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Rahman, M. Shahinoor, Mossammad Salma Sultana, and M. Mostafizur Rahman. "The Creation of Tradition and the Alteration of Social Structure by the Mystic Baul Fakir Lalon Shah." Praxis International Journal of Social Science and Literature 6, no. 5 (May 25, 2023): 47–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.51879/pijssl/060506.
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This paper investigates how the Bengali poet Fakir Lalon Shah established a separate tradition of his songs and ideas. This research is also relevant to how Lalon's heritage of songs and philosophy has appeared to have formed, innovated, and altered over time. The songs of Lalon, their continued performance, how the songs get performed, and the attitudes of Lalon's devotees and the singers of his songs have all contributed to the development of a specific type of tradition. "a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition," (Hobsbawm 1983) is how Hobsbawm describes tradition. Fakir Lalon Shah was a notable philosopher, poet, and musician born in Bengal and flourished during the 19th century in what is now Bangladesh. He was known as Fakir Lalon Shah. The Baul tradition, a syncretic form of devotional music that integrates aspects of Sufi Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and indigenous folk beliefs, was started by him. He is known as the originator of the Baul tradition. Lalon Shah founded the Baul tradition and broke radically with his era's prevalent cultural and religious standards when he established it. He was not a follower of traditional organized religions because he considered them limiting and dogmatic. Instead, he emphasized individual spirituality and the quest for the truth inside.
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Mohammad Chishti, Kazi Ehteshumes. "Reviewing Nachiketa’s Lyrics as a Protest against Diverse Malpractices: A Study from a Post-colonial Perspective." Shanlax International Journal of Arts, Science and Humanities 9, no. 1 (July 1, 2021): 54–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.34293/sijash.v9i1.4072.
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Songs are not always a source of recreation that soothes one’s mind with beautifully romantic hearttouching sugar-quoted lyrics. Songs may also be angry in tone and harsh in voice, as is noticeable in many of the songs of Nachiketa Chakraborty. Likewise, the crucial period of Colonialism may be over, but a more critical period of Neocolonialism is now a dominating practice in the developing countries by rich and most developed countries, mostly through their political and economic strategies. The interesting thing is that power and resistance go side by side. Nachiketa’s melodious lyrics are the literary resistance to Neocolonial forces. Nachiketa is one of the few Kolkata-centric artists whose late post-90s modern Bengali songs have won the hearts of both West Bengal and Bangladeshi people. What is less noticeable during these three decades is that Nachiketa has a strong presence through vocal and melody, where his rebellious voice has not failed to criticize the government, political, religious, financial, or cultural institutions that indirectly represent Neocolonial ideologies like Capitalism, Globalization, and Cultural Imperialism. This article is going to excavate how Nachiketa has criticized different layers of malpractices prevailing in the diversified aspects of day to day life through his best known, surprisingly turbulent anti-imperial lyrical creations.
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Chakravorty, Swapan. "“Subjects,” “Liberty,” and “Equity”: Queen Victoria's Proclamations and Bengali Writers." Victorian Literature and Culture 52, no. 1 (2024): 226–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150323000839.
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Starting with Queen Victoria's address to the Proclamation Durbar in 1877, this article surveys how Bengali writers critiqued British colonialism in India through their stories, songs, poetry, journalism, and lectures, sometimes directly about the queen herself, more often when discussing governance, social reform, and the desire for political liberty.
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Mukherjee(Chatterjee), Piyali. "“Political and Nationalistic views reflected in the Tagore‟s Bengali Songs”." IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science 19, no. 3 (2014): 27–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.9790/0837-19362730.
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Nizam Uddin, Md Abu Saleh. "Nazrul’s Persia in his decolonizing melodies." IIUC Studies 18, no. 1 (December 15, 2022): 135–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/iiucs.v18i1.61279.
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Kazi Nazrul Islam of Bangla literature may be best described as a poet of humanity. Besides the anti-colonial and spiritual dimensions of his melodies, there is also a decolonizing tone in his literature. His songs, especially those that recuperate and include rich Persian heritage of Bangla literature, significantly contribute to decolonizing the colonially victimized Bangla literature in British India. Thus, this paper initially attempts to examine how distinctly and strongly Persian language, nature and culture remain as an important heritage for Bangla literature while Nazrul writes songs imbued with the Persian elements. Then, this paper has the prime aim to explore how the poet, in a colonial backdrop, robustly endeavors a comprehensive decolonization of Bangla literature with his Persia-attached songs. Thus, the study examines the poet’s measures of decolonization with efforts to revive successful Bangla literature, have it compete with or even exceed English literature and place Bengali Muslims again in their rightful literary domain. IIUC Studies Vol.18, December 2021: 135-156
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Williams, Richard David. "Playing the Spinal Chord: Tantric Musicology and Bengali Songs in the Nineteenth Century." Journal of Hindu Studies 12, no. 3 (November 1, 2019): 319–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiz017.
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Abstract Across the nineteenth century, Bengali songbook editors applied musicological theory to their tantric religious practices. Responding to the new possibilities of musical publishing, these editors developed innovative techniques of relating the body to music by tying together tantric tropes with music theory and performance practice. Theories about the affective potential and poetic connotations of rāgas were brought into conversation with understandings of the yogic body, cakras, and the visualization of goddesses. These different theories, stemming from aesthetics and yogic philosophy, were put into effect through lyrical composition and the ways in which songs were set to music and edited for printed anthologies. This article considers different examples of tantric musical editorial, and explores how esoteric knowledge was applied in innovative ways through the medium of printed musical literature.
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Mukherjee, Kamalini. "Bangla Rock: exploring the counterculture and dissidence in post-colonial Bengali popular music." International Journal of Pedagogy, Innovation and New Technologies 4, no. 2 (December 28, 2017): 35–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.5604/01.3001.0011.5843.
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This paper is an attempt to explore the politics and the poetics of vernacular music in modern Bengal. Drawn from extensive and in-depth research into the current “scene” (as popularly referred to in the musician and music lover circles), this paper delves into the living histories of musical and linguistic revolutions in a part of India where the vernacular literature has been historically rich, and vastly influenced by the post-colonial heritage. The popular music that grew from these political and cultural foundations reflected its own pathos, and consecutively inspired its own form of oral tradition. The linguistic and musical inspirations for Bangla Rock and the eventual establishment of this genre in a rigidly curated culture is not only a remarkable anthropological case study, but also crucial in creating discourse on the impact of this music in the creation of oral histories. This paper will discuss both the musical and the lyrical journey of Bengali counterculture in music, thus in turn exploring the scope of Bangla – as in the colloquial for Bengali, and Rock – the Western musical expression which began during the 50’s and the 60’s (also populist and political in its roots). The inception of this particular political populist narrative driven through songs and music, is rooted in the Civil Rights movement, and comparisons can be drawn in the ‘soul’ of the movements, though removed both geographically and by time. Thus this paper engages with the poetics of Bangla Rock, to understand the marginal political voices surfacing through alternative means of expression.
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Numani, Dr AJM Qutubul Islam. "The Use of Arabic Words in the Poems and Writings of Revolutionary Poet Kazi Nazrul Islam: An Analytical Study." Dhaka University Arabic Journal 23, no. 26 (June 14, 2024): 137–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.62295/mazallah.v23i26.64.
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Qazi Nazrul Islam was a great revolutionary poet, a creative and a genius writer, a Bangladeshi national poet, and a man gifted by God. He touched on all literary branches of poems, songs, Islamic songs, stories, novels, plays, scholarly articles and music. He was also a journalist as he used to write in the daily newspapers on various literary topics, especially Islamic issues. So, he is said to be the poet of the Islamic Renaissance. When the business relations and Muslim relations of the people of India, especially the Bangladeshis, with the Arabs began to develop, the Arabic word began to enter the Bengali language. There was a new trend among Indian writers and poets to use Arabic words in their writings, whether poetry or non-poetry. The poet Qazi Nazrul Islam vowed to Islam to use more Arabic words in his writings. Therefore, I like to choose the topic "Using Arabic Words in the Poetry and Writings of the Qazi Nazrul Islam" to know the size of the Arabic words used in the poet's writings and to know the types of terms used in his writings from singular, dual, and plural.... etc. Researchers and writers point to the importance of this topic and encourage them to research in detail on this topic and to benefit readers and researchers about the poet's exceptional talent and his reaching the top of poetic fame; albeit poetically brilliant, he could not reach the secondary stage of education. The research shows that the entry of Islam into Bengal, in general, gave a brief overview of the poet's life and works and the critics' opinions about him. At the same time, this research also discusses the Arabic alphabet in sequential order with a straightforward and cites a list of sources and references.
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Mamona, Anhelina. "R. Tagore’s lyrics in composers’ interpretations: an attempt at comparative analysis." Aspects of Historical Musicology 33, no. 33 (December 28, 2023): 22–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-33.02.
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Statement of the problem. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1912 Rabindranath Tagore faced enormous popularity among Western composers. Their attention was mainly drawn to his two collections of poems – “Gitanjali” and “The Gardener”, which were translations from Bengali made by Tagore himself and published in 1912 and 1913 respectively. Interestingly, these poetry books were soon translated into a number of European languages, among which – French, Spanish, German and Italian. These translations were used by hundreds of composers who represented different national schools. In some cases, a number of different composers chose the same poem, which gives us an opportunity to compare their ways to interpret Tagore’s text. This make it possible to better understand both, the individual vectors of composer creativity, and the possible common or different tendencies in the interpretation of the poetic primary source. In this paper, we analyse and compare three songs, written by Franco Alfano, Karol Szymanowski and Alexander von Zemlinsky to the text of the poem № 7 “Mother, the young prince…” from Tagore’s “The Gardener”. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of the article is to determine the peculiarities of musical interpretations of R. Tagore’s poem by named authors focusing on the compositional, intonation and figurative-emotional aspects, for which the methods of comparative, semantic, genre and stylistic, structural and compositional analysis are involved. Attempts to make such a comparison have not been made previously. Results and conclusion. The first song from “Three Poems by Tagore” (“Tre poemi di Tagore”) by F. Alfano, the second and third numbers of “Four Songs” op. 41 by K. Szymanowski and the second part of the “Lyric Symphony” op. 18 by A. Zemlinsky were compared. It was found that all compositions show bright stylistic differences (late romantic, impressionistic, expressionistic musical complexes), along with conceptual ones, taking into account genre conditions (chamber-vocal and vocal-symphonic models). There are certain common features between the tempo solutions by F. Alfano and A. Zemlinsky, however, these solutions are aimed at different interpretations of the poetical text. The two-stage dramaturgical development laid down in R. Tagore’s text is shown most clearly in K. Szymanowski’s cycle, where the plot of the poem is embodied in two songs instead of one, with obvious tempo contrast between them. While in the impressionistic song by F. Alfano, the image of a young girl captivated by her own feelings in a state of awe-inspiring anticipation appears before us, K. Szymanowski’s music written in line with expressionist tendencies, emphasizes mournful and tragic moods and sounds almost “otherworldly”. In A. Zemlinsky’s late romantic genre concept, R. Tagore’s poem becomes the basis of a vocal-symphonic scherzo with a tragic and philosophical undertone. Taking into account these differences, we will also note an interesting common typological tendency, which is visible in a kind of “portrait of a girl with a necklace”: a departure from the usual romantic musical oriental complex, despite the “exoticism” of R. Tagore’s works.
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Krakauer, Benjamin. "Carola Erika Lorea, Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman: A Journey Between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation." History and Sociology of South Asia 12, no. 1 (December 22, 2017): 110–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2230807517726408.
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Banerjee, Archi, Medha Basu, Shankha Sanyal, and Priyadarshi Patnaik. "Towards the origin of devotion and happiness: An acoustical and neuro-cognitive exploration of Indian spiritual music." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 154, no. 4_supplement (October 1, 2023): A241. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0023415.
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Since the age of the Vedas, devotion has remained a key component of Indian music through centuries of changes and foreign influences. The brightest example of this is the Bhakti tradition, a pan-Indian movement (7th-15th Century CE), which integrated poetry and music in the transmission of spiritual and social goals. Devotees often report perception of emotions like devotion, happiness, awe while listening to spiritual music of their own religion and culture. This paper aims to study the acoustical and neuro-cognitive correlates of these emotions for two Indian spiritual music traditions – (a) Sikh Gurbani/ Shabad Kirtan, (b) Bangla Vaishnav Kirtan, both of which emerged from the Bhakti tradition. 5 Punjabi and 5 Bengali speaking participants listened to 3-minute long four songs from these two spiritual music traditions while EEG signals were recorded from each participant along with their emotion responses. Acoustical time series of these music clips and their corresponding EEG signals were analysed using nonlinear DFA technique. DFA Scaling Exponent values were calculated for multiple 30-second EEG segments across the total duration of each music clip to understand the perception and induction process of devotion and happiness in human brain, which is a novel step in the domain of music cognition and signal processing.
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Rose, Evangeline M., Avery J. Scofield, Autumn M. Wenstrom, Katherine A. Stennette, Benjamin D. Shank, and Gregory F. Ball. "Male and female red-cheeked cordon bleus sing similar yet individualistic songs." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 155, no. 3 (March 1, 2024): 1909–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0025236.
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Birdsong is an excellent system for studying complex vocal signaling in both males and females. Historically, most research in captivity has focused only on male song. This has left a gap in our understanding of the environmental, neuroendocrine, and mechanistic control of female song. Here, we report the overall acoustic features, repertoire, and stereotypy of both male and female Red-Cheeked Cordon Bleus (Uraeginthus bengalus) (RCCBs) songs in the lab. We found few sex differences in the acoustic structure, song repertoire, and song stereotypy of RCCBs. Both sexes had similar song entropy, peak frequency, and duration. Additionally, individuals of both sexes sang only a single song type each and had similar levels of song and syllable stereotypy. However, we did find that female RCCBs had higher song bandwidth but lower syllable repertoires. Finally, and most strikingly, we found highly individualistic songs in RCCBs. Each individual produced a stereotyped and unique song with no birds sharing song types and very few syllable types being shared between birds of either sex. We propose that RCCBs represent a promising species for future investigations of the acoustic sex differences in song in a lab environment, and also for understanding the evolutionary driving forces behind individualistic songs.
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Santra, Aparajita. "A tale of the city of Kolkata through the eyes of the “common women"." Enquiry The ARCC Journal for Architectural Research 20, no. 2 (November 10, 2023): 92–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.17831/enqarcc.v20i2.1162.
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This paper focuses on working-class women from the informal settlements of Kolkata, India and their precarious relationships with the city. Their existence at the margins of society (socially, spatially, historically, and sometimes even geographically) tends to make them invisible actors in the production of contemporary urban spaces of Kolkata. This paper examines the role of class, caste, and gender in informing the spatial practices of these minoritized women that occur in the city’s liminal landscapes. These practices are quite distinct from those of women from middle- and upper-classes in Kolkata. Terms like “public women” or “bad women” or chhotolok (a common Bengali term used for people from lower classes or castes) have been used to represent and mark these working-class, lower caste women as deviant bodies in terms of their class, caste, and even sexualities. These labels are important to understand how these women have been represented historically in the urban history of Kolkata. By analyzing secondary literature, archival texts, songs, films, poems, and photographs, the paper investigates the following interrelated questions. First, how has the spatial organization of urban Kolkata historically determined the ways in which these women have navigated, engaged with, and attempted to overcome a wide array of structural and systemic constraints? And second, how have these women produced and applied various forms of situated spatial knowledge in the city’s liminal landscapes? In terms of the paper’s structure, I start by analyzing the existing literature on gender and urban space in India. Thereafter, I lay a theoretical groundwork to elucidate the importance of adopting an intersectional lens to understand overlapping regimes of power that affect the life-worlds of minoritized bodies; in this case, the working-class lower caste women of Kolkata. Finally, I use a chronological approach to examine the changes in Kolkata’s urban fabric and its material culture that have significantly added to the precarities faced by these minoritized and marginalized women. In other words, I trace an alternate urban history of Kolkata through the eyes of these “common women.”
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Dutta Ain, Anwesha. "A Reading of Satyajit’s Pather Panchali and Agantuk as Subtexts of Fictional Ethnography." Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, no. 83 (2021): 77–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.25145/j.recaesin.2021.83.06.
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This essay focuses on Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955) and Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991) and discusses the style of Satyajit Ray’s filmmaking which combined the aesthetics of European verisimilitude with suggestive symbolism based on conventional Indian iconography. The paper will concentrate on the authentic representation of a poor family in rural Bengal in Pather Panchali and the urban setting, in his last film Agantuk. The main aim is to explore how the detailing of the shots and the dialogues in these films engage in the ethnographic study of the Bengali society through these cinematographic fictional narratives
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Crovetto, Helen. "Embodied Knowledge and Divinity: The Hohm Community as Western-style Bāāuls." Nova Religio 10, no. 1 (August 1, 2006): 69–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/nr.2006.10.1.69.
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ABSTRACT: Hohm Sahaj Mandir (Hohm Innate Divinity Temple) is a new religious movement that has achieved international status under the name "Western Bauls." The Western Bauls have a number of similarities to the Bauls of Bengal, wandering minstrels with an ecstatic inclination whose lives are consumed by their search for the divine. Like many Tantric groups, the Western Bauls believe the body is a microcosm of the universe in which divinity is present. Their spiritual praxes are bodybased. In the advanced stages they include an esoteric yoga called kaya sadhana as well as other practices of aropa, the mystical conversion of matter to spirit practiced by the Bauls of Bengal. The close-knit members of the Hohm Community include a high percentage of talented artists, writers, performers, singers and musicians. They emphasize poetry and writing in addition to music, dance, and song, for which the Bengali Bauls are known.
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Dipa, Sahelee Parveen. "Subversion of Colonial Masculinity and Manifestation of Gendered Nationalism in Letters of 1971 (Ekattorer Chithi)." Crossings: A Journal of English Studies 13, no. 2 (December 1, 2022): 27–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.59817/cjes.v13i2.446.
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Bengali males, in colonial hegemonic discourse, were projected as “weak” and “submissive” (Macaulay qtd. in Chowdhury 4; Banerjee 29; Ray 21). This tendency of feminizing colonized males was naturalized through the process of constant discursive practices by the end of the nineteenth century. This discourse, as has been demonstrated by different historiographies, had influenced the self-perception of the Bengalis to a large extent. However, the colonial resistance and nationalist movements proved to be a fruitful site for the Bengalis to counter the negative portrayal of their masculine selves (Chattopadhyay 271). Again, emerging nationalist discourses in anti-colonial movements in various parts of the world led to the concept of “gendered nationalism” whereby nation is signified as mother and its male citizen as the savior or protector of the “motherland” (Mayer; McClintock, qtd. in Banerjee 6). Consequently, the view that woman is to be seen as the preserver of the tradition and producer of the valiant male citizen got normalized in the discourse of nationalism. It is against this background that this paper aims to read Letters of 1971 (Ekattorer Chithi) – a collection of letters written during the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971 by the freedom fighters – as an endeavor to the historic legacy of reclaiming Bengali masculinity. Letters of 1971 unraveling the gallantry of the freedom fighters, and their decision of embracing martyrdom over defeat, engages a glaring instance of a counter-narrative of the colonial discourse of Bengali masculinity. Alongside, the narratives of Letters of 1971 will be seen, in this paper as participating in the discourse of gendering nationalism through its projection of the nation as mother who is in dire need of action from its valiant sons.
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Biswas, Stella Chitralekha. "‘Sons of Bengal’ and the Absent Daughters: Gender, Performativity and Nationalism in Bengali Juvenile Literature." Indialogs 8 (April 7, 2021): 183. http://dx.doi.org/10.5565/rev/indialogs.168.
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Ashraful Islam, Khandakar. "(Re)tracing Resistance from a Culture of Silence:." Crossings: A Journal of English Studies 7 (December 1, 2016): 72–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.59817/cjes.v7i.163.
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Bengal—a land of rivers and natural resources—has been the abode of the “jele” community (fishermen) for centuries. But hardly have we come across the life of the fishermen in Bengali literature before Manik Bandopadhyay and Adwaita Mallabarman. In fact, these two noteworthy novelists, in their novels, The Boatman of the Padma and A River Called Titash, poignantly depict the poverty, hunger, suffering, and exploitation of the fishermen. However, both novelists portray this community as passive victims of all socio-economic exploitations and nowhere in their narratives is there any trace of resistance from the side of the afflicted. Therefore, in this paper, focusing on Harishankar Jaladas’s Sons of the Sea I will re-read the novels of Bandhopadhyay and Mallabarman in search of the forces that dissuaded this community from fighting back. Moreover, shedding light on the life of this subaltern group, in Sons of the Sea, I will attempt to trace the root of resistance so that breaking the age old culture of silence may create a new future for them.
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Adhikary, Chanchal. "Oral Literature and Performing Arts of a Marginalized Community: The Chain of West Bengal." Contemporary Voice of Dalit 10, no. 1 (January 29, 2018): 28–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2455328x17744626.
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In this article, an attempt has been made to collect and examine the folk and oral traditions of the Chain community of West Bengal in an ethnohistorical context. These included marriage songs, Gambhira songs, rhymes, lullabies, Jhumur, Alkap, riddles, etc. All have been collected through field work.
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Field, Garrett M. "Music for Inner Domains: Sinhala Song and the Arya and Hela Schools of Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Sri Lanka." Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 4 (November 2014): 1043–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021911814001028.
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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.
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Padoux, André. "Hugh B. Urban, Songs of Ecstasy. Tantrie and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal." Archives de sciences sociales des religions, no. 124 (October 1, 2003): 63–170. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/assr.1017.
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Pal, Bidisha. "Book review: Asit Biswas and Shubh Brat Sarkar (Eds.), Dalit Poems, Songs and Dialogues from Bengal in English Translation." Contemporary Voice of Dalit 15, no. 1 (May 2023): 134–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2455328x221148914.
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CHAUDHURI, ROSINKA. "Cutlets or Fish Curry?: Debating Indian Authenticity in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal." Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (April 18, 2006): 257–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x06001740.
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Current discussions on the development of modern literary genres and aesthetic conventions in nineteenth-century colonial Bengal have tended, perhaps because of its relative neglect in the modern day, to ignore the seminal role of poetry in formulating the nationalist imagination. In academic discourse, the coming together of the birth of the novel, the concept of history and the idea of the nation-state under the sign of the modern has led to a collective blindness toward the forceful intervention of poetry and song in imagining the nation. Thus Dipesh Chakrabarty, in a chapter devoted to poetry in Provincializing Europe, ironically elides any mention of it at the crucial instance of the formulation of national modernity, when he takes his argument about the division between the prosaic and the poetic in Tagore further to say, without mentioning the seminal role of poetry, that: ‘The new prose of fiction—novels and short stories—was thus seen as intimately connected to questions of political modernity’. Partha Chatterjee discusses, in the introduction to The Nation and Its Fragments, the shaping of critical discourse in colonial Bengal in relation to drama, the novel, and even art, but ignores completely the fiercely contested and controversial processes by which modern Bengali poetry and literary criticism were formulated. ‘The desire to construct an aesthetic form that was modern and national’, to use his words, ‘was shown in its most exaggerated shape’ not, it is my contention, in the Bengal school of art in the 1920s as he says, but long before that in the poetry of Rangalal Banerjee, Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, Madhusudan Dutt, and Nabinchandra Sen, and in the literary criticism and controversy surrounding their work.
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Guha, Sukanya. "Echoing Tagore’s Love for the Monsoons." ASIAN-EUROPEAN MUSIC RESEARCH JOURNAL 6 (December 4, 2020): 101–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.30819/aemr.6-8.
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In India, Bengal’s most celebrated literary figure, Rabindranath Tagore, was specifically sensitive regarding the various seasons occurring in India. The monsoon and its relation with Tagore’s songs is the main focus of this paper. The monsoon, when Mother Nature spreads her beauty by unravelling her bounty treasures, is richly expressed by Tagore. In the composition for the khanika (poem) ‘Asho nai tumi phalgune’ [you did not come in the spring season] Tagore says: “when I awaited eagerly for your visit in the spring, you didn’t come. Please, don’t make me wait any longer and do come during the full monsoon”. In another of his songs he visualises on a cloudy sunless day, a person’s longing to share his or her deepest treasure of feeling for that particular important person ‘Emon ghonoghor boroshaye’ [in this heavy downpour] (Tagore 2002: 333, song 248). Through these poetic compositions and many more, one may understand the depth in Tagore’s understanding of the human’s emotional details regarding this specific season. The monsoon may also be disastrous. According to Tagore’s a composition ‘Bame rakho bhoyonkori’ [keep aside the destructions] (Tagore 2002: 394, song 58) he describes as well as wishes that the monsoon keeps away the damage or distress from people’s lives. His tunes blend with his words and emotions, not to mention the ragas that are believed to be related with rain that is popular to the Indian subcontinent such as Rag Megh or Rag Mian ki Malhar. These have been affluently used by Tagore to create emotional feelings through his words. He expresses being a philosopher with whom people can find a connection, irrespective of their regional background.
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Ghosh, Ratul. "Lorea, Carola Erika : Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman. A Journey Between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation. Leiden/Boston: Brill 2016. XVIII, 332 S., 48 Abb. 8° = Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 22. Hartbd. € 145,00. ISBN 978-90-04-32470-1." Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 116, no. 2 (September 1, 2021): 158–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/olzg-2021-0055.
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Banerjee, Kathakali. "Humanism as A Way of Life: Close Reading of Lalon Fakir and Bauls of West Bengal." Scholars Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences 11, no. 03 (March 9, 2023): 43–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.36347/sjahss.2023.v11i03.001.
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Religious forbearance and fondness for mankind is the central theme of Lalon’s philosophy. Baul tradition has been performing as an important element in creating and developing of aesthetics. Baul songs are essentially contains the elements of Hinduism, Vaishnavism, Islam, Sufism and Buddhism. The Baul community is still now at a swinging stage still they are not considered as an important part of society. The Bauls resides in West Bengal of India and Bangladesh but we all know they are the wanderer. There are three communities which is seen in the source of Baul community of West Bengal. Community is inhabitant of Birbhum, Bankura and Midnapur districts which are situated in the West sides of this state. There is disparity of their songs. The presentation of different singers different and they sing different tune. Sometimes they compose their own lyrics, those lyrics are very much deep and sometimes in their songs we can imagine this society, the different problems they face and most importantly the way society draw their image.The main objective of this research paper is to research on Baul community, their history, their position in the society, Baul philosophy, family relationship cosmic energy, cosmic love and cosmic relation and also a close study of Lalon Fakir and his role in this Baul community to be specific in this society.
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Dutta, Uttaran, Panchali Banerjee, Soham Ghosh, Priyam Ghosal, Samya Srimany, and Sahana Mukherjee. "Songs of Dissent and Consciousness: Pronouncements of the Bauls of Rural Bengal." Religions 12, no. 11 (November 18, 2021): 1018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel12111018.
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Bauls, the wandering minstrels of rural Bengal (of both Bangladesh and India), are a socio-religiously marginalized cultural group. While the ritualistic practices and spiritual discourses of the Bauls have received scholarly attention, scholarship on Bauls’ songs about material and communicative adversities and their emancipatory visions is lacking. Bauls’ performances and discourses are precursors to envisioning alternative emancipatory possibilities that question dominant intolerances, oppressions, and exploitations. This article documents and reflects on the works of two contemporary Bauls—Shah Abdul Karim and Manimohan Das. Through their songs and performances, they (i) question the power structure and legitimize the sufferings and struggles of the downtrodden, and (ii) seek to raise societal consciousness in imagining a free and just society.
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Urban, Hugh B. "Songs of Ecstasy: Mystics, Minstrels, and Merchants in Colonial Bengal." Journal of the American Oriental Society 123, no. 3 (July 2003): 493. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3217748.
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Johnson, Kurt A. "‘Lisping Tongues’ and ‘Sanscrit Songs’: William Jones' Hymns to Hindu Deities." Translation and Literature 20, no. 1 (March 2011): 48–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/tal.2011.0005.
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In 1784-9 Sir William Jones, then a Supreme Court Judge in Bengal, wrote nine ‘Hymns’ to Hindu deities. In examining one of the ‘Hymns’ – ‘A Hymn to Súrya’ – in more detail, this article maintains that Jones uses the hymnal form as a means of cultural translation, transposing the religious and cultural significance of Vedanta Hinduism poetically into an accessible and uncompromised form. With an emphasis on Jones’ early poetic criticism and his personal fondness for the Hindu religion, this article demonstrates how Jones employs the hymnal form in order to reach a poetic, religious, and cultural ‘original’ through translation.
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Dutta, Uttaran, and Mohan Jyoti Dutta. "Songs of the Bauls: Voices from the Margins as Transformative Infrastructures." Religions 10, no. 5 (May 22, 2019): 335. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel10050335.
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Bauls, the rural minstrels who sing songs of transformation, are a socio-economically and politico-religiously marginalized cultural population from rural Bengal (both from eastern and north-eastern, India and from Bangladesh). They identify themselves outside of any organized religion or established caste system in India, and therefore are constituted at the margins of contemporary global South. Voicing through their songs and narratives of emancipation, they interrogate and criticize material and symbolic inequalities and injustices such as discrimination and intolerance (including class and caste hierarchies, and other forms of disparities) perpetuated by hegemonic authorities and religious institutions. Embracing a critical communication lens, this paper pays attention to material and discursive marginalization of Bauls and Fakirs, foregrounding voice as an anchor to communicative interrogation of structural and cultural inequalities. Through voice, Bauls and Fakirs foreground reflexive spiritual and humane practices that raise societal consciousness and cultivate polymorphic possibilities.
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Mahmood, Seemen. "SOCIAL CONCERNS IN MAHASHWETA DEVI’S MOTHER OF 1084." EXPRESSIO: BSSS Journal of English Language and Literature 01, no. 01 (June 30, 2023): 51–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.51767/jen010104.
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Mahasweta Devi is known not only for her political writings but her tremendous contribution towards landless laborers in eastern India where she worked for years. Her close connection with these communities gave her a deep insight to understand and write about these grassroots-level issues, thus making her a socio-political commentator of the marginalized community. As an eminent Bengali writer and social activist, writing in the mid-1900s, she did not shy away from pointing out the injustices prevalent in society. This paper deals with her novel titled ‘Mother of 1084’ and depicts the helplessness of a mother who gets acquainted with her son’s ideal after his death. The trauma of the tragic death of her son haunts her throughout the novel and makes her an aggrieved mother. The novel honestly depicts the trauma and psychological disturbances of a mother who has lost her son. ‘Mother of 1084’ at one end openly criticized the brutality of the government and the police in counteracting the Naxalite movement, while on the other end highlighted the political consciousness of a mother. It portrays many aspects of Indian society as well as the political state of West Bengal in the seventies where youth were ruthlessly suppressed by the government. The present paper also explores how she belongs to a male-dominated society that considers women as an object of sex, neglected and subjugated beings, and how she revolts against the traditional established system and trembles the base of that rotten society.
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Irani. "Authorship, Reception, and Memory in Early Modern Bengal: Songs Attributed to Saiyad Sultān." ReOrient 5, no. 2 (2020): 198. http://dx.doi.org/10.13169/reorient.5.2.0198.
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Ghosh, Sreyasi. "Skillful portrayal and reflection of the Naxalite Movement of Bengal (1970s) in world of stories." RESEARCH REVIEW International Journal of Multidisciplinary 7, no. 4 (April 15, 2022): 48–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.31305/rrijm.2022.v07.i04.007.
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The Naxalite Movement of Bengal ( 1970s ) was undoubtedly a landmark in history of political movements of Bengal and it had undoubtedly a pan – Indian character for spreading in Andhra Pradesh , Uttar Pradesh , Bihar , Kerala and Punjab . The movement had its root in the historical Tebhaga Movement and Telengana Movement, the Food Movement (1959), the Movement against hike in tramfare (1965), the Food Movement (1966) etc. The Naxalite Movement was devastated in face of police atrocities but its imprint was long-lasting in world of literature of Bengal such as on dramas, poetry, novels and stories. Actually it influenced literature of Punjab , U.P., Maharashtra , Dandakaranya , Andhra Pradesh , Kerala also as well as songs and movie- making in whole India but here in this article I have tried my best to depict only impact of the bloodbath and political violence in stories of our Bengal and it must be admitted without any hesitation that those stories were reflection of social realism which did not always consider the importance of pure aesthetic value related to creation of literary treasures. Dearth of mass base , excessive loyalty towards ideology of China , personal vengeance in name of urban revolution , ruthless attack on schools – laboratories- libraries – images / statue of famous personalities , policy of annihilation and bloodbath, extreme authoritarianism in leadership style of Charu Mazumdar and Saroj Dutta, amalgamation of urban and rural youth power during days of the rebellious upsurge and glorious role / contribution of courageous women in revolution were skillfully described in various stories some of which had been written by the Naxalite revolutionaries themselves.
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Sudhir K. Arora. "The Bengali Face in the English Mirror: Reflection of Dalit Consciousness in Shyamal Kumar Pramanik’s The Untouchable & Other Poems." Creative Saplings 2, no. 06 (September 25, 2023): 48–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.56062/gtrs.2023.2.06.382.
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Shyamal Kumar Pramanik, who belongs to Poundra Kshatriya community, is a significant Bengali Dalit poet with a mission of establishing equality and fraternity among the people. His poetry collection The Untouchable & Other Poems, translated by Jaydeep Sarangi and Anurima Chanda into English, demonstrates him as a poet of Dalit consciousness. Without being violent, he raises the Dalit consciousness so that Dalits may come together and unite themselves in order to break the shackles of exploitation and oppression. He wonders how the non-Dalit authors can express the experiences of Dalits. He envisions the fourth world coming out of the darkness. He makes the untouchable Shambok his representative in voicing Dalits who have always been marginalized. He loves nature and makes her his companion and friend for sharing his feelings. He is a poet of hope and future and, so, continues to sing the song of a casteless society despite the feelings of pains, insults and sufferings. His Bengali face reflects the Dalit consciousness in the English mirror, i.e. The Untouchable & Other Poems.
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Eben Graves. "The Marketplace of Devotional Song: Cultural Economies of Exchange in Bengali Padāvalī-Kīrtan." Ethnomusicology 61, no. 1 (2017): 52. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.61.1.0052.
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Hatcher, Brian A. "Songs of Ecstasy: Tantric and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal. By Hugh B. Urban. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 187 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper)." Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 4 (November 2003): 1305–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3591826.
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S, Bhuvaneswari. "Trade in the Development of Social Hierarchies in the Dual Epics." International Research Journal of Tamil 4, no. 3 (July 21, 2022): 182–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.34256/irjt22326.
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Sangam Songs and epics illustrate how the ancient Tamils traded well within and outside the country. In the post-Sangam period, during the period of the Epics, there were bartering methods in the domestic trade. Business flourished in the development of cities. Silappathikaram confirms that every commodity was traded on every street in the cities. From the sale of their products by the common people to the sea trade, evidence could be found. Business activities could also be noticed in Manimegalai following Silappathikaram. Small-scale business practices could be found in the cities. Similarly, professional businesses were also appreciated. People going abroad and doing business using the vessels known as Bengal could correspondingly be observed. The verses of Manimegalai are a demonstration of the fact that they exported and imported expensive goods.
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Mandal, Somdatta. "”May You Be the Mother of A Hundred Sons!”: Barrenness vs. Motherhood in Bengali Cinema." Asian Cinema 22, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 329–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ac.22.1.329_1.
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Basu Roy, Sanghamitra. "AN ANALYSIS OF ISHWAR CHANDRA VIDYASAGAR AS PIONEER OF WOMAN EDUCATION." International Journal of Advanced Research 10, no. 01 (January 31, 2022): 512–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.21474/ijar01/14069.
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The eighteenth and nineteenth century are the most resplendent period in the history of India. During this time, India witnessed the holistic reawakening of the people in the world of new ideals, new thoughts and aspirations in every dimensions of life. The regeneration of India got its expression in Bengal and so this resurgence is called Bengal Renaissance Movement. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar played a prominent and vital role in Bengal Renaissance. He also advocated individual liberty and freedom of the press. He was a staunch fighter for the rights and honour of women .Vidyasagar realized a change may be said to have come over the spirit of the times and this may be reckoned as a new era in the history of education on Bengal. He also propagated the ideal from the Shastas ,KanyapyebamPalaniyasikshaniyaitayatnatah- Daughters also are to be reared up and educated with care together with sons. Vidyasagar left no stone unturned to unfetter women from the bondages. He also fought for widow remarriage, abolition of polygamy, child marriage and female education. Educated women are the weapons who yield positive impact on the Indian society through their contributions of home and professional fields. Education as means of empowerment of women can bring about a positive attitudinal change. Vidyasagar was pioneer in woman empowerment who realized way back in 18 th century that unless and until resurrection and empowerment of woman is done reform or renaissance was impossible to bear fruit in the society.
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Dan, Manolescu. "Book Review: Bhattacharyya, M. (2020). Rabindranath Tagore’s Śāntiniketan Essays: Religion, Spirituality and Philosophy. London & New York: Routledge." Journal of Practical Studies in Education 2, no. 3 (April 19, 2021): 12–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.46809/jpse.v2i3.25.
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Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was the first non-European poet and lyricist who received the most coveted of international awards, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, “because of his profound sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.” (www.nobelprize.org ) His most notable work highly praised and duly appreciated by The Swedish Academy was Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), a collection of poetry, but Tagore is also famous for having written a variety of genres, including drama, essay, novel, novella, short-story, dance-drama, and song.
While Tagore is recognized today mostly for his poetry, his short stories also proved to be extremely popular in what is called the Bengali-language version of the genre, and his essays reveal another facet of his personality, and that is his philosophical thought in which he distinguished himself as a language innovator. Rabindranath Tagore’s Śāntiniketan Essays were translated and published by Medha Bhattacharyya in 2020 in a book celebrating Tagore’s “fundamental meditations on life, nature, religion, philosophy, and the world at large.” (Flyer, Bhattacharyya, 2020)
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Urban, Hugh B. "The Marketplace and the Temple: Economic Metaphors and Religious Meanings in the Folk Songs of Colonial Bengal." Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 4 (November 2001): 1085–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2700021.
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The marketplace and the temple: traditionally, Western scholars have been nervous and ambivalent about bringing these two spheres into too close a proximity. On one side, historians of religions trained in the lineage of Joachim Wach or Mircea Eliade have long warned that “reductionism” is the cardinal sin in the study of religion, which is claimed to be a sui generis, or irreducible phenomenon. Hence, “economic reductionism” or “vulgar economism” would be the most heinous crime of all (Wach 1958; Eliade 1958, xi). On the other side, those trained in Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions have typically wanted to explain religious myths and rituals either as ideological screens masking deeper material forces or as symbolic expressions of misrecognized social interests. As Pierre Bourdieu—one of the most sophisticated recent representatives of this tradition—explains his own method, he wishes to “utilize the economic model to extend materialist critique into the realm of religion and to uncover the specific interests of the protagonists of the religious game, priests, prophets and sorcerers” (1990, 107).
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Acharya, Avidit, David D. Laitin, and Anna Zhang. "‘Sons of the soil’: A model of assimilation and population control." Journal of Theoretical Politics 30, no. 2 (November 12, 2017): 184–223. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0951629817737858.
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We model the cultural outcomes of ‘sons of the soil’ conflicts. These are conflicts between the local inhabitants of a particular region and migrants to the region, typically belonging to a dominant national culture. Our goal is to understand the conditions under which migrants assimilate into the local culture, or in which locals assimilate into the national culture. The model has two main actors: a national elite of a dominant ethnic group, and a regional elite seeking to promote the traditional culture of the sons of the soil. Both actors have parallel strategies, viz. assimilating the other group into their culture, controlling the size of the migrant population, doing both, or allowing market forces to determine outcomes. The model has three possible cultural outcomes: the culture tips to that of the sons of the soil; the culture tips to that of the migrant group; or the region remains bicultural, with each group retaining its own culture. We illustrate these outcomes through four cases: (i) Bengalis and Assamese in the Indian state of Assam; (ii) Russians and Estonians in the Ida-Virumaa county of Estonia; (iii) Tamils and Sinhalese in Jaffna and the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka; and (iv) Castilians and Catalans in the autonomous community of Catalonia in Spain.
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Da Costa, Dia. "“Spoiled Sons” and “Sincere Daughters”: Schooling, Security, and Empowerment in Rural West Bengal, India." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33, no. 2 (January 2008): 283–308. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/521053.
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