Bengal

The once-derided culinary tradition of Bangal refugees from East Pakistan is slowly gaining acceptance and pride of place in popular culture and gastronomical writing.

Thinking of Him tells interlinked tales of distress, oscillating between the past and the present.

The varied trajectories of Bengali cabaret/bar dancers who ferried themselves between the two cities of Mumbai and Kolkata in search of livelihood and shelter since the last decades of the 20th century are mapped. Taking Kolkata as the epicentre of research, the author proposes to trace the eviction drive of the city’s erotic dancers ascribing their large-scale exodus to the cultural crusade waged by the progressive state that forced out many poor and labouring dancers, calling them out as visceral symbols of apasanskriti or pervert culture.

This essay probes the iconicity of New Theatres, exploring the hypothesis that its genesis in the 1930s was rooted in aspects of contemporary life in Bengal that went much beyond the realm of cinema. The objective is to look deeper and understand cinema as an institution with roots in the politics and economy of early 20th century Bengal.

The history of the province of Bengal is marked by peasant uprisings during the second half of the 19th century. The surprising aspect of this phenomenon is that the political regime had been more oppressive during the Mughal era and during the rule of the British East India Company which ended in 1857. Using both mainstream and subaltern literature, this paper argues that the sudden rise of peasant revolutions in Bengal under the British crown can be explained by the theory of preference falsification on the part of the peasants before the period under discussion, which could help to explain such instances of social discontinuity in human behaviour.