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

A History of Indian Poetry in English explores the genealogy of Anglophone verse in India from its nineteenth-century origins to the present day. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes extensive essays that illuminate the legacy of English in Indian poetry. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse of such diverse poets as Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Rabindranath Tagore, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Kamala Das, and Melanie Silgardo. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of imperialism and diaspora in Indian poetry. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Indian poetry in English and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

India has often been at the centre of debates on and definitions of the postcolonial condition. Offering a challenging new direction for the field, this Critical Reader confronts how theory in the Indian context is responding in vital terms to our understanding of that condition today.

The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader is made up of four sections looking in turn at:

• visual cultures
• translating cultural traditions
• the ethical text
• global/cosmopolitan worlds.

Each section is prefaced with a short introduction by the editors that locate these interdisciplinary articles within the contemporary national and international context. Showcasing the diversity and vitality of current debate, this volume collects the work of both established figures and a new generation of cultural critics.

Challenging and unsettling many basic premises of postcolonial studies, this volume is the ideal Reader for students and scholars of the Indian Postcolonial.

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.

'...after all, natives were natives - interesting, no doubt, but finally ... an inferior people' Based on his experiences as a policeman in Burma, George Orwell's first novel is set during the end days of British colonialism, when Burma is ruled from Delhi as part of British India. In the fictional district of Kyauktada, based on Kathar, U Po Kyin, a corrupt Burmese magistrate, is planning to destroy the reputation of the Indian Dr Veraswami. The doctor's main protection is his friendship with John Flory who, as a European, has higher prestige. Dr Veraswami wants the privilege of becoming a member of the British club because he thinks that if his standing with the Europeans is good, U Po Kyin's intrigues against him will not prevail. U Po Kyin begins a campaign to persuade the Europeans that the doctor holds disloyal, anti-British opinions, and believes anonymous letters with false stories about the doctor 'will work wonders'.

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

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

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

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

This essay is a version of the text presented as a paper in Kolkata in February 2003. This was the first day of the two-day S. G. Deuskar lecture delivered by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Fifteen years after that event, this essay finds its place among a new CSSSC lecture series titled Social Science Across Disciplines. Spivak's essay on ethics and politics is infused with a concern to bring forward the way the 'literary' works in the production of ethics and politics. The notion of ethics that she uses here is far removed from an inventory of moral principles or moral action. Instead, the ethical, here, is something like a much broader notion of a mentality, or sensibility, which remains part of ones being.