Landscape And The Bengali Diaspora

Bengalis have been great travellers for centuries and are famous for recreating their way of life wherever they go. This book critically analyses skilled Bengali migration within and beyond India and looks at landscapes created by the Bengali diaspora beyond the terrain of their homeland, ranging from those of nostalgia and imagination (Durga Puja/Saraswati Puja) to those of subjugation and loss of identity. This book demonstrates the relationship between landscape and diaspora in terms of perception, imagination, space and place, ethnicity, race, caste, and class. With case studies from Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Dehra Dun, Oxford, Aberdeen, New York, and the Bay Area (USA), it brings together themes like evolution of the Bengali diaspora, transnationalism and identity, stratification and segregation, urban social space, adaptation and assimilation, and questions of discrimination from other communities. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of over 300 skilled Bengalis, the book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of diaspora studies, urban studies, ethnic studies, migration studies, geography, sociology, history, and political studies.

This book presents an examination of fictional representations, in books and films, of the 1947 Partition that led to the creation of the sovereign nation-states of India and Pakistan. While the process of representing the Partition experience through words and images began in the late 1940s, it is only in the last few decades that literary critics and film scholars have begun to analyse the work. The emerging critical scholarship on the Partition and its aftermath has deepened our understanding of the relationship between historical trauma, collective memory, and cultural processes, and this book provides critical readings of literary and cinematic texts on the impact of the Partition both in the Punjab and in Bengal. The collection assembles studies on Anglophone writings with those on the largely unexplored vernacular works, and those which have rarely found a place in discussions on the Partition. It looks at representations of women’s experiences of gendered violence in the Partition riots, and how literary texts have filled in the lack of the ‘human dimension’ in Partition histories. The book goes on to highlight how the memory of the Partition is preserved, and how the creative arts’ relation to public memory and its place within the public sphere has changed through time. Collectively, the essays present a nuanced understanding of how the experience of violence, displacement, and trauma shaped postcolonial societies and subjectivities in the Indian subcontinent. Mapping the diverse topographies of Partition-related uncertainties and covering both well-known and lesser-known texts on the Partition, this book will be a useful contribution to studies of South Asian History, Asian Literature and Asian Film.

This edited collection attends to the locations of memory along and about the Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh borders and the complex ways in which such memories are both allowed for and erased in the present. The collection is situated at the intersection of narratives connected to memory and commemoration in order to ask how memories have been formed and perpetuated across the imposition of these borders. It explores how national boundaries both silence memories and can be subverted in important ways, through consideration of physical sites and cultural practices on both sides of the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh borders that gesture towards that which has been lost – that is, the cultural whole that was the cultural regions of Punjab and Bengal before Partition, as well as broader cultural "wholes" across South Asia, across religious and linguistic lines – alongside forces that deny such connections. The chapters address issues of heritage and memory through specific case-studies on present-day memorial, museological and commemoration practices, through which sometimes competing memorial landscapes have been constructed, and show how memories of past traumas and histories become inscribed into diverse forms of cultural heritage (the built landscape, literature, film).

India’s partition in 1947 and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 saw the displacement and resettling of millions of Muslims and Hindus, resulting in profound transformations across the region. A third of the region’s population sought shelter across new borders, almost all of them resettling in the Bengal delta itself. A similar number were internally displaced, while others moved to the Middle East, North America and Europe. Using a creative interdisciplinary approach combining historical, sociological and anthropological approaches to migration and diaspora this book explores the experiences of Bengali Muslim migrants through this period of upheaval and transformation. It draws on over 200 interviews conducted in Britain, India, and Bangladesh, tracing migration and settlement within, and from, the Bengal delta region in the period after 1947. Focussing on migration and diaspora ‘from below’, it teases out fascinating ‘hidden’ migrant stories, including those of women, refugees, and displaced people. It reveals surprising similarities, and important differences, in the experience of Muslim migrants in widely different contexts and places, whether in the towns and hamlets of Bengal delta, or in the cities of Britain. Counter-posing accounts of the structures that frame migration with the textures of how migrants shape their own movement, it examines what it means to make new homes in a context of diaspora. The book is also unique in its focus on the experiences of those who stayed behind, and in its analysis of ruptures in the migration process. Importantly, the book seeks to challenge crude attitudes to ‘Muslim’ migrants, which assume their cultural and religious homogeneity, and to humanize contemporary discourses around global migration. This ground-breaking new research offers an essential contribution to the field of South Asian Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Society and Culture Studies.

Post-colonial and post-partition South Asia, one of the fastest-growing and yet one of the least integrated regions of the world, is marked by both optimism and pessimism. This intriguing dichotomy of strength and weakness, security and insecurity, hope and fear, connections and disconnects underpins South Asia’s regionalism conundrum and gives birth to borders and boundaries – both material and mental – with a complex territoriality. The Janus-faced nature of South Asian borderlands – the inward nationalizing impulses entangled with the outward regional frontier-orientations – is a stark reminder that history of mobility in this eco-geographical region is much older than the history of territoriality and colonial cartography and ethnography. This collection of meticulously researched, theoretically informed, case studies from South Asia provides useful insights into bordering, ordering and othering narratives as practices and performances that are intricately entangled with identity politics and security discourses. It shows how a sharper focus on subterranean subregionalism(s), border communities, popular geopolitics of enmity, and transborder challenges to sustainability, could open up spaces for new multiple (re)imaginings of borders at diverse scales and sights including sub-urban neighbourhoods, school textbooks/cinema and trans-border conservation initiatives. The chapters in this edited volume have been contributed by both renowned as well as young emerging scholars, looking into the borders and boundaries in South Asia. Each chapter offers new perspectives and insights into themes like trans-Himalayan borderlands, India-Pakistan physical and mental borders, Afghanistan-Pakistan border and numerous social boundaries that we see in everyday South Asia. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Borderlands Studies.

Between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banaras, the iconic Hindu center in northern India that is often described as the oldest living city in the world, was reconstructed materially as well as imaginatively, and embellished with temples, monasteries, mansions, and ghats (riverfront fortress-palaces). Banaras’s refurbished sacred landscape became the subject of pilgrimage maps and its spectacular riverfront was depicted in panoramas and described in travelogues. In Banaras Reconstructed, Madhuri Desai examines the confluences, as well as the tensions, that have shaped this complex and remarkable city. In so doing, she raises issues central to historical as well as contemporary Indian identity and delves into larger questions about religious urban environments in South Asia.

This book examines the evolution and journey of regional language television channels in India. The first of its kind, it looks at the coverage, uniqueness, ownership, and audiences of regional channels in 14 different languages across India, covering Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu, Assamese, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Odia, Punjabi, and Malayalam. It brings together researchers, scholars, media professionals, and communication teachers to document and reflect on language as the site of culture, politics, market, and social representation. The volume discusses multiple media histories and their interlinkages from a subcontinental perspective by exploring the trajectories of regional language television through geographical boundaries, state, language, identities, and culture. It offers comparative analyses across regional language television channels and presents interpretive insights on television culture and commerce, contemporary challenges, mass media technology, and future relevance. Rich in empirical data, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of media studies, television studies, communication studies, sociology, political studies, language studies, regional studies, and South Asian studies. It will also be useful to professionals and industry bodies in television media and is broadcasting, journalists, and television channels.

The book is an anthology of creative and critical responses to the many partitions of India within and across borders. By widening and reframing the question of partition in the subcontinent from one event in 1947 to a larger series of partitions, the book presents a deeper perspective both on the concept of partition in understanding South Asia, and understanding the implications from survivors, victims and others. The imagery of the barbed wire in the title is used precisely to confront the jaggedness of experiencing and surviving partition that still haunts the national, literary, religious and political matrices of India. The volume is a compilation of short stories, poems, articles, news reports and memoirs, with each contributor bringing forth their perception of partition and its effects on their life and identity. The many narratives amplify the human cost of partitions, examining the complexities of a bruised nation at the social, psychological and religious levels of consciousness. The book will appeal to anyone interested in literary studies, history, politics, sociology, cultural studies, and comparative literature.