Beneath Meaning In Bengali

The Black Rose

A young student in pre-Independence Dacca, Ranajit Dutta is relatively untouched by the patriotic fervour gripping the rest of the country. He is suffocated by and often critical of, the constricted environment and superstition ridden society he lives in. He seeks an escape through poetry and his search for the embodiment of universal womanhood. But one event shakes up his idealism and fundamentally changes his relationships with the women in his life: his first love Mitu Bardhan; his affectionate but neglected aunt Kajol; his revolutionary friend Bulbul; his naive, adoring wife Nalini. A man's perennial quest for the unattainable, Black Rose also brings alive the heady idealism and the charged years when India was struggling to be free.

The History of the Bengali Language

Contemporary Indian Writing in English between Global Fiction and Transmodern Historiography

This study offers a comprehensive overview of Indian writing in English in the 21st century. Through ten exemplary analyses in which canonical authors stand next to less well-known and diasporic ones Christoph Senft provides deep insights into India’s complex literary world and develops an argumentative framework in which narrative texts are interpreted as transmodern re-readings of history, historicity and memory. Reconciling different postmodern and postcolonial theoretical approaches to the interpretation and construction of literature and history, Senft substitutes traditional, Eurocentric and universalistic views on past and present by decolonial and pluralistic practices. He thus helps to better understand the entanglements of colonial politics and cultural production, not only on the subcontinent.