View Large Image Different Nationalisms: Bengal, 1905-1947
Semanti Ghosh
₹946₹995(5% off)
ISBN 13
9780199468232
Year
2016
The period between the partition of Bengal in 1905 and the Partition of India in 1947 was witness to a unique experience of imagining nations in Bengal. With neither the Bengali Muslims nor the Bengali Hindus envisioning homogenous ideas about nationhood, many contesting and alternative visions emerged, both within and between the two communities. These other nationalisms were not anti-national, but creeds of either a federal Indian nation with regional autonomy, or a regional nation on its own strength.
In Different Nationalisms, Semanti Ghosh goes beyond the Muslim-Hindu and nationalism-communalism binaries to reveal an unfamiliar terrain of hidden contestations over the concept of nation in colonial Bengal. For several of these competing ideologies, Partition, rather than being an expected or even desired outcome, was an anti-climax in their long-drawn battle for a nation.