Author Description

By exploring a narrative of dissent, struggle, and conflict among various contending speech communities, this book reexamines some fundamental debates in the cultural experience of the educated middle classes in nineteenth-century colonial Bengal. More specifically, it studies power and representation in colonial Bengal through the print-language and literature and its impact on the resultant identity formations. In the nineteenth century, language and its written literature was more than anything else object of immense debate, scrutiny, and surveillance among the Bengalis and the colonial administration. But what is often less understood is that print languages and literature were also vital instruments for crafting social identities, and in a competitive environment like colonial Bengal, they offered substantial opportunities to indigenous groups to consolidate power along multiple axes of class, gender, and community. By relocating within the world of Bengali print groups previously thought to inhabit the peripheries of literate cultures, the volume also challenges the conventional understandings of social formation in the nineteenth century.