1st Edition

The Changing World of Caste and Hierarchy in Bengal Depiction from the Mangalkavyas c. 1700–1931

By Sudarshana Bhaumik Copyright 2023
316 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

316 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

316 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

This book challenges the prevalent assumptions of caste, hierarchy and social mobility in pre-colonial and colonial Bengal. It studies the writings of colonial ethnographers, Orientalist scholars, Christian missionaries and pre-colonial literary texts like the Mangalkavyas to show how the concept of caste emerged and argues that the jati order in Bengal was far from being a rigidly reified... Read more

Introduction 1. Locating the issues of marginality and hierarchy in colonial Bengal: histories from the long past 2. The making of the goddess tradition in Bengal: exploring the world of omnipotent lower caste malevolent deities 3. Popular religion, myths, orality and subalternity in Bengal 4. Land reclamation leading to new agriculture and settlement 5. Risley and the constructed Bengali space: caste, census and the relevance of jatis Conclusion

Biography

Sudarshana Bhaumik is Assistant Professor of History at Lloyd Law College, Greater Noida, Delhi NCR. She has a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She is a recipient of the prestigious Charles Wallace India Trust Grant Fellowship (2018). She has delivered lectures at various international conferences held at places like Queens College, Oxford (March 2019), IIAS Leiden (July 2019) and Victoria University of Wellington (November 2019). She has published articles in numerous journals and edited volumes including IIAS Summer Hill , Historical Sources and Genres and Encyclopaedia of Historiography: Africa, America, Asia (2019). She has worked as Assistant Professor (History) in the Lovely Professional University, Punjab and has also worked as Guest Faculty in the Department of History, Central University of Karnataka, Gulbarga, and as Guest Lecturer at Milli Al-Ameen College for Girls (Affiliated to the University of Calcutta).