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3 books match the query 'West Bengal'

cover of Bengali Women

Bengali Women

Manisha Roy

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Drawing on personal experiences and interviews with others, Roy explores the frustrations and rewards in the lives of Hindu Bengali women in upper and upper-middle class families in India. Roy traces the psychological dimensions of these women as they play their specific roles, including daughter, wife, mother, and sister-in-law.

In a new Afterword, Roy discusses changes in Bengali society and culture over the last two decades which have direct bearings on women's lives: divorce and the breakup of the joint family, education, increasing Westernization via television and women's magazines, and the erosion of traditional religious practices.
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cover of Bondhu: My Father, My Friend

Bondhu

My Father, My Friend

Kunal Sen

Seagull Books, 2023

A behind-the-scenes look at the life of filmmaker Mrinal Sen through the eyes of his son Kunal, who grew up immersed in the world of Indian cinema.

“No one remembers when and why I started calling my father Bondhu. It was a strange way to address a father, as the word means ‘friend’ in Bengali. . . . As I got older, I became very self-conscious about such an odd name . . . and yet I cannot explain why I could not switch to the more acceptable Baba or something similar.”

Just as Kunal Sen, son of actor Gita Sen and filmmaker Mrinal Sen, was approaching adolescence, his father’s cinematic celebrity was reaching new heights. In this memoir, Kunal reflects on growing up in a middle-class household in South Calcutta, where his father’s Marxist beliefs and unrelenting urge “to be challenged and contradicted” often collided with the practical challenges of making a living. Through it all, what emerges is a picture of a family’s unyielding commitment to the craft of cinema, the risks each of its members took, and their endearing sense of humor. Celebrating Mrinal Sen’s birth centenary in 2023, Bondhu takes us on an intimate journey of a son attempting to reconcile his father’s public and private selves.
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cover of Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal

Visible Histories, Disappearing Women

Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal

Mahua Sarkar

Duke University Press, 2008

In Visible Histories, Disappearing Women, Mahua Sarkar examines how Muslim women in colonial Bengal came to be more marginalized than Hindu women in nationalist discourse and subsequent historical accounts. She also considers how their near-invisibility except as victims has underpinned the construction of the ideal citizen-subject in late colonial India. Through critical engagements with significant feminist and postcolonial scholarship, Sarkar maps out when and where Muslim women enter into the written history of colonial Bengal. She argues that the nation-centeredness of history as a discipline and the intellectual politics of liberal feminism have together contributed to the production of Muslim women as the oppressed, mute, and invisible “other” of the normative modern Indian subject.

Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories of Muslim women who lived in Calcutta and Dhaka in the first half of the twentieth century, Sarkar traces Muslim women as they surface and disappear in colonial, Hindu nationalist, and liberal Muslim writings, as well as in the memories of Muslim women themselves. The oral accounts provide both a rich source of information about the social fabric of urban Bengal during the final years of colonial rule and a glimpse of the kind of negotiations with stereotypes that even relatively privileged, middle-class Muslim women are still frequently obliged to make in India today. Sarkar concludes with some reflections on the complex links between past constructions of Muslim women, current representations, and the violence against them in contemporary India.

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