Neilesh Bose. Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal.

Extract

At the heart of Neilesh Bose’s Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal is an exploration of the connection between literary history and politics in twentieth-century Bengal. For Bose, “literary culture” refers to both “the literal texts that Bengali Muslim writers and critics were creating” as well as the larger social and political context in which this literature was being produced (xxi). Bose’s book argues that this was a highly reciprocal relationship in which individual writers, literary societies, and literary journals helped delineate a distinct Bengali Muslim literary tradition that shaped and was shaped by Bengali Muslim politics. The “recasting” in the title refers to decentering of the bhadralok (self-defined “respectable” upper-caste society) universalism that underlies the historiography of colonial Bengal.

Bose begins his book by briefly tracing the multiple precolonial influences and origins of what becomes defined, in the twentieth century, as Bengali Muslim literary culture. The expansion of vernacular language publications, the resistance to increasingly Sanskritized literary production, and an interest in pan-Islamic political projects (beginning with India’s pro-Ottoman Khilafat movement) contributed to this highly generative period. Bose’s second and third chapters explore the literary societies and writers who ostensibly “inherited” and extended this tradition. Beginning with Kazi Nazrul Islam and Muzaffar Ahmad (and the journals Dhumketu, Langol and Samyabadi), Bose highlights the authors’ creative use of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian tropes and their radical political activism (Ahmad help establish the Communist Party of India), all of which produced a corpus of prose, poems, and songs that opened up new avenues of anticolonial protest. Bose then shifts to writers and intellectuals based in Dhaka (connected to the Muslim Sahitya Samaj [MSS]) whose concerns included mounting a “rational critique of Islam” and focusing on social and economic “uplift.” Such literary concerns reflected the political agitation for colonial land reform and efforts to increase the access of Muslims to modern-education movements (however reformist) that put Muslim intellectuals and politicians at odds with their bhadralok counterparts.