The Girl Child in the Life, Lore and Literature of Bengal

The Girl Child in the Life, Lore and Literature of Bengal
Author: Nivedita Sen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2024-10-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040172288

Contemporary children’s literature in Bangla celebrates irreverent, defiant and deviant boys whose subversive doings critique the parenting and schooling they go through, while the girl child is neglected and marginalised. The rare fictional girls who show resilience and demand a normal childhood are consciously silenced, or contained and assimilated within unwritten masculinist norms. This book –a compilation of translated works of the author, critic and academic, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay –focuses on gender and childhood in Bengal. The book includes a translation of his Bangla Shishusahityer Chhoto Meyera (Little Girls in Bangla Children’s Literature), as well as a translated essay on Thakurma’ Jhuli (Grandma’s Sack), a collection of Bangla folk tales and fairytales from early twentieth century that underscores the subaltern role of adolescent female characters with hardly any agency or voice in the oral legends and folklore of Bengal. The translation of the piece ‘An Incredible Transition’ from Bandyopadhyay’s Abar Shishushiksha (On Children’s Education Again) applauds the role of Indian social reformers and British educationists in initiating women’s education in Bengal, while questioning the erasure of protagonists who are girls in the nineteenth-century primers. Interrogating gendered constructions in diverse genres of literature while revisiting the subject of female education, this book will be of interest to students of children’s literature, comparative literature, popular literature, gender studies, translation studies, culture studies and South Asian writings.

Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India

Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India
Author: Javed Majeed
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2018-10-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0429799349

George Abraham Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India is one of the most complete sources on South Asian languages. This book is the first detailed examination of the Survey. It shows how the Survey collaborated with Indian activists to consolidate the regional languages in India. By focusing on India as a linguistic region, it was at odds with the colonial state’s conceptualisation of the subcontinent, in which religious and caste differences were key to its understanding of Indian society. A number of the Survey’s narratives are detachable from its rigorous linguistic imperatives, and together with aspects of Grierson’s other texts, these contributed to the way in which Indian nationalists appropriated and reshaped languages, making them religiously charged ideological symbols of particular versions of the subcontinent. Thus, the Survey played an important role in the emergence of religious nationalism and language conflict in the subcontinent in the 20th century. This volume, like its companion volume Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, will be a great resource for scholars and researchers of linguistics, language and literature, history, political studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies.