New Publications in Bengal Studies
The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland
The Chittagong Hill Tracts in the southeastern part of present-day Bangladesh are home to about twelve different peoples, of which the are the Chakmas and the Marmas. Not much seems to be known about any of these peoples. Inhabiting the hills and mountains in the Southeast, on the borders with Burma and in the Northeast on the Indian state of Assam, they remained relatively untouched by the civilizations of the plains. Linguistically and culturally the peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts are said to belong to the westernmost part of Southeast Asia rather than South Asia. British colonial administration regarded them as primitive and unimportant. This view remained largely unaltered even after independence in 1947, when the Hill Tracts became part of East Pakistan.
In the introduction to their book Willem van Schendel, Wolfgang Mey, and Aditya Kumar Dewan already state that the 'region remains hidden behind a curtain of ignorance'. These three authors, all specialists in the field, deserve credit for having lifted this curtain and showing the Chittagong Hill Tract peoples through more than four hundred photographs, covering the period from the 1860s to the 1970s. Most of these pictures were taken for private purposes and thus never formed part of any official colonial documentation. They have the impact of a first direct encounter. In the absence of much written records of the Hill Tract peoples, the authors offer this volume as a primary historical source.
The authors have taken great pains to compile their book. The photographs were selected from over fifty collections scattered over the globe. The book contains more than twenty chapters. Every chapter deals with a separate theme such as 'mapping a region', 'the colonial overlords', 'religions of the hills', 'getting around', and 'lifestyles'. The very lucid text gives a lot of background information on the photographs which are presented subjectwise chapter by chapter. The combination of the images and the text are an important attempt to write the cultural and political history of the region, while focusing on the everyday life of the people involved.
The authors clarify their historiographical allegiances in the last chapter. As the region was seen as peripheral in British-India and subsequently in Pakistan and Bangladesh, its history neither formed part of the 'great' history of the civilizing mission of imperialism, nor the struggle for independence, nor the language movement and the war of independence from West Pakistan. At best the Hill Tract peoples were seen as irrelevant, and at worst as insurgents or traitors. Thus the Hill Tract people found themselves, and in many ways still do today, in what can be legitimately called a subaltern position. According to the authors a 'reintergration' of their subalternness into a redefined mainstream history of the Bangladeshi nation 'requires historians to overcome "nationalist" ideologies to which they have so long been subservient' (p 300). The authors plead for a history-writing that allows other voices to be heard besides the mainstream Bengali Bangladeshi one. Collecting 'information and making it publicly available is one way of giving voice to ideas, perspectives, and interests of ordinary people who have been marginalized or silenced' (p 302). The authors have remarkably succeeded in the task they had set themselves. (VvB) *
- Schendel, Willem van, Wolfgang Mey, and Aditya Kumar Dewan
The Chittagong Hill Tracts:
Living in a Borderland
Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2000, VIII + 325 pp, ISBN 974-8434-98-2
Peasant Revolts and Democratic Struggles in India
Originally, Suprakash Roy's Bengali work on peasant revolts and anti-colonial democratic struggles: Bharater Krishak Bidroha O Ganatantrik Sangram (1966) was much longer. The English version contains the translation of the chapters dealing with peasant rebellions in the eastern part of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Five rebellions are analysed in these chapters: the Sannyasi revolt (1763-1800), the Chakma rebellion (1776-1787) in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the Indigo cultivators' struggle (1830-1848), the Wahabi rebellion (1831) and the Santhal rebellion (1855-1857).
Roy was an avowed Marxist and wrote his work from that perspective. Nowadays, Marxist historiography has not only gone out of fashion, it is often looked upon with a patronizing smile. There are methodological and ideological problems with classical Marxist historiography. The greatest criticism one could level against it is its schematic and eschatological view of history. Roy wrote this book long before post-modernist rereadings of Marxism had come to the fore. This is why, at times, his interpretations sound like official party-doctrine. For instance, he firmly believed in the revolutionary leadership of the working class. To the extent that agrarian uprisings were not led by the working class, they would fail.
A classic in Bengali, Roy's book opened up space for subaltern historiography long before the actual school of that name had come into existence in the early 1980s. In fact, the book itself was a source of inspiration in the early 1970s, when militant agrarian struggles reached a peak as Partha Chatterjee writes in the foreword to the translation (p. 8). According to Chatterjee, Roy's importance today lies in the fact that he is an 'example of politically committed scholarship' (p. 10). Roy's work in English translation will 'establish him better within the history of modern Indian historiography'.
Roy's work will be of great interest for historians of colonialism and resistance to colonialism, because the book examines grassroot-level forms of resistance to the state and its hegemony long before urban anticolonial nationalism began to challenge colonial rule.
The translator Dr Rita Banerjee has done her best to do justice to the original. In his Bengali original, Suprakash Roy quoted from English works but in his own Bengali translation. Rita Banerjee has correctly identified most of these sources and quoted them in their original form in English. In footnotes she gives the references wherever possible. (VvB) *
- Roy, Suprakash (Translated from Bengali by Rita Banerjee)
Peasant Revolts and Democratic Struggles in India
Delhi: International Centre for Bengal Studies, 239 pp
ISBN 81-85971-61-7
Rabindranath Tagore in Germany: Four responses to a cultural icon
One may well wonder: 'Why another book on Tagore?' This study by Martin Kämpchen is, however, not only an extremely readable and interesting book, it also fills a gap in our knowledge about the Tagore phenomenon in Europe between the two world wars. This volume is a follow-up of Kämpchen's earlier book Rabindranath Tagore and Germany: A documentation (Calcutta: Max Mueller Bhavan 1991). In the present study Kämpchen documents the encounter between Tagore and four German intellectuals: count Hermann Keyserling, the personal friend, Kurt Wolff who published Tagore in Germany, Helene Meyer-Franck, the translator, and Heinrich Meyer-Benfey, the literary interpreter of Tagore. In presenting the Tagore encounter through these personal contacts, Kämpchen actually writes a most engaging piece of intellectual and cultural history of the recent past when Europe was the hub of a colonial world system. The Tagore mania in Germany during the Weimar republic was not only a major mass media event, it also revealed the deep anguish and search for ultimate meaning in Germany. Tagore and indeed the 'East' were supposed to provide this meaning. In this book Kämpchen shows us what sensitive German intellectuals were looking for in Tagore and why they promoted him and his writings. (VvB) *
- Kämpchen, Martin
Rabindranath Tagore in Germany: Four responses to a cultural icon
Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Rashtrapati Nivas, 1999
128 pp, ISBN 81-85952-71-X