Sumanta Banerjee
Showing all 9 books
In seventeenth-century India, the fates of three little hamlets were forever changed when East India Company officials chose them to be developed into a city suitable for their settlement. Thus was born Calcutta.
In Memoirs of Roads, Banerjee journeys through time and narrates the story of three of the arterial roads of British India's first capital. And through their story, he presents an engrossing history of the development of this remarkable urban landscape, ...
Sumanta Banerjee analyses the development of the various forms of folk culture of the urban poor in the new metropolis of Calcutta, as a fallout of the process of urbanization in the wake of the establishment of the British colonial system in Bengal. Consisting primarily of traditional artisans and craftsmen who migrated from the neighbouring villages, the lower orders of Calcutta evolved a new urban folk culture from their own older rural inheritance. Profusely ...
Taking its title from Karl Marx's description of religion as 'the general theory of this world... its logic in a popular form', this volume of essays explores the hidden logic behind the popular construction of certain myths, beliefs about godlings and spirits, and cross-religious cults, viewing them as popular inventions attempting to make sense of human existence in the face of an overwhelming and often hostile environment. These religious manifestations of ...
This collection of Bangla short stories in English translation is an endeavour to present in a single volume a representative picture of Bengal of the recent past and of today, and to introduce the readers to some significant features of the life of its people, its society and culture. While sharing the motif of home as the running thread, each story in this volume however has a different dimension also. One can find a story or two that are politically more ...
The four Stories in this collection are located in the urban and suburban underworld, and form an unusual segment of Mahasweta Devi's oeuvre -- 'Fisherman' (about Jagat who recovers bodies of young boys from the village tank so that the police can pass them off as cases of drowning), 'knife' (a tongue-in-check account of gang warfare in a suburban town of West Bengal, bordering Bangladesh), 'Body' (about a 'young woman', used by a politician and his cohorts until ...
Like other pre-colonial socio-economic formations, the profession of prostitution also underwent a dramatic change in Bengal soon after the British take-over. Dangerous Outcast explores the world of the prostitutes in 19th century Bengal. It traces how, from the peripheries of pre-colonial Bengali rural society, they came to dominate the centre-stage in Calcutta, the capital of British India--thanks to the emergence of a new clientele brought forth by the ...
Unlike most of her works, which focus on tribals and the rural dispossessed, the four stories in this collection are located in the urban and suburban underworld, and form an unusual segment of Mahasweta Devi’s oeuvre—‘Fisherman’ (about Jagat who recovers bodies of young boys from the village tank so that the police can pass them off a cases of drowning), ‘Knife’ (a tongue-in-cheek account of gang warfare in a suburban town of West Bengal, bordering ...