Contested Regionalism: A New Look on the History, Cultural Change and Regionalism of North Bengal and Lower Assam

Multiplicity of regional and sub-national assertions of diverse ethnic groups in post-colonial India is no doubt a serious factor in the Indian nation building process. In order to understand the regionalism, the social scientists have identified a few factors on the basis of their research approaches. Social, economic, communal, political and cultural factors have been treated as the dynamics of the regional and sub-national movements. But regionalism cannot be properly understood without having a new look into the pre-colonial and colonial legacies of the regions as identity aspirations had been started in India since the colonial period with the issues of pre-colonial political and socio-cultural traditions. This book, after cortically reviewing the major discourse on various forms of regionalism of colonial and post colonial India, has stressed on the process of cultural changes in case of regional aspirations of North Bengal and Lower Assam. There has been a demand to form a separate state in North Bengal since the last years of colonial rule on the basis of caste and cultural-linguistic issues. Identity aspiration on such issues, however, is the spontaneous outcome of the process of cultural change started in North Bengal in the pre-colonial period with the formation of the organized states in this region. It was further stimulated under the colonial rule due the administrative requirement of the colonial government. Again formation of states along the linguistic and ethnic lines in postcolonial India and the inevitable impacts of the partition of Bengal had reinforced the demand for a separate state in North Bengal and along with a part of lower Assam. This book has been designed to analyze the identity formation of the ethnic communities of North Bengal and lower Assam with a new approach of cultural change. It has also identified other causatives of regionalism and examined the validity of issues of regionalism in the age of globalization. This book has every possibility to create interest among the academicians, students, administrators, politicians and general readers on the history, cultural change and regionalism of North Bengal, Northeast India and India as a whole.