History of the Bengali People: From Earliest Times to the Fall of the Sena Dynasty

John W. Hood is an internationally recognized scholar of Indian art cinema and is known for his work. The Essential Mystery: Major Filmmakers of Indian Art Cinema, also published by Orient Longman. He has also written on the films of Mrinal Sen and has published a book of translations of Buddhadeb Dasgupta's poetry, Love and Other Forms of Death. He has been a scholar of Indian culture for most of his life and is also a translator of Bengali literature. He now divides his time between his homes in Melbourne and Kolkata.

Formerly Bagisvari Professor of Indian Art and Culture, now Emeritus Professor at the University of Calcutta and Founder-Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, Niharranjan Ray is today one of the foremost interpreters of the history, tradition, art and culture of his country and people. His most significant contribution has been his introduction to historical writing in India, of the approaches, tools and techniques of social analysis, and presentation of historical events and situations in a sociological framework free from any ideological straight-jacket. In the late forties, the doyen of historical research in India, Jadunath Sarkar, welcomed this new departure initiated by Niharranjan Ray, as the promise of a new direction in Indian historiography. Equally significant has been his contribution to the interpretation of India’s artistic activity through the ages in terms of her changing social process. He has salvaged art history and art criticism from the hidebound formulae of archaeology and iconography on the one hand and from emotional effusions and pseude-metaphysical cobwebs on the other.

Sumit Sarkar retired as Professor of History, University of Delhi.  He was earlier the President of the Modern India section of the Indian History Congress, and Secretary of that body.  He has held visiting professorships at the universities of Oxford, Canberra, Paris, and Hawaii.  One of the foremost scholars of modern South Asian history, his publications include Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908 (1973), Modern India, 1885-1947(1983), A Critique on Colonial India (1985), Writing Social History (1999), and Beyond Nationalist Frames (2002).  His many books include Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History (Permanent Black paperback, 2003).