29
MAHASWETA SENGUPTA
READING THE WORLD:
GROWING UP IN THE “DISCIPLINE”
ABSTRACT: Looking back at the evolution of my own self as a teacher of Literatures
in English, I am fascinated by the gradual erosion of the values that were taught to me
as a student. Values are contingent, but the process of paying heed to the alternative
voices of the whole world makes one conscious of the enormous exclusivist project that
formed the bedrock of our education in English literature. I consider myself lucky to
have gone through this process of evolution from an elite, exclusive club to an
acknowledgement of Others. Postcolonialism has been successful in breaking up the
limits of knowledge and understanding, and I consider that to be the most important
change that has taken place within the discipline. This essay is a record of my experiences
as a teacher in India.
KEYWORDS: postcolonialism, alterity, disciplinary formations, values in literary
studies, history and literature, literary studies in India.
“It was to ask a question about how thought was related to place.”
Dipesh Chakrabarti1
“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting.
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall;
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more,
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, opening lines.
Imagine a sixteen year old girl walking into the first class of her English
(Honours) course and hearing these immortal lines of Shakespeare for
the first time in her life. There were about twenty students in that class,
most of them from schools around that region and a very few from
English medium schools in Durgapur or Asansol in West Bengal. All of
1
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Preface to
the 2007 Edition, p. XIII. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford, 2000.
30
Mahasweta Sengupta
us actually were absolutely baffled by the lines that were being recited
by the teacher; we were on a terrain that was not familiar to us, we did
not understand the significance and also the connotation of the words
being used. While as sixteen year olds we were all quite interested in
“love”, this text seemed to move into realms with which we were not
familiar- we were being asked to familiarize ourselves with a world that
appeared to be very remote to us – more so to me. The musicality of
Illyria and Elyseum did not mean much to us. The words did not strike
chords in our minds. This class set the tone of the experience that we
had to go through during the next three years in the Honours course – a
huge empty space lay between what we were reading and the way we
were living our lives. This was 1968, when the entire western world was
being shaken by the ideas from France and the conventional wisdom of
notions of the European and North American communities were being
challenged. In West Bengal also, the Naxalite Movement was gathering
momentum and thousands of students were involved in this struggle to
change the existing social order. Our curriculum of course had nothing
to do with these changes – we were simply following the pattern set by
scholars during the nineteenth century.
I would like to tell you of another experience of that time, it happened
during our third year in college. We were in the final year of our studies
and all of us thought that we needed to acquaint ourselves with the
burgeoning area of Indian Writing in English in our Honours course, a
course that was fully loaded with British texts from various historical
periods. I should mention that the year was 1971 – the country was
engrossed with the Bangladesh liberation war that year. All of us decided
to go and speak to one of the teachers and we did go to tell him that we
think our syllabus should contain something from the new literatures
showing up in the world. The teacher listened to us patiently and then
said that the English honours programme was not open to “hybrid” writing,
we were going to read only “pure” British or English literature because
that happens to be the best in the world. All of us were a bit disappointed,
but since the observation came from one of our favourite teachers, we
accepted it without protest. This was the situation in the seventies in
rural West Bengal, and I think the picture was more or less the same in
all parts of non-metropolitan India. It could be that some isolated centers
Reading the world
31
did change the syllabus to accommodate newer writing, but that was
absolutely a freak case – in West Bengal, we were aspiring to be “pucca”
sahibs in our own way. We did not even imagine that “hybridity” (Homi
Bhaba’s term) would become one of the defining characteristics of
postcolonial societies later, and we wanted to avoid any kind of fuzziness
in our efforts to study “English literature”.
Of course, I need to locate myself in the terrain before I get into any
account of the world that I lived in. Santiniketan (for those of you who
do not know) is about a hundred miles away from Kolkata — the city
which had been the capital of British India for a long time, and a city that
happened to be the first anchor of colonialism in the country. The school
in Santiniketan was established by Rabindranath Tagore in the early
years of the twentieth century, on a landed property of his father
Debendranath Tagore, who found spiritual solace in the surrounding of
that area in the district of Birbhum. Debendranath named the place
“Santiniketan” – a place where bliss and peace ruled.
As we all know, Rabindranath Tagore was very much opposed to the
colonial education system prevalent in India – he had withdrawn himself
from those schools in his own childhood. There is a mention of one
school in Kolkata that he records in his memoir Jeebansmriti, the students
sang a prayer which was gibberish to him and the words were simply
nonsensical to all those kids shouting during prayer-time. There are many
observations that can be found in his writings about the absolute disregard
he had for a learning process which had no relation to the life surrounding
it, and he speaks profusely about what he wanted to do in his school in
Santiniketan. To cut the matter short, I grew up in an environment which
was in tune with nature – songs, dances and all kinds of other activities
circled the curriculum that needed to be followed in order to prepare the
students for the world. We never thought that academic studies was the
only thing that we should learn, there was much more than books to be
followed and all children grew up in an atmosphere that was free from
the trappings of the colonial education system initiated long ago.
I completed my school successfully and in a very obvious manner, decided
to study “English” as the Honours subject though I was very fond of
some other subjects like Geography and Political Science. I am sure you
32
Mahasweta Sengupta
know why I chose English–a lot of research has shown how the passport
to social mobility and prestige was related to your control and usage of
the English language in this country. My obvious decision was linked to
my assumption that by doing a degree in English, my job prospects would
be better and I will find a security that is usually not available through
other subjects. Therefore, I had to study English literature. Nobody
advised us about which subject I would like – it was determined by
larger forces about which we did not talk. Also nobody explained why
History or Philosophy might have been of more use to me if I did English
Literature – I chose my subsidiary subject to be Geography which I
loved a lot.
In rural Bengal, that is in Santiniketan, most teachers came from Kolkata
and were largely drawn from the Presidency College in Kolkata. One or
two were from Bihar, and they were mostly in agreement with their
colleagues who came from Kolkata. The ideology that almost saturated
the curriculum was that there was an absolute necessity to know texts
from the Anglican world, and students should equip themselves to
understand the intricacies of English literature in a proper fashion so that
they follow the reigning conventions of the discipline. I don’t want to
suggest that these conventions have been totally disregarded now – we
still operate under them and we are trapped in the discourses that we
have imbibed through our education. This is where I started and that is
the point we decided to go and ask for IWE in our curriculum which
resulted in a negative response from the faculty.
In hindsight it appears to me that in our disciplinary world at that time,
there was no existence of any “other”; others were supposed to dissolve
in the pond of the Self created and sustained by our curriculum which
preached the universality of literary studies. It was assumed that we
would strive to acquire the values that English literature upheld to us, the
standard was to be like the “best” in terms of values that spoke of
“universality”, “timelessness” and “transcendence”. There was no effort
to relate our presents to the past that we inherited – the involvement of
the student was only on a marginal sense meaningful as a reader. Needless
to say, I am not preaching the omission of English literary texts in our
curriculum, I want to emphasize the fact that all canons are ideologically
constructed and therefore any other canon would have had a programme
Reading the world
33
inherent in it. I think the problem lay with our complete disregard for
other canons, for other voices and peoples, and it appeared as if we
were learning the “best” in the world. I don’t believe that we cannot
teach English literature to students who are outside the cultural orbit of
that literature, but the method has to be completely different – the students
should be able to identify with that literature through their own lives.
Yeats, Eliot or Pound or even Shakespeare appears meaningful only if
we are able to do that. In our curriculum, this effort was lacking and the
emphasis was on adapting ourselves to their views and their positions.
We were never made aware of the fact that this is only one reading of
the text, like every “translation” this also is one reading of the world
which means something. The message seemed to be that this is the only
reading of the world.
Actually, the experience of studying English literature had some strange
effects on us. All students in the department thought, or assumed, that
they were slightly more privileged than the others in the college. We
were a “chosen” lot; we thought we were smarter and cleverer than the
others around us. Literature in Bengali supported our assumptions – the
major characters mostly happened to be M.A. in English, Tagore’s Amit
Ray in Sesher Kobita leading the list. People acquired a “lustre” of a
certain kind when they studied English Literature – they knew more of
the world and were more sophisticated. Anyway, I finished my course
and tried desperately to find a teaching job, and finally got it in the same
university. I joined as Lecturer in English to teach in a Central University
in 1978.
All through my college years and then at the beginning of my teaching
career, I was always bothered and irritated by myself as a person –
what exactly was I teaching to students in the class was a question that
haunted me all the time. My life in Santiniketan was very fulfilling, my
singing and reciting kept me busy throughout the year. But what
relationship did that life have to the texts I read? That was a difficult and
almost inexplicable position which I could not resolve. As later research
shows, all of us who studied English literature in India, lived on multiple
levels, and the different levels sometimes contradicted each other
vehemently.
34
Mahasweta Sengupta
There was another factor at this point of time that disturbed many of us;
we constantly felt that we were in some ways much less than our
metropolitan counterparts. English literature students in Kolkata had a
superior attitude, an air that definitely distinguished them from us – the
people who came from the “hinterland”2. There was unmistakable
snobbery in our colleagues from Kolkata – they knew better it was
assumed, because they came from the city and studied in English-medium
schools and famous colleges which upheld the British texts most
accurately. I may be mistaken, but that is the reading that prevailed
amongst us. They dictated indirectly what needed to be studied if we
read English literature and how we needed to study it. Shakespeare was
the ultimate of knowledge and the highest ambition was to study the
drama of the Elizabethan period. We never disagreed. As I told you
earlier, my B.A. course started with a play of Shakespeare and for a
whole year, the drama was closely taught to us; I thought I was missing
out on what the teacher was teaching because I could not follow what
was going on in the play. My deeply rooted self stood in serious conflict
with the way in which the drama was taught. There were many such
situations during my tenure as a student, and I always thought that it was
my duty and requirement to rise up to the blessed position of a person
who is learning the “best” literature in the world, and I tried my best to
inform myself of the history and philosophy of the English. Macaulay’s
opinion was largely supported by our complete surrender to the ideology
of lifting ourselves from the mire that we were living in.
Not that there were no contrary realizations – there were occasions
when many texts touched and related to our lives and we were moved,
but in general, the experience was one of “alienation”3 from our immediate
surroundings. I certainly identified with “issues” or “ideas” that came up
through the texts, but the language most of the time did not act as a live
wire through which my mind would wake up to consciousness. There
was a serious lapse, a break in the communicative process. On the one
hand, I was learning more of the English language, but all the other
2
A term used by a famous scholar/activist in India when she learnt that I taught in
Visva-Bharati which happened to be a Central University but in rural India.
3
Preface, Subject to Change: Teaching Literature in the Nineties, Edited by Susie
Tharu, 1996.
Reading the world
35
values inscribed in literature were creating problems with my being, there
were multiple fault lines there. Let me give you an example; I was very
fond of the poetry of W.B. Yeats – somehow I could connect to the
different voices of his poems. They touched me as a person who identified
with the problems that they upheld and spoke about. This was not the
case with many other poets with whom I could not establish any
relationship whatsoever.
As a teacher I was assigned to teach literary criticism and Romantic
Poetry, and I tried my best to perform. Questions that were dealt in
class concerned matters very remotely connected to us – we were trying
to imagine the beauty of the Lake District and the Coffee Houses in
Eighteenth Century England to understand the texts that were in front of
us. We also had to read Wordsworth’s The Prelude which appeared to
be singularly unattractive to most of us because at that age we were not
really interested in the “growth” of a poet’s mind. As an individual on the
other hand, I lived the life of a Santiniketani who sang to her heart’s
content and participated in all local festivals to the best of her ability.
These festivals were all secular of course, because the place was Brahmo
in religious perception, where no model of any god was worshipped.
This fragmentariness of my beliefs shaped me as a person – I lived in
different worlds as I said and only one of them was the world of religion
and worship.
A serious blow to my understanding occurred when I took admission in
the Ph.D. programme of the Department of Comparative Literature in
Amherst, Massachusetts in 1985. I was asked a question several times
at the beginning of the course – how much of my own literature did I
know? This set my “self” in a storm that I had never experienced earlier.
Why did not I know much about my own mother-tongue literature? Why
was it that the singular aim of many Indians happens to be studying
“English” literature in the country? What have I learnt from that discipline
and how has it affected me as a person? These questions came up to
my mind at this time, when I was being asked about my competencies.
The assumption most probably was that languages are deeply connected
to their communities, and a person who learns another language and
reads its literature was twice removed from the reality of it. At that point
36
Mahasweta Sengupta
of time, I was certainly not a bilingual being who floated with ease in
two languages. Most students in India are like that – they are not
necessarily easy enough with the English language which they learn
with considerable effort. That explains the temptation of being anglicized
in India – acquiring an ability to speak and behave like the English so
that we could research in areas that had absolutely no connection to a
very large section of the people in the country. This also creates the
barrier within our own communities – the people who know English are
the people who rule the country and decide everything around. The
assumption of course was earlier that we have to be like them, there
was no value in our own forms of existences. My inabilities started
showing up very convincingly to myself – I was handicapped by my
own education, I could not talk much about my own literature with any
ease. Earlier I never thought that was necessary.
At the University of Massachusetts, I took up a course on Literary
Theory and was asked to write a paper on various approaches to reading
a text. The text I chose was Tagore’s Nashtanir and while writing that
paper I discovered that my ideas were in serious clash with the theories
that I was reading. I made it clear at the beginning of the paper (difficult
for myself to believe now) that I believed in the autonomy of literature
and firmly subscribed to the notion of the autotelic nature of art; but then
I could not reconcile those ideas with the theories I was reading – Reader
Reception or Historicism or Postcolonialism. I was now on a dangerous
ground; I had to decide how my pre-existing ideas could be reconciled
with literary theories which demonstrated an intimate connection between
the world and the reader. This was a time that witnessed the rise and
proliferation of the ideas of Edward Said and many other Poststructuralists
in the American academy. How could I explain what I was taught as a
student, that English literary texts were for all times and for all places
when I could not make an appeal in teaching a translated short story of
Rabindranath to undergraduates in a class? What created a barrier in
our understanding of texts that were from faraway lands and cultures
which the students were not familiar with in their lives? The idea of
reading “contrapuntally” formulated by Edward Said was not available
to us at that point of time – the idea of critique as a mode of reading a
text was non-existent.
Reading the world
37
This is the time when I started thinking about “difference” as a theoretical
tool. Was there really any validity to our understanding as human beings
in a world that was becoming conscious of the difference of cultures in
the globe and that did not wish away that difference? What difference
did “difference” make to us as human beings, and was all thought related
to the place which produces those thoughts? Am I supposed to act in a
way that was a replica of the English people or was I supposed to be my
own individual self who had her own anchors in reality? The conflict
and tension was mostly in my understanding of myself as an agent who
could break out of the network of knowledge handed over to me, a
network that designated my place to be with the critics and writers who
explained and analyzed English literature in a certain way.
A crucial role in re-orienting literary studies was the research publications
of scholars in the discipline of history- particularly those who moved the
focus of the camera from the rulers to the ruled- the subaltern studies
initiatives which clearly showed how grassroot level activism shaped
historical processes in the colonies. Undoubtedly, the pioneering work of
scholars made us aware of the existence of multiple modernities and
communities that were not necessarily following the European rational
tradition of the Enlightenment. Critics like Edward Said, Gayatri
Chakravarti Spivak and Homi Bhaba spoke from the American
universities, but others in India worked to tune in literary studies with the
research that was being published in the world. Professor Partha
Chatterjee and Professor Dipesh Chakrabarti’s works steered students
of English literature in India into realms that were never imagined earlier.
Womens’ Writing received a similar focus through the work of Professor
Susie Tharu and K.Lalitha’s massive volumes of work done in India by
women. Ashis Nandy and Meenakshi Mukherjee played a similar role in
making us comprehend the very shaky nature of our assumptions
regarding life and literature. I distinctly remember my uneasiness after
reading Nandy’s Intimate Enemy in Amherst – many of my lifelong
convictions received a shock after I read that pioneering work.
The crucial point in my own rise from a passive reader to an active
interpreter of cultural matters received its final push from a course done
with the African writer Chinua Achebe at the University of Massachusetts
in 1987. In fiction written in English from the African continent, the
38
Mahasweta Sengupta
voice of the native was always heard clear and loud, and Achebe told us
to pay attention to our own voices in understanding the world. This was
something very different from what I learnt in India; here, in India, I was
trying hard to fit myself into the networks of discourses that already
existed and my own voice there was not necessarily important in
comprehending matters. Even the doctoral research that I did in India
involved a lot of this assimilation of what others said about a textual
tradition, and I think now that I could have done a better job if I ventured
on my own self to analyze problems and questions which came up in my
own mind. This is in a way an acknowledgement that we had been
“slaves” in our ideas to a large extent – we rarely ventured out of the
limits set by prevailing standards. Most probably many scholars who
were taught in metropolitan colleges did not feel that way; they analyzed
and discussed Dickens or Eliot or Pound in a way that was not available
to me as a person; I felt drawn by issues that related to me as a human
being in the world. I could only relate to texts that touched me as a
person and with which I could establish a relationship because they dealt
with issues that concerned me as a person who lived in historical time.
Meenakshi Mukherjee has written about how she was refused several
times for jobs in Delhi University and elsewhere, the argument being
that she was working in an area which was not considered a part of the
European canon; the English literature department did not have a place
for her. The English department actually held their best places for scholars
who followed the British line – working in the area of Elizabethan,
Romantic or Victorian or Modern Studies. I am most willing to accept
that, but I expected that others who did not choose to work in those
areas also needed to be heard and recognized. This is where
Postcolonialism offered a liberatory path — a path which was carved
out of the blurred pictures of terrains in the world. My own growth as a
reader or a person happened largely because the world was waking up
to the strategies of the colonial empires in the world, and texts were
representations of those strategies in the subtlest forms. Even when
texts were not concerned with the colonial-postcolonial times, they had
to be connected to the context and community that produced them. I
was now more interested in that connection, that lifeline which existed
in literary studies – I wanted to study those features of texts that told me
Reading the world
39
more about life. I was ready to read everything “contrapuntally” where
all voices were heard, and where what was not said was as important as
what was said.
I think most teachers of English in India had to go through this phase of
questioning and analysis. We do remember the work done on the
disciplinary stature of English studies in India in the late eighties and
nineties to break open the limits imposed by our colonial history.4 I should
acknowledge the first course I did at the University of Massachusetts
offered by Professor Ketu Katrak on Postcolonial Literatures. There
were two students in the course – Isabella Matsikidze, a student from
Zimbabwe and myself and the reason there was nobody to do that course
is because students did not consider it worth doing. We started with the
writings of Frantz Fanon and then read literatures from other parts of
the colonial empires. Another teacher who was of immense support at
this time at the University of Massachusetts was Gauri Viswanathan –
who had just joined the department after completing her thesis under
Professor Edward Said in Columbia. Masks of Conquest was yet to be
published. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan was also there and the presence
of these teachers in the English Department made a huge difference to
me – I was beginning to see the Others in a new way.
I came to the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages at the
end of the year 1994 and joined the Department of Distance Education.
My mind was already far away from texts with which I could not relate
in some way, I would not like to teach anything with which I could not
connect as a human being. My research work in Comparative Literature
was concerned with Translation Studies; I analyzed the auto-translations
of Rabindranath Tagore into English from Bengali and I was deeply
interested in cross-cultural interactions in literature or writing. What
happens when representations cross cultural barriers and land in another
place and time? Translated texts were minefields of information on these
matters and I enjoyed unraveling them. My entry into the Distance
Education programme also exposed me to a wide range of students who
4
The edited books of Svati Joshi, Rajeswari Sunderrajan and Susie Tharu clearly
signaled the change of English studies in India, and they are historical records of the
transition from blind acceptance to conscious critiques of our worlds.
40
Mahasweta Sengupta
were coming from diverse locations in the country. I thought this was a
boon for my abilities as a teacher; I could re-orient them in a way that
had been denied to them as students of English literature in this country.
In fact, I think I am still doing that after sixteen years of my service here
and enjoying it fully.
My experiences in teaching Postcolonial Literatures at the university
remains the most satisfying phase of my learning as a person. I offered
this course on Postcolonial Literatures first time in 1998 and continued
offering it till 2008; I myself witnessed the change in the course as
symptomatic of my own understanding of the discipline. We did not start
with Fanon, as the western universities did, but brought in Gandhi and
Ambedkar to demonstrate anti-colonial and anti-establishment writings.5
We also studied diverse texts from the regional languages of India
because there were students from various regions of the country. One
thing amazed me while teaching this course, many of my students (about
50%) in the class did not know their mother tongue – they only knew
English. While that is the case with major writers who have forcibly
shaped English into Indian forms and dealt with subjects that are typically
of this country (Amitav Ghosh – The Shadow Lines and The Hungry
Tide are good examples), these students certainly did not possess the
souls of their community any more. They were uprooted from the
country’s soil; they lived in the make-believe world of English. What
could I do to help them find their own voices? I could only direct them to
similar texts that spoke of such lost souls in the world.
I should admit that this is not a discussion of Postcolonialism as a
theoretical approach and the pitfalls of the term. I am also not concerned
with the various discussions of its performance in academies of the world
in various countries – USA, Australia, India, Africa, Canada or other
parts of the world. I am here thinking of my own life only and the
continuous modifications that it went through. Now I work in a
department that is named “Literatures in English”, a name that we chose
consciously to represent the diversities of the world and I write lessons
for Distance students who are far removed from the cities where we
5
Professor Alok Bhalla inspired me to think otherwise and include them in the course
and I still am grateful to him for that.
Reading the world
41
live. They should encounter the change and expand their idea of “English
studies”, they should know that they need to value their existences and
not hanker after being like someone else any more.
Actually, I am most willing to accept ideas now which are absolutely
contradictory to mine; and I think that this is the most fruitful effect of
my engagement with Postcolonialism. I am not only open to all voices in
the world; I see their right to exist in the world of ideas. While I have my
own existence to nurture, I see the possibility of the existence of all
other forms of living and all other voices. And as mentioned in Dipesh
Chakrabarti’s view of the relationship between “thought” and “place” –
I wholeheartedly subscribe to the existence of this relationship
everywhere. I would like to end with an anecdote which will give you an
idea of my change as a person. When I joined this university in 1994, I
was quite intolerant of the idea of having a woman in my class whose
face was covered with the veil. Not that I objected to the dress, but I
had problems with not being able to see the face of the person, I could
not see the responses of that person. I used to get very disturbed and did
not know what to do. Two of my senior teachers, Professor Meenakshi
Mukherjee and Professor Susie Tharu suggested a way out; they told
me that I should try to understand how I myself sat in the American
classroom wearing a six-yard long cloth on my body and where everyone
else was differently dressed. That was as shocking to them as this was
to me. The comparison hit me hard; I realized how every culture has its
own constructs and how fiercely they protect them. All human beings
have a right to exist in the way they think fit to exist, there can be no
evaluation of what is right and wrong there by others who do not belong
to that culture and nobody can change that. The change has to come
from the people who live that kind of life. If I could cover up my body,
someone else could as well cover up her face; there could be no
theoretical objection to these acts of living or dressing or eating, leave
alone representations in literature or art.
It is time we realize what we are supposed to do in teaching in India –
not adopt values and standards from the western world and repeat them,
but find out our own intellectual bearings and nurture them. Literary
studies can only flourish if we embrace the “contrapuntal” method outlined
by Edward Said, where even the minutest detail has a voice that tells
42
Mahasweta Sengupta
you something. That is the gift of moving out of the jacket of disciplinary
boundaries and embracing Postcolonialism. The pedagogy of
Postcolonialism presupposes our acceptance of all parts of the world as
equally valuable; we need to hear all voices and silences that exist. No
one culture or literature or painting or poetry or any form of representation
should claim superiority over others, because all forms of expression are
born out of specific histories in the world. If we cannot open ourselves
to the varied expressions of all communities, we will be restricted in our
reading of the world. Postcolonialism has offered a method to do so, and
I am thankful for that.
REFERENCES
Aquil, Raziuddin & Chatterjee, Partha (ed.). 2005. History in the Vernacular.
Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
Chakrabarti, Dipesh. 2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference. With a new Preface by the Author. Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Chakrabarti, Dipesh. 2002. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of
Subaltern Studies. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press.
Chatterjee, Partha. (ed.) 2005. Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial
Bengal. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Chatterjee, Partha & Ghosh, Anjan (ed.). 2002. History and the Present. Delhi:
Permanent Black.
Cohn, Bernard, S. 1997. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British
in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Joshi, Swati (ed.). 1991. Rethinking English: Essays in Language, Literature,
History. New Delhi: Trianka.
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Mahasweta Sengupta
Department of Literatures in English
School of Distance Education
EFL University
msciefl@gmail .com