29 March 2016, 05:30 am
The Construction of the Hindu Identity in Medieval Western Bengal: The Role of Popular Cults
Programme Type
Talks,
Webcasts
Speaker: Shri Jawhar Sircar, CEO, Prasar Bharati
Chair: Prof. Dipankar Gupta
The focus is on how only one of the 5 Divisions of Bengal (the western Rarh tract, i.e., modern West Bengal) became a Hindu majority region, while the 4 other Divisions of Bengal (including Bangladesh) had an overwhelming Muslim domination. Sircar has been analysing this from the early 1980s and had undertaken field researches for a project of historical anthropology, that was supported by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) which covered the 6 western districts of Bengal. His conclusions are that there were ‘three distinct phenomena’ that helped the revival and reconstruction of the Hindu identity, in the western part of Bengal, which he will narrate through slides, tables, statistics and maps, based on his monograph.”
Chair: Prof. Dipankar Gupta
The focus is on how only one of the 5 Divisions of Bengal (the western Rarh tract, i.e., modern West Bengal) became a Hindu majority region, while the 4 other Divisions of Bengal (including Bangladesh) had an overwhelming Muslim domination. Sircar has been analysing this from the early 1980s and had undertaken field researches for a project of historical anthropology, that was supported by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) which covered the 6 western districts of Bengal. His conclusions are that there were ‘three distinct phenomena’ that helped the revival and reconstruction of the Hindu identity, in the western part of Bengal, which he will narrate through slides, tables, statistics and maps, based on his monograph.”
