This book examines the impact of British education policies on the Muslims of Colonial Bengal. It evaluates the student composition and curriculum of various educational institutions for Muslims in Calcutta and Dacca to show how they produced the educated Muslim middle class. The author studies the role of Muslim leaders such as Abdul Latif and Fazlul Huq in the spread of education among Muslims and looks at how segregation in education supported by the British fueled Muslim anxiety and separatism. The book analyzes the conflict of interest between Hindus and Muslims over education and employment which strengthened growing Muslim solidarity and anti- Hindu feeling, eventually leading to the demand for a separate nation. It also discusses the experiences of Muslim women at Sakhawat Memorial School, Lady Brabourne College, Eden College, Calcutta, and Dacca Universities at a time when several Brahmo and Hindu schools did not admit them. An important contribution to the study of colonial education in India, the book highlights the role of discriminatory colonial education policies and pedagogy in amplifying religious separatism. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, religion, education, Partition studies, minority studies, imperialism, colonialism, and South Asian history.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

The book presents a chronological study of the Bengali political parties and organisations in Britain (1831 - 2009). Faruque Ahmed enters the heart of the community to unearth its extraordinary heroism and inherent dilemmas. He concludes that the future of the Bengali community is not in Bangladesh or in the subcontinent; it is in Britain.

This book reopens the debate on colonial nationalisms, going beyond ‘derivative’, ‘borrowed’, political and modernist paradigms. It introduces the conceptual category of samaj to demonstrate how indigenous socio-cultural origins in Bengal interacted with late-colonial discourses to produce the notion of a nation. Samaj (a historical society and an idea-in-practice) was a site for reconfiguring antecedents and negotiating fragmentation. Drawing on indigenous sources, this study shows how caste, class, ethnicity, region and community were refracted to conceptualise wider unities. The mapping of cultural continuities through change facilitates a more nuanced investigation of the ontology of nationhood, seeing it as related to, but more than political nationalism. It outlines a fresh paradigm for recalibrating postcolonial identities, offering interpretive strategies to mediate fragmentation.

In the Bengali speaking regions of Bangladesh and India, the Bengali term bede today often evokes stereotypical imaginations of itinerant people. Of highly contested origin, the term has in the last two hundred years become the pivotal element for categorising and portraying diverse service nomads of the Bengal region. Besides an analysis of their portrayal in ethnographic and Bengali fictional literature, this book traces causes, reasons, and processes that have led to an increasing perception of these so-called `Bedes' as being ethnically different from the sedentary majority population.

Includes section "Numismatic supplement," no. 5-45 (previously issued in the society's Journal, later in its Journal, 3rd ser.).