Swarupa Gupta outlines a paradigm for moving beyond ethnic fragmentation by showing how people made places to forge an interregional arena. The analysis includes interpretive strategies to mediate contemporary separatisms.

Papers presented at the Seminar on "Ethnicity, Culture, and Nationalism: Problems in the Context of North-East India", held in Sept. 1995 at the North Eastern Hill University.

Through the present account the author has made several departures from the trend of thought related to ethnicity as set in the West. Instead of compehending the same primarily as the system of categorisation based on a set of fixed criteria where inter-relationship of the national mainstream with the so called ethnic minorities is considered important, in view of pluri-cultural realities, ethnicity has been perceived here as the strategy of interest alliance: a state of dynamic equilibrium. The nature of exposition of ethnicity under the circumstance depends to a major extent o the kind of stimulus, received by an individual or a group at a given point of time. Such a definition of ethnicity presupposes possible multiplicity of identities and inherent plural loyalties on social, political, cultural or other counts. Importance of boundary in the understanding of the problems of ethnicity, therefore, is considered very crucial. What is even more important at this stage is to accept the fact that ethnicity in its broader perspective manifests the apparent clash of cultural and political mechanisms of boundary maintenance that are basiccally unlik. Under the given constraints, expectations for the spirit of uniformity, as it appears, is required to be replaced by that of harmony acknowledging the distinctionsof those that are really different.

"India is a land of various ethnic and tribal groups. Cultural diversity is the unique feature of North-East India exhibited by a large number of tribal communities in the region. Owing to ill-planned economic development policies, there is evident regional imbalance and backwardness in all spheres of life in the north-eastern states. Poverty, lack of employment opportunities and aimless political process have resulted in gross dissatisfaction among the population. Ethnicity has been growing rapidly, and it has brought together the marginally differentiated ethnic groups as a strong united force, which continues to have frequent conflicts with the local governments on various issues of ethic identity and independence. There has been a lack of true information regarding the social structure of various ethnic groups of the North-East India. This book therefore tries to explore the genesis, factors, causes, consequences of the growth of ethnicity, ethnic movement, state formation and inter-ethnic relations, and its impact on the social structure. The role of economy, politics and religion has also been considered as wider causes of the movements in the north-eastern states.Several theoretical issues have been discussed in this eighteen-chapter book, which will be useful for policy makers and policy analysts, sociologists and social anthropologists."

In The Brahmo Samaj and its Vaiṣṇava Milieus: Intersections of Knowledge and Love in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Ankur Barua offers an intellectual history of the motif of religious universalism in the writings of some intellectuals associated with the Brahmo Samaj.

The Jewel of Annual Astrology is an encyclopaedic treatise on Tājika or Sanskritized Perso-Arabic astrology, dealing particularly with the casting and interpretation of anniversary horoscopes. Authored in 1649 CE by Balabhadra Daivajña, court astrologer to Shāh Shujāʿ – governor of Bengal and second son of the Mughal emperor Shāh Jahān – it casts light on the historical development of the Tājika school by extensive quotations from earlier works spanning five centuries. With this first-ever scholarly edition and translation of a Tājika text, Martin Gansten makes a significant contribution not only to the study of an important but little known knowledge tradition, but also to the intellectual historiography of Asia and the transmission of horoscopic astrology in the medieval and early modern periods.

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.