In seventeenth-century India, the fates of three little hamlets were forever changed when East India Company officials chose them to be developed into a city suitable for their settlement. Thus was bo
Dangerous Outcast traces prostitution in Bengal from precolonial times through the arrival of the British, examining how the profession was reordered to suit British desires. Drawing on nineteenth-cen
In this book, Sumanta Banerjee analyzes the development of the folk culture of Calcutta’s urban poor following the establishment of the British colonial system in Bengal. Consisting primarily of
Like other pre-colonial socio-economic formations, the profession of prostitution underwent a dramatic change in Bengal soon after the British take-over. Under the Raj explores the world of the prosti
Unlike most of Mahasweta Devi’s works, which focus on Bengali tribes and the rural dispossessed, the four stories collected in Bait are located in the urban and suburban criminal underworld, and form