Probinshializing Bengal:

Probinshializing Bengal:
[Manuscript shows Colon [= ':'], but no subtitle, at time of Current Resotaration].
Attributed: Nirad C. Chaudhuri

author of the famed:

“ To the memory of the British Empire in India,

Which conferred subjecthood upon us,
But withheld citizenship.
To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge:
"Civis Britannicus sum"
Because all that was good and living within us
Was made, shaped and quickened
By the same British rule.
”


(The attribution of this far-sighted hitherto lost work to N. C. Chaudhuri (Bill, to his friends) is contested by some scholars, two actually (of three) who know about it.

Unpublished Manuscript. 300.5 pages. Foolscap.

Contents:

PART I: Historicity and The Truth of The Past
chapter 1. The Artifice of Discursive Distances and the History of Post Colonialism
chapter 2. The Two Capitals in "the Two Histories"? The Metropole as the Center of History and Neo-Tory Ideology.
chapter 3. How I learnt to Love Untranslatable Life-Worlds and Stopped Worrying about why We got over Marx.
Chapter 4: Dominant Histories, Superaltern Futures

PART II: Myths of Exodus
Chapter 5: Trauma of Renunicant Ascetics (Natives) and Foreign Householders
Chapter 6: Nation, Narration, Alliteration: Now You Try: Hey Nonny, Nonny, Theory, Fa La La...
Chapter 7: The Forgotten History of Table Manners and the Loss of Adda: The Veiled Wife and the Oxbridge Camera
Chapter 8: Shah Rukh Khan, Zeenat Aman and Vinobha Bhave

Epilogue: Antidisestablishmentarianism and its Global Discontents




Initial Reviews:

"The great value of this book lies in Chaudhuri's (?) exceptional ability to bring to light what constantly is put forth and remembered when we can only speak the language of the colonizers and Tagore in translation. Chaudhuri makes me regret that which can no longer be said...."
--N.Ferguson, The New Right Review

"the in-choate in-fans ab-original para-subject cannot be theorised as functionally completely frozen in a world where teleology is schematised into geo-graphy"
--Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Post-Colonial Reason (Oh allright, you tell me what the bloody hell she is on about if not this unpublished book).

Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Not the Carnatic Violinist) could not be reached at this time. He is at Santa Monica Beach (Not an Adda) taking in the surf and suds with wide-eyed, overworked students. However see his forthcoming review for London Review of Books entitled "How can a Bengali be a Subaltern?" (2009j, LRB).