Mind, Body, and Society: Life and Mentality in Colonial Bengal.

• Author: Kopf, David

Edited by RAJAT KANTA RAY. Calcutta: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1995. Pp. 486. $35.

This easily overlooked collection of essays written on occasion of honoring distinguished professors of history who have been members of the Department of History at Presidency College, Calcutta, represents the most convincing evidence yet that Bengali historiography, though dormant the last twenty years or so, is far from dead. It is not without significance that the high quality of scholarship in several of the articles is related to the fact that they are dedicated to truly great Indian historians such as Kuruvila Zacharia (1916-30), Susobhan Chandra Sarkar (1933-56), Amales Tripathi (1954-69), and Ashin Das Gupta (1960-72), all of whom were trained in the British scholarly tradition.

This reviewer, for one, has waited impatiently over the last two decades for the return of a free, open and balanced approach to history. For years, we have been made to feel guilty for writing about Bengalis who fraternized with the British, or for celebrating British-built Calcutta as the "City of Palaces" or as the setting for the Bengal Renaissance. For almost a generation now, articles have been written on nineteenth-century Bengal based not on primary, indigenous sources but on foreign theoretical presuppositions on the varieties of "colonialist discourse." And to this day, all too often, we must hack our way through the verbal jungle and ascend mountains of "historical discourse" before we can reach the threshold of an idea. We have become saturated with jargon meant to deconstruct our "feeble" and "mythic" conception of the true nature of British India. It is so refreshing that the Ray volume contains not a single reference to such terms as the "hermeneutics of colonial tropologies" or to the "altertistic fallacy in postcolonial discourses."

We must be thankful that Oxford University Press has seen fit to publish a volume of historical papers which actually raise questions, probe deeply into available sources, reason objectively and honestly without total submission to irrelevant ideologies external to the material, and arrive at conclusions which are derived refreshingly from the evidence or what we unashamedly once called "facts." Incredible as it seems, Mind, Body, and Society contains hundreds and hundreds of endnotes and an impressive list of bibliographical sources in English and Bengali.

There are thirteen articles - including a brilliant introduction by Rajat...