"Thesis approved by the University of Calcutta for the degree of Ph. D." / First ed., 1946, published under title: Obscure religious cults as background of Bengali literature. Includes bibliographical references.

"Thesis approved by the University of Calcutta for the degree of Ph. D." / First ed., 1946, published under title: Obscure religious cults as background of Bengali literature. Includes bibliographical references.

A revised version of the author's thesis, University of London, 1969. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [197]-206) and index.

Thesis (master's)--Universität Heidelberg, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 137-142).

Thesis (M.A. (Hons.))--University of Wollongong, 1999. / Typescript. Bibliography: leaf 145-150. Also available in electronic version.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta, 2010. / Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on December 21, 2009). "A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English and Film Studies." At head of main screen: University of Alberta. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Language and Literature. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is often considered the most important literary figure in modern Bengali history. He lived through the transformation of Bengali culture and society from colonial to anticolonial to post-colonial times. Tagore was a playwright, novelist, philosopher, and songwriter. He wrote and composed nearly 2,500 songs, called Rabindrasangeet. My interlocutors ascribe Tagore’s songs with a particular affective strength that has become a medium for the construction of diasporic identity. In this dissertation, I explore the lives of three generations of women – from precolonial Bengal, post-independence Bengal, and the modern diaspora – and the types of movement they have experienced. I identify a rupture between the familiar and the immediate that accompanies their movement, and characterize this rupture as creating space for multiple identities, reflections, and intimacies, and the continuous building, dismantling, and rebuilding of culture. I argue that the genre of Rabindrasangeet forms and reforms in the diaspora through embodied processes of micro-level performance. Through friendships, kinships, inter-generational relationships, and technologically mediated connections, Rabindrasangeet remains present. It is a tool for self-making, and used to convey unspoken feelings in a gendered world.

This thesis constructs a history of reading for South Asia (1857-1914) through an examination of the eccentric relationships that marginal colonial agents and subjects - soldiers, peasants, office clerks and women - developed with everyday forms of writing. Drawing on the methodologies of the history of the book, and literary and cultural histories, it creates a counterpoint to the dominant view of imperial self-fashioning as built on reading intensively and at length. Instead, it contends that the formation of identities in colonial South Asia, whether compliant or dissenting, was predicated on superficial forms of textual engagement, leaving the documents of empire most likely misread, unread, or simply read in part. I illustrate this argument through four chapters, each of which brings together extensive archival material and nonliterary texts, as well as both canonical and little-known literary works. The first two discuss the circulation of unread texts in colonial institutions: the army and the government office. I study Garnet Wolseley's pioneering war manual, The Soldier's Pocket-book for Field Service, a book that soldiers refused to read. This is juxtaposed, in the second study, with an examination of the reception of the bureaucratic document in illiterate peasant communities, explored through the colonial archive and ethnographic novels. In the third and fourth chapters, I focus on texts consumed in part. I turn to the Bengali Hindu almanac, a form that made the transition from manuscript to print in this period, and examine how it trained its new-found readership of English-educated office clerks to oscillate smoothly between British-bureaucratic and local forms of time, as well as to read quickly and selectively. I end with a study of The Indian Ladies' Magazine, and suggest that the cosmopolitan form of the periodical and editorial practices of extracting and summarising gave women unprecedented access to a network of global print.

(in English): Śaratcandra Caṭṭopādhyāẏ is one of the most beloved Bengali authors, but has so far received only a very limited academic attention. The thesis briefly introduces the author's life and subsequently analyses his work using the terms and methods of contemporary narratology. Its primary goal is to contest traditional critical views of Śaratcandra as an overly emotional author for bored housewives. Śaratcandra intriguingly uses various literary devices (especially his narrators and focalisation) to enhance intimacy between the reader and the characters which finally leads to the reader's greater emotional involvement in the presented events. His usage of types of characters also innovatively combines ancient Indian types, real-life observations and western literary forms. The author juxtaposes characters in order to introduce a critique of social, religious and gender inequality, and to add an emotional argument to Īśvarcandra Vidyāsāgar's intellectual and legal endeavour. It is also possible to interpret Śaratcandra's work and the author himself - in contrast to Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur and Baṅkimcandra Caṭṭopādhyāẏ - as one of the most important modern descendants of the Mahābhārata tradition of Indian literature.