Review: \u27Recasting the Region: Language, Culture and Islam in Colonial Bengal\u27

The origins and growth of Bengali Muslim identity have been the center of several studies till date. Most have concentrated on the politics of Muslim separatism in the 1930s with the politicization of the eastern Bengal’s peasantry and subsequent support for the Pakistan Movement. Neilesh Bose, in his Recasting the Region: Language Culture and Islam in Colonial Bengal shifts focus from politics to the Bengali literary sphere where Bengali Muslim intellectuals created a particular regional identity distinct from both mainstream Urdu Muslim and Hindu Bengali culture. This particular Bengali Muslim identity, Bose argues, was produced and established through writings of well known Muslim writers and activists, in Bengali language journals published and read in both Dacca and Calcutta but also in the mofussils, and through the functions of literary civic societies. Bengali identity that thus emerged in late colonial India was based not exclusively on religion but also on language and region