While the July Uprising was sparked by economic problems, political repression, and a desire for democracy, it found a strong and surprising voice in a new form of music for Bangladesh: rap. Two songs, “Kotha Ko” (Speak Up) and “Awaz Utha” (Raise Your Voice), came to represent the sentiment of the movement in July.
In his analysis of the Estado da Índia, which was the official name of the Portuguese Empire, George Winius distinguished between the formal administration by the Estado’s headquarters at Goa over overseas possessions and the ‘informal empire’, which he called the ‘shadow empire’, that the Portuguese established in the Bay of Bengal. The shadow empire was a unique experiment carried out by sailors, merchant adventurers, pirates, and missionaries, with little formal sanction either from Goa or from Portugal.
Chittagong’s neighbour Sandwip is absent from Bay of Bengal history because its nature is hard to define.
The poetic tradition in the East, particularly in Greater India, has long been characterised by diverse literary experimentation, significantly influenced by Sanskritic, Arabic, and Persian cosmopolitan traditions.
The inspiration for decolonization, as a philosophical term, writes Achille Mbembe, was the ‘active will to community’ which can be translated as something like ‘to stand up on one’s own and create a heritage’.
Ravi Shankar methodically plucked the seven top strings on his sitar, drawing twanged melodies out of the four-footlong instrument.
Anwarul Quadir (1887-1948) was a key literary figure whose work significantly influenced the intellectual movement of Bengali Muslims in late colonial Bengal.
If you think about the international reaction to the Bangladesh Liberation War, you most likely would consider the United States government openly siding with Pakistan.
In the sixties of the last century, I earned my primary degree with majors in Philosophy and Indian Studies and became a secondary school teacher.
Cartography in India might have had its roots in this expansionist ambition but went on to achieve much more than this. Rennell’s Map of Hindostan, published by an act of Parliament in 1782, inaugurated the cartographic identity of modern India for the first time on the world stage.
Although Rammohun Roy was notably many things, he was not an unlikely person to write a grammar—or, in fact, two grammars: one in English and one in Bangla, the latter being a free translation of the former.
Kazi Nazrul Islam, according to Kazi Abdul Wadud (1895-1970), perhaps the first formidable critic who took him seriously, “was the first writer among Bengali Muslims of the modern era who was able to conquer the hearts of Hindus and Muslims alike of Bengal.”
