The Construction of the Hindu Identity in Medieval Western Bengal: The Role of Popular Cults

Speaker: Shri Jawhar Sircar, CEO, Prasar Bharati
 
Chair: Prof. Dipankar Gupta

The focus is on how only one of the 5 Divisions of Bengal (the western Rarh tract, i.e., modern West Bengal) became a Hindu majority region, while the 4 other Divisions of Bengal (including Bangladesh) had an overwhelming Muslim domination.  Sircar has been analysing this from the early 1980s and had undertaken field researches for a project of historical anthropology, that was supported by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) which covered the 6 western districts of Bengal.  His conclusions are that there were ‘three distinct phenomena’ that helped the revival and reconstruction of the Hindu identity, in the western part of Bengal, which he will narrate through slides, tables, statistics and maps, based on his monograph.”