Through her field study and narratives in bhajan ashrams and temples in Nabadwip, the ‘city of widows’ (p. 29), Nilanjana Goswami explores the position of women amidst the exclusionary nature of religious practices as also the commingling of religion and politics, demonstrated through the presence of framed photos of local ministers and MLAs (Members of Legislative Assembly) in the bhajan ashrams.
However, one must point out that, a) the research focus on only ‘software professionals’ can be critiqued on the ground that it cannot be considered as representative of a much larger and a heterogeneous new middle class, as the author herself observes, which is not confined to urban metropolitan India, nestled in gated communities/SEZ or EPZ; b) the author needed to explain the shift in the cultural and political agenda of the new middle class in more detail.
The Bengali intellectual displays this immense appetite for knowledge, and it does not matter where it came from. Whether it is Badal Sircar or Kunal Basu or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, they are not afraid of looking far and wide to grasp, and even grab, ways of seeing and ways of writing. But this is overlaid on a deep Bengaliness. And that saves them in many instances from being blown off their feet.
The genesis of the book lies in Subramaniam’s stint as a teacher at CalArts, during which he felt the need for a ‘handy guide of music theory’ potentially useful to ‘a practical musician and a composer’ (p. 1). This led to the authors collaborating on a work initially titled Euphony, of which the book being reviewed here is an extensively revised edition. The authors’ backgrounds attest to their formidable grasp over three distinct forms of music, namely the Hindustani, Carnatic, and Western classical systems.
But a complex formal puzzle is announced in the Author’s Note: ‘The chapters in this book are marked with a number and an alphabet. The alphabet marks its own absence in the chapter whereas the number is a more conventional ordering. And in embarking on this book, you are invited to follow either the numbers or alphabets and you will stilll be reading the same book…’
Suman Nath, Riziya, and Tahirul, are all sensitive, intelligent, and thinking individuals who are victims of the social structures that they question but fail to surpass. Religion is not a matter of spiritual sublimation, as Riziya and Suman would like to believe, or a matter of juridical authority, as Tahirul would like to believe. It is twisted and deployed for politically motivated ends by the residents of Sadnahati.