Revisiting the Question of Widow Remarriage
Surbhi Vatsa
WIDOWS OF COLONIAL BENGAL: GENDER, MORALITY, AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATION by By Aishika Chakraborty Primus Books, New Delhi, 2023, 427 pp., INR 1795.00
October 2024, volume 48, No 10

Aishika Chakraborty’s Widows of Colonial Bengal, her thesis-turned-book spanning more than four hundred pages, is a very accessible read due to its lucid style as well as its content.

It locates itself within a large and richly proliferating genealogy of the emergent gender question in the colonial period alongside works by historians like Lata Mani, Tanika Sarkar, Jyoti Atwal, Sudhir Chandra, NV Prasad, Uma Chakravarti, Kumkum Sangari, Sudesh Vaid, Ania Loomba and others. The long Introduction does a commendable job of laying out the disciplinary and historiographical horizons of the field as well as spelling out the terms of the various debates around tradition/modernity and reform/revivalism or cultural nationalism within which the present study is to be located.

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