Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-201) and index.

Preface: Ways and means of the narrative -- Introduction: Threads of memories! -- Weaving contemporary and comparable remembrances -- A family maverick : existential slog and identity encounters! -- Nuri : a virtuous woman with a voice of her own! -- Achkan/sherwani, fez, lungi or dhoti? identity & dress -- The incredible Rezu Chacha : quest for Sufism in a rural community? -- Kaleidoscopic rural elites : Rai Sahebs/khandans/beparis? -- Muslim identity imaginations : "Never apologize for being a Muslim!" -- Eclectic historiography : "Demise of memories is the end of history" -- Conclusion: Memories are a Cherag on the edge of history!

"Blended with the author's own family remembrances and diverse sources including his doctoral and post-doctoral research and field works, this is a recount of the rural Muslim historiography in Colonial Bengal, a largely ignored swathe in the dominant chronicles of South Asia. Between the twilight of the 19th Century and nearly the first half of the 20th Century, the Muslims in Colonial Bengal in India were haunted by misgivings about an alien rule and its cohorts. Resistance to change, self-denial, religiosity, the conflicting urges of survival, the spiraling Hindu-Muslim discord, the feudal constraints and marginalization by the bhadralok swirled around them. The British Indian Bengal wracked by religious, cultural, social, and political conflicts come alive in the intergenerational narrative in this book. Authored by an academician and a well-published scholar on South Asia, this is a meticulous, insightful and comprehensive portrait of a rural Muslim family in a historical context. It addresses the scholars, students and specialists as well as the general readers about a rural Muslim family's existential challenges intertwined with history, society, political conflicts, identity and religiosity. Conjoined by the known historical context and backed by reliable oral narratives, qualitative interviews, authentic memoirs, and scholarly sources, this is not a chronological autobiographical memoir. Relevant to the academics and interesting to avid readers, this recount touches several disciplines from history and politics to anthropology as well as the probing readers"--

History & Philosophy

Sumaiya Kainat Bintey Kohinoor