Promotional Information

The Imaginary Institution of India is the first major collection of Sudipta Kaviraj's essays and, as such, will be received with great curiosity and attention. -- Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California, Los Angeles

Table of Contents

Introduction: Literature as the Mirror of Modernity 1. On the Advantages of Being a Barbarian 2. Literature and the Moral Imaginations of Modernity 3. The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal 4. A Strange Love of Abstractions: The Making of a Language of Patriotism in Modern Bengali 5. Tagore and Transformations in the Ideals of Love 6. The Poetry of Interiority: The Creation of a Language of Modern Subjectivity in Tagore's Poetry 7. Laughter and Subjectivity: The Self-Ironical Tradition in Bengali Literature 8. Reading a Song of the City: Images of the City in Literature and Films 9. The Art of Despair: The Sense of the City in Modern Bengali Poetry 10. The Invention of Private Life: A Reading of Sibnath Sastri's Autobiography 11. The Second Mahabharata Index

About the Author

Sudipta Kaviraj is professor of Indian politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. He has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and was an Agatha Harrison Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford.

Reviews

The analysis is stimulating, elegant, and novel. Choice Kaviraj's narrative about the state in India is an important one, and it is high time these influential papers were collected in one volume. -- Sailen Routray Contemporary South Asia