Cultural Pluralism And Other Essays

In the first of the six essays collected in this book, the author defines cultural pluralism and traces its application or lack of it in the global context. Next he notes that, more often than not, Sanskrit and Indian literatures have been interchangeably used by scholars over a long period of time while Indian literature should be seen as an amalgam of all the literatures produced in different languages of India. The author shows that the Bengali identity has a long history in which language has played the dominant role. In a critique of most histories of Bengali literature, he complains that its periodization was influenced by an Eurocentric view of history that led many historians to ignore certain characteristics of Bengali literature in given periods to suit their division. The author is of the view that just like the identities of an individual, a society's identities are many while some of these are emphasized in different contexts and he applies this hypothesis to the case of the Muslims of Bengal down to the eighteenth century. The final essay seeks to look into the world view of the celebrated poet and thinker, Rabindranath Tagore.