A valedictory lecture is usually an anodyne statement—at its best a summing up of one's life-work, rich in wisdom and scholarship. The present exercise does not belong to that category, not merely because the speaker lays no claim to wisdom or scholarship, but because the present moment is unsuited to anodyne statements on India. Besides, the concern of this lecture has only peripheral links with my areas of professional expertise. It is addressed to a political-cum-cultural phenomenon in contemporary India which, in the opinion of many, portends a grieveous threat to the cherished values on which Indian democracy is based. We also believe that this threat, if not neutralized in time, may yet destroy the structure of polity and society which the Indian nation-state has sought to nurture; and done so, despite its many failures, with at least a modicum of success. A struggle is on for the hearts and minds of the Indian people. The present exercise is meant to be a modest contribution to the debate which is at the very heart of that struggle.

Calcutta's failure to insulate itself from the communal hysteria that plagued the length and breadth of India in the aftermath of the demolition of Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 came as a rude shock to the city's intelligentsia. True, the Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946 had initiated a vicious circle of communal rioting in the subcontinent climaxing in the ‘truncated settlement’ of 15 August 1947. The events of 1946–47 were viewed by left-wing intellectuals as a defeat of radicalism in post-Second World War Bengal politics. But the structural disarticulation between class and politics experienced during these Partition days was rapidly bridged in the western half of British Bengal that came to form a part of the Indian union. While other regions of India continued to be struck by periodic bouts of Hindu–Muslim violence, West Bengal remained relatively free of the communal virus. Calcutta, its capital city, emerged as the crucible of the country's left and democratic politics.

Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Calcutta was the setting for the first sustained encounter between Asian intellectuals and the west. An Indian intelligentsia living in Calcutta responded in a most creative way to aspects of European culture that became available to them in the city. Much about this response is now contentious. If the term Bengal Renaissance is still generally applied to it, the implications of that term are disputed. It is no longer necessarily assumed that ‘modern’ India was born in early nineteenth-century Calcutta by a fusing of what was western and what was ‘traditional’. Assumptions that Indian cultures in general and that of Hindu Bengal in particular lacked a capacity to change and to develop on their own internal dynamics, whatever the input from the west, now look more than a little ‘orientalist’. Furthermore, even if the Bengal Renaissance can be shown to have had its roots in its own culture, to some recent critics it was still a movement whose impact was severely limited by the very narrow base on which it rested: an elite group enclosed in a colonial situation. Yet, however the Renaissance may be reassessed, there can still be no doubt that Calcutta under the East India Company contained Indian intellectuals of exceptional talent, who absorbed much from the west. ‘The excitement over the literature, history and philosophy of Europe as well as the less familiar scientific knowledge was deep and abiding’, Professor Raychaudhuri has recently written.

In the late nineteenth century British expatriate enterprise enjoyed extraordinary success. A few large firms effectively dominated the external trading sector and the modern industrial economy of Eastern India. Based in Calcutta, these firms have been credited with the introduction into India not only of modern industry, but also of modern corporate organization. However, having reached a peak of dominance in the early 1900s, British enterprise seemed to lose its dynamism and became increasingly associated with the old and declining sectors of the Indian industrial and trading economy.

Studies concerned with the intimate areas of human experience suggest that the institutions and social mores structured around the instinctive drives of mankind—such as sex, love and fear, are not meant to serve the same purpose in every culture. Belief systems, world views and culturally-determined expectations from life determine the texture, causation and expression of even our very basic emotions. Nature's purpose for the sexual impulse may be the propagation of the species, but in controlling and harnessing this drive for the ends of social cohesion, different cultures have had very different objectives in view and used very different means. The emotive affects associated with its expression have also varied accordingly.

By the grace of the Almighty an extraordinary species of sentient life has been found on earth in the nineteenth century: they are known as modern Bengalis. After careful analysis zoological experts have found that this species displays the external bodily features of homo sapiens. They have five fingers on their hands and feet; they have no tails; and their bones and cranial structures are indeed similar to the human species. However as yet there is no comparable unanimity about their inner nature. Some believe that in their inner nature too they are similar to humans; others think that they are only externally human; in their inner nature they are in fact beasts.

Which side do we support in this controversy? We believe in the theory which asserts the bestiality of Bengalis. We learnt this theory from English newspapers. According to some redbearded savants, just as the creator had taken atoms of beauty from all beautiful things to make Tilottama, in exactly the same way, by taking atoms of bestiality from all animals he has created the extraordinary character of the modern Bengali. Slyness from the fox, sycophancy and supplication from the dog, cowardliness from sheep, imitativeness from the ape and volubility from the ass—by a combination of these qualities He has made the modern Bengali rise in the firmament of history: a presence which illuminates the horizon, the centre of all of India's hopes and future prospects, and the great favourite of the savant Max Mueller.

Dr Kaiser Haq gives his fine new English translation of Tagore's novella Chaturanga the title ‘Quartet’. This elegantly preserves much of the meaning of the Bengali title, for not only does it imply the ‘four limbs’ or ‘four parts’ that make up the novella—the four chapters that were originally published separately in consecutive issues of Sabujpatra (November–February, 1915–16)—but also, as in a string quartet, the interplay between the four characters that the chapters are named after. Since Tagore was always alert to the full meaning or etymology of names, perhaps we should also remember that a chaturanga in epic India was a complete army comprising elephants, chariots, cavalry and infantry. This matches the grandeur of the novella, the vigour and precision of its prose, and the moral and spiritual battles that are its subject. Finally, chaturanga as a name for a chess game (technically a four-player version of the game) evokes both the intellectualism of the book and its concentrated passion.

The poet known to the Hindi literary world as ‘Bachchan’ was born as ‘Harivansh Rai’ in 1907 to an Allahabad Kāyasth family. His given name derived from a prescribed recitation of the Harivamśa Purāna that had broken his parents' much-lamented childlessness; the pandit's honorarium for the recitation was 1001 rupees, paid off in monthly instalments over the first ten years of the boy's childhood. The roman spelling of the name varies, the Sanskritic ‘Harivansh’ standing in contrast to the form ‘Harbans’ with which the author's Ph.D. thesis is signed. Such a distinction is not without significance, for underlying the author's cosmopolitan exterior lies an intimately provincial Allahabadi character more fully caught by the ‘Harbans’ spelling than its somehow sanitized, all-India tatsama equivalent. It is a feature that one longs in vain to recapture in English translation many a time, for example to resonate with the semi-tatsama phrase pūrab-pacchim, for ‘East and West’, so much more redolent of the vernacular scene than its Sanskritic parent pūrva-paścim. But in English, East is ‘East’ and West is ‘West’.

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).

If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

This article examines the dissemination of military propaganda and the operation of censorship structures within the Indian Army ‘units’—a term used in historically contemporary documentary sources to denote regiments, divisions or battalions—serving in the eastern provinces of the subcontinent during the Second World War. Instead of presenting propaganda as merely being misleading information, this work operates with Philip Taylor's interpretation of it being a combination of ‘facts, fiction, argument or suggestion’, and concentrates instead on unravelling its form and the intent behind its deployment. Moreover, the often artificial distinction between ‘propaganda’ and ‘counter-propaganda’ is avoided, since the many wartime British public relations projects in South Asia that were aimed at contradicting particular enemy claims were very frequently represented as having other concerns. Particular attention is devoted to describing the military's attitudes towards policies of propaganda and information between 1942 and 1945, as these years saw Eastern India, defined in wartime official documents as being comprised of Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, the eastern districts of the United Provinces and the sparsely populated frontier areas bordering Burma, develop into an important base of operations against the Japanese armies located in Southeast Asia.