Neilesh Bose
Biographic Data
| ID | 201452 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Neilesh Bose |
| GIVEN NAMES | Neilesh |
| FAMILY NAME | Bose |
| SIGNATURE | BOSE N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Victoria |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6125-0570 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Passages through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples, and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890-1940 by Somak Biswas
Historical interest in globally recognized Indian “gurus,” such as Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), waxes and wanes with historical and political fashions. At times, such figures have been recognized as liberal, progressive exemplars of a composite Indian religiosity and purveyors of irenic political practices. At other times, these same figures have been branded as narrowly nationali…
Understanding Indo-Canadian Sikh Women’s Challenges after Covid-19
This paper focuses on Indo-Canadian Sikh women’s issues after Covid-19 and their challenges of diasporic consciousness. It is based on a study conducted with face-to-face interviews in Victoria, Canada, to assess these women’s post-Covid-19 challenges in healthcare and employment and their diasporic dual identity crisis. The research addressed questions like: What are the challenges of Indo-Canadian Sikh women in Canada after Covid-19 and the imp…
Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam, and Literature of the Bengali Muslims
The History of Afghanistan as Global History
Faiz Ahmed's Afghanistan Rising enters several historical subfields through a textured study of Afghanistan's modern history. This introduction to the kitabkhana offers a snapshot of these contributions—and their limits—through the lens of recent developments in imperial history, legal history, and global history
South Asia Archive
South Asia Archive, https://www.southasiaarchive.com/ Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (Chicago, 2015) and Sumit Guha’s History and Collective Me
Lex Mercatoria , Legal Pluralism, and the Modern State through the Lens of the East India Company, 1600–1757
As the debate over historical antecedents to contemporary forms of lex mercatoria suggests, the nature of legal authority appears to be changing into a less familiar, more pluralistic form, even as states struggle to reassert their power. In seeking to understand this transformation in—and decentering of—the modern state's authority, we consider the multiple sources of legal authority claimed by the East India Company (1600–1757) and the way in w…
Special Section: Oral Histories of Decolonisation: Bengali Intellectuals, Memory and the Archive
Special Section: Oral Histories of Decolonisation: Bengali Intellectuals, Memory and the Archive." South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 41(4), p. 827
Inheritance and the Idea of ‘the East’ in Banglaphone Thought in the Era of Decolonisation
Recent research on intellectual histories of the Global South explore the nature of inheritance and the incorporation of ideas from diverse places into colonial and post-colonial histories. Though research into the histories of science, liberalism and nationalism have multifaceted reference points in the discipline of history, histories of intellectuals in conversation with the history of decolonisation remain a missing link in the history of the…
Decolonization and South Asian Studies: Pakistan, “Failure,” and the Promise of Area Studies
(2017). Decolonization and South Asian Studies: Pakistan, “Failure,” and the Promise of Area Studies. South Asian Review: Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 43-49
Revisiting India's Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics , edited by Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola
Chandak Sengoopta. The Rays before Satyajit: Creativity and Modernity in Colonial India
Chandak Sengoopta’s cultural and intellectual history of the illustrious Ray family of India—usually known in the Western world through the twentieth century filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1921–1992)—explores three generations of Rays, from the eighteenth century through the early-twentieth-century birth of Satyajit. With links to everything from printing technology, religious reform, children’s literature, book design, nationalist politics, painting, a…
India in a World: Dilemmas of Sovereignty
Azfar Moin's The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam prompts a consideration not only of the histories of Islam and early modern connected histories of Central and South Asia, but also of current debates about local and global history‐writing. Moin's work intersects with a strand of comparative world history—following Victor Lieberman's Strange Parallels —but also engages strands of historical anthropology, bringing to li…
Notes for a Muslim American theatre historiography or a conclusion that is a beginning
Roundtable: Ayad Akhtar and the politics of representation and reception of Muslims on American stages
Commentary: The dramaturgy of political violence: Muslim Americans on American Stages – Princeton University, 3 April 2015
Expansions of the dramaturgy of political violence: Snapshots of three Muslim American playwrights
Communicationsreviewserratum
Shukla Sanyal. Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal
Shukla Sanyal’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda, and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal explores the revolutionary political culture of early-twentieth-century Bengal. Rather than studying political parties, radical student groups, or revolutionary newspapers in isolation, Sanyal’s work promises to offer new insights into the topic of nationalism in colonial India through a study of pamphlets and propaganda. Sanyal aims to “illustrate the e…
Performing History and Constructing 'Culture: Ronnie Govender's1949and the Romanticism of Historical Memory
Though both South Asian and South African literary and cultural studies boast deep critical traditions, rarely have critics specifically focused on dramatic literature and the performative acts of Indian South Africans. Theatre – as an aesthetic genre as well as a social institution – has been remarkably under-theorised within Indian Ocean communities, even though its power in Indian South African communities and within South African history and …
Recasting the region: Language, culture, and Islam in colonial Bengal
Presents an analysis of Muslim political mobilization in the late 20th century, arguing that it emerged out of a sustained engagement with Bengali intellectual and literary traditions rather than from north Indian calls for a separatist Muslim state.
Regional Confidence and the Rise of Folklore
By turning the gaze to sites other than the urban, formally educated intellectuals, this chapter lays stress upon Bengali Muslim cultural history while examining the attitudes maintained towards folk culture and mufassils (hinterland towns outside of Calcutta and Dacca), within the specific context of Muslim responses and constructions of such folk culture in Bengal during the 1930s. Concurrent with the process by which Hindu intellectuals constr…
Literary Publics in Dacca
Traversing one end of urban Bengal to another, this chapter looks at how Dacca (the present capital of Bangladesh), the putative city of mosques, but also a city of Hindu bhadralok (the educated and refined classes), and many others besides Muslim elites, hosted Muslim modernist movements just like the ones held in Calcutta. The focus of the chapter is the Dacca University–based Muslim Sahitya Samaj (Muslim Literary Society), formed in 1926, and …
Defying the perpetual exception: Culture and power in South Asian Islam
In a recent anthology of writings on Muslim South Asian culture and history,1 Barbara Metcalf discusses South Asia’s frequent casting as ‘marginal’ to the historical and cultural centres of the Isl
The Cannibalized Career of Liberalism in Colonial India
The interpretation of liberalism as a project that not only masks, but enables, political domination has long held currency in South Asian historiography. Recently, the subject of liberalism and empire in both francophone and anglophone contexts has returned to discussions in broader imperial historiography. One especially pressing question that emerges from these approaches is how to analyze intellectuals of colonized countries, such as India, w…
Remapping Muslim literary culture: Folklore, Bulbul , and world-making in late colonial Bengal
Bengali Muslim literary culture comprises a conspicuously under-researched domain of colonial Indian history. That Muslims formed the majority of Bengal’s population by the early twentieth century has been recognized in a variety of sources, but the comprehension of this fact within the cultural and literary histories of colonial India has eluded modern historians. Late colonial Bengal saw the rise of a Muslim literary culture that included inten…
Purba Pakistan Zindabad: Bengali Visions of Pakistan, 1940-1947
This paper details the history of the concept of Pakistan as debated by Bengali intellectuals and literary critics from 1940-1947. Historians of late colonial South Asia and analysts of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab along with colonial Indian 'Muslim minority' provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual aspects of Bengali conceptions of the Pakistan idea. When Bengal has come int…
The Cannibalized Career of Liberalism in Colonial India
The interpretation of liberalism as a project that not only masks, but enables, political domination has long held currency in South Asian historiography. Recently, the subject of liberalism and empire in both francophone and anglophone contexts has returned to discussions in broader imperial historiography. One especially pressing question that emerges from these approaches is how to analyze intellectuals of colonized countries, such as India, w…
Remapping Muslim literary culture: Folklore, Bulbul , and world-making in late colonial Bengal
Bengali Muslim literary culture comprises a conspicuously under-researched domain of colonial Indian history. That Muslims formed the majority of Bengal’s population by the early twentieth century has been recognized in a variety of sources, but the comprehension of this fact within the cultural and literary histories of colonial India has eluded modern historians. Late colonial Bengal saw the rise of a Muslim literary culture that included inten…
Performing History and Constructing 'Culture: Ronnie Govender's1949and the Romanticism of Historical Memory
Though both South Asian and South African literary and cultural studies boast deep critical traditions, rarely have critics specifically focused on dramatic literature and the performative acts of Indian South Africans. Theatre – as an aesthetic genre as well as a social institution – has been remarkably under-theorised within Indian Ocean communities, even though its power in Indian South African communities and within South African history and …
Defying the perpetual exception: Culture and power in South Asian Islam
In a recent anthology of writings on Muslim South Asian culture and history,1 Barbara Metcalf discusses South Asia’s frequent casting as ‘marginal’ to the historical and cultural centres of the Isl
New Settler Colonial Histories at the Edges of Empire: "Asiatics," settlers, and law in colonial South Africa
The history of Indians in colonial South Africa betrays a long history of settlement, from at least the mid-seventeenth century, regulated by inter-imperial spaces of negotiation, first via the regulation of religion and custom in the 1795-1814 period and then via the regulation of mobile laborers a century later in the high era of legal intervention from 1885-1914. During the latter period, Indians were still categorized as "Asiatic," even thoug…
Muslim Modernism and Trans-regional Consciousness in Bengal, 1911–1925: The Wide World of Samyabadi
Histories of Marxism in South Asia often focus on the great men of colonial Indian politics, such as M. N. Roy, who imagined political futures away from nation or identity, or narrowly on activists like Muzaffar Ahmad, the founder of the Communist Party of India, without consideration of the regional-historical and intellectual contexts out of which such activism and imaginations sprang. Using the Bengali Muslim context of the early twentieth cen…
Care and rehabilitation of prisoners in the Muslim community in Britain
Care and rehabilitation of prisoners in the Muslim community in Britain
Bombay Dreams (review)
Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (review)
Reviewed by: Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India Neilesh Bose Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India. By Nandi Bhatia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004; pp. 206. $49.50 cloth. Nandi Bhatia seeks to offer, via an analysis of colonial and postcolonial Indian theatre, a theoretical contribution to the world of subaltern resis…
The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
Book Review| December 01 2008 The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain Nicholas B. Dirks Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006 xviii + 389 pp., $27.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper) Neilesh Bose Neilesh Bose Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2008) 28 (3): 565–567. https…
Sharuk and Shylock: The creation of a South Asian American aesthetic
South Asian diasporic theatre in the Americas, unlike its counterparts in other regions such as the UK, has only recently begun to develop its own aesthetic voice and tradition of dramatic literature and theatrical production. This essay examines the landmark play, Shishir Kurup's Merchant on Venice and its premiere production in Chicago in 2007, in order to initiate a historical discussion of South Asian American theatre history. Through an exam…
Muslim Modernism and Trans-regional Consciousness in Bengal, 1911–1925: The Wide World of Samyabadi
Histories of Marxism in South Asia often focus on the great men of colonial Indian politics, such as M. N. Roy, who imagined political futures away from nation or identity, or narrowly on activists like Muzaffar Ahmad, the founder of the Communist Party of India, without consideration of the regional-historical and intellectual contexts out of which such activism and imaginations sprang. Using the Bengali Muslim context of the early twentieth cen…
The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab
Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (2010), x + 277 (University of California Press, Berkeley, £27.95/$40.00). The social history of language and
Recasting the region: Language, culture, and Islam in colonial Bengal
Presents an analysis of Muslim political mobilization in the late 20th century, arguing that it emerged out of a sustained engagement with Bengali intellectual and literary traditions rather than from north Indian calls for a separatist Muslim state.
Regional Confidence and the Rise of Folklore
By turning the gaze to sites other than the urban, formally educated intellectuals, this chapter lays stress upon Bengali Muslim cultural history while examining the attitudes maintained towards folk culture and mufassils (hinterland towns outside of Calcutta and Dacca), within the specific context of Muslim responses and constructions of such folk culture in Bengal during the 1930s. Concurrent with the process by which Hindu intellectuals constr…
Literary Publics in Dacca
Traversing one end of urban Bengal to another, this chapter looks at how Dacca (the present capital of Bangladesh), the putative city of mosques, but also a city of Hindu bhadralok (the educated and refined classes), and many others besides Muslim elites, hosted Muslim modernist movements just like the ones held in Calcutta. The focus of the chapter is the Dacca University–based Muslim Sahitya Samaj (Muslim Literary Society), formed in 1926, and …
Defying the perpetual exception: Culture and power in South Asian Islam
In a recent anthology of writings on Muslim South Asian culture and history,1 Barbara Metcalf discusses South Asia’s frequent casting as ‘marginal’ to the historical and cultural centres of the Isl
The Cannibalized Career of Liberalism in Colonial India
The interpretation of liberalism as a project that not only masks, but enables, political domination has long held currency in South Asian historiography. Recently, the subject of liberalism and empire in both francophone and anglophone contexts has returned to discussions in broader imperial historiography. One especially pressing question that emerges from these approaches is how to analyze intellectuals of colonized countries, such as India, w…
Remapping Muslim literary culture: Folklore, Bulbul , and world-making in late colonial Bengal
Bengali Muslim literary culture comprises a conspicuously under-researched domain of colonial Indian history. That Muslims formed the majority of Bengal’s population by the early twentieth century has been recognized in a variety of sources, but the comprehension of this fact within the cultural and literary histories of colonial India has eluded modern historians. Late colonial Bengal saw the rise of a Muslim literary culture that included inten…
Hiding the Nation in the Global: Modern intellectual history and South Asia
New Settler Colonial Histories at the Edges of Empire: "Asiatics," settlers, and law in colonial South Africa
The history of Indians in colonial South Africa betrays a long history of settlement, from at least the mid-seventeenth century, regulated by inter-imperial spaces of negotiation, first via the regulation of religion and custom in the 1795-1814 period and then via the regulation of mobile laborers a century later in the high era of legal intervention from 1885-1914. During the latter period, Indians were still categorized as "Asiatic," even thoug…
Purba Pakistan Zindabad: Bengali Visions of Pakistan, 1940-1947
This paper details the history of the concept of Pakistan as debated by Bengali intellectuals and literary critics from 1940-1947. Historians of late colonial South Asia and analysts of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab along with colonial Indian 'Muslim minority' provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual aspects of Bengali conceptions of the Pakistan idea. When Bengal has come int…
Shukla Sanyal. Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal
Shukla Sanyal’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda, and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal explores the revolutionary political culture of early-twentieth-century Bengal. Rather than studying political parties, radical student groups, or revolutionary newspapers in isolation, Sanyal’s work promises to offer new insights into the topic of nationalism in colonial India through a study of pamphlets and propaganda. Sanyal aims to “illustrate the e…
Performing History and Constructing 'Culture: Ronnie Govender's1949and the Romanticism of Historical Memory
Though both South Asian and South African literary and cultural studies boast deep critical traditions, rarely have critics specifically focused on dramatic literature and the performative acts of Indian South Africans. Theatre – as an aesthetic genre as well as a social institution – has been remarkably under-theorised within Indian Ocean communities, even though its power in Indian South African communities and within South African history and …
Notes for a Muslim American theatre historiography or a conclusion that is a beginning
Roundtable: Ayad Akhtar and the politics of representation and reception of Muslims on American stages
Commentary: The dramaturgy of political violence: Muslim Americans on American Stages – Princeton University, 3 April 2015
Expansions of the dramaturgy of political violence: Snapshots of three Muslim American playwrights
Communicationsreviewserratum
Decolonization and South Asian Studies: Pakistan, “Failure,” and the Promise of Area Studies
(2017). Decolonization and South Asian Studies: Pakistan, “Failure,” and the Promise of Area Studies. South Asian Review: Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 43-49
Revisiting India's Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics , edited by Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola
History (27 works) · Political science (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (19 works) · History (17 works) · Politics (17 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Colonialism (12 works) · Archaeology (11 works) · Art (11 works)