Book Reviews : KIRIT K. SHAH, The Problem of Identity: Women in Early Indian Inscriptions, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 194

Abstract

two fundamental social categories. Unfortunately, Ray’s exclusive reliance on Tarashankar Bandopadhyay’s depiction of the complex inter-connectivity between land, labour and status in rural Bengal automatically puts a brake on his attempt to reveal a wider theme of emotional patterns characterising the bhaclrcclok and the chotalog. So speculative a set of investigations based on purely literary sources cannot fall into neat formulations. Ray, emerging more as a perspicacious literary critic than a conventional historian, seeks to ground his critical approach within a selective choice of texts, which leaves a suspicion that different texts would have hampered the free flow of his main argument: that nineteenth-century Bengali literature, though recast in a different mould, had thematic and emotional continuities with its pre-colonial past. Few will dispute the indigenous twist to the fiction erupting in colonial Bengal. Some will agree to the existence of an emotional