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The Death of an Uncrowned King—C. R. Das and Political Crisis in Twentieth-Century Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Paul Greenough
Paul Greenough
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
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Extract

These observations, which open a widely read essay on primitive religion, might with equal profit be applied to the comparative study of complex societies. They suggest an unusual descriptive project: to catalog the threats to social order in particular cultures in order to make revealing comparisons. They also imply that, armed with such a catalog, unusual meanings might be wrung out of recurrent disasters and common dilemmas. Such a project has not been ventured for South Asia, and I should like to begin with modern Bengal, but the embarassment arises that I am not confident I possess the “active principles” of Bengali culture. It is only by taking up acknowledged instances of “dangers,” “cataclysms,” and “disasters” that I expect to be able to reason back to ordering concepts and thus to complete the catalog. In the course of this short essay, however, only one specific calamity—the death of C. R. Das, a charismatic Indian politician—can be examined in detail. If I succeed in showing that this one calamity has a hitherto unrealized significance in modern Bengal, perhaps the reader will grant that the role of relatedcalamities in Bengal, and even in the whole of modern India, has not been insignificant.

Type
The Popular Culture of History
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 1986 , pp. 414 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1986

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References

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