Concept Note

Bengal as a cultural, social, and analytical territorial space carries a series of nuances that bear, directly and indirectly, on the processes of identity formation. While these processes may be read as organic phenomena in pre-colonial and undivided Bengal, they became a prominent aspect of colonial and national identity politics in post-Partition Bengal. This volume explores the spectrum of such processes as they unfold across the transition from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial cultural and political history of Bengal, from the eighteenth century to the present.

The volume situates the interrelationship between popular culture and religious identities against the cultural and political landscapes of colonial and post-colonial Bengal. Its focus falls on both undivided colonial Bengal and post-colonial West Bengal, and on the interrelations between religious identities and emerging cultural forms within these spaces. It seeks to see Bengal as a cultural space constituted through diachronic and synchronic relationships between popular cultural forms and religion, and through the identity formations and political categorisations these relationships have produced. Such spaces are performed and expressed along various registers in which popular cultural forms—texts, visual culture, festivals, rituals, and modes of self-expression—play an instrumental role.

Historically, in colonial India, religion inspired art forms such as kavya, kabigan, natya, patachitra, panchali, harikatha, and jatra, which, drawing on mythological and religious figures, appealed to popular consciousness and thereby spurred the growth and dissemination of religious consciousness even before the formal advent of print modernity in India. The materialities of these art forms, conversely, triggered cultural transactions that rendered rigid religious divides porous and permeable. Bengali patachitra paintings, for instance, were predominantly concerned with Hindu gods and goddesses, yet they involved many Muslim artists and craftsmen; the boundaries organised by religion thus opened onto a space of “affective community” (Leela Gandhi 2005) that in some cases continues to this day.

In the early nineteenth century, patuas came to Calcutta’s Kalighat temple from different parts of Bengal. These artists included several endogamous groups (jati) belonging to varied regional, religious, and sectarian divisions. From the confluence of these cultural and religious practices, the Kalighat patachitra emerged as a popular visual form of religious imagery, storytelling, and social documentation. It encompassed images of deities, references to mythological narratives and kavyas, and critiques of the emergent westernised babu cultures. The didactic character of the earliest paintings was transformed into a popular art of critical social and philosophical reflection at the emergent religious site of Kalighat, catering to diverse identities and blurring cultural divides. Painters and their customers together constituted a public for which the tales of Manasa, a Hindu snake goddess, existed on par with those of Satyapir, a Muslim fakir.

Food habits and dietary practices likewise negotiate the relation between popular culture and religious identity. Food choices, being part of popular convention, structure the religious identities that organise social and cultural imaginaries. Alternatively, the cultural ecology and geography of a place may contest religious imaginaries founded on food culture. In coastal areas, for example, it is economic interdependence rather than religion that weaves the affective community, on the axis of sustainability; here religious identity, generated around popular cultural belief, becomes porous and permeable. The emergence of local and regional goddesses—Bonbibi, invoked against the threat of tigers in the Sundarbans, or Sitala, invoked against the incursion of epidemics such as cholera in colonial Bengal—developed communities founded on shared cultural belief and practice across religious divides.

While popular culture often worked in favour of social harmony and the “felt community” (Ray 2003) in Bengal, it also became, at times, a site of escalating religious tension and polarisation. The colonial state weaponised popular religious belief to widen identity divides through official and unofficial means alike—histories, rumours, stories, and narratives. Administrative practices such as the census, religious law, and political representation, together with historical and political narratives of unbridgeable communal enmity between Hindus and Muslims, hardened religious identities that were further capitalised upon by political leaders seeking power in the movement towards Partition. These narratives splintered syncretic co-existence and instilled the two-nation theory into popular consciousness. Cheap print technology, moreover, allowed popular cultural narratives from differing religious perspectives to essentialise a unilateral religious identity standing in direct opposition to the “other(s)” constituted in the same act of essentialisation.

In post-independence Bengal, these tensions have been both exacerbated by state religious politics and subjected to considerable ideological and cultural contestation through emerging cultural forms. Post-Partition riots, fanned by separatist sentiment, hardened the divisions between Hindu and Muslim religious identities. At the same time, the literary, visual, and performative circles of the post-independence era—writers such as Kamal Kumar Majumdar, Mahasweta Devi, and Syed Mustafa Siraj, and artists such as Ganesh Pyne and Bikash Bhattacharya—invoked religious tropes to foreground the syncretic interrelationships between religion and popular culture in Bengal, and the asymmetrical relation these bear to time as they revert to an ancient past and trace its relationships with the present. Painters, playwrights, filmmakers, and writers frequently anchor their narratives within a shared cultural past of colonial Bengal even in post-colonial times. These temporal anchorings narrativise the framework of post-colonial Bengali cultural identity, forging an interplay between cultural forms, narratives, and religious beliefs.

Recent interventions from Marxist, Dalit, feminist, Adivasi, and intersectional positions interrogate the governing assumptions of Bengali cultural identity. What processes these interrogations is itself a complex synergy between religion and popular culture. Gendered and intersectional perspectives—in the work of Mahasweta Devi, Manoranjan Byapari, Anita Agnihotri, and Amar Mitra, among others—demonstrate the intricate interrelationships between caste politics, religious identity, and popular cultural form in Bengal. At the same time, post-colonial Bengal has witnessed the gradual ascendance of a politics of Hindu identity alongside the spread of religious nationalism in India. The recent popular mandate with which the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party has assumed the reins of political power in the state marks a singularity in the post-colonial, public-making cultural politics of the party. This mandate announces a normative Hindu-Bengali cultural identity, inflected towards an image of masculine aggressiveness represented by the god-man Rama.

The volume addresses these issues through a situated and contingent cultural-historical lens rather than a settled, essentialised narrative. It stages a conversation between two fundamental questions: how have popular cultural forms shaped religious identity in colonial and post-colonial Bengal? And how does the evolving relationship between popular culture and religion in these two Bengals construct and challenge the idea of an essentialised Bengali identity, historically accounting for the changing institutions of power?

2.  Indicative Thematic Clusters

Abstracts are invited on, but not restricted to, the following clusters. Each is understood as a broad pointer around which arguments may be woven and chapters developed; all clusters take colonial and post-colonial Bengal as their frame.

1. Religion and popular songs
2. Religion and advertisement
3. Religion and forms of entertainment
4. Religion and popular perceptions of the Bengali body
5. Religion, culture, and intimate art forms
6. Religion and theatre
7. Religion and dietary discourses
8. Religion and painting
9. Religion and health
10. Religion and the printing press
11. Religion and cinema
12. Religion and environmental perceptions
13. Religion, caste, and engagements with the blue space (river rituals, the crossing of the kalapani, and related practices)
14. Religion, sport, and fandom
15. Religion and scientific discourses
16. Religion and popular recordings of time (almanacs, Bengali calendars, and related forms)

Proposals falling outside these headings are equally welcome, provided they speak to the broad thematic concerns of the volume.

3.  Submission Guidelines

• Abstract: 300 words, stating the argument, primary material, and critical framework of the proposed chapter.
• Keywords: five to six, listed below the abstract.
• Biographical note: 100 words, including institutional affiliation, research interests, and select publications.
• Format: a single editable file (.doc or .docx), with the author's name, affiliation, and email address at the head of the document.
• Deadline for abstracts: 31 October 2026.
• Email to: subhamdutta1@gmail.com, with the subject line Religion and Popular Culture in Bengal Volume.
• Full chapters (on invitation following abstract acceptance): [6,000–8,000 words including notes and references], formatted in [Chicago Notes-Bibliography / MLA 9] style.
• Contributions must be original, unpublished, and not under consideration elsewhere. Bengali-language sources are welcome; quotations should be accompanied by English translations, with transliteration used consistently throughout.

Note to editors: bracketed items above are placeholders to be confirmed before circulation.

4.  Enquiries

Queries regarding the scope of the volume, the suitability of a proposed topic, or the submission process may be addressed to Subham Dutta at subhamdutta1@gmail.com, with the subject line Religion and Popular Culture in Bengal Volume.