Description: A team of historians, anthropologists, literature experts and women's studies' specialists explore in this book the various levels of mentality, with emphasis on the differences in the mentality of the Baul, the Bhadralok and the Mullah which developed within the same Bengali society. They explore realms of experience not charted in conventional history - the changed contours assumed by rationality when transplanted in a context beyond Europe; the violent fundamentalist reaction engendered thereby in a non-European society; and the local and older forms of popular materialism which were marginalized in the process. In Bengal the colonial middle class subjected a whole range of familial and gender relations to the yardstick of 'reason'; fostered new images of womanhood; and transformed childhood, adolescence and youth by means of the knowledge imparted through school and college. But, the monopoly the Bhadralok had over the new knowledge, and the lonely path charted by the Baul with his own homegrown notions of reason and justice, made both vulnerable to the fury of the Mullah. No history of mentality has been written so far as regards Indian society, through there are a few psycho-historical studies.

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