Ricerc@Sapienza

This study thus aims at throwing light to alternative notions of India’s cultural, social and economic renaissance which were circulated during the final decades of the colonial period and in various ways contributed to the vision of India that would come into being after independence. It focuses on Bengal’s response to Gandhi which was significantly conditioned both by certain regional cultural traits, as well as the colonial constraints faced by Bengali urban elites as they approached the ‘rural question’ as part of their own idea of ‘nation in the making’.

Adivasis are the indigenous people of eastern and central India who were identified as “tribes” under British colonial rule and who today have a constitutional status as “Scheduled Tribese. The notion of tribe, despite its evolutionist character, has been internalized to a large extent by the indigenous people themselves and has had a considerable role in shaping community identities. Colonial studies, moreover, were the first systematic investigations into these marginalized and subordinated communities and form an important primary source in historical research on Adivasis.

Through an analysis of travel accounts and memoirs of Hariprabha Takeda, this article
studies the experiences of a Bengali traveller / migrant to Japan in the first half of the 20th century.
It argues that the notion of a pan-Asian identity based on a shared cultural heritage, which was being
debated and popularized in early 20th century India, partly shaped her understanding of the society
and culture of her new habitation. Focusing on the issues of integration, identity and rootedness,