The Invention of Private Life brings together a number of insightful essays by Sudipta Kaviraj written over the past fifteen years. Many of the essays have appeared previously. But reading them together, as a book, gives readers important and critical insights into modernity and its relationship to literary culture in Bengal. While most of the essays focus on the colonial period, particularly the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two—namely “The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal” and “Reading the Song of a City”—address the precolonial and early postcolonial periods respectively. The latter essay also marks Kaviraj's foray in the terrain of Hindi film song and demonstrates his extraordinary suppleness as a thinker of the modern condition in India.

Introducing this collection, Kaviraj puts forward a defense of literary analysis against detractors who might resist such practice on the grounds that literature is to be savored and not taken apart. He argues that analysis itself can be an enjoyable practice. Indeed, his reading of novels, poetry, and nonfiction makes it abundantly clear that Kaviraj is a rasika who mines a variety of texts to glean critical insights about modern Indian political thought and emotions. As he remarks, “[S]ince great literature … helps us think about its own worlds in interesting and unprecedented ways, it is important to reflect on the way the text sees the world, and … the way the world saw the text” (pp. 1–2). The seriousness of this claim is heightened by another statement soon after where Kaviraj argues that in the Indian context much of the “serious reflection” on modernity “is contained in literature” (p. 4).

This claim constitutes the most significant and polemical core of the book. Questions about the nature of power, the self, the meaning of love, humor, and revolution in modern India were raised and dealt with at length in literature produced during the colonial period. Whether or not literature was the most important mode of philosophical reflection in colonial India is a subject that will likely be debated by scholars in years to come. Many might ask: What was it about literature in the colonial period that made it the chosen vehicle for political thought? Why was this not the case in precolonial India? And in what ways has the place of literature been ceded to other modes of writing in the postcolonial period? These are valid questions that come to mind while reading The Invention of Private Life. But they do not detract from the finely textured treatment that Kaviraj reserves for each of his chosen texts and themes. This is particularly noteworthy in the present academic milieu where a righteous indignation at certain nineteenth-century Bengali intellectuals (Rabindranath Tagore and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in particular) and the Bengali bhadralok more generally, often with little first-hand acquaintance of their writings, have become par for the course.

Let me conclude with some examples of the more general points I made above. In an essay on precolonial Bengali literature, Kaviraj puts forth an observation that merits further research. He argues that most major innovations in medieval Bengali literature were associated with dissident religious traditions. Hence the caryapadas emerged out of the anti-Brahmanical spirit of Buddhist sects, the mangalkavyas from cults of lesser goddesses such as Manasa and Candi, and the padavalis from bhakti traditions. A sign of this dissidence was also the heteroglossic nature of the texts that clearly demonstrate the evolution of Bangla through interactions with Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. Colonial education marked a rupture in the development of Bengali as a composite linguistic enterprise that combined Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic influences.

Finally, a word on Kaviraj's masterful treatment of song-texts in this book, especially Vande Mataram and Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan. Vande Mataram has become a veritable minefield of controversy, with many regarding it as an anti-Muslim statement and as a celebration of an aggressive Hindu ideology. Kaviraj retrieves the history of the song's composition and its reception. For instance, Bankim's use of Sanskrit and Bengali in Vande Mataram, he tells us, left his learned contemporaries aghast, as they regarded such mixing as a literary infelicity. For Kaviraj though, Vande Mataram is a critical moment in the evolution of the Bengali language's capacity for abstraction. “In my reading,” he argues, “Vande Mataram is the aryastotra transformed by the stress of living through the violent, desecrating chemistry of colonialism” (p. 131). The song as a literary and sonic vehicle that registers the bewildering changes of modernity is also analyzed in the reading of Bombay Meri Jaan. Here Kaviraj shows how effectively the device of a duet was deployed in the film to transform the anonymous, threatening space of the modern Indian city into a domain of the underprivileged. Through the song, the Indian everyman (and woman) emerge as citizen subjects staking their claims upon urban space as the site of jouissance.