Mirrors of Modernity across Bengali Borderlines: Autobiographical Traces of the Search for Self

This essay addresses a persistent lacuna in the voluminous scholarship on pre-1947 Bengal: a comparative study of how Hindu and Muslim intellectuals, between 1850 and 1950, engaged with fault lines of socioeconomic asymmetry and inherited prejudice. Through a close reading of three Bengali autobiographies (Rajnarayan Basu's Ātmacarit of 1909, Sivanath Sastri's Ātmacarit of 1919, and Jasimuddin's Thākurbāṛir Āṅgināẏ of 1961), it explores the intersections between realities of India and representations of Britain, as well as between Hindu and Muslim lifeworlds, in the medium of autobiographical self-searching. Building upon recent studies of South Asian modernity that move beyond binary frameworks of resistance versus accommodation, the essay proposes a tripartite framework of "incremental", "cosmopolitan", and "fractured" modalities of colonial subject formation. These modalities, it is argued, do not operate in isolation; rather, they unfold through dynamic inter-relationships of braided interaction, cascade effects, and productive interference, with their direction and intensity shaped by differential access to economic resources, institutional positions, and social capital. By attending to the material conditions under which universalist visions persistently become fractured against quotidian realities, the essay reveals modernity's arrival in Bengal as a non-linear process in which the search for self remains inseparable from the search for livelihood, recognition, and belonging across Hindu-Muslim borderlines.