02438nam a22001577a 4500999001900000008004100019100003200060245014300092260005200235300003600287520177300323773005202096906001402148942000702162952011102169  c525195d525195240214b           ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d  aBhattacharya, Medha 949954  aLinguistic minorities and strategic mobilisation in eastern India: Bengali-Biharis during the ERA of linguistic territorialism (1935–57)  aThe Indian Economic and Social History Review    a60(3), Jul-Sep, 2023: p.275-300  aThis article analyses how linguistic minorities in the province of Bihar navigated the era of linguistic territorialism, when mainstream political organisations and figures within India largely agreed that specific linguistic communities ‘belonged’ in particular regions. Indian scholarship has tended to focus on the mechanisms that brought about the linguistic reorganisation of states in India, therefore, concentrating largely on the ways in which territory and language became intrinsically connected. This article will examine the link of language and belonging with regard to a ‘community’, which demanded that states remain linguistically and culturally heterogenous. It focuses on the section of Biharis that identified Bengali as their ‘mother-tongue’ and tracks the transformation of Bengali politics within the province/state during the transition from colonial rule to independence. It explores the ways in which narratives of historical Bengali settlement were deployed for different reasons across this period, and argues that Bengalis in Bihar conceptualised the ordering of the Indian nation in a way that was inherently different from mainstream understandings of how the country should be ordered during this period. Bengali-Bihari figures and publications deployed rhetoric that attached much greater value to territorial belonging than to linguistic or cultural belonging. This article demonstrates that contrary to common assumptions, there were large groups of people who conceptualised India not just as a linguistically heterogenous nation, but one that consisted of linguistically heterogenous states that protected minority linguistic communities. – Reproduced 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00194646231183347
  aThe Indian Economic and Social History Review    aLANGUAGES  cAR  00102ddc40709400244aIIPAbIIPAd2024-02-14h60(3), Jul-Sep, 2023: p.275-300pAR131031r2024-02-14yAR