Abstract
A remarkable intimacy between Bengalis and dreams is widely known, so much so that the region is globally known as much for its ferocious Royal Bengal tigers as for people’s pervasive predilection for dreaming. I was once struck in the early 1990s by a British academician’s casual, but astute, remark in the cafeteria of a premier college of London: ‘dreaming Bengal’. It immediately occurred to me that if one had to capture the differentia specifica of Bengalis in a single word, ‘dreams’ would be one of the fittest: dreamy Bengalis, dream-soaked Bengalis, dream-loving Bengalis, dream-worshipping Bengalis, and so on.
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Greenhough, P. (1982), Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
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© 2013 Springer India
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Maharatna, A. (2013). Dreaming Bengal. In: India’s Perception, Society, and Development. Springer, India. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1017-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1017-7_3
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