Bengal: A Region with a Pioneering Past and an Uncertain FutureCarmen Brandt und and Kirsten Hackenbroch

ASIEN – Nr. 130 (2014) pp. 5–7

This special issue of ASIEN is dedicated to the region of Bengal, which was the focus of two interdisciplinary “Conferences on Bengal Related Studies for Students and Young Scholars” at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 2010 and 2012. The conferences brought together young scholars from different disciplines, primarily the humanities, whose research focuses on different cultural, geographic, historic, linguistic, political, and socioeconomic aspects of the Bengal region — an area today consisting mainly of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. The four papers in this issue each present a strand of work to be found on Bengal as a region in different disciplines. The two conferences from which these articles emerged revealed the challenge of integrating varying disciplines, theoretical perspectives, and methodologies. Nonetheless, all four papers discuss processes of societal change — and it is herein that interdisciplinary methodologies can help contribute to an understanding of the wider developments that are taking place in a particular region…