| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Pradip Kumar Datta. Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. 312. $29.95.

This book represents a sedimentation of the rich, though often acrimonious, debates in South Asian history over the question of communalism. It shows how far the historiography on the subject has advanced since the early 1980s. Pradip Kumar Datta looks at communalism in Bengal in the 1920s with vastly more sophisticated concepts and methods than historians before him. 1

Datta's techniques are mainly discursive. He examines a series of interrelated texts from early twentieth-century Bengal—essays, pamphlets, news reports, editorials, official correspondence, some fiction—to describe the complex discursive field in which communal ideologies grow. Datta is particularly sensitive to the political uses of rhetoric. Unlike generations of historians before him, he does not think that ideological texts are to be read in order to peel away the layers of rhetoric and uncover some hidden truth representing a group claim or a class interest. Datta's book is an excellent example of how the writing of history has benefited from the so-called "linguistic turn." He has successfully interrogated and redeployed for his own purposes the established historical archive without abandoning the distinctive genre of the historical narrative. . . .

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