East of the West: Repossessing the Past In India

Public history, as it is practised in India, defies easy attempts at classification. This is partially because hardly anything that would be recognised as public history is identified as such by its author(s). For the term, despite its ever-increasing acceptance outside India as a discipline and a practice distinct from history, has yet to gain any currency within India. Any attempt to identify works that are self-consciously public history in the Indian context will likely not yield much fruit. Nor, for that matter, will borrowing any of the many definitions of the term from the West and trying to find works that adhere to it in India. Instead, this chapter will try to highlight the myriad forms that public engagements with the past have taken place in India. This article focuses specifically on museums, arguably the preeminent site of public engagements with the past in India. To that end, it will look at a new generation of museums that are charting new paths towards enabling a better public engagement with the past. It will also analyse a few institutional forms of public engagements with the past

The Archival Book as an Experimental Dialogue in Public History

This article argues for a new genre of book making which I call an archival book that is created to present archival material to the public. The book discussed here was published as a commemorative volume in 2010, soon after the centenary of the Indian physicist, Homi Bhabha. The archival book described here attempted to move away from the celebratory coffee table format and focused instead on the archives of the scientist. The article tries to define the key characteristics of the archival book that is meant for the public and not exclusively for a scholarly community and the challenges of presenting archival material in this form. Finally, the article focuses the inter-disciplinary nature of the archival book-making project and the collaborative way in which the writers and designer can work together in order to make the archives accessible, especially in countries where archives remain inaccessible to the general public

Colonialism and cultural identity : The making of a Hindu discourse, Bengal 1867-1905.

This thesis studies the construction of a Hindu cultural identity in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in Bengal. The aim is to examine how this identity was formed by rationalising and valorising an available repertoire of images and myths in the face of official and missionary denigration of Hindu tradition. This phenomenon is investigated in terms of a discourse (or a conglomeration of discursive forms) produced by a middle-class operating within the constraints of colonialism. The thesis begins with the Hindu Mela founded in 1867 and the way in which this organisation illustrated the attempt of the Western educated middle-class at self-assertion. In constructing a homogeneous Hindu identity, this social group hegemonically appropriated the distinct traditions of subordinated groups. Crucial to this project was another related one - that of history-writing. History, it was felt, contained the essence of civilisation and culture. A refutation of colonial notions about Hindus and Bengalis had to be achieved through the fusion of the historical and the mythological which sought to displace colonial history-writing. The anxiety about an ineffectual male identity ascribed to the Bengali male by colonial discourse prompted the imaging of meaningful icons of resistance in the form of heroic womanhood. The links between the figures, i.e., of the motherland, the mother and the ideal wife, are therefore especially significant. No less important is the reformulation of an alternative heroic male identity out of the conventional Hindu institution of Sannyas or asceticism by Vivekananda. He forwarded a notion of spiritual conquest by addressing the universalist dimensions of Hinduism. The political implications of this constructed identity was clearly revealed in the cultural events that preceded the partition of Bengal as well as those that formed and directed the Swadeshi movement

Comparison of liver function status between home treated and hospital treated SARS-CoV-2 survivors

Background: SARS-CoV-2 has emerged as one of the greatest challenges faced by the world. There is association of liver injury with SARS-CoV-2 infection indicated by abnormal ALT levels accompanied by altered bilirubin level in blood. The aim of the study was to evaluate the quantitative difference of serum ALT and bilirubin level in home and hospital treated patients.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University, from July 2020 to June 2021. After infection most of the patients with mild symptoms were treated at home but patients with difficulty in breathing and various complications were treated at the hospital. Due to SARS-CoV-2 infection certain derangement of liver enzymes were noticed.Results: This study was planned to evaluate the changes of liver enzymes (ALT) and serum bilirubin after the recovery of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients. The aim of the study was to compare the derangement of serum bilirubin and ALT in home and hospital treated patients.Conclusions: There was no significant difference regarding liver function between these two groups

Assessing groundwater stoichiometric composition and its suitability in northwestern Bangladesh

Groundwater quality analyses included pH, EC, cations (Ca2+, Mg2+, Na+, K+, Zn2+, Cu2+, Mn2+, Fe3+ and As3+), anions (CO32-, HCO3-, NO3-, SO42-, PO43- and Cl-) and TDS of northwestern Bangladesh. The samples contained Ca2+, Mg2+ and Na+ as the dominant cations and HCO3- and Cl- were the dominant anions. Ratios of major cations and anions of water samples suggest the predominance of Ca and Mg-containing minerals over Na-containing minerals. According to TDS and SAR values, all samples were classed as 'freshwater' and 'excellent' categories. The SSP of all waters was under 'excellent' and 'good' classes. All samples were within 'soft' class regarding hardness with 'suitable' RSC. Based on As3+, Zn2+, Mn2+, Fe3+, SO42-, NO3- and Cl- all groundwater samples were within the 'safe' limit for drinking but unsuitable for some industries for specific ions

Development and validation of a multimodal neuroimaging biomarker for electroconvulsive therapy outcome in depression: A multicenter machine learning analysis

Background Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is the most effective intervention for patients with treatment resistant depression. A clinical decision support tool could guide patient selection to improve the overall response rate and avoid ineffective treatments with adverse effects. Initial small-scale, monocenter studies indicate that both structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) and functional MRI (fMRI) biomarkers may predict ECT outcome, but it is not known whether those results can generalize to data from other centers. The objective of this study was to develop and validate neuroimaging biomarkers for ECT outcome in a multicenter setting. Methods Multimodal data (i.e. clinical, sMRI and resting-state fMRI) were collected from seven centers of the Global ECT-MRI Research Collaboration (GEMRIC). We used data from 189 depressed patients to evaluate which data modalities or combinations thereof could provide the best predictions for treatment remission (HAM-D score ⩽7) using a support vector machine classifier. Results Remission classification using a combination of gray matter volume and functional connectivity led to good performing models with average 0.82–0.83 area under the curve (AUC) when trained and tested on samples coming from the three largest centers (N = 109), and remained acceptable when validated using leave-one-site-out cross-validation (0.70–0.73 AUC). Conclusions These results show that multimodal neuroimaging data can be used to predict remission with ECT for individual patients across different treatment centers, despite significant variability in clinical characteristics across centers. Future development of a clinical decision support tool applying these biomarkers may be feasible.publishedVersio

Mothers and Non-Mothers: Gendering the Discourse of Education in South Asia

This essay brings together and complicates three stories within South Asian education history by gendering them. Thus modern education was actively pursued by mothers for their sons; indigenous education should be understood as continuing at home; and women were crucial actors in men\u27s reform and nationalism efforts through both collaboration and resistance. Gendered history should go beyond the separate story of girls and women, or the understanding of women as mothers and mothers as the nation, to see these three processes as gendered. The paper argues for the coming together of historical and anthropological arguments and for using literature imaginatively