লকসসকত বনম ভদরলক সসকত: উনশ শতকর বলয এক দবনদবমলক পঠ

Nineteenth-century Bengal was a complex phase of social, cultural, and intellectual transformation under colonial rule.During this period, the spread of Western education, the English language, print technology, and urbanization led to the emergence of a new English-educated middle class, historically known as bhadralok society.This bhadralok culture sought to establish itself as the bearer of modernity, rationality, moral reform, and social progress.In contrast, the long-established folk culture of rural Bengal-comprising folk songs, folk theatre, folk religion, rituals, and oral traditionsrepresented a different cultural logic and social reality.This paper analyzes the relationship between folk culture and bhadralok culture in nineteenthcentury Bengal as a "dialectical," "unequal power-laden," and "class-based cultural process."It demonstrates that bhadralok dominance was not limited to matters of taste, morality, or reform; rather, it functioned as a form of cultural power closely linked to education, language, knowledge production, and the colonial state.Through print culture, newspapers, and literary language, bhadralok society attempted to marginalize folk culture by labeling it as backward, primitive, and "inferior."However, the paper also argues that folk culture was not entirely erased.Instead, through various processes of resistance, adaptation, and negotiation, folk culture sustained its presence within the space of modernity.Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Subaltern Studies, cultural hegemony, and colonial modernity, this study seeks to reassess the cultural history of nineteenth-century Bengal from a new and critical perspective.