At Home in the World: Remarks on the Bengali Sense of Belonging
At Home in the World: Remarks on the Bengali Sense of Belonging

Summary/Abstract: Two Nobel laureates coming from the same geographic area, writing more than 100 years apart, using—more or less—the same concepts to describe the importance of cultural identity. What changed in these 100 years? Generally understood, cultural identity refers to a person’s sense of belonging to a particular culture. We often understand the construction of identity in terms of gender, class, age and ethnicity, language, and/or religion. But what happens when a person is forced to leave his/her culture and to live in a different environment, alongside people never met before, in a place where another language is spoken, and where God has a different name? What does cultural identity mean? How are the home and the world related nowadays? Where is home in the world? This essay views the Bengali sense of belonging in the current context of globalization, linking the determinants of the Bengali culture to the structural changes in the world.

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