A Swadeshi Chaitanya

Bengali Vaishnava traditions were most foundationally re-evaluated by the bhadralok in the process of writing literary histories of Bengali language. These histories, which began to emerge around 1870s and continued well into the twentieth century, are discussed in this chapter, with a focus on the decades before and after the Swadeshi moment (1905) in anticolonial politics of India. The chapter argues that Bengali Vaishnavism and Chaitanya’s abiding status in Bengali imagination (one which continues until this day)—the former, as the repository of literary greatness, and the latter as a Luther-like Hindu religious reformer—was put together in these decades, specifically by antiquarians, collectors, and archivists such as Dinesh Chandra Sen, who tirelessly worked to discover and bring to light the literary pasts of the Bengali language.